This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury and Popular Choice Awards in the art galleries category. See the full list of winners here. 

In another Architizer A+ Award upset, “DOMUSae, Spaces for Culture,” an exhibition at Madrid’s Salón de Reinos, swept both the Jury and Popular Choice Prizes for best art gallery. Appealing to professional critics and architecture fans-at-large, “DOMUSae, Spaces for Culture” fuses contemporary gallery spaces with a historic baroque armory. By showcasing a selection of canonical Spanish buildings within an opulent historic edifice, Architects Aparicio + Donaire celebrates the extensive architectural patrimony of Spain in downtown Madrid.

The architects were thrilled to be able to exhibit within Salón de Reinos, a 17th-century wing of the Royal Buen Retiro Palace. The grand halls of the former armory are capped with fresco-covered vaults and elaborate plasterwork from the former days of the colonial Spanish Empire. Chief project architect Jesus Donaire says that the opportunity to use the uninhabited building to house the exhibition “enabled us to construct an exhibition route through the building’s empty spaces. This means that the visitor can simultaneously enjoy the content of the exhibition and experiment by way of spatial transition with new ways of seeing the original building.” Read more after the jump!

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“One can kill a man as easily with a dwelling as with an axe!” Artist Baptiste Debombourg takes literal this famous damnation of Heinrich Zille, only updating the killing device  from a singular ax to an arsenal of automated guns. Entitled ‘Tradition of Excellence’, Debombourg’s hand-rendered drawings treat each of the guns as a solid mass, from which are carved a series of architectural rooms and spaces.

A series of dormitories are aligned along the interior shaft of a Famas-F1, while a narrow corridor follows the curve of its hand guard that lead to a large room of unspecified program.  Tiered seating fill up the auditorium that resides in the magazine of a Kalachnikov AK-47, a grand staircase hugs the walls of a Colt M1911, baths run down the central arm of an Uzi. The greatest spatial complexity can be found within the M134D Minigun, whose bilateral symmetry is realized in plan as a Baroque collage of mirrored rooms, sculptural staircases, and angled walls.

The drawings recall the plan drawings of medieval British castles–famously collected and studied by Louis Kahn–in which small spaces are excavated out of the thick fortress walls. Yet the “walls” of Debombourg’s gun typologies are much more thin, even nimble, with electic, non-platonic profiles that prove naturally conducive to the new spaces and programs. Click through for more of the drawings.

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