Above the church in Carballeda de Avia, Spain, a hill village in Ourense, FIRM and BASED anchor the Muimenta Multipurpose Social Center to a house left in ruins by the 2018 fires and the stone terraces around it.
The Multipurpose Social Center belongs to a rural revitalization plan that the Concello de Carballeda de Avia has drawn up for the Muimenta Model Village, a core in Ourense slipping toward abandonment. The aim is blunt: keep younger residents from leaving, draw new ones in, and put the surrounding productive land back to work by reviving traditional trades and offering affordable housing. The center joins a sequence of earlier moves, a community kitchen and laundry, temporary public lodging, and the reworking of a few key outdoor spaces.
It sits on the highest plot in the village, just above the church. Rather than flatten the ground, FIRM and BASED read the slope through its socalcos, the Galician terraces cut into steep hillsides, and left the topography untouched. The program stays elementary: three rooms able to hold everything from neighborhood celebrations to a small day center or workshops where would-be entrepreneurs can set up.
The first of the three is the existing house, gutted by the fires that tore through Muimenta in 2018. Restored, it now bridges the first two terraces. Inside, one room per level is kept as flexible and non-hierarchical as possible, ready for work, talks, courses, exhibitions, or nothing more than sitting. A service core along the north wall gathers the stair, restroom, storage, and facilities, freeing the rest to stay open.
On the intermediate terrace, a second building answers the brief's demand for more space. A timber portal frame under a tile roof runs parallel to a pre-existing retaining wall, once a low granite armature for climbing vines, and turns the terrace's green surface into usable ground. It reads as a foyer for anyone arriving from the western end, and its independence from the old house lets separate activities run at once without colliding.
What ties the pieces together is the ground itself. The intervention recovers a horreo, the raised granary of the Galician north, along with a well-laundry and the perimeter wall, and threads a pedestrian path between the plot's two entrances, partly paved with stone dug out during the work on the house. Nothing is treated as a monument. The center reads instead as one more layer laid over land that has been farmed, terraced, and lived on for generations, betting that the way to hold a village together is to give it somewhere to gather.
