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Architects: Office x Tohme
- Area: 170 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Nicolás Provoste
Text description provided by the architects. In the outskirts of the city of Quito, the Office-Warehouse project emerges as a need for expansion of workspace for a textile company. The new building seeks to install a model for alternative workspaces from the periphery and rurality.
Modular industrial construction enables a proposal of generic spaces adaptable to any desired program. The layout of the new project (pavilion) relates to the existing infrastructure (warehouse) through distance and depth.
A linear metal structure repeats and adapts as many times as necessary to form spaces that, through strict modulation and liberated edges, propose a complete connection with the exterior. Certain indeterminacy of the program is observed on the glazed pavilion, leisure areas such as dining and resting spaces are delimited by landscapes contained by the structure itself at the ends of the pavilion.
The typology of the new building in the form of a "t" developed horizontally proposes the organization of interior spaces through a central corridor that connects the front and back, causing the arrangement of the inverted roof.
Design and construction strategies are evident in three important moments: the first, a geometric support as a working method with simple and recognizable elements through a grid, a measurement system, and a mathematical relationship every 2.5 meters longitudinally and every 5 meters in the opposite direction, proposing a spatial and pragmatic order to work on a context with irregular edges.
The second, on the other hand, through precise and neutral geometric support, the determination of the interior space establishes a definition of isolated or associated elementary geometric figures (service spaces such as bathrooms and kitchens) to existing elements. Third, through repetition of window carpentry in a vertical direction, an alternating rhythm is proposed between fixed panels and ventilation, causing each interior space to have a relationship with the immediate context (garden and/or warehouse).
A project that proposes a new contract between scales where the domestic becomes a workspace and vice versa in the face of rurality with certain characteristics of domesticity with imposing and static isolated infrastructures.
