The building that was to be rehabilitated – the former facilities of the Hispano Olivetti company – is located in an area of the city of Barcelona that is undergoing a rapid transformation.
The traditional isolation suffered by this part of the city will be resolved with the opening of roads that will definitively connect the rest of the city.
These circumstances explain the acquisition and conversion of a building like the one we are dealing with, despite its current isolation.
The building was built around the 1950s and consists of basements and three floors. Its structure is made of reinforced concrete and is composed of large pillars paired with turnbuckles that help to save the large lights in the forge and is in a way a replica of the adjacent building, Industries Olivetti, and that due to its interest in structural expressiveness, deserves to be preserved.
The project had to transform the current free floor into another one compartmentalised into small workshops of variable surface area between 30 and 100m2, capable of hosting the various activities of a business creation centre.
In the organisation of the new plant, the cores of vertical access, staircase, elevator and freight elevator are maintained and a new external fire escape is added, in accordance with current fire regulations.
The distribution of the workshops is made with painted concrete block walls up to 2.40m high, with the intention of maintaining a unitary ceiling that allows a better perception of the space and at the same time facilitates the natural lighting of the plant, as well as a more practical and rational layout of the facilities.
The privacy of each workshop is ensured by the placement of metal fabric meshes hanging from the ceiling, which isolate each workshop, both from the adjacent one and from the general accesses.
In front of the existing building is placed a small construction that houses the offices of the centre; its position qualifies the accesses to the centre, one pedestrian and the other wheeled, for the goods that reach the floors from the basement.
A large translucent canopy is also built to protect the entrance to the buildings and the loading dock in the basement.