RIA DE CIENCIA
Developed in a post-industrial area next to the Rias of Vigo, this proposal aims to articulate the complex programmatic requirements of the CSIC Marine Research Institute with a system of collective and public spaces so that they jointly form a synergic platform for knowledge production.
To efficiently resolve the coexistence of the modular rigor of the laboratory grid and the fluid integration to collaborative programs, a set of simple reticular volumes are slightly edited to create new spaces for interaction between research groups.
Three landscape elements unite the campus. In the basement, an underground connector logistically links all buildings. At the ground level, a linear plaza carves into the buildings to connect their public programs to the outside. Finally, in the center of the campus, a carballeira garden provides workers and visitors with a green space to interact and exchange knowledge.
PARTICIPATORY LIBRARY IN MADRID
The Las Tablas Municipal Library is a net-zero, highly dynamic building that can be designed through a participatory process, and transformed in time. To achieve this goal, the main strategy consists in dividing the program into independent volumes, which are then deployed around a patio. In the possible organization that is presented, the patio level contains the uses that are more dynamic and that require easier access from the street, such as the areas for children and teens, and the consultation areas. The second level houses, in turn, the reading rooms, workshops, and study spaces.
The constructive system manages solar control and ventilation while it triggers the building’s aesthetic solutions. The building facade combines ceramic, white bricks, and locally sourced materials. The skin alternates transparent, opaque, and open areas to calibrate the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, promoting a lively center for the local community while allowing different levels of quietness and activity for the library spaces.
EDIFICIO BRITS
This 83-unit residential building explores a micro-urban structure that articulates landscape and architecture to orchestrate the multiple forces that act upon its development process over time.
Formally, the building resamples the metrics of the municipal urban fabric to organize the project in a (rather large) sloped site plot to provide good solar exposure, privacy, and views to all apartments.
Set up in concentric rings, the project’s ground floor is laid out around an infrastructural garden that beyond supporting leisure activities, manages climate-change events and features local flora to promote the reconstitution of regional ecologies. Facing this central garden, a covered pedestrian ring provides access to all towers and building amenities fostering the building’s collective life.
A RESILIENT ART COMPLEX
Currently, under construction and over 400,000 sqm, this project explores new relationships between form and (undetermined) function.
Developed in the context of non-western rapid urbanization, amid the creation of the institutional organizations that will define the cultural visions to support these future buildings, the design of this cultural complex integrated architecture and landscape to perform simultaneously as content and container, as art and architecture.
By articulating flexible and resilient architectural and urban configurations, this project explored the latent possibilities of regional-local architecture to adapt to new scales and programs while hosting and remaining open to its future (and possibly unplanned) art programs.
