La Llotja theatre and conference centre by Mecanoo Architecten

Regarded from the large scale of the region, the building forms a link between the river and the mountain. Viewed from the urban scale, La Llotja and the river form a balanced composition. At street level the cantilevers of La Llotja de Lleida theater and conference centre provide protection from sun and rain.

La Llotja Theatre and Conference Centre

Design Team: Mecanoo Architecten, LABB arquitectura

Location: Lleida, Spain

Status: Completion March 2010

Situated between the seu vella mountain and the segre river, the building design is influenced by its Spanish surroundings with earthen stone cladding and a light bathed interior with vibrantly coloured accents representing the fruits of the region. Sustainable design principles are integrated throughout La Llotja, with a large cantilever for shade and shelter from the rain, photovoltaics, thermal storage and a large roofscaped garden which also provides a city terrace for Lleida’s citizens.

The large stone edifice seems to have sprouted from the Spanish earth. The building’s horizontal form provides a large garden on the roof, while under the cantilevers begins a square for events, with the stairs of the adjacent building serving as a tribune. Parking has been created underground with the loading area for trucks on the ground level, the same level where the theatre stage, dressing rooms and restaurant kitchen are found. Small trucks can load and unload on level -1. In a light court in the centre of the building, a monumental staircase rises from street level to the multifunctional hall on the first floor. A ramp leads on to the foyer on the second level where there is a panoramic window looking out across the city and the river. The entrances to the theatre, which also serve as a large conference hall, meeting rooms and a small conference room are located in the foyer. The latter is visually connected to the multifunctional hall by means of a raked tribune separated by a glass wall. The press office, VIP rooms and a meeting centre are situated on the city side of the building, accessed by an internal corridor. The entire functional logistics for the theatre and the conference centre are situated inconspicuously but extremely functionally. Restaurants with bars are located on the side of La Llotja facing the river and the square.The monolithic building is in fact composed of different pieces of buildings linked together by sound-absorbing foyers.

Materials ensure distinction and orientation in the interior. The exterior is of stone. Inside there are mainly white, plastered walls and either wooden or marble floors. The entrance hall and the multi-functional hall have a marble floor, while the foyer has a floor of mixed hardwood. The theatre has the atmosphere of an orchard with walls of dark wood in which trees of light have been cut out. Thousands of leaves on the ceiling light the hall. The colour palette of fruit is a theme that recurs in small details throughout the building. After all, the region of Lleida is famous for its fruit production. The roof is colourful: pergolas support a range of creepers and climbers like roses, jasmine and ivy. The garden with its mirador is not only pleasant but also useful since the roof cover keeps the building cool in the summer, provides a beautiful view for people living in the neighbourhood and serves an extra place for conference guests to sojourn.

La Llotja is 37,500 m2 with two congress halls (1,000 and 400 seats), the largest functions as a theatre as well, a congress hall with 200 seats, a multifunctional space and a lounge with a view on the old city and on the segre river, 9,500 m2 of parking and a public square of 15,325 m2, mercolleida office and retail of 2,591 m2. building costs amount to 35 million euro.

via Mecanoo

Continue reading...

Municipal Theatre and Auditorium by FOA

Given the scarce amount of space in the plot in respect to the required program, the design is to lifts the auditorium from the ground level, letting the plaza penetrate the plot, becoming a foyer that sits beneath the cantilevered mass of the building.

Municipal Theatre and Auditorium
Design Team: Foreign Office Architects
Location: Torrevieja, Spain
Status: Completion 2006

Torrevieja is one of the main tourist towns in south-east Spain, and it is now involved in an ambitious program of infrastructural improvements aimed at raising the profile of the town beyond its current mass tourist destination. This project is the result of a commission to implement a new urban infrastructure, a 650-seat theatre and auditorium, in a corner site inside one of the town centre blocks, and the redevelopment of a neighbouring existing plaza.

The scarce amount of space in the plot made the architects lift the auditorium from the ground level, letting the plaza penetrate the neighboring plot, becoming a foyer that sits underneath the cantilevered mass of the building. The public space becomes an incision into a solid mass, clad in local limestone, which fills the maximum volume allowed on the site, completing the blocks corner. The geometry of the auditorium has been used as the main feature of the cantilevered, stone mass; a reminder of the landscape of limestone quarries that surrounds the town.

The building has been designed as a single container where the proscenium has been made removable, allowing a seamless continuity between the audience, the stage and the scenic tower. This will provide the maximum flexibility of use of the theatre. The interior finish of the room has been designed as a system of folded planes which reflect the sound to provide ideal acoustic conditions, both for theatre and musica (performances. The crystalline geometry of the interior finish and its white color are a reference to the towns trademark salt lakes.





via FOA

Continue reading...

