Atienza, a historic village in Guadalajara, is home to the eighteenth-century Casa Palacio de los Manrique, a noble residence that exemplifies traditional Castilian architecture. Its austere façade of ashlar and timber carries the family coat of arms, a testament to centuries of heritage.
Tassilo de la Torre Schönborn led the restoration from the site itself: days spent working alongside the building team, evenings and weekends given to planning materials, coordinating the sequence of the works and refining the drawings. That involvement closes the distance between designing a building and putting it up.
The shell was completed in three months. The doorways are so narrow that machinery was almost impossible to bring in, so most of the work was done by hand — an intensive manual labour and a traditional building process that gave the site the character of another age.
