Coderch’s Architecture in Mediterranean Landscape: Ugalde House.

José Antonio Coderch i Sentmenat's (Barcelona, 1913-1984) sensitivity to the Mediterranean Landscape has already been studied (Pizza & Rovira 2000, Sória 1999), especially concerning to vernacular architecture and Catalonian material culture. We try to focus on their coastal detached houses –in special in Ugalde House– to address how its relationship with topography transcends the simple choice of views, or the preservation of the native forest, stablishing a complex dialogue with the whole environment. Those relationships are based in formal operations of Architecture and Landscape, where composition translates accurately the sensitive discourse. A historic perspective across three 3D site reconstructions –1947 American flight, 1997 SIGPAC flight and 2021 orthophoto (IGN 2024)– shows the landscape transformation and its interaction with the built volume, represented in a virtual model. Implanting the model on the topography we can verify the syntax of the architectonical masses. Moreover, theses masses shape the structure of the living space, inner, outer and in-between, and their connection with the natural environment. Overlapping of topography, Caldes d’Estrach climate – eminently conditioned by its solar cycle and wind regime– and architecture of Ugalde house (Fochs 1989), allow the identification of precise environmental strategies, beyond the Mediterranean and vernacular cultural references, transferring sensitive landscape to a formal site-specific system (Bovati 2017). From a phenomenological perspective, these relationships can be read as a narrative of lights and shadows through different hours, days and seasons of the year; variations of thermal gradients, air moisture or breezes –including their corresponding olfactory and sound stimuli–; picturesque scenes or naturalized spaces. The diffuse boundaries on habitable platform thus culminate this strict compositional device, ordered to link the daily experience to the Mediterranean Landscape