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Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. The warehouse 17c in Madrid, Spain by Arturo Franco OfficeJune 14th, 2011 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: Arturo Franco The warehouse 17c has been the first intervention made in the Matadero complex and, as such, could be considered as a pilot trial. The project was born with two well-defined clients. On the one hand, the Council itself by means of its Arts City Council and on the other hand, by means of Intermediae and its programmatic constraints as the warehouse’s future tenant.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar
 Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar
 Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar From the very beginning, we assumed the intervention as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of refurbishment. The point was to contribute with a new attitude in face of the public realm of historical patrimony, a radical posture, an experience about limits, the limits of non–intervention, reducing such intervention to a bare minimum.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar In this project, the traditional insecurity and theoretical vagueness that persistently affects actual interventions on patrimonial legacy with results halfway in-between what to do and what not to do, disappeared from the very beginning. We decided to choose an idea and to explore it to the very end, without fears, with no inferiority complexes. We decided to intervene in a radical manner without intervening, taking the idea to the ultimate consequences.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar We made no concessions concerning refurbishment, respecting the ruin, boosting its values with minimum intervention. A constant dialog has been established between the new and the old, without mixing them up, together but not blended. These two languages look close to each other. The new boosts the value of the old and vice versa. Two viewpoints face to face, both revealed with maximum rawness. In a voluntary manner, we chose to preserve the cuts on the walls, the same kind of cuts a radial saw does. Exposed, PVC drain pipes are more interesting. With the withdrawal of revoke, marks made by the backhoe originate unexpected textures. Here, cork isolations appear like a witness of its cooling history, with no inferiority complexes. Thus, the past reveals itself, the work reveals itself. Any witness of the process remains intact. The powder blue of levels, the retrieval and consolidation of columns, signs, wrinkles, wounds still open, like the existence of an old man with no oddities, where its immoderate personality seems to be beyond anything.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar Its condition of transformable space led us to consider its reutilisation, its relocation, its constant manipulation and in its high wear resistance. For this, we have used materials coming directly from industrialization, with no transformation at all, using standard dimensions.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar Report The project was born in the scope of the Old Slaughterhouse of Madrid and belongs to a cultural program promoted by the City Council. A complex of more than twenty warehouses constructed by the architect Luis Bellido circa 1907, that now intends to become a new avant-garde cultural centre where different institutions have assumed the management and refurbishment of some warehouses. ARCO Foundation, Ruipérez Foundation, the Teatro Español, the Designers Society, COAM Foundation and Madrid City Council will be the first ones occupying this space.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar First of all, the warehouse 17c has been assigned to Intermediae, a new institution created by the Madrid City Council to promote contemporary creation through a program of scholarships and initiatives linking artistic production and citizen participation. All of this is intended as a steady process of production, where precisely the process will become the common thread of this space.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar The warehouse 17c has been the first intervention made in the Matadero complex and, as such, could be considered as a pilot trial. The project was born with two well-defined clients. On the one hand, the Council itself by means of its Arts City Council and on the other hand, by means of Intermediae and its programmatic constraints as the warehouse’s future tenant.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar When addressing the project, Intermediae philosophy was the first condition and, as Pedro Aullón says, the concept of process is still alive.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar “The process… Process is an idea related to relationship and change dynamics and implies, in our perspective, a vivacious sense of experience. Being considered like this, the process doesn’t opt for the analysis or synthesis preponderance but naturally coexists among them, installed on a base that is intuition, foremost, and the open sky of an imagination that cannot be separated from understanding. The process as a needful becoming, not in a theoretical or practical sense but as reality that goes beyond this distinction, is inseparable from an idea of reflection on becoming as well as on the idea of becoming itself, because it is possible to consider that all becoming is mixed up in the same march of events. It’s the procession of processions, the absoluteness. If certain thought in the first half of the Twentieth Century insisted on a process of physical as well as metaphysical argument by a path able to transcend the philosophical tradition of substance, at the same time it’s true that it is possible to find a non-contradictory tradition with substance that, by means of a non-restrictive exegesis, highlights the requirement of motion and novelty, action and processualism, functional capacity and duration. This is not alien to an assessment criterium but it enriches it. It is continuity, discontinuity and the process continuity, alive reality.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar Pedro Aullón”
From the very beginning, we assumed the intervention as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of refurbishment. The point was to contribute with a new attitude in face of the public realm of historical patrimony, a radical posture, an experience about limits, the limits of non–intervention, reducing such intervention to a bare minimum.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar In this project, the traditional insecurity and theoretical vagueness that persistently affects actual interventions on patrimonial legacy with results halfway in-between what to do and what not to do, disappeared from the very beginning. We decided to choose an idea and to explore it to the very end, without fears, with no inferiority complexes. We decided to intervene in a radical manner without intervening, taking the idea to the ultimate consequences.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar This crude standpoint before refurbishment and the necessity to serve Intermediae like a rising institution in constant evolution, so the natural ambiguities from a bicephalous client, had forged the natural hardness of the project.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar We made no concessions concerning refurbishment, respecting the ruin, boosting its values with minimum intervention. A constant dialog has been established between the new and the old, without mixing them up, together but not blended. These two languages look close to each other. The new boosts the value of the old and vice versa. Two viewpoints face to face, both revealed with maximum rawness. In a voluntary manner, we chose to preserve the cuts on the walls, the same kind of cuts a radial saw does. Exposed, PVC drain pipes are more interesting. With the withdrawal of revoke, marks made by the backhoe originate unexpected textures. Here, cork isolations appear like a witness of its cooling history, with no inferiority complexes. Thus, the past reveals itself, the work reveals itself. Any witness of the process remains intact. The powder blue of levels, the retrieval and consolidation of columns, signs, wrinkles, wounds still open, like the existence of an old man with no oddities, where its immoderate personality seems to be beyond anything.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar Against this, what is new: very few, very hard, very clean and very upright. The novelty appears with determination, sometimes very heavy, very confident; sometimes very clear, very fragile. Youthfulness looking to the past and vice versa.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar Its condition of transformable space led us to consider its reutilisation, its relocation, its constant manipulation and in its high wear resistance. For this, we have used materials coming directly from industrialization, with no transformation at all, using standard dimensions. Thus, de-contextualised steel profiles, with no treatment, become benches, bars, raised floors, baseboards, doors, glass stops, etc. Also, glass mounted the easiest way with its maximum dimensions and uncut can be reutilised. A world of industrial materials loaded with heaviness, able to establish an open communication with the old, the ancient, reaching the both its maximum expressiveness.  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar  Image Courtesy Carlos Fernández Piñar
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