Ikea Restaurante by Estudio Mariscal

Ikea means a small hill in Basque. To conceptualize the interior decoration of Ikea, the designers imagined it as a restaurant in a farmhouse set on the top of a small hill, surrounded by a forest of beech and oak trees.

Ikea Restaurante
Design Team: Estudio Mariscal
Location: Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Status: Completion 2006

The fact is that the Ikea restaurant in Vitoria is a fairy story house, which is in the middle of a forest of buildings and apartments. After the reform, the forest is experienced inside. Oak and other local woods share the area with warm stone and granite. Unpolished wood and stone, leaving the grains and knots, the cut of the saw on view... Seeking the authenticity of the materials more than the rustic nature they mean.

Oak floorboards on the floor. On the ceiling, a framework of unpolished, cut trunks without seeking perfection, as if they had been hand cut, through which artificial light filters. On the inside walls, panels of different woods on which a mosaic of irregular pieces has been made, in which stone occasionally finds a place. Different varieties of wood, different textures and cuts to provide a primitive sensation in which formal imperfection was simply a quality of the material.

On some of the panels there are crabs, made of fibreglass and illuminated with fibre optics, which provide a contrast and will be a reference to contemporaneity, somewhere between crudeness and sophistication. A kind of metaphor from Jose Ramon Berriozabal's kitchen, who prefers cooking to experimenting, but who does not scorn researching into flavours and including products that do not come out of the traditional recipe book.

As far as the treatment of the space is concerned, the old dividing walls were removed to create light and airy spaces that coexist with other more intimate and welcoming ones, when diners wish to enjoy privacy.





To introduce natural light into the lower ground floor, an English courtyard was created, long and narrow and closed in on one of the sides by a concrete wall which will be covered in plants, while the wall that communicates with the diners has had large windows opened in it.

On the exterior, box hedges will follow the perimeter of the facade.

As an annexe to the restaurant, there is a marquee; a place for holding banquets, which Mariscal has conceived as a "lay cathedral". A structure made of strips of beech wood envelops an interior space and gives it great character.





via Estudio Mariscal

Continue reading...

Carabanchel Social Housing by FOA

The architects based their design on a simple concept that is low-cost, sustainable and playful, experimenting with the standard ideas on social housing.

Carabanchel Social Housing
Design Team: Foreign Office Architects
Location: Madrid, Spain
Status: Completion 2007

Foreign Office Architects gave bamboo a leading role in the Carabanchel Social Housing project. There were two main reasons for doing so: it's eco-friendly and it's comfortingly cosy. Operating within a severely limited budget, the Carabanchel Social Housing project is 100 social housing units on the outskirts of Madrid. Regulations set the number of units and the percentages of every size. The maximum height was also a constraint, but not the alignment within the rectangular plot.

Given the adjacency to the future urban park and the North-South orientation of the site, our proposal is to compact the volume within the given height to provide a private garden for the units on the eastern side and to produce double aspect units facing both gardens. In order to achieve this, the units became elongated tubes that connect both facades. Thanks to the compactness of the block, we succeeded in providing fully glazed facades for all the exterior surfaces. The facades have been lined with a 1.5m wide terrace which provides a semi-exterior buffer space enclosed with bamboo screens mounted on folding frames. The screens protect the glazed surfaces from the strong East-West solar exposure, and are able to open to the side gardens when desired.Our target was to provide the maximum amount of space, flexibility and quality to the residences, and to erase the visibility of the units and their differences into a single volume with a homogeneous skin which is able to incorporate a gradation of possibilities.

The primary architectural effect of the building is not dependent on the architects vision, but as an effect of the inhabitants choice, as if the facade was a register at any given moment of a cumulative effect of individuals choices.







via FOA

Continue reading...

CS House by AH Asociados

"Building a house that creates an isolated world for its inhabitants requires a simple but determined execution." says AH Asociados.

CS House
Design Team: AH Asociados
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Status: Completion July 2002

This house is located in an area dotted with residential buildings. Building a house that creates an isolated world for its inhabitants requires a simple but determined execution. It has been necessary to make the most of the views by making use of the elevated position of the plot, to protect it from the impact of adjacent buildings.

The 'S' section allows the opening up of the bedrooms and living room to the garden that is protected by vegetation. The first floor has the opposite orientation so that the light enters directly into its rooms. In this floor, the opaque level that turns into a far image of the house protects the terrace, a floor opened to the sky in the folded level, which is the private and intimate place of the house.

The folded 'S' section floats above a cut in the ground with a 'C' form that in its opening empties the site and leaves a hole above which the house is constructed. The access floor is located in the basement and discovers the dynamic section.





via mimoa

Continue reading...

Encants market by b720 Arquitectos

Encants market is an initiative to accomodate all commercial activities and improve the mobility, the public transport system and the management of equipments in the area.

