Types of Spaces

Palma + Hanghar
Pasaje Chimenea

With the collaboration of Cerámica Sampedro y Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning – University of Michigan.

The project is located in the passage of the old tobacco factory of La Rioja, an urban space of narrow and elongated dimensions, filled by a monumental red brick chimney. The project restores the site to its status as a built space by consolidating the façades and giving the tobacco factory as a whole its original unity. The interior is articulated through the concatenation of a series of square rooms measuring 3.6×3.6m that form a spatial procession of corridors and rooms of a domestic nature, thus reconstructing the emptiness of the passageway.

The rooms, open to the sky, explore various spatial possibilities through their emphatic geometries in plan, while their domestic scale, so alien in the public space of the city, transfers the occupant from visitor to inhabitant, allowing the possibility of interacting with the installation in a more profound way. The interior rooms provide those who pass through them with an unexpected atmospheric experience of sprayed water, returning the inhabitant to an exterior condition that reminds them of the public nature of the intervention.

These sort of programmatically generic but spatially specific spaces are built with 30x30cm thermo-clay bricks that give the project a familiar condition thanks to the use of a material that is so typical of the collective imaginary. Moreover, the brick block is both the material and spatial unit of the project, generating a system with a stereotomic appearance capable of veiling its tectonic logic thanks to the massiveness of its pieces. The floor, covered with discarded brick chips, gives the space material continuity while slowing down the passage of those who pass through it and providing a leisurely experience away from the hustle and bustle of the city.