Minimalissimo

Norvento Building

architecture

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Located close to the city of Lugo, Spain, between an industrial enclave and a forest, the new Norvento Building. It's the research centre of a firm specialised in renewable energies, which adopts the form that enables it to open on to the forest and be in a continuum with it, while closing up on the side facing the adjacent industrial scene. The architect Francisco Mangado explains the main purposes of the project:

The project takes off from a reflection about the office type and proposes a manner of working and researching that calls for something different from the typical large anonymous administrative building with identical office units of little interest. The new workplace must have a certain ‘domesticity', be a place where both privacy and encounters are possible. A place which is not defined, delimited, but somehow in daily reinvention, through interaction with users. The floor plan presents areas that stretch on and become part of the park, and this layout makes it possible to structure each department in a differentiated, autonomous way, enabling programs to be enlarged in the future, as specified in the competition brief.

The astonishing orthogonal interior generates rich geometries, especially at the points of encounter, giving to the light a special importance with beautiful contrasts of light and shadows. Also, glass dividers and skylights were used to welcome necessary light into the rooms. This program also gives to Norvento a particularly recognisable building.

As it could not be otherwise, the building is commitment to the environment, using eucalyptus in all the façades—a common wood in Galicia used for making pulp but not in the construction.

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