Recycling old public buildings to adapt them to new programmes attain here their maximum expression. The objective is to transform the old Town Hall, with all its municipal areas, in the new Youth House. This entails transforming an inherited, rigid area, therefore conflicting with what a youth department programme in Madrid’s outskirts needs.
There were two simultaneous and obvious difficulties to surmount. First, overcoming the resistance such a representative building as the old Town Hall embodies, when having to construct a clear identity for programmes created by youth groups. Second, the building’s inadequate geometrical configuration, inappropriate for the streamlined development the new activities require.
In the face of this situation, we decided to intensify and reconstruct through a tuning process, by creating an identity which would allow the new users to appropriate themselves of the building. In this way, we have inserted/embedded a large piece in the shape of a meteoric rock or “mutated diamond” en the building’s axis. Thanks to it, we reshape the relationship with the area in its section and we restructure the floors so that all the activity revolves around this piece.
