The hydrological machine:
During the 19th century, the textile factories of Poblenou used the abundant underground water for their operation. With the disappearance of this industrial regulator, the water table has risen considerably, and water outcrops are found less than 7 m deep. The new headquarters of Barcelona Activa transforms this problem into a project factor: two 30 m deep wells extract a flow of 70,000 liters of water per hour with a constant temperature of 18 degrees - higher than that of the air in the winter and cooler in the summer-, they feed a hydrological machine that supplies the necessary energy for air conditioning, irrigation and sanitary services. This energy model, including the 100 m3 pool for the storage of extracted water, is located on levels -2 and -3 of the building.
The complex includes a media library, an auditorium, the corporate headquarters of Barcelona Activa, the existing business incubator and a new office tower. The stage where this programmatic complex is gathered is a semi-open square in the street that we call the campus. A proposal that revises the concept of enclosure that emerges from the Cerdà blocks of houses in which the spaces that belong to the street are differentiated from those inside the block of houses.
The 'campus' is separated from the street by a gate-pavilion that functions as a curtain, a threshold that allows you to organize access to the square, the descent to the media library or the classroom and the entrance to the Nursery, according to timetables or requests for different operation. There are more sequences of curtains in the project: intermediate spaces that dilate the passage from the street to the square, from the square to the inside of the building, from the elevators to the floors, from the inside of the offices to the outside of the façades’ balconies. These transition spaces measure from one millimetre to two metres.
The arrangement of the entire complex has been a delicate contract between different programs and typologies that create paradoxes of size: entrance pavilions too small to be buildings and too large to be pieces of street furniture; small squares to be understood as squares and very large if read as exterior rooms; towers excessively tall in proportion to the site alongside buildings considerably long for their height... With an overabundance of what is horizontal, during construction, and even today, the complex looks more like a shelf than a building. Things can be placed on this shelf, and their positions can be swapped. The entrance pavilion has its own graffiti-advertisement; the floors are ready to be able to connect wherever you decide, both inside the offices and in the square; the ceilings, to move the lights; the glasses, to accept various protections, labels or transparencies.
Sobriety plus flexibility: versatile buildings with a great ability to be combined. Non-representative buildings, buildings neither ostentatious nor pre-figured but adaptive. Like old industrial production buildings: without excessive authorship, without necessarily style, comfortable as a warehouse and for transformation. Architecture ready to accommodate changing uses and identities.