Encants market/ Mercado de Els Encants de Barcelona
Design Team: b720 Arquitectos
Location: Barcelona, Spain
When to visit: Expected completion 2011

b720 Arquitectos has won the design of a new Encants market from the City Council of Barcelona. The new Fira of Bellcaire market, better known as Encants Vells of Barcelona, will be located in the zone of Bosquet and its transfer is one of the pieces that will facilitate the unfolding of the modify of the Metropolitan General Plan in the Glories area.

The new Encants market is installed as a device to mediate between the reform of the Glorias square and the axis of Meridiana, an area popularly known as the Glories of Bosquet. The b720 proposal raises a platform (or commercial square) at various levels as a continuous surface suitable for all commercial activities. By bending the platform, the different levels of the street are reconciled, understanding the market as a large square deck, capable of instilling activity in all parts of the program.



The new facility, defined as “functional, open and future”, tries, from a structural point of view, for protecting the business of inclement weather under their deck, but always retaining a sense of buying outdoors. The commercial solution proposed (shops and auction) will be located primarily at the street level and will not be placed under any building other than its own deck, which will form an open commercial space with a main façade to the Meridiana avenue and the Glories square.

The remaining business that has the market (formed by the other shops that are not at the street level) and the new supply and services that may have (restaurant, play centres, offices, multipurpose rooms…) would be located over this zero level while preserving the sense of buying street. The project includes an underground car park with capacity for about 300 cars, loading area, storage area, locker, offices and other auxiliary services.

The cover, the principal component of urban recognition, protects commercial activities and reflects the city inside the market. Each modular structure will have different inclinations to reflect light, atmosphere and landscape.




via b720

Continue reading...

Conde Lumiares Drugstore by Mobil M

The 256 tubes hang from the centre of the shop, without doubt, the originality of this interior architecture.

Conde Lumiares Drugstore
Design Team: Mobil M
Location: Alicante, Spain
When to visit: Anytime

Spanish architecture firm Mobile M, has renovated the Conde Lumiares drugstore in Alicante, Spain, offering an innovative, non-traditional approach to pharmacy design while renovating the store.

Architect in charge, Daniel Ferrer has removed the suspended ceiling of the old shop, lending an airy and spacious feel to the interior. Ferrer has raised the roof from two meters to around five meters. To fill in the void created by having a large space open, Mobile M installed 256 suspended cylinders, ranging from two to four meters in length. A second level to the drugstore has also been created for use as a laboratory, warehouse and employee training area.





The exterior of the shop also received a makeover. The single piece shop window glass is five meters high, offering a view of the interior of the shop from outside.






via Mobil M

Continue reading...

MN19 Office by b720 Arquitectos

The new facade is a colourful transparent glass slats float horizontally, changing from yellow to orange.

MN19 Office
Design Team: b720 Arquitectos
Location: Barcelona
When to visit: Anytime

The project consists of transforming an administrative building between party walls, which had significant structural problems, into an office building.

The work presents two basic concepts: on one side, the training of obtaining, from a very determining pre-existence, the flexibility and services level that this typology demands. On the other side, a new facade had to allow its identification as a contemporary corporative building. b720 decided to use colour as an integration tool in a consolidated environment of upper class apartment buildings On the facade of Mestre Nicolau, coloured transparent glass slats draw a surface floating without specific limits face to the siding.

The whole sets out gradually in two aspects: horizontally, the colour, changing from yellow to orange, borrowing the shades of the awnings of the close bourgeois balconies and terraces, and, vertically, the density of the slats, which, depending on the sun rays and on the narrowness of the street, make the protection more necessary in the upper floors than in the lower floors.




In the inner facade, b720 take advantage of the existing siding wall. They designed a simple white facing with oblong holes, regularly arranged. Every hole is encircled with a thick sheet plate as a perimeter entrance portal projecting from the facade surface and painted in several colours with a progression similar to the one of the main facade, By removing a projecting body of the interior facade, it was possible to place the new access core in the central space, which was an air shaft by the party wall on the right. This allowed the distribution of the floors In two main office areas, facing, respectively, the exterior -Mestre Nicolau St. and the inside -air shaft and also a central area thought as an open office.

The ground floor is at the street level and comprises the accesses to the offices, the ramp for the parking access and a commercial premise taking the rest of available space. The structure was reinforced with carbon fibre and endured certain changes in the position of the columns existing in the basement and ground floors to be able to fit the current distribution to the new conditions of use. b720 used colour combined with very highlighted graphics as a very effective resource to supply unity and style. The hall and stairs are covered with black terrazzo applied continually on flooring and vertical facings, which sometimes tilt and form light grooves or transform in the concierge desk.



via b720 Arquitectos

Continue reading...