BANK HEADQUARTERS
CHINA-MONGOLIA BORDER

Year: 2011-
Status: On going
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Team: Nuno Lobo with BIAD

RESIDENCE OF MEDITATION
CHINA, SHANXI PROVINCE, WUTAISHAN

The commission by the leader of the Buddhist monks in Wutai Mountain was to design a new place which will allow a close approach to the meditation realm.

The first task was to identify the functional and aesthetic values which define the core of the Buddhist life and then to generate the best possible expression of these core qualities; given to the sense of time, and to the sense of place an unconditional priority.

While some of the vocabulary is without literal precedent, the design remains true to the spirit of the religious congregation. The scheme has a number of powerful contexts to negotiate; ranging from the existing structures on the site to historically based ideas of what a place of meditation should look like.
Quiet rigour connotations of different scales are manifest; landscape views are framed; circulations are raised to a pleasurable moments; materials are restrained with concrete, timber, and paper doors; every junction manifest the Buddhist aesthetic purity.

The many features of this project reflect the truth that authentically simple environments are almost inevitably the outcome of complex but rich architectural processes.


CREDITS

Year: 2011-
Status: On going
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Team: Manuel Navarro with BIAD

TWO TOWERS
CHINA, TAIYUAN

These two towers are a new 40-and-23-storey high-rise complex located on the West bank of the river in Taiyuan.

The office tower -the highest- has been carefully carved to introduce a new perspective from the street, and that at the same time, avoids the standard tower's full height.
The boutique hotel tower - the smallest- is excavated in its curtain wall to reveal the inner life of the building. This creates a profile for Taiyuan skyline while generating a set of specific features -indoor/outdoor spaces with plunge pools and terraces-.
The horizontal element which links both towers is a covered plaza which accommodates an extensive mix of dining and leisure facilities.

The design dismantles the typical tower and podium typology, creating not a tower in isolation but instead a skyscraper that melds with the city.


CREDITS

Year: 2010
Status: Concept design
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Team: BIAD

VISITOR CENTRE IN HENGSHAN TEMPLE
CHINA, DATONG

As fast as China develops new requirements for Architecture displayed. Far away of the quotidian urban scenario, this enterprise requires the knowledge of how to operate in a historic-rural area.

The aim of this municipal action is to promote tourism in an ancestral scenario; particularly, one which is characterized by the existence of the Hengshan temple, a monument of the Wei Dynasty (386-534 AD). There is also a dam next by which is going to be used in order to promote its use as an aquatic recreation.

In this scenario, the architectural purpose is focused on how to utilize the distance between the lowest elevation of the dam and the highest. The focus on this characteristic creates the possibility of taking the full potential of what it would be otherwise a basic element (a stair) and make of it an architectural excuse to create a vertical promenade.

This promenade is materialized away from picturesqueness that would be created in the misunderstanding of this remarkable enterprise. it is looked for a different model approach; one which is closer to the ancestral sense of the local heritage than the literal reproduction of the local forms.


CREDITS

Year: 2010
Status: Concept design
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Team: BIAD
Press:
Architectural Association, Issue 14, Winter 2011
Zhulong, 2011.04.26
Arch Daily, 2011.05.02
PlaraformaArquitectura, 2011.05.05
Concept magazine, 2011.06

INTERIOR DESIGN FOR THE BANK OF DONGGUAN
CHINA, DONGGUAN

Banks are usually characterized by linear bands of repetitive units with resulting anonymous undifferentiated spaces that contrast with the banks’ ambition to treat each costumer as an individual.

In this “found” scenario of a generic-concrete-twenty-floors structure, the entrance hall has been wrapped in glass producing a disfiguration that has rendered it complex and jointed.
The articulation of the two floors for the lobby has been materialized by a circular staircase. Although, the ceiling is highly expressive it reveals the original structure of the building which contrasts the smoothness of the new reconfiguration.
In the upper floors, the key was to understand the whole floor without distractions whilst preserving of the privacy creating sheltered enclaves for working, drinking, dining or relaxing.

Although its colour and materials is a common language trough out all of it, each section of the building has its own unique character; so that staffs develop an intuitive sense of their place within the whole building.


CREDITS

Year: 2010-
Status: On going
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Team: Manuel Navarro, Carlos Collado, Jorge Cortés with DADC

CHAIR LONG
FURNITURE

A chair long is a temporary refuge, a place where you can be safe from the street rawness or from the daily stress. That is why chairs are so important and that is why there are so many.

