The project tries to listen to the place and its limits, to every scale. To local scale, its topography, its edges, its soil. To urban scale, the pulses of a dislocated space, half field half city, characterized by the distant horizons marked by the agricultural simplification of the vegetation, the aqueduct of San Lázaro which reminds to us the city and its history and the imagined footprint of the future building of the Departments of Government of Extremadura. Drawing a map that defines the territory, we contemplate a set of dualities that indicate these limits to us. Between them there is the space that we are interested in. Of a side we have places marked by the stability, the weight, the fixation, the permanence. These are all of them conditions, perhaps inevitable, in the architecture. On the other hand, in parallel, there are places, in fact, I would say atmospheres, governed by the instability, the movement, the mobility, the fleeting expression of the moment that they accompany to the events of the life that with our buildings we celebrate and hold. Our intention is to collect this atmosphere, solidify through the project, such as an alchemical operation, this vanishing material, this gas, and catch him in the space unless this pending disappear, its volatility and its vitality. A strategy, not a form.
The plot possesses an inclination that determines the implantation of the building. We bury, yes, but less … The low level, which lodges the uses typical of the building, from the parking lot of ambulances, the stores and wardrobes up to the big Room of Coordination and attached spaces, it buries the vehicles area, but simultaneously it enjoys a frontal landscaped space for which it opens the officeand the rest room.
The program of the building is proposed in three clear bands: an equipped technical wall assumes the uses of service of the building simultaneously that separates the usable areas of the the street: toilets, wardrobes, control, safety room, cold room..., but also space for the main installations of the building, from the machinery of air conditioning or the generating group to the solar plates in covering. The second longitudinal band gathers the communications and accesses of the building, in a space to double height illuminated by the side skylights; the third band, protected and assisted for the previous ones, lodges under the only, folded and useful covering, the different rooms and occupied spaces of the building.
The pedestrian access appears from the top level from a small square of access, an expansion of the pavements in a nod to the city, to the way that the buildings must find with the public space - a yard would say the Smithson, one of those between strategic-. Since this is thrown a ramp - stairs is thrown up to the center of the building, where the access control is located. The vehicles enter from the traffic circle, allowing this way so much its quick exit in any direction as its comfortable access to the building from two main streets nearby. This accesses ringlet allows that both the main entry and the tire or the emergency exits to be solved to every level of the urban development, facilitating both the accessibility of the building and its safety and control of access.
The rest of uses, so much the room of Crisis like that of the Committee adviser and the offices occupy the space under the continuous covering, allowing both its suitable orientation and lighting and the high vision of the Room of Coordination. These mezzanines have in addition to private trade, toilets and exit to the passable covering from the main communications nucleus. Under the crease–deck-building the spaces, fluid but systematical, they are illuminated by different resources, adapted to its destinations end: side skylights, deep terraces, louvres…, configured inside somewhere new, but similar to that could have existed for centuries, split and vibrant lights of the rays of the Sun through the tres.
The building is not only the envelope of a tidy program adapted to a physical place. In this strategy of hardening of the vitality of all the places and ambience of the project we want that the head office of attention of Urgencies and Emergencies of Extremadura 112 is a social - urban symbol. We construct the building like a topography, avoiding the competition with the aqueduct and the new building of the Commissions, proposing more a scenery than an object. In this silence architecture the force resides in the action: opposite to the glance, the architecture asks now to fix the sight, attentive look, intense look.
Elevated from the ground, the big lattice illuminates and the building shows his only eye to the city, the eye of Boullée, of Duchamp, of Magritte, a renewed Polyphemus that with his gaze cautious spear a message: calm, we remain vigilant …
