A really interesting refurbishment proposal for a 1959 office building by a well-known Catalan architect, Francesc Mitjans.
The challenge was renovating the façade, improving its water-tightness and thermal performance, while remaining respectful to a significant building from recent Catalan architectural history.
Sauerbruch Hutton, as always, please us with their magnificent architecture, accurate construction, and a sensitive and warm colour palette that fits the surroundings perfectly.
Look at the interesting brickwork they have developed in this project. Its geometry, enhanced by the different colours, decomposes the brickwork wall into a pixelated surface, an abstract texture where each pixel projects shadow over the wall itself.
The ceramist Cumella produces this elegant ceramic cladding, according to a design that evokes traditional wooden-slat sun-protections in Barcelona.
Even though the cladding evokes slats, it is not a sun filtering element; it is an outer layer of a rain screen façade that, intermittently, encloses the building either passing close to the wall or liberating an external open space. This depends on functional requirements.
We are pleased to add this case-study to facad3s website for various reasons, the most relevant is the interest of the overall construction solution, and the appropriateness of having good quality cooperative social housing proposals.
We congratulate this young team of architects for their efforts and successful contribution to convincing and then implementing such innovative proposals in the Spanish context.
An interesting double skin glass facade. A fully glazed inner skin with minimal structural profiles, and an outer one that gives a new rhythm to the building.
The cutting in half of the glass panels of this outer skin, and its placement - varying the angle with respect to the front of the façade - distorts both the scale and the image reflected in the glass.
The proliferation of prefabricated systems, including those used in façades, is causing an extent use of terms such as “modularity”, which we could say is “trending topic”. What a pity not to use it according to its most specific meaning, the one that refers us to the module as understood by Le Corbusier among others.
Resorting to precast concrete panels for the façade enclosure is nothing new. In fact, the use of said material in large-format boards of minimum-thickness is not new either, the ΩZ pre-stressed board system has been allowing it for some time.
The thinness of the plate makes it difficult to perform an adequate sealing of the joint and therefore the tendency is to leave them open, and define a drained cavity on the back to grant water tightness. A rain screen.
Another example of good architecture and good construction from this young firm of architects.
We specially want to draw attention to the successful combination of materials and the interesting formal possibilities of the large-format cement boards.
The rhythm and location of the open joints in the outer layer of this rain-screen facade leads us to think about the traditional local solution of “envà pluvial” or ‘rain-shield’.
We want to use the case of this residential building in Barcelona to highlight the huge number of substructures that appear in many buildings so as to support the various enclosures, divisions, cladding, or finishing elements.
In the specific case of this façade, we have a substructure for the balconies glass doors, plus the substructure of the glass banister in some points, plus the substructure of the slab lining, plus the substructure on the top of the large curved glass that closes the ground floor, and so on.
Seeking for the new massivity we were talking about in the study "Closed joints claddings"
For more information about the case take a look to that video