The hotel is located on the corner formed by Passeig de Mossèn Verdaguer and Avinguda de Pau Casals, two of the city's main thoroughfares. The 1,000 square metre site it occupies was intended to close off a block of terraced buildings. The project approach is based on the desire not to complete the block in a conventional urban way, and to refer to the landscape of dividing walls of the surrounding streets as a qualifier of the urban space. Thus, the new hotel does not fill the available site, but adopts a configuration in which the internal dividing walls of the hotel itself, converted into structural elements, are deliberately left exposed and construct the image of the building and its internal organisation. The possibility of incorporating the partitions into the visible part of the building also leads to their being used as components of the interior space. The site's dimensions are occupied by two narrower, intersecting bodies, which favour the application of this device. The rooms on the top three floors no longer require specific treatment for the end walls, as is the case in conventional hotel typologies.

Partitions - Ventilated façade

The Ciutat de Igualada Hotel is seen as an opportunity to intervene in the city.

The site is a plot of about 1,000 m2 at the head of a block located along Passeig Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer, one of the main arteries of the city of Igualada.

At its junction with Avenida Pau Casals, around a roundabout that distributes traffic accessing the city, are the municipality's central railway and bus stations.

On this same avenue, just in front of the 50-metre-long façade offered by the plot, is the municipal cemetery of Igualada.

As in many other fragments of the city that have developed through diverse processes of growth, the dividing walls along the avenue are the only element of organisation that is really present.

The proposal of the regulations for the plot consisted of a volume defined by the corresponding parameters of alignments and heights; an object that, by closing off the block and the building, slowed down the possible flow to or from the city.
This invited us to question the proposed volumetry and instead take advantage of the possibility, which the city always offers, of adopting diverse configurations.

The Hotel Ciutat de Igualada project aims to chameleonically become part of the varied repetition of partitions along the promenade that structures the city. The resulting space that will develop between them is respected, allowing it to become an extension of the city.

Building the end wall from the partitions, accentuating their disparity and arrhythmia, and taking advantage of the double façades that these generate towards the streets and towards the interior of the block, allows the façade facing the old cemetery to be blinded. The façade is thus left open. The rotation of the upper floors, to open up to the best views and orientations, encourages the gaze across the profile of the city and its natural environment, thus incorporating the building into the territory.
The structure is formed by the partitions themselves. In their anchorage, some of them penetrate beyond street level, generating courtyards that provide light to the basement, for collective use. As on the ground and mezzanine floors, where the system of partitions on each side allows for different connections, floor slabs, in response to the different programmes, their entrances and their communication.

The upper floors contain the rooms, 67 in total. The business hotel programme takes advantage of the shape of the rooms, narrow and long, to organise them into three consecutive zones along the partition, work-hygiene-rest, each accompanied by a material related to its use, waterproof-acoustic-paper; while two floor-to-ceiling units provide storage and furniture for the same programmes.

The partitions are constructed as rain partitions with an iridescent folded sheet metal finish, and the façades between them are constructed with a curtain wall which, avoiding the generation of a boundary plane through the strategic combination of glass with different degrees of colour and reflection, enhances the fluidity of the space without becoming an extension of, or leaving an end to, the public space.

The discovery of an innovative, very low-cost construction system - a rain-screen façade - coming in at 35 euros/m2 - for the main façade and the façades with the largest surface area of the hotel has led to huge financial savings, without which the construction of the hotel would not have been possible.