LA ALMAZARA

In the Serranía de Ronda (Malaga, Spain), a few kilometers from the historic centre,  La Almazara is at once a working mill that continues producing EVOO and an experiential museum dedicated to olive oil. When I arrived for the shoot, the first thing that struck me was how a building of that scale sat so naturally within the olive grove and the surrounding sierra. Philippe Starck and Touza Arquitectos managed to make the two feel like a single scenography.

One of the key pieces of the project is the large Cor-Ten steel enclosure by Ottostumm Mogs, Italian specialists in architectural steel and bronze systems, which works as a mobile threshold between the interior and the panoramic terrace, extending the exhibition space and drawing the landscape into the architectural composition. This connection between inside and outside was one of the central points in the initial briefings with the Ottostumm team: understanding what to prioritize, what to show outdoors and how to document that relationship between architecture, product and landscape, with an intended use for archive, web and editorial publications such as Architecture Hunter.

The texture of Cor-Ten steel is what gives the material its value, so I used close shots and detail shots to show its characteristics and volumes, with the main light hitting the surface laterally and fill flashes to balance the darker areas of the frame. The medium shots served to place the enclosure within the space so the viewer could understand its scale and weight within the project.

For the exteriors, it was clear from the briefing that the aesthetic had to be very graphic: showing the building as a structure within a landscape. Flying the drone was the logical choice in a terrain like an olive grove, with balanced and geometric compositions, strong visual weight. From the air, you perceive how La Almazara sits within its surroundings, and the horn is the element that seemed to me to break that symmetry and reinforce that integration even further.