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Architects: Coll-Barreu Arquitectos
- Area: 12792 m²
- Year: 2012
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Photographs:Aleix Bagué, Juan Rodríguez
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Manufacturers: BANDALUX
Text description provided by the architects. The building accommodates the central Public Safety services for a one million people urban area.
The ground on which the building sits was unstable. It was uncertain. It is the result of having quickly filled an open mine, with pits up to 50 m deep, which formed a cavernous place in its physical reality and its memory.
Upstream, other mine sites have been transformed, also visible from the site, which confirm the history of this exchange between matter and soil, the life of the city and that of men, the densification of the territory and the air. Policemen House’s concatenated planes are perceived from distant areas and set up a close relationship with the steep topography of the slope.
Above this vacillating place, buildings do not have any mass. Folded aluminum sheets acquire enough inertia to be supported in the air. The present construction is a system of layers. It is paper. We do not understand that the current architecture tries to simulate a massive construction, because the massive construction no longer exists. In this building corresponds, at the same time, to the mobile ether condition of the land.
It is appropriate that the policemen house has been made of paper, it is part of our democratic contract: the police are a piece of paper. Our buildings are paper, as they are our security, our convictions, our society: uncertain, temporary, fleeting.
