AIR CARGO CENTRE OF MADRID BARAJAS AIRPORT
1994. MADRID

In the year 1994, the representatives of the Air Cargo Centre of the Madrid-Barajas Airport organised a tender of projects for the construction of the building of the Air Cargo Centre of the airport.

According to the rules of such tender, the building had to include offices for the different air cargo companies, with a list of requirements that covered the construction of offices of 22 m2 to offices of 2,000 m2.

On the other side, the building had to be flexible and versatile enough to allow the renting of a wide range of surfaces.

According to the abovementioned rules, the office building could have a maximum of 9 floors on the grade line and a built surface of 19,000 m2. Another of the requirements consisted in building, in two of the floors, a joint area for business use and another for administration purposes related to air cargo matters of around 2,500 m2 each.

The requirements for the parking area consisted in a total of 1,300 parking spaces with loading and unloading area, divided between general public, clients and business area.

The total height of the building was limited to the upper height established by the airport. Another of the conditions established that the construction of the office building had to be developed in three different stages, so that some of its parts could already be operational from the first stage, such as the administrative, business and parking areas. The surface of the building was fixed at 7,000 m2.

In the second and third phases, while keeping the building operational, it should be possible to enlarge it 6,000 m2 every time.

From the conceptual point of view, the proposal presented has a plan in the shape of a TT. In the first phase, the shape is that of an inverted U and after the two foreseen enlargements it should acquire its definitive TT shape.

In this elemental shape, every stroke represents one of the parts of the building that can be identified according to its function.

For example, the horizontal stroke corresponds to the office building of nine floors in its central part and eight floors in the two external ones.

Each of the vertical strokes represents the Ground Floor of the Business Area and the Administration Services Area, which are developed in two different floors.

The space between the vertical strokes corresponds to a pedestrian gallery partially covered by two glazed vaults, which are reminiscent of the classical shopping arcades of the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th that are distributed all around Europe, in places such as Naples, Milan, Brussels, etc.

In this plan are distributed 1,300 parking spaces as well as loading and unloading areas. The vehicular traffic system has been organised in an inverted U shape juxtaposed to the plan of the office building in the enlargement areas corresponding to Phases 2 and 3.

Due to the fact that the building has to be operational during the process of construction of Phases 2 and 3, the central section of phase 1 corresponding to the inverted U, includes the main communications centres of the three phases of the office building.

Each of these centres consists of a staircase, a group of three lifts, a communications room, installations room and toilets.

The office building has two main accesses in the Ground Floor through the indoor gallery, where it is located the control and security unit.

This gallery can be accessed by pedestrians through two routes located in the eastern side, where the client´s parking and the airplane platform can be found.
The northern and southern routes of access, between the nine-floor building and the two-floor one, lead to the gallery from the parking of the business and public services areas and from the public parking.

In the western side, there is another route that allows to access the building from the parkings mentioned above and from the access road to the cargo centre.
In this floor, there is also an access from the pedestrian gallery to the business centre and to the administration services offices.

The emergency stairs located in the east with their respective goods lifts, can be accessed from the porchs of the buildings corresponding to Phases 2 and 3.
Two stairs from the office building and the business building complete the vertical evacuation routes in case of emergency. These are located within the construction and on the grade line.

The electric meter room and the room for control and management of the installations are located adjacent to the routes of access of the office building.

The communications have also been placed in the services and installations basement. This basement occupies only the plan corresponding to the first phase of the Office Building.

In the first floor of the ensemble of the three phases, there is a centre of vertical communications with circular plan that includes an emergency staircase, a goods lift and forced ventilations, as well as the venting system of the premises, which is located throughout the business area and the public services offices.

In this floor, the premises of the business area are directly linked to the lower level through the escalators and through a courtyard with central lighting.
Likewise, some of the rooms of the administration services offices are located in this area.

In the following levels, from the third to the seventh floors, the building keeps the same shape with 5 centres of communications. In the eighth floor, the area corresponding to the first phase is made up of offices. The wings of the Second and Third Phases are balconies.

The roofing plan of Phase 1 has two levels in which are located all the installations that give service to the three phases of the building.

In the lower level are located the rooms for the boilers, pumps, climatisers, cooling towers, power generators, telecommunications infrastructures and PA systems, as well as the rooms for the lift machinery.

The lighting conductor, the aerials and the cleaning pod are located in the upper level. The cleaning pod moves through a rail that runs along the whole length of the First Phase.

