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42, JOSEFA VALCÁRCEL BUILDING
1990. MADRID

In the year 1990, the Swedish development company Reinhold announced a tender of projects for the construction of an office building in a plot located in the eastern part of Madrid, in the road leading to Barajas airport.


This plot had a rectangular plan of around 6,000 m2 of surface, with facades opening onto two different streets.

The urban development code established that the setback with regard to the boundaries depended on the height of the building, and the length of the straight span of facade was limited to 70 meters.

The requirements of the tender consisted in an office building that could be used for one or more entities, with a minimum module office surface available for rent of 350 m2 and the possibility to market modules of 700 and 1,400 m2, open-plan stories, flexible distribution, maximum useable surface / built surface, maximum saving of energy and lower maintenance costs.

The maximum built surface on the grade line was established at 10,000 m2 and the number of floors was eight plus a setback attic.
Special attention should be given to the view of the building from the road into Madrid from the airport, in the A-road II.

All these requirements and conditions made the team of Abarrategui choose a solution in which the access to the building was done through an interior road that leaded to the streets corresponding to the facades of the plot.

In order to optimise the distribution of the floors and solve the problem of evacuation and accessibility of the building, two access were planned as well as two centres of communications. Such centres were made up of a group of two lifts and a goods lift, a staircase, toilets, a communications room and installations rooms.
These centres were located in the western facade and they converged in the ground floor level with the access to the building. From this floor, the subterranean car park and the basement of the installations could be accessed through a staircase and a lift.

In the ground floor level, there were two modules of offices and a surveillance and control room for the whole of the construction.

The access routes to the control room were joint by a porch that was created by the volumes located immediately on top. From such porch, the garden area and the pond in the centre of the plot could be easily admired.

Adjacent to the pond, a cylindrical element houses the emergency stairs of the first, second and third floors. In this case, it was necessary to fit out a third centre of evacuation due to the configuration and surface of such floors.

The requirements that consisted in limiting the spans of the facade to 70 m, limiting the volume to be built and establishing a setback distance for the boundaries proportional to the height, were the elements that encouraged us to design a plan in the shape of an omega, with lateral wings tangent to the two main communications nods and with the volume of the emergency staircase located in the central axis.
The first, second and third floors are identical to one another and they consist of four modules of offices.

Due to the urban development requirements mentioned above and to the need of keeping the interior of the office totally open on a structural level with no middle supporting structures, the fourth floor is partly occupied by two big bridge beams that hold the structure of the upper floors and measure 45 m and 27 m respectively, and two brackets of 9 meters.

In this floor, apart from two centres of communications, there are two office modules as well as more balconies.
In the fifth floor are located two modules of offices, two centres of communications and two balconies within a volume of 45 x 14,40 meters resting on the two bridge beams.

The volume of the fifth floor is maintained in the sixth and seventh floors, until the maximum height of cornice is achieved.

At this level, there is a setback attic with two office modules, apart from two balconies in the eastern and western sides of the building and the centres of communications.

The roofing has two centres: in the lower one are located the rooms for the boilers and the pumps, the cooling plants, the enthalpic exhangers, the plant rooms for the lifts and the goods lifts.

In the upper level can be found the lightning conductor, the installations for communication purposes and the cleaning gondolas.

Due to the singularity of the building, in order to clean the facades using conventional pods, thirteen teams had to be distributed in the various balconies located in different parts, leaving some areas with difficult accessibility. To overcome this problem, a new cleaning pod was designed with an arm of 35 m and a flexible telescopic arm that helped gaining access to the areas setback in the facades and, in short, to all the external parts of the building.

With the aim of reducing the vision of such elements from the outside, a central cylinder was located in the vertical spin axis that continued through the cooling plants.

The basic horizontal modulation measures 0,90 X 0,90 m and, in this case, it measures exactly the same in the vertical position, because this figure coincides with the regulations for urban development.

This modulation was the base for the design and the location of the facades, structure, installations, compartmentalisations, ceilings, etc.

In this case, the structure is metallic and takes into account the existing height limitations, so that the design of the floors can be open enough.

The supporting structures are always located in the facades with the web girders placed parallel to these. The bay of the different modules of the building measures 14,40 meters and it is joint by framed girders placed every 1,80 meters and resting on the beams located in the facade.

The framing is made up of concrete over metal sheet, and the installations of each of the floors are placed on the intertices left between the ceiling, the framing and the structure. This optimisation of the space is possible thanks to the modulation of all the elements mentioned above.

The design of the facade was solved by using a curtain wall formed by a reticle of aluminum semiprofiles with thermal bridge failure allowing the execution of three-floor high glazed panels which, in turn, favoured a faster assembling.

The peculiar position of the building against a background in which industrial constructions existed side by side with residential buildings and offices, together with the suburban character of the environment, were the main elements that made us decide to exploit to the most the plastic possibilities of COOL LITE, using a grey, green and pink colour palette to lend the building an individual image, a sort of rainbow in the middle of the storm.

The fact that the glass was of a high performance, allowed us to use all the free space in the facade, such as the joint areas, and it was not necessary to use opaque elements to achieve the global coefficient of heat transfer, as would have happened in the building previously presented.

In the areas of vision, the glazing consisted of COOL LITE of 10 mm plus an air chamber of 12 mm plus a sheet made up of two planilux glasses of 4mm.
In the areas where the vision was not possible, the glass used was COOL LITE of 10 mm plus a sandwich panel in the extrados.

The construction of the curtain wall coincided in Spain with the first manufacture of COOL LITE. The curtain wall system was manufactured in France using panels, for such reason, it was necessary to send the glass to that country for its assembly in the panels, which were later assembled, in turn, at the work site.

Depending on the incidence of the light and due to the special conditions of transparency of the glass, the building is perceived differently throughout the year.

There are other factors that also affect this perception such as the weather conditions, the time of the day, the light, etc. It should also be highlighted that the night vision of the building is radically different because, at this time, the external and the internal lighting systems add multiple variations to the way the building is perceived.

The modulation used in the construction becomes evident in the external side of the building because the glasses are divided following such modulation.

This modularity becomes also evident in the external roofs of the building facade, in the aluminum-covered bridge beams, in the supporting structures, chimneys, crowning elements, etc.

Inside, this modularity is present in the rangers, rails and windows of the curtain wall, in the metal roofs of 0,30 x 0,90 meters, in the distribution of the installations and in the rest of the elements inserted between the plates.

The foreseen compartmentalisations are coordinated with the facades, the installations, roofing, etc. using the same modularity as in the design.

This conception fulfils the need for flexibility and versatility in the use of the office building.


Nowadays, the building is rented to two different companies and is divided vertically in two equal parts.

The first one is occupied by the newspaper La Razón, and the other by the laboratories Roche.

 

 

 

 

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