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Cortijada Los Gazquez Creative Retreat / Eco-Guesthouse

Overview

Cortijada Los Gazquez is a creative retreat and ecological guesthouse situated in an off-grid location within the Parque Natural Sierra Maria - Los Velez, in Andalucia, Southern Spain. The house is the result of renovating five traditional farmhouses (Cortijada, in Spanish) into one carbon-neutral building. Energy is harnessed through the use of solar power, wind power, and wood burning. In addition to its guesthouse, Los Gazquez oversees 47 acres of farmland, including an Olive Orchard, almond and fruit trees, and wheat fields. It also offers a variety of art classes and seminars and is the site of Joya, an artists’ residency program focused on art that engages with issues of ecological sustainability.

History

Los Gazquez is the project of Simon and Donna Beckmann, who chose the location and began working on developing the property into an ecologically and socially responsible retreat in 2006. The five original farmhouses represented a traditional Spanish set-up, of simple vernacular structures that economically accommodated farmers as they cared for the surrounding land. The Beckmanns combined the houses to create a space that could accommodate guests and the ecological goals of their project, while also maintaining the essential architectural style of the original houses.

La Cortijada’s design is rooted in an effort to respect the traditional Spanish architecture while also allowing for attention to design. Construction of the building includes traditional whitewashed stone and adobe. Inside, reformed Andalucian ceilings have been created, using pine and poplar beams covered in yeso. The exterior rooftop is a traditional techa arabe, or a composition of curved tiles.

In the renovation of the five old farmhouses, the Beckmanns sought to capture the spirit of the vernacular, understood as the “unconscious work of craftsmen based on knowledge.” By combing vernacular elements with a more modern pared down minimalism, the structure and design of La Cortijada Los Gazquez is best described as an example of New Vernacular architecture, that which “considers the synthesis of modernity and tradition” ^[1].

Energy and Sustainability

Los Gazquez is located Off-the-grid, or independent of the electric, water, and waste networks that connect most modern homes and buildings. This has allowed La Cortijada Los Gazquez to focus on both sustainable living while remaining dedicated to creating an architecturally innovative structure and landscape. The house itself is designed to use both passive and active systems of off-grid energy systems. Some of the passive systems incorporated into the house include a gray water reclamation system, rainwater harvest channels, wood fuel collected from the surrounding land, and a reedbed waste cleaning system.

The gray water system is integral to the reformation of the house. It collects all the water from basins, showers, and the dishwasher and with the aid of eco-friendly detergents, transports the water through a series of channels to terraces for the irrigation of an orchard.

The rainwater harvesting system collects water from the roof during summer weather events or winter snow and transports it via acequias, or canals, to the aljibe, an underground deposit. During one summer rainfall weather event, the system can collect up to 50,000 litres of water.

The reedbed cleaning system consists of two alternating aerobic vertical flow reedbeds and one anaerobic horizontal flow bed. Bacteria is digested in the vertical flow reedbeds by Phragmites australis. In the horizontal bed, amoebas and other protozoans digest bacteria. At the end of the process, the water is 98% clean and can be used for irrigation.

Heating, of both water and the house, is also achieved ecologically, via 24 vacuum tube hot water solar collectors as well as bio-mass wood boilers for underfloor central heating and the kitchen range.

Los Gazquez is powered by a 48v system that employs both a 6 x 160 watt photo voltaic panel with a tracking system to follow the sun as well as a 3000 watt wind turbine at 12 meters high. The tandem active systems were chosen because of the specific weather conditions of the region. High winds and more than 3100 hours of sunlight/year allow the panel and turbine to power the entire building without any additional energy.

Joya, a Residency for Artists Working Within Transition Culture

Simon Beckmann has written of his approach to the project and land,

“Like every other member of mankind I am not a figure in a landscape but a shaper of the landscape. I manipulate land and life form to suit my needs. As an artist I have made this project fulfill my aesthetic needs as well as my practical needs, I am an explorer of nature who has made his home in this wonderful place. And when I look aloft to the golden eagle in the sky at the apex of the food chain, I take great sustenance from having fulfilled a project which aimed to exist benignly on this land, and that our being here will no more effect the natural ecology other than to serve it."

