The project presented began when Manresa City Council organised a competition to rethink the internal functioning of its current building. The main objective is to make it more functional while ensuring compliance with all current regulations. And that is why it proposes that the required objectives be achieved by means of the location of a new vertical communications core attached to the rear façade; and, incidentally, the rear façade of this building, the only one that is currently in very poor condition, will be restored. ‘The old can be new’ In the project for the remodelling of Manresa Town Hall, the new vertical communication core necessary for the internal functioning of the building, by being located on the rear façade, must also resolve the enclosure of the building, currently in ruins. The new enclosure that we propose is not intended to be understood as an addition from the outside, but as a material continuity of the façade itself, which occasionally adopts certain geometries. That is why it is proposed to construct it by cladding the base structure with construction systems that are technologically contemporary, but which at the same time are in material dialogue with the existing building and the old town where it is located: a curtain wall with a simply plastered finish and, occasionally, glass. ‘Occasional Geometries’ The enclosure that will delimit the space occupied by the staircase, the lift, the viewing points that have emerged from the rooms at certain points, the existing installations and the possible ones, will adapt its form to the occupied and necessary spaces, avoiding the automatic generation of empty spaces. The support structure for the stairs and landings, which is nothing more than the triangularised façade itself, is supported on one side by the ground and anchored to the building on the other by means of new frames built around the old windows, which in this way also move closer to the new limits of the façade. Only the spatial needs posed by the programme and the requirements of the structure have been taken into account when defining the ideal shape of the new enclosure, thus generating a geometry for the occasion. Landscape hall We understood Manresa as a city that one day was established on a hill on the banks of the river Cardener, precisely opposite the mountains of Montserrat. We observed that the Town Hall building is located almost at one end of the platform that, occupied by the old town, overlooks the river and faces Montserrat. The main façade dominates the main square and places the building at the end of the old town's routes - and it is the rear façade which, occupying the end of what we are mentioning, dominates the descent of the topography towards the river in broad strokes. Placing the new communications hub of the town hall building at its rear façade, resolving its finish and taking into account its location in relation to the building, the municipality and the territory, has allowed us to concentrate the tensions of its location in the design of this piece: continuity with the old town and precipitation towards the landscape. The proposed scale can be understood as pieces of these routes through the old town, probably the final ones, which, crossing the town hall building, run through it while extending beyond it in the form of cantilevers towards the river. A panoramic staircase, an intervention between the city and the territory. CONSTRUCTION SYSTEMS The New Access and Façade Project for Manresa Town Hall is materially developed from two fundamental construction systems for the project: structure and façade. Both have definitely influenced the final form of the building; that is, we can affirm that the final formal result absolutely responds to the structural and constructional needs. The shape of the façade responds to the shape of the structure; and the shape of the structure responds directly to a three-dimensional diagram of forces that resolves the balance between the structure of the Town Hall building itself, the new staircase slabs and the new façade. - Structure The ideal solution for constructing the structure is a system of metal bars and joints. The desire to protect the structure from the exterior and to construct the new façade with technologically contemporary multilayer panels led to a redesign of the metal nodes, ensuring that, due to their shape, they would always remain inside the building, behind the new façade. The nodes are thus conceived as ‘shields’ of welded metal sheets joined at the points of intersection of the bars. The desire to achieve a simple construction process using simple pieces that in turn respond to the complex geometry of the façade, leads to the idea of constructing these nodes in phases: in the first phase, each bar will have only one of the sheet metal faces of the node, hence the arrow-shaped bars that allow for an initial assembly with the bars at their tips; and in a second phase, redesigned on site, these nodes will be completed with the necessary connecting plates. - Curtain wall façade with plaster finish As for the façade, the desire to achieve a multilayer panel with the same roughcast finish as the rest of the old façade of the Town Hall led us to develop the following construction sequence: Assembly of a multilayer opaque façade assembled on site, consisting of an initial skin in Formawall 1000 Horizontal Panel, in 1,000 mm wide modules formed by two sheets of extra-flat galvanised steel, 0.8 mm thick on the inside and 0.6 mm thick on the outside, with a suitable additional central core of injected polyurethane, forming a total thickness of 50 mm. The finish on the visible inner face is Kynarcolor, the finish on the inner face is standard colour embossed Policolor, with a coefficient K = 0.38 Kcal/m2/ºC. The outer skin is finished with the STO system. Omega-shaped galvanised steel profiles are placed on top of the Formawall panel and the rigid fibreglass and resin panels, 10 mm thick, are fixed directly to them. The joints between panels and corners are treated with resin and fibreglass paste (the same material as the panels). Alkali-resistant reinforcement mesh is installed to provide anti-cracking and impact resistance. STO cement-free, elastic, anti-cracking, rough-finish thin-layer finishing mortar. · The windows. Installation of CW Premier series curtain walls, four-sided structural silicone type, made in prefabricated modules with a self-supporting structure forming a grid in extruded aluminium profiles, hidden from the outside. Includes anchors, joints, seals... In vision areas with 100% impact, includes double insulating glass made up of 6 mm thick COOL-LITE KN 169 outer glass with 61% light transmission and solar factor g (iso 9050m1) 0.42; offset chamber with seal. COOL-LITE KN 169 with 61% light transmission and solar factor g (iso 9050m1) 0.42; offset chamber with 6+6 mm colourless structural and laminar silicone perimeter seal. Lacquered finish, polyester quality, standard RAL colour. Modulation adapted to the shapes of the façade, maximum module width 2.50 m. Includes all the auxiliary means necessary for the complete formation of the wall.