The CJCM project (Council of Youth of Madrid) represents a radical exercise in tectonic austerity, executed at the threshold of economic impossibility (under €200/m²). Located within a "vetust" 1970s structure, the intervention faced a rigid "double-donut" configuration of load-bearing walls—an interior courtyard ring and an exterior perimeter. Rather than fighting this structural stubbornness, the project performs a total internal clearance, stripping the space to its skeletal essence to reveal the "curved corner" as its primary spatial protagonist. The materiality embraces the "Socioplastics of the Raw." Industrial wood-chip flooring (OSB) and perforated metal sheets serve as the new domestic dermis, replacing traditional partitions with "prototype-shelving" that functions as both storage and spatial boundary. This is an architecture of the "exposed nerve": electrical systems are suspended from the ceiling in a choreographed web, while the original cast-iron radiators are preserved as industrial totems of a bygone era. The white-out treatment of the walls serves as a "chromatic reset," allowing light to negotiate the tension between the flat functional zones and the sinuous, curved edges of the plan.
Conceptually, the CJCM was a "fugitive success." It provided a high-impact, low-resource infrastructure for a social organism that would later be dismantled by institutional shifts. Today, this 2005 intervention stands as a precursor to the "Superjunk" ethics—a proof that architectural dignity does not reside in the budget, but in the radical repositioning of existing matter. It is a "situational fixer" on a macro scale, where the debris of the 70s was re-coded into a vibrant, relational laboratory. We tore down every partition and stripped the place to its bare bones, leaving a single open room filled with light and echoes. The floor was done with the cheapest recycled wood we could find —a kind of pressed sawdust that gave the space a raw, almost provisional texture— and we decided to run all the electrical wiring visibly, like veins drawn over the skin of the building. Every division or enclosure was made not with walls but with a large modular shelving system built from perforated steel panels, each with two-centimetre holes and forty-by-forty modules, allowing light, air and sound to pass through. The result was somewhere between a workshop and a studio, an interior that felt honest and alive, where the structure of things remained exposed, and every surface seemed to breathe. It turned out beautifully simple, open, and full of possibility.
Further within the Socioplastic Network:
The Trole Building: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-trole-building-madrid-south-white.html
Industrial Aesthetics and Modular Domesticity: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/industrial-aesthetics-and-modular.html
Minor Letter e: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/minor-letter-e-from-industrial-ruin-to.html
