CID Centro
Development center in Calamonte.
Nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award 2017.
The plot is located in the urban edge of the small town of Calamonte, on a land platform that visually dominates the surrounding farmland. From this location, which gives it a special value in the city-field-landscape relationship, leave the main formal and conceptual decisions that inspire the project. Furthermore, the presence of the building far from the road access routes, the A-66 Highway and Road to Seville, also causes the building necessarily respond to them. Therefore, the roof emerges as the fundamental element of the design. Seen from afar, the building completes its compact thanks to her presence, dialoguing with the landscape of hills surrounding the place. Closeup view, the roof provides greater height spaces that require it, such as the entrance, assembly hall, etc ... likewise providing dynamism and special character to interior environment.
The building is implanted in the plot, rectangular proportion and north-south orientation, adapting to their longitudinal shape. The plan generator concept is opening a crack-courtyard on its central axis, running through its entire length, becoming the main space of the project. In the north facade, this crack configured public access between volumes, and after overcoming the lobby, continues to be characterized as a more introspective space. The required program, consisting of administrative applications support entrepreneurs, organized with greater programmatic rationality and economy circulations, ensuring the required flexibility. Applications are grouped into three distinct units: the business incubator, support offices and meeting rooms, arranged around the central hall, center of gravity of the building that facilitates quick visitor orientation.
The concise palette of materials intended to reinforce the geometric power of volume: in addition to the white outer shell, finished with a liquid polyurethane membrane, only found concrete ceilings and floors and varying degrees of transparency, ranging from glass to cellular polycarbonate one or two layers, which qualifies natural light and control direct sunlight.
