Text description provided by the architects. Starting the project from the abandoned facilities of a salt factory in the western sector of Santiago Chile, the commission is considered as a counterpoint of industrial aesthetics of the precarious versus a clear and contemporary proposal that complies with the various demands of an advertising agency.
The program is developed considering a workplace for the creative staff that includes offices, conference rooms, photographic studios, service and storage areas, cafeteria, restrooms and incorporated parking.
The project's strategy consists of providing a human scale to a place conceived for productive processes. For this effect, a number of inter-related flexible units are arranged to host the diverse activities inherent to the world of advertising; activities that range from ordinary situations to unlikely ones, like photography of wild animals or vehicles.
From the standpoint of plasticity the project is expressed as a huge meccano, an image congruent with a prefabricated system of construction based on low cost serial modulation, consequently materials that enabled quick assembling were used: steel, glass, and Isopol panels. The panels have great thermal capacity and were developed for industrial use in refrigerating chambers. Additionally, it was chosen for its rigidity, versatility, and low weight, permitting easy transport.
Each one of the cells conceived to host the programmatic functions constitutes a "small citadel" that linearly encompasses completely the creative process like an assembly line of ideas. These units of controlled atmosphere ensure a comfortable work environment within the great preexisting containing structure.
Programmatic units are structurally joined by braided steel cables anchored to the existing trusses, in order to obtain the maximum structural capacity of the constructive elements that comprise those units; thus creating a non-dissociable relationship between the old and the new project ( host and guest ).
Architecture is re-invented on the site as an advertising metaphor, where astonishment and fiction surpass reality...
