RECIRCULATING THE ‘EIXAMPLE’
This urban block in Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia neighborhood located within the Cerdà ‘Eixample’, is unique in that it concentrates a variety of public facilities: a library, a market, and a multipurpose civic building. The project involves the renovation and revitalization of these facilities as the strategy for opening up and redefining the complex’s urban significance for the neighborhood and the city.
The interventions consisted of improving the energy efficiency of the complex by updating the air conditioning systems in the library spaces, replacing the façade and market roof and installing a new photovoltaic solar field. The building at 425 Mallorca Street has been transformed into a multi-purpose facility (elderly people center, civic center, and children's center) following a comprehensive renovation as a ZIB (Zero Impact Building), which consists of demanding and consuming little energy throughout the building's life cycle for each of the environmental vectors (water, materials, and waste) having specially in mind the user’s health as the intervention’s first priority.
From the city's point of view, the incorporation of a wide passageway with a series of ramps and access points from Mallorca Street ensures universal accessibility and spreads the colonization of public space to the various facilities within the block, enhancing the social character of this type of building and reinforcing its definition as spaces open to neighborhood life. These routes always start from safe, sunny spaces that are activated by direct contact with the different programs. At the same time, the appropriation of the roofs at different levels by citizens increases the amount of open space in the city and underpins the commitment to biodiversity.
From the street, the extensive use of a very limited color palette (according to the Barcelona Municipal Institute of Urban Landscape's color chart for the Eixample district) and modular construction systems - based on parameters of scale and repetition - such as curtain walls and awnings (Mallorca façade) or painted brick (Padilla façade), transform potentially isolated urban episodes into a kind of relational device that reinforces the (public) identity of the complex.
Indoors, the aim has been to link architectural elements from different periods by identifying them through color—in the case of the new structural reinforcements—and through the raw surface of the existing structural elements and dividing walls. The selection criteria, which are equally limited, direct, and unbiased, favor materials with diverse but harmonious textures and appearances, seeking to reinforce coexistence by promoting difference.
