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Architects: Aranguren & Gallegos Architects
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Photographs:Jesús Granada, Manolo Yllera
Text description provided by the architects. The new ABC Center of Drawing and Illustration, comes with a willingness to be an artistic international reference and a cultural symbol of Madrid.
The installation in the old factory building in Amaniel Street has to be a suitable intervention in a historic building without sacrificing the character of expressing a contemporary center with a diverse range of cultural and artistic institutions.
The existing building has a possible dual access from two streets connecting them in an interior court. Before the intervention, one of the entrances was through a longitudinal height body that closed the courtyard.
From this front we propose the principal access to the new Center ABC. To achieve this, the mentioned longitudinal body is restructured as a great "girder" of translucent glass that operates as a lintel towards the interior court. Located inside is the cafeteria, and under it, through a glass floor on which you enter the courtyard, the basement of the new center catche the light.
To create a space or "atrium" in the new institution, that will allow the center to express its contemporary and modern character, it was proposed to use the courtyard as the access space of the building that would serve as a lobby before the entrance to the interior space.
The architectural mechanism used for this aim is based on creating a "vacuum stressed" a "dihedral space" formed by the horizontal plane of the floor of the courtyard and the vertical plane of the facade of the former factory.
Both perforated planes are built with similar triangular holes that will supply light into the spaces they serve. This generates a "weightless space" that mixes the real, imaginary and symbolic.
As a "huge magnet", it will catch and carry us with a certain power of seduction into the new institution, provoking simultaneously curiosity, anxiety and pleasure while visiting it.
