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Mateo Barcelona
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1
Residential Building
Passatge Marimon, Sant Gervasi
Project: 2010
Construction: 2012-2013
Surface: 907 m2
The main façade is defined by two planes. One, flush with the façades of the adjacent buildings, comprises stainless steel and glass to ensure optimum lighting for the apartments on the upper floors, the shop and the communal areas of the building, supported by three black iron pillars. The other, nearest the street, like a veil forming a filter between the pavement and the interiors, is a wooden brise-soleil. This second structure is separated 45 cm from the façade and is made up of four different mechanisms, turning the façade into a dynamic element that reinvents the Majorcan-style louvered shutters that protect the windows of our neighbours.
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2
Ninot Market
Carrer Mallorca 133, Eixample
Project: 2008
Construction: 2010-2015
Surface: 15.000 m2
The building, constructed in 1928 by the architects Antoni de Falguera and Joaquim Vilaseca, occupies an elongated site between Carrer Villarroel, Carrer Casanova and Carrer Mallorca, the street with the main entrance, which was raised approximately 1.5 metres above grade prior to our intervention.
The architect’s intervention centres on four key points: maintaining the impressive existing structure, improving approaches, redesigning the façades and roofs, and exploiting the subsoil.
One of Mateo’s first decisions in this process was to maintain the market’s characteristic metal structure comprising three volumes, the central taller than the ones either side, to encourage ventilation and the entry of daylight.
The approaches have been reorganized, adapting the floor to the differing levels in order to eliminate the existing unevenness, and bringing together the approaches in a unified space in the main foyer. The foyer offers users an overview of the market and access to the lower floor.
Façades and roof have been redesigned to let natural light shine in while controlling direct solar radiation which could harm the produce. This is achieved by a system of perforated slats that regulates the entry of natural light.
Further, the side façades now integrate the outdoor stalls, which no longer extend out over much of the surrounding pavement.
To adapt the market to the present-day needs of logistics and installations, it was decided to excavate the subsoil, creating two underground floors that house the car park, a supermarket, loading bays and storage space. With the creation of this new space, the structure is raised, requiring work on the foundations.
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3
Filmoteca
Plaça Salvador Seguí 1, Raval
Project: 2004-2005
Construction: 2007-2012
Surface: 7,515 m2
The Film Theatre of Catalonia is situated in the historic neighbourhood of El Raval, in Barcelona. In the past years this area has been immersed in a major process of transformation and modernization though it retains the popular, built-up, even oppressive nature of a port district.
The Filmoteca reflects the ambivalence of its existence. It addresses the structures of the past without concealing the force of its presence.
Its relation with the setting was determinant in defining the volume of the building. The project works with scale, allowing the building to relate formally with neighbouring constructions and prompting the decision to underground the cinemas. The ground floor is designed as a passageway for users of the film theatre, connecting the street on one side to the plaza on the other. The Plaça de Salvador Seguí, in front of the building, is a new space that introduces light and air into the area.
The building compresses the narrow, complex existing structures and, as a counterpoint, the side façades create a new and intimate space: a series of porches protected by projections.
The building is envisaged as a series of filters and screens, exterior as well as interior. Its relation with the exterior is mediated by a series of patterns made of wire and perforated metal sheet that filter daylight and give the occupants privacy, allowing them to look without being seen. Inside, the use of filters continues on the upper floors; coloured glass screens divide the space and, like the filters and diaphragms used in film cameras, control the intensity and the colour of natural light.
The structural layout is the product of the organization of space around two volumes with rectangular floor plans. One is capped at ground floor level and the other rise up above the plaza.
The longitudinal façades confine the above-grade volume, whereas the end façades fold over themselves, producing a series of projecting volumes.
The functional requirements and spatial conception of the building rule out the use of intermediates supports in the undergrounded volume, for various reasons:
- This volume houses the cinemas, calling for large spaces without pillars or structural walls.
- The volume above ground creates a series of transparencies that draw light inside the building.
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4
CCIB
Plaça Willy Brandt 11, Sant Martí
Project: 2000-2001
Construction: 2002-2004
Surface: 85,000 m2
Convention centers are often oversized, disconnected from city life, at risk of becoming windowless “caverns,” indifferent to their surroundings.
The CCIB (Barcelona International Convention Centre) emerges from the southern waterfront of the Besòs River, at the far end of Avinguda Diagonal. It is born from the memory of that place: a nearly magmatic mass that meets the geometric hardness of certain architectural elements. The constructive energy required to think through instability, levitation, and supportless spans was essential to the project’s development.
The CCIB is not a building in the conventional sense, but a predefined pattern of bands, a flexible system capable of accommodating diverse functions, programs, and users within a 70,000 m² area.
To the north, toward the Diagonal Mar complex, two rigid volumes emerge: a hotel and an office building, sliced at the thirteenth floor by public terraces that open up new urban perspectives.
The CCIB was conceived with the intent of perverting the autistic nature typical of this kind of facility: by optimizing the site’s conditions—light, sea, open landscapes—the building establishes multiple points of communication with its surroundings, responding to the qualities of the environment.
The actual convention center is defined by a covered plaza—as if the large public square that connects the buildings at the end of Rambla Prim had entered into the building itself. It is an immense metal structure, where the precision of steel participates in something normal yet monstrous, banal yet not domestic—superhuman. The main exhibition halls are protected zones within this public space, which is envisioned to extend across adjacent plots.
To the south, the metal façade undulates, forming an organic, continuous front, a soft base. Inside, a vast hall—160 meters by 80—acts as a multi-purpose space for exhibitions and performances, capable of hosting up to 15,000 people.
While such large-scale spaces could have risked banalizing or compromising the value of the CCIB, the tectonic and technological quality of the design has instead made it one of the most integrated buildings within Barcelona’s Mediterranean landscape.