MADRID – NAVE TORROJA

International architecture competition “Nave Torroja”
FINALIST
Data: Renovation and extension of warehouse.
Program: Temporary and permanent expo space, educational centre.
Location: Madrid, Spain.
Design: 2006.

NAUTA rises like a technological fog, which ‘ascends’ and leans on the Nave Torroja. It formulates a contemporary clone of the existing building, generating at the same time a hybrid public space, not a square, nor an exhibition space, but both. The replication of the structure and the ˆnave˜ scheme offers a great flexibility to the changing program, allowing wide configurations of temporary and permanent exhibition. NAUTA is rises from the floor, moving the experience of the nave on a higher level. The connection side of new and old buildings becomes the “educational zip”, a moving platform where the flexibility is granted by whole floors moving vertically, providing the real connection grip between the nave and its extension, commercial and educational program.
The Nave Torroja plays with the light through the openings on its roof. It follows a rhythm dictated by the structure. NAUTA plays with the light as well, but in a different way. It is a permeable fog, continually crossed by light, making the mixture of space and light, mass. NAUTA is a narrative slides sequence, where layers of glass articulate the spaces like in a filmic plot. All spaces make the whole but they still live an autonomous life according to the exhibition program. The square below, an open field of alternation between natural and artificial light, becomes a platform to witness the happenings inside and outside the building. It is the projection of the upper slide, where commercial or educational images are displayed according to the cultural plan of the complex.
“Box in box” materialization, and the use of perforated stainless steel make NAUTA even more dissolving, expanding the perception on the building as immaterial, mediatic.