Agrosemillas Offices
The Agrosemillas offices are located within an agro-industrial environment conceived at the scale of large vehicles, logistics infrastructure, and productive processes, rather than at a human scale. The site is isolated, connected to a national road that separates it from the urban centre of El Peral—a town of 660 inhabitants—and surrounded by extensive agricultural fields with no nearby references. The character of the place is defined both by this territorial condition and by a climate marked by strong seasonal contrasts and recurring episodes of torrential rain. Activity is organised around harvest cycles, alternating periods of low intensity with phases of continuous work.
The project responds to the need to introduce workspaces capable of providing appropriate conditions for concentration, meetings, and technical development within a context dominated by noise, dust, and logistical intensity. Users—from warehouse staff to engineers involved in innovation—change tasks and rhythms depending on the time of year, requiring a building able to accommodate diverse uses without losing organisational clarity. At the same time, the offices needed to maintain a direct relationship with the surrounding industrial sheds, leading to the search for a certain degree of formal continuity between uses.
The new building is understood as a strategic opportunity to accompany the transformation of the company. Agrosemillas, with a long history linked to seed production, is entering a new phase oriented towards technological innovation and sustainability. The architecture explicitly assumes the responsibility of expressing this moment of differentiation, articulating continuity with the existing legacy while introducing a more open, young, and relaxed attitude. This position is materialised through the direct use of the corporate colours—green and yellow—applied without mediation or prejudice. The façades are resolved with a limited number of large circular openings, protected by equally circular manually operated shutters, understood almost as a switch borrowed from the digital realm.
The offices are built simultaneously with more than 4,500 m² of productive and bulk-storage sheds, sharing systems, materials, and trades. The project relies on the labour available in the immediate context: local craftspeople, such as the village blacksmith and plumber, the formwork teams from a neighbouring town, and the area’s regular industrial construction crews. This condition proves decisive in making design decisions aligned with the real means of the place and reinforces a deliberately austere architecture.
Spatial organisation is resolved through a clear and repeatable system. Four reused standard shipping containers, opened on two of their sides, rest on a concrete plinth shared with the industrial sheds. Their arrangement generates a saw-tooth roof that acts as a sequence of skylights, providing homogeneous natural light and a notable richness of interior space. The north-facing orientation of the open planes allows for constant and controlled daylight entry.
Perpendicular to this structure, and organised as a grid, three bands structure the plan: one dedicated to open workspaces, another to service areas, and a third to meeting rooms and laboratory spaces. Accesses are segregated according to logistical and work-related flows, and the intermediate roofs incorporate strips of experimental cultivation, integrating research, production, and architecture into a single operation.
The building is conceived as a precise and contained work infrastructure, where architecture is constructed through system, use, and the people who make it possible.
