Conservation and Maintenance Centre for A6 Highway

Description of the project by Enguita & Lasso de la Vega

In the case of Conservation and Maintenance Centre for A6 highway, our first interest was, logically, focused on scale issues related to road infrastructures, due to the large size of the circulation, manoeuvres and parking of snowploughs and trucks track, resolved by a single 400 meters long and 50 meters wide ring, within which the building is located.

A building intended to be more than just an industrial unit. And it´s at this point when typological questions arose, since although it’s a chain of simple wharehouses for salt storage, equipment conservation, and road´s material collection, unifying them rises in a big abstract volume much more complex than a warehouse. Right after that was time for geometrical questions, with the main problem of finding a common structural grid that would unify the proportions of the different building systems required for any of the industrial units, different from each other, and made of concrete walls, metal structures and timber-frame roof large structures.

Finally, perceptive questions arose, since it was about –because its compulsory closeness to the highway- to create a façade capable of making this whole passing almost unnoticed without sacrificing its own expressivity. An expressivity we decided to look for through the relationship between two colors, white and red. White because of snow being this infrastructure´s main concern, as well as Madrid´s mountains background color, and red because it´s the color that warns us against traffic inherent risks.

In this case, the interest for activating the experience in the perception of weight, dimension, scale and light along with the compromise with place´s remarkable, results in a markedly abstract and evanescent building that hides its large scale under a lightness appearance and whose seemingly white surface vibrates towards red depending on the incidence of light and the speed of movement from the highway.