Telefónica Móviles Building / Pich-Aguilera Architects

Architects: Pich-Aguilera Architects
Location: Castilla, Cataluña, Spain
Team: Felipe Pich-Aguilera, Teresa Batlle
Project Area: 6,504 sqm
Photographs: Eduardo Sanchez Lopez

Group Manager: Xavi Milanés, Angel Sendarrubias
Project Manager: Bruno Sauer, Ute Müncheberg
Bioclimatic Consultant: Emilio Miguel Mitre. EMMA
Facilities: PGI Grup
Budget: Tècnics G3
Structures: BD, Consultors
Direction: Manuel Santolaya, Juan Francisco Serrano
Technical Architect: Vicente Erguido. Ingeniero PGI Grup

From the architect. This is a building that considers the environmental and energy loads not as a decisive impulse of the project, trying to break the traditional dichotomy between architecture and machine.

The building is conceived as a large container made by assembling components manufactured by the industry. The bearing structure opens the three-dimensional cores and a frame, as a support for long span slabs. It has the efficacy of an infrastructure, covered by a light and diverse enclosure capable of activating and filtering the outside weather to obtain the conditions for interior comfort.

The building is clearly differentiated into three zones: the central area houses the service operators. It works as a great climate atrium, where the roof defines the space with its different slopes, layers and mechanisms. It reacts a a complement with input from the adjacent areas according to the seasons, for optimal uptake of energy and a balanced distribution of air (hot and cold) to all spaces. A south area, closely linked to the first, houses the resting area.

It functions as a large greenhouse that supports the other areas, producing and evacuating heat as needed. The north area that houses management offices makes up a large, shaded chamber of moist air, which functions as cooling plant, as it is traversed by hot and dry air during the summer.

This space, with its landscaped courtyards, functions as a thermal regulator and provides freshness to the other areas. Thus, conventional machinery has been dimensioned as a complementary support to the climatic operation of the architecture itself in the production of its own interior comfort. The resulting shapes should be read as an expression of that operation.