The intervention liberates redundant wall partitions, revealing a diaphanous circular diagram across the XIXth century existing floor plan
The new Madrid headquarters for Urbania International are housed in an elegant premodern building close to the Retiro Park, in Madrid’s Salamanca District. The intervention is the result of combining the old distribution of two adjoining houses, resulting in 400sqm. of disposable office space supported in the old room-wall-corridor organization. By means of a selective relocation of lost connections in the building’s traditional corridor scheme, an infinite loop around the courtyard is attained.
This loop is used as a gradient programmatic device, polarizing the different functions in its circular route following a natural hierarchy between public and private, or seclude and open areas. Moreover, the loop is understood as a metaphor for the working day, leading the office’s staff along its lines syncopated with the passing of time and the daily movement of the sun along the office's long South and East facing facades. This gradation is made explicit and accentuated in the chromatic pallete and the general finishes: from black to yellow, via tones of blacks or blues, and from polished to unfinished. Exposing, in the way, raw textures and as-found elements belonging to this 150-year-old structure.
Project: Madrid Urbania Headquarters
Status: Competition - First Prize (2020) Built (2021)
Client: Urbania International
Location: Distrito Salamanca, Madrid, Spain
Team: Jacobo García-Germán, Raquel Díaz de la Campa, Miguel López, Marta Roldán
Builder: IC-10 Proyectos Técnicos y Construcciones + HDFaber
Photographs: Imagen Subliminal (Miguel de Guzmán + Rocío Romero)
