Space of Young Creation
...Dwarfing water (or how a warehouse turns into space of young creation)
A water tank. A hermetic dark water tank, without doors. A water tank with walls of three meters and a half wide where was nobody. Only water.
After emptying it...
We decided to open holes. The first hole to enter. And once inside, we created more holes. As many as we needed. We conceived different type of holes, in the walls to pass from an area to another one, in the vaults to have light and to see how the place was, we even made holes to go up to the rooftop.
From the rooftop we could have a look to the interior by a hole and we could see...
A place to do cinema, to play music, place to paint, a place for theatre, with computers and mixing desk to record, a place with an oven to cook ceramics, to reveal photography, to do exhibitions, a place with books and guitars, to see movies, a place to teach and especially, a place to learn.
Intervention Strategy
The old Water tank was composed of two large cisterns, divided by a thick wall, and an octagonal tower that sticks out from the volume of the deposits. The idea consists in respecting, cleaning and rehabilitating the structure of the original building. The ancillary program is collected in the annexed Tower, inside a large cylinder, thus achieving a new spatial configuration capable of fulfilling the program needs, giving flexibility to the space of the deposit. The Space for Young Creation adapts the original space, conceived to contain water, creating holes: the vaults are pierced to achieve a natural illumination of the interior space. The wall separating the cisterns is opened in four points to create the connections and necessary communications between the spaces and to allow a circulation, creating four circular steps between them.
In this way we achieve a large limpid space, clean, whitewashed, luminous, allowing the division of the same in different classrooms, when necessary, by curtains. Services and fixed program as toilets, recording booth, photo lab, data center and facilities, are concentrated in a cylinder inside the tower.
