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Architects: Pich-Aguilera Architects
- Year: 2005
Text description provided by the architects. This is a building that considers the environmental and energy loads not as a decisive impulse of the project, trying to break the traditional dichotomy between architecture and machine.
The building is conceived as a large container made by assembling components manufactured by the industry. The bearing structure opens the three-dimensional cores and a frame, as a support for long span slabs. It has the efficacy of an infrastructure, covered by a light and diverse enclosure capable of activating and filtering the outside weather to obtain the conditions for interior comfort.
The building is clearly differentiated into three zones: the central area houses the service operators. It works as a great climate atrium, where the roof defines the space with its different slopes, layers and mechanisms. It reacts a a complement with input from the adjacent areas according to the seasons, for optimal uptake of energy and a balanced distribution of air (hot and cold) to all spaces. A south area, closely linked to the first, houses the resting area.
It functions as a large greenhouse that supports the other areas, producing and evacuating heat as needed. The north area that houses management offices makes up a large, shaded chamber of moist air, which functions as cooling plant, as it is traversed by hot and dry air during the summer.
This space, with its landscaped courtyards, functions as a thermal regulator and provides freshness to the other areas. Thus, conventional machinery has been dimensioned as a complementary support to the climatic operation of the architecture itself in the production of its own interior comfort. The resulting shapes should be read as an expression of that operation.
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