Contemporary

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.

On this occasion, Batlle and Roig resort to a curtain wall in which partial structures are assembled at each slab front without physical continuity between them. Glass panes are then supported over the partial structures to close the façade (have a look at the "Cadireta" curtain wall structure). Each two glass panes are framed with an aluminium frame made of unitized panels profiles. So, is this a unitized façade or a curtain wall one? Maybe it is a mixture of the two?

In the ventilated façade of the Institut Geològic de Catalunya (IGC), the inner layer responds to the window distribution that the use of the building requires and the outer layer responds to formal aspects. The perforated corten sheet that clads the entire façade provides an abstract image, behind which domesticity is solved. The perforated metal sheet shows a drawing and plays with transparencies: it is a rich composition resource that is possible in multilayer façades.