Interlimits. Cafeteria on Avenue 1º de mayo by Romera y Ruiz Arquitectos

Description of project by Romera y Ruiz Arquitectos

Space with limits is the true space. There is no content without a container. We consider space when something gives it a shape, when it gives it existence, dimensions, structure, unity... Space goes from being internal to external when the dimensions vary, but the limits, the frontiers, continue to limit this space, conditioning it, giving it a different meaning according to its matter and origin. Limits can transform the interior space making it unlimited and able to integrate and merge with them. When the limit is a dividing wall, a façade, or a street alignment, as in this case, the architecture is conditioned by architecture itself. In this way, it digs or it moulds itself searching for spaces, adapting itself to the imposed forms, developing as infinitely manipulable forms.

In line with this, the project has been developed to rehabilitate and extend an old service station to be used as a cafe, located in Avenida 1 de Mayo in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The project is inserted in a free area of the block, an empty and irregular space that gives a glimpse of the adjacent façades. The proposal is adapted to the volume of the canopy that supports it providing attractive horizontal communications and special awareness of the environment conditions. Within the given limits, we find an infinitely manipulable space. When these limits are manipulated with an inner volume, we find a changeable complementary void. This void can be treated in a thousand different ways, it can be twisted, stretched, turned into pieces, hollowed out. One form of the void is more intimate or private, the one through which you access the cafe by a linear landscaped filter towards which the façade looks; and another form of the void is wider, bordered by another void through the setback of the building. A third empty space is created between the canopy and the façade of the building with a free landscaped gallery that runs along almost the entire façade and provides intermediate spaces between the interior and the exterior.

The whole program is developed on a raised horizontal level and adapted (PRM) to the level of the pavement. The free level breathes through its two ends as well as through its greater vertical dimension which constitutes a double height under the canopy where different spaces are created without partitions, preserving the geometric forms with glass and aluminium. In this way, new spaces are created by changing height or position, and by using three materials: glass, matte black aluminium and concrete. The project for the cafe/burger restaurant consists of a black opaque volume that is developed as a succession of open built spaces by using large self supporting glass panels that are provided to the voids. The predictable nature of this succession is compensated by making a break in the black volume that optically covers and shortens its length, expanding the garden or free spaces. This spatial layout is adapted to the strict development of the program by rehabilitating the existing canopy which becomes something new. What we have referred as interior spaces can have various rectangular shapes (in which one dimension predominates over the other ), ensuring that lighting reaches all the points, and allowing fluid horizontal communications.

A surrounding volume limits the two programs, cafe and burger restaurant which are developed inside each one of which occupy part of the free space like a worm inside an apple unable to stick out through the skin. Despite the imposed duality which gives way to volumes intertwined with the voids that are configured together as a single body of unitary image, “together they proved to be more than they could have imagined themselves to be individually” as in the fable of The Blind Man and the Lame.