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LIBRARY

Project design competition for a library, day care and municipal archives in Sant Martí de Provençals (Barcelona).

Located in a heterogeneous urban environment, the project aims to offer an unitary and solid image of municipal facility in order to become a new landmark in the urban landscape that surrounds it.

It exists a clear desire in the project to bring the public space of the street inside the building and also it is aimed to create intermediate spaces between inside and outside which are also used to relate the user with the building. These intermediate spaces, located between the building and the plot boundary, provide an added value.

Both in the library and the day care, the street widens in order to become the space of entrance and relation between the users.

In the day care, this interstitial space between the building and the limit of the plot could be used as a playground for the pupils.

In the entrance area to the municipal archives has been also placed an entrance to the main lift that provides easy logistics of the files, the furniture and the equipment of the library and the municipal archives.

On the basement of the municipal archives there is an outdoor patio that organizes the space and provides sunlight to the rooms.

The building has an unitary look, but, from the ground floor, it is possible to see other materials related to the different functions and uses of the different parts. The day care is easy to spot since its facades have composite panels of different colors as cladding which are easy to recognise for any user. The multipurpose hall of the library is located on the ground floor, it has an independent entrance and its interior is coated with the same wood used for the vertical slats of the main facade of the building.

After the first floor, the facade surrounds the building's boundaries completely and, in order to provide and control sunlight, it emerges a patterned language of vertical slats that can be fixed or mobile, so its orientation can change depending on the sunlight direction and the effect to be achieved inside.

On upper floors, the library develops all its functions and spaces around a main patio, which emerges from the ground floor, and a central spine where are located all the communications and accesses. In both sides of this spine are placed the different rooms. The main area of the general library files is situated on the last two floors of the biggest building. It is accessed with the central patio as reference and it always surrounds the spaces.