The AV chair comes from the idea of embodying the spirit of comfort and enjoying. Their sober colours and its ergonomic shape make a marvellous example of close-to-the-floor lounge furniture. It has a flexible backrest that curves over the head, forming a sculptural canopy and is able to be rotated and to be used in a 90-grades-opposite position.

To be used in when waiting, reading, dialoguing or even thinking. There are so many chairs to so different moments.


CREDITS

Year: 2010
Status: Prototype

WANGFUJING
CHINA, BEIJING

Since the Romans, the atrium has been a hole in a house or a building that injects light and air into the centre. In Wangfujing Street, the proposal is to create a container of artificiality where to produce an endless possibility of experience.

The approach to the project started thinking about space conditions; social, urban, and architectonical. The mass of program is manipulated with the objective to create a sectional urbanism where opposite activities and uses are set up in a successive sequence; a block which can contain the whole world.
The proposal is base on building a gross-five facades using the required retail, hotel, and apartments square metres, in order to generate an inside space. A system of void spaces introduces a spatial configuration which brings daylight into the cube, and views from/to the surroundings.

700 metres east, the historical Chinese Architecture -The Forbidden City- generously shows the possibilities to create a core protected by a built perimeter; creating its own world; its own views.


CREDITS

Year: 2010
Status: Schematic design
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez, Manuel Navarro
Project development team: Jorge Gonzalez, Cao Xi, Gan Ning with BIAD
Press:
ETSAM, 2010.10.01
AECCafe, 2011.05.19
Newsodrome, 2011.06.21
Archgo, 2011.06.21
International Business Times, 2011.06.21

BOUNDARY CROSSING FACILITIES
HONG KONG

The urban and social modification that is going to be produced by the bridge construction, between Macao and Hong Kong cities in the Pearl River Delta, will produce new synergies and opportunities driven by social and market forces.

The site will accommodate an endless series of movements: flights, trains, buses, cars, that will coexist and interact in juxtaposition. More than construct a building; a system is what needs to be generated: an open structure adaptable to any possible situation. The innovative structural system proposed will generate maximum efficiency and versatility both in construction and in program. Therefore, it will be able to adapt to either office space or hall parameters as desired.

In the twenty-first century the understanding of networks, communications, connectivity, and flows needs to prioritise the geostrategic agenda. Infrastructure must generate the ideal platform in order to be connected to the global system.


CREDITS

Year: 2010
Status: Competition
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Competition Team: Jorge Gonzalez, Manuel Navarro, Ma Quiang

OLIMPIC VILLAGE
BRAZIL, RIO DE JANEIRO

What the idea of global events (ex. Olympic Games) needs now, is a new redefinition of their possibilities.

On the one hand, the east site of the of the proposed area is organized with an open system which allows to improvise and liberate the ground almost in its entirety; reducing the buildings’ footprints to a minimum; and thus maximizing the full potential of the place.
A system of an elevated basement - no residential uses-, modifies its shape, high, and width in order to accommodate itself to the different features of the site. A number of thin towers are raised from this basement to accommodate the residential use.

On the other, the perimeter of the west site is liberated in order to erect a complex mix-use super structure in the centre. This structure contains an original vertical “promenade” of cultural events.
The façade will be in charge of communicating the public identity of the building trough its permeable skin; a non-linear rhythm of voids, vertical gardens, lights, massy…. in order to show its public and pure urban condition, providing a single and cohesive identity for the tower.

In the end, the diagrammatic clarity of the city becomes a tapestry of accidents; making the action of this sort of new urban operations to become richer. Instead of imposing a strange element in the urban fabric, make it to meld with the pre-existing urban reality.


CREDITS

Year: 2011
Status: Competition
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Competition team: Beatriz Martinez, Fernando Botton, Jorge Gonzalez, Manuel Navarro, Nuno Lobo with Carolina Molinari, Javier Gorodner, Juan Spotorno (MOGS) and Andrés Rogers, Ariel Kitay, Axel Ibarroute, Cynthia Szwarcberg, Demian Schneider, Federico Chain, Francisco Solari, Hernan Grinszpun, Joan Marantz, Joy Zimmerman, Laura Albero, Luciano Intile, Maite Landa, Martín Zlobek (Intile & Rogers)

OFFICE AND APARTMENT COMPLEX
CHINA, CHANGCHUN

In a city which can be listed as a pure-generic tabula rasa, the commission is used as an architectural motive in order to check the potential of the universal grid.

The programme is a generic-office- and-apartment 120,000 square metre space. The aim is to break down the massive programme into six separate towers but linked them by a continuous three-storey building which creates a public plaza in the ground and an elevated one above it. Indeed, it attempts to give a spatial and urban composition to the enterprise which breaks the rigid and monolithic image that the project would be otherwise.

