The restoration of San Bartolomé's Church is based in the resolution of LIGHT . Light as the space's definition, as the program's definition, as an answer that still is asking and overall like spiritual matter. Everything else is the action around the development and the enlargement of this idea. So at the time to make up the differents intervention upon the building there are some ways, by one hand, there is the own consolidation. The church was really deteriorated because of a priest's interventions in the fifties' that have caused almost the ruine into the structural system. A really hard work has been made supported sometimes by sofisticated technologies and other times by the simple work that the mason master makes.
But the most akward part is to redefine the space searching all the building's values and creating a new argument able to integrate in an only operation all of the captured energy and ready to feed its directs or indirects users.
The two most beautiful ideas of the building are recuperated like this: The ambiguouty and the superposition. The chapels hve been recuperated, the axis have been created, ...
The third and last side from the intervention, maybe the less important one, with the lower budget, but the most showy though is the decorative elements. By one hand the new entry doors to the principal church's space, with a triple play system, one for the daily transition through the wicket, another for the important ceremonies and the third one for the day in which the Virgin sorts in procession. These supply at the others that had an insufficient section, a bad wood's quality and deformations that made inutile them for its function. By the other hand the blessed water's trough and the presbiter's culmination with the altar's new stone. All of them brought from Carrara in Itally. The altar, with the same dimensions that the old table, now transported to its original location in the sacristy, tries to self equilibrate with the elements up to presbytery by its whitness and simplicity. The floor is also full of meanings: By one side, it tries to create an uniformity in a way in which the basilical plan model is marked face to the latin cross one suggested by the building's cornises. By the other side, there is an organization that follows an East-West direction that wants to express the discovery made, by putting a compass over the floor, of the architect José Echamorro's traces. In its confection it has been recuperated the 100% of the old and damaged pavement. After its realisation by cutting all the pieces in differents sizes, these have been incorporated to the new design. The rest has been grinded to make the mortar. To finish there is the walls' whitness' recuperation...