In the roofing of the building corresponding to the business area and to the public services offices, there are no installations in any of its two levels, this is due to the fact that they can be seen from the upper floors of the office building.

The parking areas for the restaurants and cafeterias of the business section are located under this roofing.
In order to achieve the highest level of flexibility, Abarrategui designed a screwed metal structure that allowed the construction of open-plan floors in the whole of the office building, with a bay of 13,50 m. The supporting structures and the web girders were located in the facades and, in between them, framed girders were placed every 1,80 meters with a concrete floor slab on steel plate.

In the business and public services areas, only web girders were placed because of the lower density of installations to be located between the ceiling and the framing.

A fundamental principle in order to achieve the desired flexibility and versatility, consists in establishing a modulation as the base for coordinating the different parts of the building: the structure, facades, installations and compartmentalisations. The modulation chosen was 0,90 X 0,90 in horizontal position and 0,85 in vertical position.

The different levels are fitted with canalisations that can be checked every 0,90 m and that are joint by a false ceiling of 1,80 m wide that runs along the longitudinal axis of the floors of the building. Such canalisations form a real fish bone structure.

The removable aluminum roofs measure 0,30 x 0,90 meters in the office areas in order to integrate and place within them all the elements of the installations, since between the roof and the framing are located the installations for air-conditioning, PA, detection, extinguishing and normal and emergency lightning.
All these visible elements have been fitted with mechanisms that allow a relative degree of mobility from their initial position of 1,20 m, in order to facilitate changes in the distribution of the compartmentalisations.

The design of the facades has been solved by using a curtain wall formed by a vertical structure of aluminum sections separated every 0,90 m or multiples of 0,90, so that any compartmentalisation done in the interior of the building and following the modulation of the roofing and the floor canalisations, always finds in the facade an element of division of the curtain wall.

The areas of vision of the office building have been solved by using a combination of COOL LITE SPB glass of 10 mm + air space chamber of 12 mm + sheet of 4+4. One of the glasses is Planterm glass in order to improve the thermic performance.

For this very reason, the curtain wall system has in its sections a device for the rupture of the thermal bridge/heat bridge/for the thermal bridge breakdown.
In the non-vision areas, the materials used have been COOL LITE glasses of 10 mm and a Sandwich Panel of varnished aluminum.

Such coatings model the architectural shapes of the building.

Glass has been one of the main elements used in the design of the panoramic passenger cars of the lifts that run along the eastern facade of the Office Building overlooking directly the airplane platform. The external closure of such cars has been solved using a curved laminar glass in two pieces, plus the cover of the roof.
The skylight designed for the business centre was done with a combination of COOL LITE air space + security sheet.

The abovementioned glasses are placed horizontally and have been dimensioned in order to endure the different climatological conditions and to fulfil the maintenance requirements.

A network of drainage channels in the shape of a grate evacuates the water coming from such skylights.
Due to the fact that the areas of vision of the public services offices and of the business premises did not allowed the use of colour, transparent glasses were used forming a double climalit glazing, with a motor-driven Venetian blind installed between the two glasses to avoid excessive solar radiation.

Another feature of the image of the building are the glazed vaults that cover the gallery that links in the ground level the different parts of the architectural ensemble from east to west.
The vaults are made up of a special structure with steel bars in the shape of tetrahedrons with threaded joints.
By using articulations, this structure rests upon the First Floor and the roofing of the business and public services areas.

Over this structure, and resting on the woodwork knots of aluminum sections, the quadrilaterals of the top side of the spacial structure have been transformed into triangles forming the polygonal surface covered by sheet glass of 10 + 10 mm.

The maintenance of the building facades has been solved by designing a pod/gondola located in the top roof of the central module of the office building.
When extended, the arm pod has a length of 45 meters and in order to keep its stability, it is joint by cables to a mast located in the axis of the trolley that runs through rails. Such rails run alongside the roof.

Due to the maximum height established for the buildings located in the surroundings of the airport, the mast has been designed in order to be able to adopt a resting position. Thanks to an hydraulic system, the pod can come down to the lower level of the roofing in this new position.

The design and modulation of the facades has been done with the following combination of materials: glass, coatings and aluminum jacketings; and with the following elements: the architectural treatment of the external communications centres using singular elements, the integration of the complex systems of installations in the roofing of the building , the design of the crowning elements and of the glazed vaults of the gallery. All these factors help to identify the image of the Air Cargo Centre of Madrid-Barajas airport.

 

 

 

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