Studio Banana TV interviews studio Entresitio, authors of the elegant San Blas health centre in Madrid.
The San Blas municipal health center is a building which from the initial competition phase was conceived as a “dislocated building”. We thought this was an effective and emphatic way to implement a functional program for a health center in an unremarkable setting.
To emphasize the spatial value of the interior, we resorted to the LeCorbusierian idea of “reconciliation of opposites”. The hermetic and heavy image of the exterior is put before the open and light space of the interior.
The program for the health center is implemented extensively on a single ground floor. The different rooms of the program are organized on a loose irregular orthogonal grid, where thirteen patios are arranged in a zigzag pattern between the public and private rooms along three parallel (non)-corridors.
In opposition to this light system, split up by the patios, the solid and heavy façade is conceived as a continuous windowless mass of exposed concrete. The idea of heaviness is reinforced by the rough texture formed by the horizontal wood planks of the concrete formwork. The absence of hollows in the vertical walls of the exterior enclosure causes the relationship between the interior and exterior of the building to occur vertically, almost with the sky above. The glass panes do not define patios, but hollows in the horizontal façade of the exterior shell of the building, creating a vertical relationship that allow an isotropic interior space to be generated. The transparency and mirroring qualities of the glass creates multiple visions by reflected symmetry. Similarly, the reflective qualities of the vertical walls of blue tile laid in a fish scale pattern help to create a spacious and luminous interior atmosphere, almost as if the sky were brought inside the building. The corridor vanishes, it ceases to exist as the traditional linear connecting structure, because the alternating arrangement of the empty spaces and public areas allows a weak relationship to exist between the “x” and “y” coordinates of space.
A relationship of opposites is established between the exterior façade and the interior space, a synthesis between the intellectual and the experimental, the classic and the picturesque. Where classic is understood as that which is related to Plato’s world, where what concerns us are the pure forms that contain what persists as ideal. By picturesque we are not referring to the fragmentation, decadence or ruined state typical of the 18th century English picturesque, but to the fact than an orderly grouping of elements on the floor plan program is revealed as fragments that give the observer the temporal and kinetic perception of space typical of the picturesque, as described by Le Corbusier when he analyzes the calibrated viewing sequence of the Acropolis described by Choisy, or even, without forgetting the differences because architectural space is not perceived projected on a flat screen, as in the “montage” film sequences of the avant-garde Russian cinematographer Eisenstein.
In short, at the time of gestation of this project we attempted to explore in greater depth one way among the possible ways of interrelating that experimental and sensory form of conceiving space with the tempting spatial manifestation of pure form. Between sensation and geometry.
Interview by Studio Banana TV. Translation by Harold Ortiz.
