Department stores are growing and the city asks for a new façade.
We spent several months trying to find a civil palatine façade, with a tower or bell tower, like those in the other buildings in Catalunya Square; incorporating memories of New York buildings (Wollworth, Rockefeller Center)..., Rome’s Rinascente, or some of F. Gehry in Boston, or even quieter ones…
The façade is made of salmon beige granite, like the letters with the logo at the top of the corner. The plinth that covers the ground floor and the continuous eaves that protect it are made of brass. At the same corner the eaves rise like the wing of a hat.
The south corner of the extension is a project of the MBM architecture studio, with horizontal rings on the last three floors.
However, after a couple of hours of work, the façade of the interior of the block came easily. It is the façade that covers the evacuation stairs and the installation ducts and is covered with die-cast aluminum plates such as the radiator shutter of the Seat 600 car. Something similar happens in the Eixample’s courtyards: they are elementary and useful, as little in need of representation and ostentation as is the case on street façades.
The slabs and granite of the street façades are the same size to fit together when they meet.
New Façades for El Corte Inglés
A new tailor-made suit, due to the new circumstances of expansion and adaptation that the building is experiencing.
A new volume from the annexation of three adjoining estates, the renovation of the facilities and the adaptation of the whole to the new fire regulations.
The existing volume is modified in its last floors going back like the attics and upper attics of Barcelona, so that it visually reduces its presence in the corner of the square with Passeig de Gràcia. These indentations extend to both sides of the corner.
On one of these jumps and in the curve of the façade the poster of the department stores built in stone is placed, following the plan of the façade.
A tower that houses the machinery of the new elevators coexists with the other towers, of medieval palatine appearance, of the bank buildings of the square. The tower is topped by the company’s calligraphic sign as a ridge, also as an extension of the façade.
The suit is a new granite cladding similar in colour to that of Montjuïc, with which most of the city’s bourgeois buildings in the Eixample were built.
The 80x130 cladding is placed on the door and highlights its vertical joint. This same fragmentation is used on the rear façade with a deployé that covers all the installations. In some recessed volumes of the main façade, stone and deployé are intertwined.
The windows, which are the width of the stones, are placed on the offices, the fire stairs and, almost arbitrarily, on the rest of the façade. A bronze plinth throughout the building collects emergency exits, entrances, and shop windows. The plinth is topped by a canopy that rises like the wing of a hat when it reaches the corner, where the main entrance is located.
