Space Jump!

At Zona Franca in Barcelona, we try to give an answer to deteriorated and abandoned industrial districts inside the city. It would be an urban activator to break the barriers of big corporative city districts that enclose the neighbors out the city, and to regenerate the industrial zone providing an actual neighborhood and public space.

Therefore, this project presents solutions at two different levels: on the one hand, an urban answer to all the identified problems in the area; on the other, a project-answer to the proposed program. At a urban level, we are transforming deficiencies into strengths: we will be using a big block without traffic to adapt it to the current traffic flow, we will be creating a colossal building that will work as a urban activator for neighbors living there and also would invite them to stay. This project intends, on the one hand, to build a necessary neighborhood in the area; on the other, it wants to break the usual idea about corporative projects like enterprises headquarters. We want to break with big fortitude-buildings, completely closed to the public; this kind of buildings favorite privatizing the floor and taking it away from the neighbors. Then, this project is a big headquarters that invite users to enter and stay. At a project level, we want to build the first Space X headquarters in Europe. On the one hand, Barcelona has always been city worried about development, science and technology. “Distrito 22@” is an example of this fact. This project wants to follow “Distrito 22@” steps and develop and activate an old industrial zone with no specific residential programs. Our project is based on a big metallic megastructure that lower the floors of the building using two structural families, leaving a ten-meters-high open ground floor that allows the entire urban program to lie inside. The building is constantly worried about being open and transparent. Then, its interior is formed by open floors. At the same time, these floors create a platform system that generates big quality open spaces inside, as it can be observed in the longitudinal section of the piece. These parts, together with the big French windows that are part of the closure, give the transparency and no privacy sensation that were intended in the beginning.