New Spanish Red Cross Headquarters in Ávila

Description of the project by ABLM Arquitectos

The winner proposal of the design ideas competition for the Spanish Red Cross Headquarters in Ávila (Spain) presents the following characteristics.

An urban strategie is chosen to develop a further link to the city’s green ring. The city of Ávila has a green ring formed by streams and orchards to the North, the Adaja river to the West, and Chico river to the South, but to the East it was split by the construction of the railway and the new urban partial plans that lead to the disapearance of the old water courses that came from natural springs. This proposal gets back this place as a part of the broken green ring in the eastern part of the city. On the other hand it is also committed to the recovery, from the memory of the place, of the connections with the water courses that used to run through the area, generating a natural space for the citizenship. The new headquarters of the Spanish Red Cross is presented as an architectural action for the city.

The proposal includes three statements:

1/ environmental sustainability, suggesing a zero energy cost infrastructure through passive systems such as orientation, protection, superisolations, cross ventilation and green roofs which will increase the thermal inertia of the construction while decreasing the urban heat island. Other active systems such as energy production through geothermal and photovoltaic energy, and the recovery of rainwater are to be used.

A reduction of the consumption of raw materials is expected by the  usage of local materials. Achieving a decrease of the impacts associated with manufacturing processes, the energy related to transport and furthermore, encouraging local and regional economies.

2/ social sustainability, the proposal supports the transverse coexistence of different ages and social types. The new headquarters juggles: 1 / a plan for older people with workshops, living areas, care area, orchards; 2 / Youth and Children's Areas; 3 / relief and emergency plan area; 4 / training center and computer labs; 5 / food plan and emergency storage. The social warp contained in the new Red Cross headquarters is to be made use of, to build a network of coexistence and multidirectional cross-relationships between social ages and layers that are barely set together.This is materialized with the arrangement of the inner relationship spaces, visually connected by patios that always have one of their faces open to the outside, which join, relate and can also be privatized.

It’s meant to be an extrovert building which takes in its outer and inner spaces, uses for social transversality.

3/ Healthy sustainability, the proposal for the New Headquarters of Spanish Red Cross proposes a landscape based on the use of light materials, sometimes invisible; other times vegetation is used as a building material to generate atmospheres capable of establishing continuous spaces between the outside and the most remote interior. Transparency, sometimes tangible, sometimes not, builds a heterogeneous spatial continuity that embraces a world of relationships and wellness. The vegetable qualities that are proposed throughout the whole project, build a continuous landscape with the interior, leaning on patios that are set as fingers at all levels and generating a particularly healthy atmospheric condition.

It is committed to an opening to the city by building continuous landscape qualities from the new building, crossing the plot and diluting to the existing urban network. Its outer uses, which are extraordinarily linked to the interior spaces, support this situation of healthy heterogeneous continuity.

The New Red Cross Headquarters is not an architectonic object, but a place for the city, an experience for the citizens.