Integration by a ceramics cladding (006)

This mixed-use complex apparently resorts to the use of ceramics to integrate the building into a historic industrial district that still conserves nineteenth-century architecture: 22@ in Barcelona. However, the use of a specific material is not enough to consider that a building is integrated into a context.

Material is not simply matter: it is a format, a construction technique and a system. What emerges from all this is a character of place that transcends the material.

William McDonough + Partners use a material, ceramic, and place it according to current techniques: coating the façade with open joints and dry fixings. All this is the antithesis of ceramic construction in the industrial period. Probably, this was precisely the idea: to play with the possibilities offered by a historical material in a contemporary use and to contrast it by applying it in a context like that described above.