The six towers rise from the porous basement having the same external volume, identical communication cores, and construction and facade details. The lighting system and the degree of transparency of the materials are the elements which are in charge of showing the programmatic condition of the building.

The universal grid fills the whole site. As the site would be a chessboard not all the cells are filled with mass in order to liberate the ground and have a condition of flexibility, permeability and continuity with the urban tissue.


CREDITS

Year: 2010
Status: Concept design
Partner in charge: Jorge Gonzalez
Team: Manuel Navarro with BIAD

MIXED-USE COMPLEX
ITALY, MILAN

Although, the nineteenth and the early twenty century produced a large number of utopias in the form of community projects -which soon became dystopias- such idea (or myth?) has survived until nowadays.

In Milan, the competition brief required multiples uses in a site surrounded by ordinary high-rise housing buildings, and a train station. The submitted proposal identified opportunities, and possible dangers; the creation of a contemporary Mediterranean courtyard, and at the same time, to avoid producing a gated community.

Following that premise, the program was conceived as bringing the urban experience of the city at large within the buildings themselves. It was created a three-dimensional configuration based on the different possibilities that geometry can provide. The proposal develops various levels of social association; market in the ground floors, and community spaces in several levels, fostering the idea of the importance of voids, as well as solids.

The result was a horizontal and vertical labyrinth within the buildings and trough the interior courtyards. The proposal was presented far removed as possible from the model of the uniformity, and the repetition of the housing block.


CREDITS

Year: 2010
Status: Competition
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez with B&M

GARDEN PAVILION
SPAIN

The study area is located in the main intersection of the pedestrian path of the central green area of the city.

The Alameda is defined by trees scarcely aligned without slated rhythm, which creates a peculiar atmosphere and gives some walking sense of distance. The design emphasizes the "tempo" of the trees giving a landmark within the context, and becoming the meeting point for the local flow.

In the pursuit of new sensorial atmosphere, this design offers different stimulus such as light, air, shadows, steam....


CREDITS

Year: 2009
Status: Competition
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez, Jesus Jimenez

HYBRID TOWER
SPAIN, MADRID

This project provides an alternative response to the conventional housing block.

Instead of a rigid tower structure essentially vacant, it is suggested that a rhythmic of solids and voids would better resonate with the future occupant activities. With various levels of social association, the scheme is flexible enough to be updated and altered as needed or desired.
Moreover, the podium part is a low-rise dwelling development, arranged in series of open spaces, like natural light providers.

The Madrid Hybrid Tower project responds to a variety of surrounding scales, building types, and extremely changed environment. It has been found conditions that might be applicable as a strategy for larger and more complex areas of development.


CREDITS

Year: 2009
Status: Competition
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez with darro18

VISITORS CENTRE
SPAIN, ZUMARRAGA

The challenge of this project was to design a strongly slated program inside an outstanding context within a deep understanding of the Genius Loci.

Not being afraid of such important enterprise, the design deals with the scale of surrounding features, enhances the existing situation by addition, creating an architectural dialogue with the existing constructions.


CREDITS

Year: 2009
Status: Competition
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez, Manuel Navarro

AUDITORIUM
SPAIN, GRANADA

The upcoming use of the auditorium with musical and dancer workshops requires the flexibility of the building combined with an understanding of its overall image.

The proposed use and site conditions are materialized in a simple shape. The volume is wrapped in a vertical fashion which, at the same time, answers the lighting requirements.

In urban terms, the proposal connects the building to the green surrounding area, while respecting the neighbourhood with the appropriate scale but nevertheless giving an outstanding form to the public building.


CREDITS

Year: 2008
Status: Competition
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez, Manuel Navarro

SOCIAL HOUSING
SPAIN, VALENCIA

The housing scheme is located on a U-shape plot, which is characterized by its short proximity to the train tracks.

According to this fact, the winning proposal was based on a defined rectangular shape; designing the north facade as a blind wall, and opening the building to the south.


CREDITS

Year: 2007-
Status: On hold
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez with darro18

SOCIAL HOUSING
SPAIN, ARROYOMOLINOS

The scheme seeks a compact shape in order to achieve different views and lay out the open space around.

Three palazzinas are settled down in the plot as objects inside the scenario. The design acquires a future capability of growth but nevertheless it keeps an identity by itself.


CREDITS

Year: 2007
Status: Competition
Competition team: Jorge Gonzalez with darro18