SGAE Headquarters
Spain CCC ES
Ensamble Studio
2007
Type
Institutional
Tags
Spain ccc
Visitability
Allowed
Description
The SGAE (General Society of Authors and Publishers) Headquarters in Santiago de Compostela is located in Vista Alegre property, a privileged site with intermediate scale between a private garden and a public park, from where the skyline of the historical city can be glimpsed. The project for the development of the plot was designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, and contemplated the construction of a series of buildings with academic purpose, most of them already built.The program includes social activities for the attendance of authors and publishers, as well as a wide range of public cultural activities. It is divided into four functional areas distributed in four levels respectively: Performance, Education, Public Area and Administration, with access from both the garden and the street levels. Three thousand square metres in total constructed to serve the city and its artists. The SGAE Headquarters expresses its will to become part of the perimeter wall of the property both by its location and longitudinal layout adapted to the border of the plot. The building puts forward the confrontation of three walls which run along a space of varied constructive, material and perceptive scales: a stone wall looking into the garden, an interior wall made of CDs and a translucent glass wall facing the street. They all work as filters of the different urban situations delimiting and organizing the program in functional strips. From these three, it is the Mondariz Grey stone facade the one that roots the building to the site. Built with irregular ashlars selected directly from the quarry’s dump yard, this sculptural element causes the disintegration of the building as such, going beyond its mere symbolic and functional dimension within Vista Alegre property: the building becomes aware of the place and stands as part of the landscape of the site. The building arches, widens and narrows, by the interaction of these three elements, generating fluid multivalent spaces, like a porticoed street which is a local reference to the city of Santiago and its urban public spaces. Walking through it, the building becomes a street, an urban space inside a garden, which reactivates the site bringing vitality and dynamism. (Antón García - Abril )