Converting the centre into a space much more connected with the outside, full of light and with the possibility of opening up and ventilating the whole house. A space in between that – although programmed and deeply architectural – lets in the natural intensity of the climate from the roof and divides the house in half, emptying it, making it more spacious and letting it breathe. A space that, due to its less domestic conditions of height, light and ventilation, manages to convey a feeling of being outside. The verticality of the central space and the zenith opening organize air and light. They make the invisible visible by sliding natural light to the bottom of the atrium while stimulating the speed of ventilation and the exit of hot air upwards to the exterior.

The program that is organized around the central space is extensive and quite fragmented. We propose a second categorization of the program that hierarchizes it so that each floor has four important spaces that are larger and higher, and these are complemented by secondary spaces that are smaller and clearly of less height.

The hierarchy between rooms is used to absorb the strong irregularity of the plot and solve all the spaces in a regular and orthogonal way in the main pieces. As in an excavated architecture, the different directionality of the spaces is absorbed by the thickness of the walls.

The main pieces always maintain the same position and dimension on all floors, while the complementary pieces vary, adapting and occupying the interstitial and irregular space left between the main pieces. Large structural walls, very thick and heavy, give the house a lot of thermal stability, but at the same time are selectively hollowed out to accommodate the smallest – and often the most sensitive – programs inside.

The great walls have been built with “poor” cast-in-place concrete. A mixture with very little cement and a selection of sands and gravels which, applied with a compaction technique similar to that of rammed earth, is a very robust and monolithic solution with a lot of thermal inertia but at the same time porous enough to help regulate and stabilize the temperature, humidity and the acoustics of the spaces.

The ceilings of the main spaces are always as high as possible and made of wood in order to differentiate them as much as possible from the complementary spaces, which are entirely mineral spaces excavated within the walls.

The central space is the most collective, the most primordial and special in the house. It is an atrium on the ground floor and first floor combined with a cloister superimposed on the second floor. Two archetypes with a very forceful geometry and dimensions that fit one on top of the other and from where the distributions are organized.

The atrium is the highest space in the house with four central pillars that free the hole in the central courtyard and that border and frame a virtual space in the middle of the house where the living room will be located.

The upper cloister is a space with similar characteristics, with lots of height and natural light, but without the centrality of the atrium. In the cloister the use, instead of occupying the centre, surrounds the courtyard. It cedes importance to light and ventilation and is located on the perimeter, expanding circulation spaces and sharing with the surrounding rooms. It is an extension of the rooms, the collective space of the rooms.

A house within the city, which due to its typological and constructive characteristics reconnects with traditional Mediterranean characteristic models of the city of Barcelona such as the Gothic courtyards and its bioclimatic and well-being values. Spaces designed to incorporate and exalt natural light, air stratification or the force of gravity. A house that tries to recover relationships with what surrounds us; an urban house.

Text provided by the architects.

This industrial constructive logic, where the building can be summarized as a repetition of a single transversal section, is transformed once you are in the interior, because the vision of the whole length of the building is stronger than the repetition of the module. The intervention in the building activates all the elements of the original building creating the new program, and reuses its physical, spatial and historical qualities to make the new construction more efficient and to reinforce the character of the original building.

The original building is 100m long, where the first decision was to bring the value of its maximum dimension, which is the length. We access through the center creating an interior square where the promenade of the interior stairs begins in diagonal double ascending. The original building is communicated physically and visually from the ground level until the roof structure. This vestibule also connects the building to Parellada Street and the Fabra & Coats complex square. This new communal space is the new structural contribution to the original building.

The new construction is by assemblage, it is a dry construction with just few materials, as in the original industrial building. Wood is used in all its forms: solid, agglomerated, cross laminated… Materials are joined as if it was a textile. To sew and un-sew, the new construction by its character and assemblage, can be assembled and disassembled, so it is “reversible”. The building, in the future, as a heritage element, can return to its original form of 1905, and the material used in its construction can be recycled.

Structural reuse of the two inner floors of the building, using them without any reinforcement (load capacity of 1,100kg/m2) to support on both floors the two new levels of housing. We convert two floors into four, to reach this we use a wooden structure, because it is 5 times lighter than a steel structure. The wooden frame structure is a translation of the old steel structures used as shelves for the storage of the threads.

Façade and roof of the building as a thermic buffer for the housing units. The new housing units are placed separated from the façade and the original roof of the building, with a new wooden façade. The in-between space is created to circulate the air; therefore, the housing units do not require the air conditioning the most part of the year.

The 45cm brick wall and the ceramic tile roof of the original building provide its thermal and shading properties to the new interior building, while maintaining its presence as an interior façade of the communal spaces. In this in-between space are the inner streets to access to the houses, identifying the old path of the thread packages through the crane bridge and the conveyor belts.

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Bar nou offers on its menu Pa amb tomaquet (bread with tomatoes), a typical catalan dish presented in a contemporary manner. According to this, one of the demands of the clients consisted in combining contemporary design with traditional approaches. Since its importance is capital for the bar’s identi- ty, a dj-booth looking altar devoted to its preparation has been designed and placed at the core of the space. There chefs play, as if they were the new dj’s, their role of pamtomaquers under a brand new vaulted scenography.

