Office building on Carrer Còrsega, Barcelona

This building is the result of the joining up of two neighbouring independent buildings. They had belonged to an electricity company and were a complex of arbitrary, mainly opaque spaces. They could not be demolished as that would have resulted in a significant decrease in the area available for building.

There were two different city scales there. The buildings are located in Barcelona, on the carrer Còrsega where it meets Santa Teresa – between the two neighbourhoods of Gràcia and the Eixample. Gràcia is an old town which has been swallowed up by Barcelona, it is made up of narrow streets and buildings of three or four storeys, the Eixample, on the other hand, is part of the urban fabric of Barcelona, made of wide streets, large volumes of traffic and buildings of seven or eight storeys high.

We made the two opaque spaces we found talk to each other – we chose a dark rust shade to highlight the domestic scale of Gràcia on all of the façades which overlook the carrer de Santa Teresa, and we placed bands of stone studded all around to establish a dialogue between the two buildings.

This is how the various volumes that make up the building understand each other – they are pulled together by the very rules that organise them, The side running from front to back is of stone, and in contrast, the side which can be seen as a sectioned volume, has been treated with coloured stucco.