Philippe Starck designs an olive mill as a surrealist artwork

In the heart of the Serranía de Ronda in Andalusia, Philippe Starck has designed LA Almazara, with Touza Arquitectos: an oil mill-museum that intertwines ancestral culture, design and territorial marketing, putting the spotlight on the region as a top destination in the international gastronomic tourism scene. The work is a statement of love for extra virgin olive oil as a symbolic element of Spanish cuisine, here “reinterpreted” in an imaginative key between irony and sacrality – as Starck can do – with a lexicon free of interpretative labels, that encourages abandonment to surprise and imagination. “Always respectful and sacred, almost religious without being believing, with intelligence and emotion, LA Almazara is a great slap in the face that awakens, shakes up, enlivens, moves and pays homage to the olive and its oil”, comments Starck. The building houses a functioning oil mill, a restaurant, a tasting area and a museum dedicated to the art of olive oil. A monolithic red concrete cube stands out in the Andalusian landscape with the indecipherable character of a surrealist work of art, where a smoke-spitting eye, carved into the structure, peers out and welcomes visitors.  A huge steel bull's horn, a giant half olive and a pipe from which water gushes, flooding a faceless statue immersed in a basin, inexplicably emerge from the construction.

Inside, intense chiaroscuro effects inspired by Caravaggio outline the visitor's route through the different stages of production and accentuate the presence of the unusual elements dotting the space: from the enormous corrida sword piercing the roof, to the gigantic portrait of a famous local matador, to the aeroplane made from scrap materials, to the suspended pipe that transports the olives for processing. To soften the twilight and dreamlike atmosphere, a terrace suspended on chains invites visitors to go outside and gaze out over the countryside and olive groves. “LA Almazara is an extraordinary, incredible and miraculous place in which visitors enjoy a powerful, radical experience that challenges and transforms. It is an accumulation of mysteries where the crystallized respect of olive oil is mixed with emotion”, states Starck.