Panticosa

Moneo Brock Studio, Tiberio Thermal Baths in Panticosa

Abstract

If you asked the designers of the studio founded in New York and moved to Madrid, Belén Moneo and Jeff Brock about the new bathing resort of Panticosa, they, as happily pragmatic authors would create serious theories regarding the design and construction progress of the authentic architectonic work, that is contextual, durable, sustainable, spacious, in the sense of generating living space both inside and outside.

They would not begin either from the whole, or from a part. They would respond «Id est principium» the single component, the fundamental element. «The hollow glassblock, to which we gave the concept and design, and which Seves Glassblock has perfected, manufactured the prototype, encoded Q30, taken from the furnace in thirty thousand pieces to use up there, at a height of 1,633 m, at Panticosa», ancient Roman nucleus of the Aragonese Pyrenees; then, much later, multiple venue for the therapeutic exploitation of the thermo-mineral water, especially thermo-sulphurous water. The Panticosa thermal bath begot by the village of Panticosa, which, in the golden age of the spa cities spread over Europe, during the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, had the not so singular aspect of hybridisation of the bathing resort villa with that of the obrera colony – whilst the village of Panticosa was further down – and remains lower down, along the winding provincial road to Huesca.