^[2]

While La Cortijada Los Gazquez was designed to exist without disrupting its surrounding environment, it also has a more active main focus. Through its creative courses and its artists’ residency program, Joya, the retreat is at the forefront of a wider trend to address how the cultural history of energy use, the increasing need to address ecological problems, and art and design can all complement each another, paving the way toward a resilient, or ‘Transition culture.’

The term ‘Transition culture’ is used to identify rising groups of individuals who are adopting strategies to meet the environmental and energy challenges that lay ahead. As the world rapidly approaches ‘peak oil,’ the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, it also faces a terminal decline in production. As a consequence strategies to maintain human culture and modern technological society without a reliance on fossil fuel based energy sources are being sought by a number of related individuals and movements. These groups see this as a great opportunity and a positive event that will necessitate progress.

The term ‘Transition Design’ was coined by Louise Rooney at the ‘Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan’ as part of the ‘Transition Town’ movement started in Ireland. Rob Hopkins has spread these ideas internationally via the internet, lectures, and his book ‘The Transition Handbook’ which sees the combination of peak oil and climate change as an opportunity to restructure society with local resilience and ecological stewardship.

In addition, permaculture, particularly as expressed in the writings of David Holmgren, also sees peak oil as holding enormous opportunities for positive change as long as countries respond with foresight. Rebuilding local food networks, energy production, and the general implementation of ‘energy descent culture’ are argued to be ethical responses to the acknowledgment of finite fossil fuel resources.

Rob Hopkins describes ‘... a sense of quickening and exhilaration in talking and listening to each other, a vision of what we want and rolling up our sleeves and starting to create it’. ‘Joya the residency for artists working within transition culture’ is intended to provide an ecological platform for artists to respond to these changing events through communication and creation. ‘Joya’s’ role is to bring awareness to, and acknowledgement of art’s unmistakable contribution to the interpretation and understanding of ‘transition’, being representative of the dynamic forces within aesthetics to represent the world.

^[3]

The first artist in residency, Rebecca Fortnum^[4] of the University of Art, London, said of the location:

“As it is wind and solar powered, the whole Los Gazquez energises itself through the environment and this provides a metaphor for the creative endeavour of the studio.”

Future participants who have been accepted to the Joya residency include:

Gordon Senior, Sculptor, California and Norfolk
Kathryn Lynch, Painter, New York
Clare Price, Painter, London
Jessica Hargreaves, Painter, New York

References

^ From Richardson, Vicky. New Vernacular Architecture. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2007.
^ From Notes from Spain [1]
^ See Transition Towns and Transition Culture. Rob Hopkins, who popularized the Transition Movement spoke at TED, 2009. Notes on his talk are available here: Rob Hopkins, TED 2009
^ Rebecca Fortnum is Reader in Fine Art at University of the Arts, London [2] and has been a visiting fellow in painting at Plymouth University and at Winchester School of Art, a visiting artist at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a senior lecturer at Norwich and Wimbledon Schools of Art. From 2004-9 she was Research Fellow at Lancaster University where she led the Visual Intelligences Research Project, that explored how artists think and make [3]. She has received several awards including from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the British Council, the Arts Council of England, the British School in Rome and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has exhibited widely including solo shows at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Spacex Gallery, Exeter, Kapil Jariwala Gallery, London, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, The Drawing Gallery, London and Shropshire [4] and Gallery 33, Berlin [5]. She was instrumental in founding the artist-run spaces Cubitt Gallery and Gasworks Gallery in London. Her book of interviews, Contemporary British Women Artists, in their own words, was published by IB Tauris in 2007. In 2007 Rebecca was a recipient of the Art House’s Space for 10 award for mid-career artists [6] and was also lead international artist for the TRADE project in Roscommon & Leitrim, Ireland [7]. She is currently taking part in METHOD, a cultural leadership programme for artists [8].