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Architects: Ramón Fernández-Alonso
- Area: 6778 m²
- Year: 2010
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Photographs:Fernando Alda
Text description provided by the architects. Factories for the manufacture of foodstuffs and pharmaceutical products give rise to production processes sharing common areas in certain cases. This project has therefore been developed to identify these common points and combine them; to organize traffic patterns in order to merge them into spatial areas and structure the functional project in three levels within a single building.
The upper level is devoted to research: RESEARCH; the lower level, to manufacturing: OPERATION/HANDLING; and the middle level; to presentation: TEACHING.
The most specific areas of traffic movement are organized starting at the entrance to the building on the middle level. The changing rooms are located on the upper level, thus avoiding two-way traffic and making better use of the vertical traffic nucleus without mixing traffic patterns. The entire plant is organized around an axis, a central corridor located on the upper floor, which allows access to the two plants -Form Production and Foodstuffs- as well as organizing and structuring the building by creating a hierarchy of areas within the rest of the building. On the lower level, the division of the Products and Materials loading and unloading area into two areas with an independent outside access for each makes for a more spatially organized and practical manufacturing plant, adding a logical, sequential aspect to the process which begins with the unloading of raw materials and ends with the loading of the finished product without crossing traffic patterns, thanks to the movement of the vertical traffic nucleus. The power generation room is located on this level, separate from the rest of the plant, and the air conditioning room for the entire building is situated on the mezzanine.
Light: Upper level: uniform, northern exposure. Laboratory lighting comes primarily from almond-shaped skylights installed in the ceiling. These skylights are suported by sheets comprised of reinforced concrete wall beams, cutting them off from southern exposure.
Lower level: east-west, filtered light. On this level, the elevated traffic area protects the building from westerly gradient light. Easterly light will enter through an almond-shaped opening in the sheet of water in the Campus faÇade.
