Re-inhabit the Puigneró Factory

The Puigneró factory, as many other industrial clusters around the territory, used to be de main economical source of the region, but now has become an architectural corpse. This project explores new ways to reuse these outdated infrastructures and make them alive again.

The current urban planning, created during the time of the real estate boom in Spain in mid 00’, contemplates a tabula rasa of the whole industrial complex and brand new constructions. The new approach is presented as an alternative that consists in optimizing the existing infrastructure in the event of a hypothetical expansion of the village, through a new regulation of the mass, the void and the technical systems. A gradual transformation and conditioning of the factory is proposed to generate a new liveable support, using the selective demolition and infiltration of public space as the main strategy.\nIn 1956 the first sheds of the complex were built and over almost 50 years, there has been a constant addition of new volumes to the apparently anarchic cluster we see today. Throughout these years the village has grown intimately dependent on the factory, until it ceased its production in 2003 due to the lack of market competitiveness, leaving an impenetrable fortress in the heart of Sant Bartomeu del Grau. In the same way the factory evolved over time to adapt to new production demands, we understand that now there has been a paradigm shift and the factory Hilados y Tejidos Puigneró must face one more stage of its metamorphosis.