Contemporary

The new building for the Dexeus Institute in Barcelona is one of the cases in which the openings completely divide the façade into horizontal strips. Consequently, the façade is not mechanically interrupted by the main structure but by the openings.

The Inbisa Tower case study enables us to highlight the subtle design strategies that make a building with four apparently identical façades so suggestive.

The façade is organized from several overlapping grids. Pillars and slabs cladded in aluminium create the main order: a grid on the scale of the structural system. Over this grid, some mullions define a second order on the scale of the windows. This second order runs literally over the first grid, regardless of whether what is behind is blind or transparent, breaking the rigidity and scale of the main order.

The unfinished Plaça d’Europa project arises from a contradiction. The objective was to provide the city of Barcelona with a more representative entrance from the airport, with towers that appear to be of tertiary use. And we say “appear to be” because many of these towers were in fact designed for residential use. This contradiction justifies the façade solution adopted in the towers.

The façade of the Renaissance hotel in L’Hospitalet has a peculiar thermal behaviour. It is based on retarding thermal loss with the concrete wall (thermal inertia), while minimizing the thermal difference between the two sides of this wall with a closed air cavity on its outer side. This closed air cavity has its thermal insulation improved by a reflective membrane coating one of its sides.

The Hotel Omm facade seems to us an interesting case study in many regards. It was a wise strategy to orient the openings towards the main avenue, Passeig de Gràcia, thus avoiding prying eyes from the building on the opposite side of the street as well as direct solar gain. Also, the bold materialization of this strategy involved transforming the outer layer of a rain screen façade into a series of lightweight walls that emerge from the façade as fish scales.

Glass, lightness and transparency is the message the façade of this police headquarters was designed to give. It achieves this even though the façade is neither light nor transparent. The horizontal serigraphy combined with the thin eaves projecting shadow over the façade give an image of dynamism. Those eaves are randomly distributed even in the opaque area of the façade.

In IEP, the courtyard and the interior office space are perceived as a continuum. This close relationship between inner and outer spaces is one of the most interesting aspects of the building. The façade solution is the resource needed to achieve this. The glass enclosure is freed from any structure just by making the glass work like plates resting on two supports instead of four.

The façade that closes the south face of the tower seems from the outside to be a simple stick curtain wall that would be of little interest if it were not for the fact that it is photovoltaic. We have dedicated a section to it because of the uniqueness of the space it contains, and the abstraction in the design that this allows. This curtain wall is the enclosure of the elevator core and therefore is devoid of many of the requirements of a façade.

This emblematic building in the London financial district maintains its formal unity beyond the differences in the design of the façades depending on their orientation. The case "Devoid of the human scale (034)" describes the southwest façade of the same building. The southeast and northwest façades attract our attention due to the sobriety conferred by the enormous glazed surface, which is only interrupted every three floors by horizontal bands of stainless steel.

The Forum Building façade has hardly been discussed, perhaps because it was eclipsed by other buildings in the same area and by other aspects of the Forum Building itself. However, after fourteen years, this risky lightweight solution has been successfully integrated into the city’s landscape. The original electric blue has slightly dulled, at the same time as a salty dust patina has added enriching nuances.