Mias Arquitectes: Office building

Spanish practice Mias Arquitectes has recently completed an office building within an irregular plot, in Barcelona's Poble Nou 22@ district. The area, which was originally designed by Ildefons Cerdà as part of the urban latticework known as the Eixample, was initially occupied by industries, workshops and eventually isolated residential buildings.

Today, most of the constructions have been demolished except those that deserved to be conserved due to their singularity. The gaps between the historic existing buildings have been refilled with new residential areas, hotels, offices and equipments. Mias Arquitectes set up this new office building in relation to the preserved existing buildings.

The project rebuilds from the old plot division rules, while simultaneously using the irregular geometry of the site as an opportunity to walk across the volume from one street to the other. The result is the creation of three main buildings crossed by transversal secondary streets that act as passages, and allow to illuminate the interior spaces of the offices: a fragmented building with vertical voids between diverse volumes.

The spatial complexity of the complex is broken in a middle point between the main streets, where a transversal axe generates all vertical accesses with stairs, elevators and vertical installations with pipes and metallic ducts. Underground, the building features a two-floor parking.

The perimeter is defined by three main façades: a façade to the street, with two non-conventional pillars, shaped one by one with four thick sheets of iron; a conventional façade with intermediate pillars and a façade to the pedestrian passage where the structure hangs out from the superior floor, leaving the the ground level open for pedestrian use.

The higher building exhibits a trapezoidal cantilever on the two upper floors, as if it was trying to cover the neighbour building. Steel diagonals are used to hold the structure and reproduce a huge beam of seven meters tall by sixteen meters long.

Mias Arquitectes: Office building in Pujades 22@, Barcelona
Architect: Josep Miàs
Collaborators: Adriana Porta (project leader), Carles Bou (technical advisor), Silvia Brandi, Dani Montes, Baptiste Marconnet, Mario Blanco, Diogo Henriques
Consultors: Engineering (PROISOTEC, Josep Masachs), structure (BOMA, Josep Ramón Solé)
Type: Offices (winner project in a competition)
Completion: 2012
Client: Private – PUJADES, 51-57 SL.
Size: 7000 sqm
Budget: <6M €