Mendaro Arquitectos design a project in which the public plot is intermingled inside the building, without interfering in the organization and restoration of the collection. This is done through volumes that generate patios and respect existing trees, generating in turn an interesting indoor climate game.
A complex, compact and porous piece of great complexity that is part of a master plan to recover a riverbank area near the city. The project generates the conditions to be able to conserve all the elements that constitute the cultural heritage of the area, which it found dispersed and in many cases about to disappear or be lost forever.
The project uses colored concrete, as material to express its formal language, and integrate into the environment.
Description of project by Mendaro Arquitectos
The foundation of the project, which initiates the entire process, is the absolute need to preserve the documentary collections that are the Heritage of Oaxaca, which in a state of emergency are scattered and many of them on the verge of destruction.
The ideal location to build the City of the Archives is a highly symbolic site: the "Las Canteras" park, from this place the stone was extracted to build the city of the Antequera Green. This fact enriches the scene and the architectural challenge becomes more transcendent. The building was not only implanted in the park, it generated an inertia to intervene the whole of it (12 hectares), enhancing the area that is located at the limits of the municipality of Oaxaca.
The urban-environmental project takes advantage of its excellent location, accessible means of transport, urban services, plus the elements that will give meaning to this new vision: green and lake areas with ample ecological potential and recreation areas intensively used by the population.
The main function of the Archive Building is to preserve and protect the documentary collection, therefore, the plot of the document will mark in some way its architectural need. The document arrives at the repositories after a complex control, it must be analyzed, selected, organized, in order to be cataloged after its due restoration; specialized tasks, whose needs are covered by the building. The project includes a space for scholars who investigate these collections, we wanted to honor them with the special room of the researchers.
The heights depend on the topography, the areas are distributed in four levels, the first one destined to the public activities and access of the documents, the higher levels destined to the activities of the archive. Inside the set, are the document repositories that occupy the greater surface.
The Park and its visitors should benefit from the culture established in the Archive, and in this way the public plot is intermingled inside the building, accessing the auditorium, the classrooms, the libraries, the exhibitions and the cafeteria, without mix or interfere in the world of the organization and restoration of the collection.
The volumes that make up the building are distributed respecting the existing trees, generating a set of buildings connected to each other by patios and interior corridors. The patios that exist within the project, in addition to allowing cross ventilation, capture a significant amount of rainwater and for which a rainwater network was projected to the existing pools in the Park. The two accesses of the building, with a topographic jump of four meters, are the beginning and end of the route, the intention of these two levels of access is that the building is very linked to the park and can de facto become a pedestrian route more of those that already exist.
The building is built in apparent concrete walls of ocher color, alluding to the color of the lands of the Mixteca. Oaxaca teaches us the importance of muraría architecture and chiaroscuro in the sequence of patios, it is a wise architecture with the climatology that merges with the vegetation allowing transparencies.