Besides the space, the project has also developed the design of the interior elements including furni- ture and lights. Both the chairs and tables introduce common materials in domestic tradition, such as cattail or mirrors. With regard to lighting, three complementary typologies have been designed. With urban scale in mind, the project uses figurative neon lights to emphasize its presence in a busy and crowded crossroad. Meanwhile, the interior suspended lamps consist of a pivoting metal tube arm that allows them to adapt to the changing position of the tables and in turn draws from outside a constel- lation of points in permanent modification. Additionally, three legged lamps provide a domestic and atmospherical light.

Text provided by the architects.

As the building doesn’t sit above a basement or car park, the studio took the opportunity to dig down into the site’s foundations.

At the heart of the office, the floor is now punctuated by three holes. Two of these were turned into cushioned conversation pits while the third overflows with leafy tropical plants.

“Light and vegetation becomes the centre from which the project is structured,” explained the studio. “[The] unusual and beautiful background is intended to encourage photography.”

Two large concrete tables were placed on either side of the office – one functioning as a communal work desk while the other can be used for general staff gatherings, surrounded by steel stools.

Steel was also used to create a sculptural prep counter in the office’s kitchen.

The only rooms that are closed off are those used for meetings or by the accounting department.

Plain white curtains were installed around their perimeter so that they, too, can serve as spaces to photograph models if necessary.

To maintain the office’s open plan, the toilets were tucked away beside the building’s stairwell. Here, an expansive picture window overlooks the street, bisected by a chunky concrete washbasin.

There’s also a floor-to-ceiling mirror where visiting models can do their makeup.

Text provided by the architect.

CONSTRUCTION AND ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE

The construction systems used correspond to the Catalan tradition of aforetime: wooden beams, stone masonry walls, Catalan ceramic vault, recovery of wooden carpentry, restoration of ceilings and coffered ceilings, marble flooring at entrances, wrought iron railings and complementary elements, etc.

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The ground floor houses shops, an entrance to the apartments and another to the underground car park. The two entrances on the ground floor of the apartments have been designed as transparent spaces to facilitate communication between public and private spaces from the street to the apartment.
The design of this building is significant not only because of the continuation of the two exterior facades, but also because of the design of the attic or through the recess, an elaborate system of gardens, balconies and terraces with a swimming pool is generated, creating this form a secluded and private oasis in the center of the city.

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The construction process, slow and complex, at least allowed decisions to be made as the essence of the property was revealed with the demolitions. Thus, once all the slabs had been demolished and the building was seen as a slender and tall prism formed by walls with a completely heterogeneous composition of all types of bricks and stones arranged without apparent order or composition, the idea of ​​leaving all these walls seen became conceptual: these four walls, more than 15m high, are a museum of the history of the building, where any trace of construction (arches, lintels, gaps in the steps and beams), and use (remnants of mortars) , furniture, subframes or coverings) will be left unaltered, exposed in all its rawness.

The new slabs (3 in total) will be sheets held by new beams between the party walls, which will not touch either of the two facades: towards the main facade, a sheet of glass will separate them from it; and towards the interior façade, the stairwell will be a 4-storey void that unites the entire interior and shows the surprising height of such a slender building.

The steps of the facilities, by ruling out from the beginning regattas on the walls or small skateboards, take on a special and relevant role in the interior: 7 stainless steel cylinders run the entire height of the building carrying all the electrical installations inside, ventilation, plumbing, extraction, sanitation, air conditioning and telecommunications in 6 of the cylinders, leaving one space for future needs.

These cylinders are not hidden and travel through the building, passing through furniture and flooring. The rest of the installations are always visible, never built-in, highlighting the roughness of the masonry walls on which they are located, freeing them from new constraints.

Materially, a certain refinement has been pursued in the new elements to be implemented, in opposition to the crude expressiveness of the existing walls, aware that the space must house a home. Thus, the kitchen is a piece of frosted brass furniture, shiny and reflective, with a white marble top; The bathroom equipment is paneled with lacquered wood in a slightly cream color, with black and brass details; the ‘headers’ of the plants are covered in white microcement; The hydraulic mosaic, microcement and oak floors add warmth and color to the interior; and the white lacquered wood ceilings incorporate registers and grilles to ‘design’ these needs.

The structure is all painted white, wanting to seek a certain material abstraction, especially in the development of the staircase, with a helical layout, which develops as a free-standing cylinder that runs the entire height of the building without ever touching its walls, offering Piranesian views helped by the heterogeneity of the walls and the diversity of the points of view. On the contrary, all the details on the existing walls are direct and raw: the window frames are made with direct mortar, the pre-frames are not disguised, and the structural tying elements are left unpolished.

Above, in the tower’s forging, a skylight introduces a beautiful gradation of light to the lowest strata; Towards the façade, the glass sheets bounce the lighting between floors and introduce ever-changing reflections, allowing the façade to be admired in all its height from the inside, just as happens in the void of the staircase. The main façade was rehabilitated following the strict dictates of the heritage department, returning it to an image of the past that it surely never had.

Only at the entrance door were we free to invent a front that reproduces the three-dimensional design of the classic hydraulic mosaic (used on the ground floor and very loved by the client) with a layout of rhombuses and triangles finished with 3 types of aluminum, which conceals the door (only recognizable by the lock) and abstracts the entrance.

Text provided by the architect.