National Museum of Science and Technology
Spain CCC ES
acebo X alonso Studio
2006
Type
Museum
Tags
cultural facilities, Spain ccc
Visitability
Allowed
Description
Before anything else is done, architecture is organisation. Integrating two different programmes in one volume was an invitation to organise a duality. At the beginning, the game was quite easy: positive-negative, up-down, black-white... A building next to another building, a two-part building, or a building split in two. But it was more interesting to think what would happen if the programmes were split up and their pieces combined into a heterogeneous mass made up of pieces of two different programmes. Thus, heterogeneity began to shape the strategy.The project team began to shape the programme and came up with a configuration that, stacked, hollowed out and oriented in different directions and created a continuous and simultaneous space between the different volumes. The result was a vertical dimension that offered a seductive volumetric path, a spatial experience between form and abstract limit. The relationship between the two resulted in a much more interesting operation than the mere addition of programmes or the division of a building into parts. It turned out to be something like a multiplication, an unpredictable multiplication of relationships.Simple topological concepts such as Inside and Around structure its duality. Inside is a conservatory, above is a museum. Concepts such as Centre and Path are also present. The centre represents the intersection and reference in the organisation. The path is vertical and centrifugal. Other more abstract topological concepts are used to explain the In-On relationship. Two starting points were to be taken from the ideas of organisation and differentiation: 1.- The understanding of the museum space is based on the continuity of the material expression of its boundaries-surfaces. 2.- The arrangement of the conservatory is based on the orientation of the programme areas.When abstract spatial organisation is transformed into size and shape, scale problems arise. The first approximations to the scale of a superstructure focus on a hyper-rigid system whose box shape helps to address the horizontal elements, on the borderline between efficiency and the drawback of its own weight. Sectorisation and acoustic considerations underpin the proposal for a large concrete element. In this space, the upper boundary becomes a vibrant and lively element that captures unwanted frequencies. Rather than revealing anything, the glass that encloses it deceives and conceals. And just like that we reach this habitable superstructure; a shape inhabited inside and out, a space expressed through its structure and construction, activated by the presence of a fragmented, decomposed light, which creates effects, new shine and thus produces the event.(Description provided by the architects)