The search for energy efficiency presides over the work of architects attentive to the climate emergency. For many of them, designing is now an exercise in innovation, guided by the need to save resources. For example, by Manuel Sánchez-Villanueva and Carol Beuter (Hazarquitectura), authors of the Community Life Center of Trinitat Vella, inaugurated a year ago and now reopened after a few weeks of closure.
For these professionals, it is as important to respond to the client’s program – a multi-purpose civic equipment – ​​as it is to do so while minimizing the carbon footprint. This is achieved, in this case, with three steps. First, a dry construction, with a mixed structure of metal and wood, material, the latter, also ubiquitous in the building’s enclosure, except for the concrete block cloths on the ground floor, which control the insolation of the lobby. Second, a combination of wood, which lacks thermal inertia, with geothermal energy, through an underground serpentine that, two meters below ground level, captures outside air, moves it, renews it and cleans it at 17 degrees underground . Third, by means of two courtyards of light and ventilation, in the center of the building, which redistribute the mentioned air throughout the building – itself, an air conditioning machine -, and ensure inside, without energy expenditure, minimum temperatures of 19 degrees in winter and maximums of 27 in summer. These passive strategies are combined with the active ones brought by the photovoltaic panels on the roof, or with the folding of the building, which makes it possible to gain space on the edge for a summer cinema.
The success of this high comfort at low cost is a priority for the architects, who dispense with any ornament in the work and, formally, are content with a building that is a parallelepiped with an abstract air, not very expressive, closed in on itself. Something understandable in a tough urban environment, and on a depressed lot next to the junction of Meridiana with Ronda de Dalt, between humble residential blocks of the fifties and sixties.
