Sebastián Arquitectos proposes a large workshop warehouse that acts as an active hub. This transparent and systematic space fosters interaction among its various users and features a program of artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics laboratories.
The proposal draws its inspiration from Paxton's 1851 design for the Crystal Palace, proposing an aesthetic based on clarity, light, and reflection, which evokes a sense of technological virtuality. The polished surfaces and reflective slats transform the volume into an architectural mirage that symbolizes the immaterial and innovative nature of knowledge.
The building is organized through a modular steel and glass structure, responding to an additive logic that allows for flexibility and spatial clarity. Two lower floors house laboratories and a data center, while the third opens up as a landscape office illuminated by skylights. Above these, the roof integrates facilities and a public terrace under a large photovoltaic pergola. The construction emphasizes the transparency, lightness, and energy efficiency of the architectural complex.
Rendering. Aragon Institute of Technology's AI Laboratory Building by Sebastián Arquitectos.
Project description by Sebastian Arquitectos
A new building block in the future DAT Alierta technology campus in Zaragoza.
The new AI laboratory building at the Aragón Institute of Technology is conceived as a component of the Río Ebro campus, a system of autonomous buildings organized according to Cartesian laws. Within this environment, where the only references are the buildings that comprise it, the laboratories are incorporated as a basic volume linked to the structure defined by the axes of the ITA complex.
The new building will house various artificial intelligence laboratories for cognitive systems, automation, and robotics, which are systematically organized according to a clear and defined structure in a steel and glass building with additive and modular logic.
Systematization and transparency are the strategies of the project, like all architecture inheriting the pioneering approaches implemented by Paxton at the Crystal Palace in 1851. This gallery of contemporary wonders also finds its place in the new ITA building. The large workshop bay is open to all the building's programs, fostering and activating a collaborative way of working among all researchers and publicizing the results of their tests.
While the two lower floors house the various laboratories around this workshop bay and the data processing center—the true heart of the information generated and interconnecting all the uses—the third floor unfolds across the entire building like a landscape office punctuated by various transparent skylights that allow light to enter the two lower levels. The top level of the roof, intended for installations, will also house a public terrace overlooking the campus, all under the large photovoltaic pergola that covers the entire building like an umbraculum.
New technologies reach us as something imaginative, with an almost dreamlike permeability. Character, understood as the manifestation in architecture of its purpose, is manifested in the seductive power of brilliance and reflection, in the magical virtuality of the aesthetics of polish. Like a mirage, the building fades into its surroundings through a system of transparent, reflective slats, intended to reveal the spirit of the technologies it houses. A seemingly simple and visually enigma, yet complex and systematic within.
