- Growing the wall -

The project is a culinary centre with a vegetable garden also dedicated to carry out different activities for the neighbourhood such as theatre, experimental conferences, expositions, music and dance, visual entertainment, reading and even there is a shop with products from the vegetable garden and different home bakery cooking made by chefs.

In order to develop a great program, I needed to understand how a chef thinks, how a kitchen works and the necessities they have related mainly to the vegetables. For this reason, I had the possibility and decided to spent a week helping and being with students in one of the most prestigious cooking schools in Barcelona to experience their life in the kitchen, daily movements, activities, uses and different ways of cooking to put it in relation to the vegetable garden and ecological food.\nI think the building doesn’t have to want to hide it has been an industrial unit before and so that not only the structure is clear and exposed inside and outside, but that both facilities and construction are also exposed to the eye giving to it this industrial character it had before.\nExposed facilities: Inside the building and due to the great number of facilities a culinary centre has, it seems interesting to treat them to be exposed elements. Furthermore, both drip irrigation and exterior lighting are distributed through the structure of the vegetable garden.\nExposed structure: An important aspect of the project is the integration of the garden in the whole construction, so that it is not an added element of the construction, but a part and complement of it and its use. This integration is done through the existing structure of the building, which is extended till the garden and could be also used as punctual mesh greenhouses in punctual seasons of the year to get a better care of the product.\nExposed construction: So that there is a constructive dialogue between the building and the vegetable garden, the facade is treated as the garden’s walls. Both have a wood skin and with some bore holes in order to show the garden to the promenade and the facade hanging on the top establishes a dialogue between the walls seemed like growing in the garden (-Growing the wall-) and the facade falling down like clinging plants.\nIn this context, you can see the garden is considered as one more building and it is treated with clinging plants inside and a wall with the same skin of the building outside with little holes as windows as it worked like its own facade.