Portal de Murcia

www.portaldemurcia.com

• Home
• Business
• Hotels
• Restaurants
• News
• Advertisement

The Architecture student of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT), Pablo Alburquerque González, has designed “La Fábricaâ€� with the aim of bringing the building of the Royal Factory of the Saltpeter of Murcia back to life and converting it into an avant-garde creation laboratory cultural.

This property, located next to the Powder Garden, in the center of the city, is currently in disuse.

The approach developed in the Alburquerque Final Degree Project respects the environment and archaeological remains.

The idea is to return that connection with the garden and open this space again to the citizens and neighbors of the neighborhood.

Just yesterday, the Plenary of the City Council approved to submit to public information the progress of the project of modification of the General Plan that affects the catalog of protected goods of this place.

The purpose of this municipal action is to extend its protection with respect to the current regulation.

Until now the PECHAM (Special Plan of the Historic Artistic Center of Murcia) protects with grade 2 its main building, which overlooks Acisclo Díaz street.

The project, tutored by the professor of the area of ​​Architectural Graphic Expression, Pau Natividad, materializes «in an architectural object that adapts to the preexistence of the environment that converge in the place where it is located.

He is sensitive and respectful, in particular with the remains of the wall of the Arrabal de la Arrixaca that are under the plot, the Caravija ditch and the old factory building, �says the recent graduate, a native of Murcia.

Albuquerque explains that his work proposes «the recovery of the disused historical building, its value that allows the implementation of a cultural and artistic program adapted to new times and users, which acts as a nursery for all artistic disciplines that require it».

The cultural program proposed by the student would be distributed between two volumes: the rehabilitated part of the old building and the proposed new facilities.

For this, static spaces are created where to carry out the training, dissemination and part of the artistic creation, and other multifunctional and multipurpose spaces in which, thanks to a system of hidden folding mobile partitions, one, two or three units are generated independent spaces depending on the different activities and events that it hosts.

The former industrial complex of the Royal Factory of Salitre was created in 1654 by royal order of Philip IV to provide raw material for the manufacture of gunpowder. Only the building that was the library of the factory (former headquarters of the Municipal Service) of Statistics), the salitre refining workshop (current headquarters of the Bullfighting Museum of Murcia), and the chimney of the workshop to carbonize (which today presides over the central promenade of the Salitre garden), in addition to the old central pavilion of offices and residence of the military leadership of the factories of Pólvora and Salitre.

While the first three were rehabilitated and ceded for their current uses, all being within the public park, which was the central pavilion and the attached land that once housed the factory garden, when finished as private property, are outside the Salitre garden enclosure and in a sad state of abandonment despite its protection in the Special Plan of the Historic Artistic Center of Murcia.

With yesterday's agreement it is cataloged, within the file of the Saltpeter Factory, in addition to the chimney and the hermitage that already were as separate elements, the rest of the buildings that still exist and that belonged to the aforementioned factory.

According to municipal sources, it is now sought to complete the catalog sheet of the Historic Joint Plan of Murcia, called 'Powder Factory' to delimit the whole, which will be renamed 'Royal Factory of Saltpeters of Murcia' and expand the property listed on that sheet by including the entire building.

In addition, the rest of the constructions that originally belonged to the Factory and that are still to be cataloged are the Acequia Aljufía, the armband of the Acequia de Caravija, the hydraulic constructions linked to these ditches, the central Paseo that has its origin at the entrance of the main building of the Royal Salt Factory of Murcia and the adjacent garden.

Source: UPCT