Inakasa Building

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Civil architecture · Year: 2005 · Authors: Alexis López Acosta, Xavier Iván Díaz Martín

Rewriting the periphery is a common way for a city to grow. The project site results from a plan to convert former industrial land into a medium-density residential area. The first operations, as in this case, face the absence of references, both architectural and natural, left behind by the former industry. In the absence of a qualified nearby environment and a defined housing programme, the proposal is to create a network of relationships that initiate an urban discourse.

The plot, practically square, has three façades facing a plaza and two opposite streets at different levels. This condition is exploited by concentrating entrances, stairs, lifts and vertical installations on the single party wall, to build a continuous volume of housing on the façade. To achieve maximum flexibility of the floor plan, a structural system is created that allows stratification of circulations (access galleries to dwellings), installations (wet areas) and rooms (living rooms and bedrooms), giving rise to a mutable typology, whose variants are multiples of a module equivalent to half a bay. Thus, two systems arise: 

1. A residential mass that develops the typological combination and manifests on the façade the residential unit through a space that illuminates and functionally articulates each dwelling, generating the entrance and separating day and night zones. In a place where the climate allows it, the aim is to transfer the patio-house typology to block building, rotating the coordinate system to bring the roof to the façade. It is an ambiguous, oscillating place. The interior is exterior. The private is public. The façade is roof. The terrace is patio.

2. A system of forces that, from the environment, shapes the built mass. Towards the plaza the building compresses in height to enhance the dimension of the public space, offering the slope between the streets a parallel, continuous profile. The housing volume rests on the top of the plot, gravitates over the lower level and is distorted at one of its lower vertices to create spatial continuity between street, plaza and central patio. This takes advantage of the slope between the streets to fold over a ramp garage that maximises the number of spaces with minimal excavation. The patio, for private use, is no longer a cloister.  It is an ambiguous, oscillating place.  The exterior is interior. The public is private. The façade is street. The patio is plaza.

The building can be seen as one of the multiple solutions to the equation of equilibrium or interdependence of both systems, which adapt and mutually deform according to an open order that manifests a process – paraphrasing Duchamp – definitively unfinished.

28.101148, -15.448507