0
Creative Hub Full of Potentials
Appareil transforms a Barcelona warehouse into a co-working and maker space with furniture integrated into walls to create a polyvalent space to host cultural activities
Appareil has converted a Barcelona warehouse into co-working office and maker space, on the top floor of a building in Poblenou, the city’s former industrial quarter. Currently part of the 22@Barcelona – Innovation District’s renewal plan, approved in 2000, the area is evolving into a dynamic, vibrant urban district, brimming with knowledge-intensive activities, from both the professional and academic sectors. The project serves as the studio's new permanent base, but it is also rented out for both long-term use and one-off events to urban planners, city data analysers, digital makers, and as academic research studios for the IAAC and the AA Visiting School.
The refurbishment of this typical warehouse space provides a simple open working space for a group of independent professionals from the architecture world and neighbouring disciplines. It has been designed to propel them in developing their work in a transparent manner, sharing ideas and stimulating potential collaborations. Besides floating tables, the volume remains deliberately hollow, and all functionalities are pushed to two intricate milled-timber multifunctional walls, which house all necessary equipment and can accommodate temporary local working solutions. All furniture can be integrated into the walls to create a polyvalent space to host cultural activities. Within the residual rectangular open space, the distribution evolves according to activities that change on a daily basis, depending on the people and projects that are present at any given time. A simple, functional kitchen and bathroom are located on the periphery, as well as a winter garden that faces the sea.
Designed and constructed on site, the refurbishment is a live test for professional interactions in this multidisciplinary melting pot of a district. It embraces the concentrations of makers, designers, architects, entrepreneurs and various crafts, both those which are manually operated and those which it equips with numerically controlled production methods: a swarming creative hub within a hub.
What do you think?
Related Content:
-
Embracing the Existing
PROJECT, ARCHITECTURE
17.06.2020
-
Radical Heritages
Invited by the Department of Interior Design at Istanbul Bilgi University, Prof. Graeme Brooker, Head of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art, London was in Istanbul for workshop and public talk. Looking at Radical Heritages, the workshop focused on a Han in Eminönü, while the public talk at SALT Galata presented a broader overview and positioning for the future of interior design. Can Altay, Head of Interior Design at Istanbul Bilgi University, who hosted Brooker in Istanbul has interviewed him on how interior design, as a spatial discipline deals with the existing spaces, and its role in the future of the built environment (or the world as we know it).
-
New Forms of Conviviality
Hulya Ertas talked with Cristina Gamboa, one of the founder members of Lacol, on their approach as an architecture cooperative
-
Healing Inspiration
PROJECT, ARCHITECTURE 25.07.2018
-
Contemporary Extensions
PROJECT, ARCHITECTURE 18.07.2018
-
An Urban Bonus
PROJECT, URBAN / LANDSCAPE 11.06.2018
-
An(other) Emergency Call
After the End of the World, an exhibition curated by José Luis de Vicente, questions the climate change that our uncontrollably consumed planet is going through
-
The Aesthetic of the Unfinished
PROJECT, ARCHITECTURE 20.03.2018
