E8 Building / Coll-Barreu Arquitectos

Architects: Coll-Barreu Arquitectos – Juan Coll-Barreu, Daniel Gutiérrez Zarza
Location: Vitoria, Spain
Project Area: 12,974 sqm
Completion: 2011
Photographs: Aleix Bagué

The E8 building is the result of a design competition called with the intention of highlight an ambitious expansion of Alava Technology Park, an institutional commitment to research whose validity and future should be represented by the building. The Park will rent or sell the full building by plants or by modules. The design should incorporate this uncertainty in use, which was taken as a positive requirement. The architecture must allow modify programs and adapt to uses, be transformable, such as the old buildings. Paradoxically, the building then gains in stability, in possibilities: we can say that the building wins time.

The extension determined by planning supposed to move forward land close to pastures and oak forests. We wanted that, despite the obligated transformations that the arrival of buildings produce, the history of the place remained, with their layers of time, with his memory, with the memory of its form. E8 Building rises, is crossed, flies and looks. So, natural landscape is present. We believe that this is important, that it is civilizing. But it seems even more important that, if in the future the landscape turns in one and another side of the building, if nature disappears, its memory can remain in the artificial improvisation of a few folds of glass. The building will then be a record, a register, a safeguard.

The E8 Building develops a climate control strategy based on an internal very isolated waterproof shell and another envelope, exterior, ventilated, that works like a parasol. In winter, the intermediate chamber is a mattress that distances the building from the cold outside. On warm days, the system produces a natural shot which cools the interior façade by pressure differences. This results into significant savings in consumption and a huge reduction in emissions.

 http://www.archdaily.com/235362/e8-building-coll-barreu-arquitectos/