The extensive ground we were tasked with organizing was located at the edge of the village, with part of the plot classified as an intensive urban zone and another part as an extensive garden city zone.

Our primary goal was to preserve, as much as possible, the distinctive silhouette of Cadaqués. From the sea, the village appeared as a compact white ensemble -crowned at its highest point by the dominant volume of the church- set within an amphitheater of dark retaining walls stepping up the mountainside. We believed that adhering to the established criteria for the village center -small-scale buildings, always white, with roofs covered in Arab tiles- could prove counterproductive for preserving Cadaqués' traditional and iconic image when such constructions expanded beyond the village and climbed up the mountain.

Grouping all the buildings into a single ensemble seemed to us the best solution in terms of landscape integration. The complex was linked to the village’s layout but faithfully followed the guidelines of the retaining walls in horizontal stripes. We proposed to finish off the urban core with an entirely horizontal volume: dark, with a glazed façade, a flat roof gardened with vines; thus creating another retaining wall that steps up the mountain in stark contrast to the miniature, white architecture with small windows and sloped tiled roofs of the village center. We thought it would be a mistake to scatter white chalets across the rocky amphitheater.

With this approach, radical but perhaps naïve, we constructed the first phase of the project. Later, the proposal indeed proved to be naïve; during the second phase, we were forced to use sloped tiled roofs, and later, chalets were built in the upper part of the area.