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Architects: Pérez Gómez Arquitectura
- Area: 926 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:César Béjar
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Manufacturers: Artexa, Atlas Schindler, Barrisol, Cemex, Lifen, Lioli
Text description provided by the architects. Clínica LR is a building to provide medical care and surgery to the community in the western part of the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area. It is developed on a very limited site around pre-existing buildings. Its only façade, which faces a busy avenue in Zapopan, receives the rays of the sun every morning, coming from the east. This situation, coupled with the fact that the main hours of operation of the building are during the morning, led us to generate a blind facade to promote the interior comfort of the building, providing ventilation through two patios that cross vertically through the building. Leaving only a wink from the interior to the exterior the reception is a glazed box shaded by the overhang generated by the upper levels.
We had a complex program and an extensive set of regulations to apply on a limited site where a medium-sized house once stood. We made an exercise of deep analysis and a major abstraction. With a clear objective: to do more with less. The functional and structural solution is based on a series of open floors that are generated by a concrete perimeter box, which contains the neighboring floor in the basement and carries the prestressed slabs of each level. The pure and strong materiality of concrete thus remains apparent on the outside of the building. On the interior, the spaces are delimited by walls free of the structure. We generated a hallway that crosses the floor plan on its long side and that illuminates, ventilates, and connects the spaces. The essence of the building is pure in its exterior and interior, giving it a character and vocation totally in line with the theme of health.
The lighting project has played a fundamental role since the conceptualization of the project and came to finish creating that atmosphere in a perfect balance between comfort and medical care (an experience that we pursued from the very first feed). The building, in addition, was conceived as a versatile structure that in the (distant) future can accommodate a variety of different uses and activities, a re-use structure. In a romantic pursuit to give second and third lives to our buildings that will remain here even as the landscape (and society) continues to transform.