Industrial building in Vallecas
The building is located as the end or the beginning, depending on how you look, at the west far of the industrial estate in Vallecas, Madrid, a place surrounded by infrastructures without references. Again, an uninspiring context, difficult to deal with.
The visibility provided by this situation and the need of exterior space for parking the vehicles of the public service defines the building position on site, organizing a clear and efficient ring for traffic circulation around the constructed volume. This volume, compact, emphatic and precise, is shifted and orientated towards the main roundabout to affirm its silent presence facing the surrounding disorder, to receive the visitors and hide the vehicles.
A simple yet heterogeneous programme organizes the different uses in programmatic strips one next to the other, without interruption. Offices, changing rooms, garages, car wash, and warehouses lead off in the space, gathering together in legible strips as well in floor plan as in section, generating a compact outlined figure of constant height resolved with a prefabricated concrete structure. This functional diversity is submitted to the discipline of using a single façade system made out by industrialized corrugated sheets, in three different finishes, depending on areas. These materials, corrugated steel and polycarbonate sheets, as a refined reference to the context, distort the scale of the construction and create a jazzy combination of brightness and reflections. For this purpose, doors and windows are fully integrated in continuity with the exterior skin by using the same perforated sheet panels, a solution that also addresses the sunlight control and the presence of the infrastructures that surround the building, with high traffic density. Therefore, the building, hermetic from the outside, receives plentiful of natural light in the inside, which considerably reduces the need of artificial lighting.
A single opening perforates the abstract volume to point out the access and to connect with the near surroundings like a true ‘boîte à miracle’.
All previously described results in the idea of achieving a well-balanced use of resources in the construction of the building, including all the details, which become more visible by their absence. Materials are clearly outlined occupying complete surfaces, always floor to ceiling. These materials used, a few and industrialized, that allow rapidity and efficiency, also make possible to reduce construction costs.
This is the third built project in a row of the same series, after the industrial buildings in Vicalvaro and Boadilla del Monte, and, here again, a grey box raises an architecture issue: the tension between the enclosure and the inner space articulated by light.
CREDITS
TEAM
Jaime Delgado
Aitor Flores
Margarita Galiana
Raquel Herrero
Daniel Juan
Javier Martínez
SCALE MODEL
Marta Prudencio (student)
QUANTITY SURVEYOR
María Luisa Sánchez
STRUCTURAL CONSULTING
Mecanismo Ingeniería, S.L.
