THE FARADAY BOX AND THE DIGITAL CITY
The Digital City project houses some Offices and a Data Processing Center that provides services to various municipal networks in Almeria and various entities. It also incorporates an office program on the upper floors. The construction period of the works, only six months, to be in operation before the Mediterranean Games in June 2005. El Toyo is a new complex, residential and tourist real estate and equipment. Near Almeria airport and open to the Mediterranean Sea. The plot has a trapezoidal shape with a slight slope towards the sea, visible to the south; the Garden of Alborán limits to the west, to the bottom one glimpses Almeria. These peculiar conditions and the dazzling light, typical of midday, formalized the idea of the project and the bare concept of the proposal. An elementary prism.
The concise concept of the proposal and the willingness to use materials and constructive elements simple, technically and economically viable to adjust to deadlines and economic budgets. We optimize the functional surface and clarify the structural execution to achieve the greatest economy and speed of construction.
We dug a ditch in the ground, to hide the underground "data box". This hermetic prism is a podium a hidden pedestal, isolated in the middle of the territory by a moat that provides the horizontal closure of the contour. We thus fulfill the requirements of security and secrecy required by the Data Processing Center. On this horizontal platform the office building is supported. The facade is a peculiar metal cage-lattice. This envelope appears as a whole structured by a uniform pattern of irregular latticework that separates, isolates and dampens the phenomena of the outside, the solar radiation and the intense light of the South coast. It is supported on the outer edge of the pit, behaves like an orthogonal and transparent protective screen. Our metallic network composed of recycled aluminum carpentry. The cage is endowed with an intense vibration of random rhythms. A metal recycling of joinery, aluminum profiles and perforated sheets of various textures and colors.
Build a peculiar Faraday cage. A box - metal enclosure of Michael Faraday whose walls of conductive material, manage to annul the electric field to manifest the electromagnetic phenomena.
The ground floor, initially diaphanous, is occupied only by the accesses and stairs to the basement or the first floor. A recurrent and "unfinished" vacuum that opens, clean, towards the four facades; it acts like nobody's land. On the upper level, separated from the land, there is a work space with a rectangular floor plan for the offices that float like a viewpoint wrapped in the filter that protects them. They are totally open to the outside. Diaphanous and flexible space to assume various possibilities of functional compartmentalization. The modules, which will occupy the perimeter of the rectangle, will allow transforming the scope with time. The windows of the facade, omit recesses and protrusions and allow the views, through the lattice - exterior cage - on the Alboran Park and the nearby Mediterranean.
The conventional prism appears as an enigmatic appearance, an architecture of transparent lightness, as if a cage of electrical conduits had fallen covering a void of a confused interior, precisely because it is empty. So, thanks to collage, with a plastic coming and going, orchestrated in ways that deny both the board and the ornament.
