Rather than work from a pre-defined plan, the project has simply defined a series of framework rules and regulations to ensure the gradual development of an urban, spatial entity similar to the way a Gothic urban fabric or Mediterranean village grew up. The final design will be produced by the interplay of these rules and parameters and indeterminate market forces acting during project implementation. Our project aims to achieve quality urban fabric by setting three baseline targets:
- Ensuring that the new office complex provides not only office space in a future key area of Barcelona but also public space and urban quality, thus becoming an integral part of the new urban development of Zona Franca. To this end, as much ground level space as possible will be left as open public areas. These will be covered to provide shade and shelter and at the same time ensure seamless integration between private buildings and public space.
- Ensuring that the future complex generates a new type of urban fabric that does not reproduce the existing models of tertiary urban development but gives rise to a new type of urban fabric combining the advantages of the traditional Barcelona city block and the Gothic urban fabric. In this sense the proposal aims at a more continuous set of differentiated buildings rather than a series of architectural icons. Quality equates with consistency rather than individuality; the whole should appear as a continuous structure rather than a heterogeneous series of independent buildings.
- Developing a new typology for tertiary space able to host an infinite variety of workspaces, from small, professional bureaux, conventional 2-bay cellular offices and “Kombi” facilities, to deep plan offices and trading floors for large organisations, while overcoming the limitations of conventional office typologies. Although formally consistent, this new building typology must be susceptible to design variations in order to meet different...
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Bockenheimer Depot Theatre
Nikolaus Hirsch & Michel Müller
The project marks the transition from a monofunctional to a multiprogrammed, changeable space in the Bockenheimer Depot, a theatre in a former industr...Komyo-Ji Pure Land Temple
Tadao Ando Architect & Associates
My brief was to reconstruct this 250 year old pure land temple of the Edo period in the city of Saijo, the gateway to Mount Ishizuchi, known for its...Simmons Hall, Mit
Steven Holl Architects
The new residence hall in Cambridge campus is part of a porous strip of potential new MIT Buildings forming the Vassar Street edge along the Briggs At...