26-July-2016 CONCEPTUAL MEMORY The buildable volume, the singular character of this new building, its relationship with the urban periphery makes the new office building of Gas Natural belong to the family of contemporary buildings which have started to appear on the skyline of the city. However this doesn’t mean the new building lacks a clear desire to become compatible with it urban surroundings… the small scale of the district of la Barceloneta… the surrounding houses and the park…
It has the verticality of an office tower, while at the same time offers an entrance that shows the representative character of the building from a rapid view of the interior. That is why we have made a proposal where the interest lies in the fragmentation of the buildable volume into a series of constructions that at the end form a unified volume…responds to different scales and in clear relation to the nearby apartment buildings… forming a great doorway which allows the opening up of the district of La Barceloneta … and a singular public space that brings the construction to the ground, until it forms an urban landscape of different dimensions…
The treatment of the facades follows a similar criteria… A series of large windows give interest from close up… while an indifferent volumetric treatment that protects the building from the sun and the noise shows a series of abstract volumes that confuse with the other buildings along the periphery
Text Enric Miralles 1999.
15-Mar-2016 When we were asked to designed a store we started to dream… Camper has much to do with “el campo”, that is the countryside, the fields… to walk in the fields… and so we imagined shoes stepping on irregular surfaces, like when we walk on earth.
Camper has gotten us used to play, smile, see fashion with children’s eyes… we imagined trying on shoes in front of the twisted mirrors of an amusement park… here I am tall tall… here short short… and that’s how wobbly reflecting surfaces appeared in the project.
Later, we visited Camper´s factory to see how shoes are made. There we understood we wanted to build our new store the same way Camper shoes are built in Mallorca: flat leather sheets are cut and, like magic, with a couple of stitches and a mould, they become beautiful tridimensional wrappings!!
We cut different shoe forms, with hills, without hills, tall, short, for men, for women… we put those flat profiles one next to the other… and that is how our the volume of our new Camper store appeared!!
Its construction was unusual, but very simple.. (I love thinking how much fun the guys who assembled it must have had!) MDF sheets cut like shoes, fixed one next to each other transform into benches, tables, surfaces and lots of crazy mirrors -where children will spend their time while their moms devote time to the art of shopping.
