Carbajo Barrios' proposal positions the three buildings oriented in such a way that they take advantage of the best orientation and views towards the nearby parks, generating an interesting overall image that orders three linear blocks of six floors and two intermediate spaces for community use.
Thanks to this simple but intelligent arrangement, the houses have a large amount of natural light open to the exterior space that is delimited by a lattice that surrounds the complex, as a brise soleil and filter, shading the sunlight and the views between facing buildings. The envelope is configured by a pattern of colored concrete made up of pieces of twenty centimeters by twenty centimeters.
The streets are planned in direct relation to the ground floors, fragmented into two levels as a result of the unevenness, and linked to the configuration of a green corridor, which creates an ecological access route and connects visually and physically with the parks located in the immediate vicinity.
Residential Space Cornes by Carbajo Barrios. Photograph by Luis Díaz Díaz.
Description of project by Carbajo Barrios
Schedule
Buildings develop a residential complex compound with 125 apartments, garages, and boxrooms, which during the project process and work site had allowed develop 22 different typologies of dwellings, as much in a unique floor as in duplex format. Residential complex doesn’t have any uses different from residential.
Complementarily to dwellings, exists a free space for public use and three community rooms: a children's room, a gym, and a living room.
Situation
Buildings are in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, in fields occupied by Cornes Railway Station since 1873. Part of it had been refurbished and the result is a public building called “Casa das Asocacións”, which hosts all different associate collectives of the city and is located next to the designed apartment block. That old station housed the first Galician railway line between Santiago de Compostela and Carril. The building will be used for passenger transport for two decades, until the entry into service of the actual railway station of Santiago de Compostela (in another location) in April of 1943. As of this moment, it’s continued to function as a merchandise assistant railway station for some decades more, over the name “Santiago-Cornes”, until its dismantling in the twentieth century final days.
Free space
The urban planning anticipated a three lineal blocks management with two free private spaces for public use like elements of the relation between parallel strips. The free space formalisation (exclusively pedestrian use) is conditioned by its linear nature. More streets than squares are proposed in direct relation to building ground floors, where it is committed to residential use. This area is fragmented lengthwise into two levels, as a result of the vertical drop. Therefore, it projected a platform which is configured like a green corridor, drawing transversal paths for access to dwellings and longitudinal paths through the space in visual and ecological connection with surrounding parks. Some hollows appear on this space through underground floors, introducing large-size vegetation, making the distance between facades and apartments, and introducing natural illumination and ventilation towards garages and boxrooms. All of this is complemented with a transversal pedestrian street which crosses buildings, decompressing the space in between and releasing transversal views.
Residential Space Cornes by Carbajo Barrios. Photograph by Luis Díaz Díaz.
Buildings
The urban planning is based on the premise to incorporate apartments with high levels of natural light and harnessing views that the plot has of surrounding parks and the city.
Three pieces form the building complex, which has a length between seventy and one hundred meters and approximately twelve meters in width. Also, all of them have a cantilever surrounding the entire perimeter. After that decision, it proceed to open the entire plan to the outside, with a fully glazed envelope, preventing the use of a perimetral corridor as an exterior space of all apartments. The end of these spaces is delimited by a precast concrete lattice, which acts like a brise soleil, qualifying sunlight and views in between faced buildings. Corridor’s lattice will be the building skin, which defines its constructed volume, opting for a regular distribution of a solid element which configures a coloured concrete fabric made of 20x20cm pieces separated between them around eighty centimetres. This solution is extended to the whole facade, until the ground floor where appears a variety of patios which permits separate facades from the urban line, creating a buffer zone from the apartments to the space toward which they open it.
Given the massive geometry handed down from the urban planning, it decide to unify levels in collections of two floors to minimize the scale of facades. Furthermore, it provides movement, grabbing the allowed cantilever, turning on a tiny bit some floors over others, and making different facade lines. It creates a movement on the volumetry which break the original prismatic envelope, reducing the impact of the implantation. Finally, it decides to tint the concrete envelope, avoiding the buildings dilution in the monochrome surrounding background and giving a ferruginous colour that reminds the industrial nature which had the original space, turned now into an approaching lighthouse to the southwest façade of the Compostela downtown.
