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Architects: OMA Octavio Mestre Arquitectos
- Area: 453 m²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Adrià Goula
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Lead Architects: Octavio Mestre, Laurent Duport, Michel Matival
Text description provided by the architects. In Les Caves Ecoiffier, some old wineries from the 1800s in Alénya, a town near Perpignan (France) and under enormous wooden beams that go from façade to façade, we propose a coworking for the town, whose modules can be rented at will, according to the needs of young local companies and start-ups in the region, the Communauté des Communes Sud Roussillon (CCSR).
The intervention leads us to open holes in the rear façade (corten steel boxes that can be inhabited as we already did in the Olivé Gumà Clinic in Barcelona or in our house in Tamariu) and in the roof, through skylights with solar control that illuminate the central space (when we visited it for the first time, the interior space was very gloomy).
We established a series of modules, many of them mobile to favor different implementations and modules accessible through sliding doors that can be joined at will with others. At the end of the enclosure, at the top, there is a small stand for presentations and community events. The project is committed to maximum flexibility that allows user rotation.
The regulatory need for a second evacuation route invited us to design the emergency staircase on the rear façade that dialogues with the new windows and is presented in a sculptural form. Above -and at the level of the beams-we proposed the rest areas from a recreational component: a series of networks that allowed the youngest to live in the clouds and have another spatial perception of the place that, finally, by the Complications that entailed regulatory effects were not implemented.
The floor is exposed to concrete. Contrast is voluntarily sought between the new wooden modules and the old roof beams (trying to minimize height problems) while leaving the stone of the walls visible. One of the three public tenders won in France in the last three years, with C+D as a local partner.