A HOUSE FOR HERODOTUS  -  1st PRIZE IN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

The Eternal Villa is born from the opposition of two fundamental interrelated concepts in the essence of the human being: History and Architecture.
History: the science that studies the human being and his imprint in the temporal and spatial spectra.
Architecture: Marks of the human being in the spatial and temporal environment.

There is no more intrinsic relationship than that of the passage of time and the manipulation of space. Without architecture, the perception of history would be ethereal, immaterial and unintelligible. Without history, architecture would be primary, tied to its origins and incapable of reflecting a given society and culture, or changes inherent to it. Both concepts have their roots in Ancient Greece. However, the meaning of history, as we know it today, is due to one man: Herodotus. Before him, the word had a humble and banal meaning. Because of how he contemplated and documented the past as a philosophical problem and thoroughly researched human knowledge and behavior, he changed our perception of the passage of time.

The chosen location is the south of Iberia, a toponym coined by Herodotus in the 5th century BC. The first civilization known to the Greeks was Tartessos, which settled in the south of the peninsula and to which Herodotus refers in his fourth story: "after passing the columns of Hercules, they came by their good fortune to Tartessos.  Tartessos was then for the Greeks a virgin and recent empire that they had just discovered.  There they traded so well with their genres that none of them equaled them in profits from the journey...". Because of its abundance and work of precious metals, it was central to Greek trade, becoming a multicultural center. This society and its heirs have generated a unique architectural diversity, an ideal location for our client's home, which helps us to stabilize the passage of time. A circular landmark in the landscape, silent, representing eternity in the infinite plains of cereal and olive trees. A house where genius loci and innovation are in perfect balance with the materiality, light, and trace of time.