Heavy: > 125 kg/m2

Sober architecture but a confusing solution.

Which is the main façade layer in this concrete façade? The 8 cm think concrete panel or the brick wall? 

The relationship between the façade enclosure and the structure is a recurring theme in Batlle and Roig’s work.

In the CMT headquarters the structure is located offset from the façade to allow free development of a nearly entirely glazed envelope.

A group of residential buildings in Torrelago district, Laguna de Duero (Valladolid), has been refurbished in the context of the European Programme CITyFIED: Replicable and Innovative Future Efficient Districts and Cities. The renovation addresses both the image of the buildings and energy factors. 

This rain screen façade clearly demonstrates evolution along the path to prefabrication. Both the interior and exterior layers are built with highly prefabricated dry systems and it is not so common to find such a massive solution. This enables the façade to loose neither its thermal inertia nor reduce the acoustic barrier.

The inner layer, which uses heavy concrete panels, is a very good option.

This residential building in Barcelona is highlighted on account of the overall strategy that has been used to solve this particular structural system. It is one of the first examples of the work of this team of architects that shows a design approach based on the optimisation of prefabricated elements according to a well organised arrangement of the floor plan.

There is little to say about such a glass façade. A steel-profiles mesh covers everyday life like a blanket.

Load bearing facades are nowadays a common solution due to the permeability they permit in the inner space. Some of those structures are let to be seen from the outside, some of them are not. 

The Hotel Constanza is part of the Illa Diagonal complex. Like the main building, the facade is covered with a travertine rain screen. The narrowness of the drainage cavity is striking, but is interrupted by the lack of cleanliness of the insulation surrounding the fixings.

There are lots of things to say of each of the buildings we publish in this website. However, from the beginning we decided to focus just in one aspect or curiosity for each of them. 

ETICS solutions, which are now so common due to the thermal insulation continuity they allow, were already used twenty-five years ago in designs such as the MACBA building. At that time, achieving continuous rendering without joints was not that simple, as the rendering materials were not as good as the ones we use today.

Lightweight solutions for the rainscreen outer layer were barely known. Probably because the architects did not trust this solution, the inner wall was completely covered with a watertight membrane.