2016_03_18_ARQ_santas_suarez

"Bilbao is not only the Guggenheim or its historic center, but also its peripheral neighborhoods. A continuous ring of districts surrounding the most touristic center of the city with obvious needs for architectural intervention. Matiko is one of them, and there the City Council has disposed of an industrial building to convert it into a center for entrepreneurs", says Asier Santas, Deputy Director of the department of Projects, Urban Planning and Theory and History from the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra.

Based on this premise, Suárez Santas Arquitectos Auzo factory Irazabal Matiko was conceived as an action model based on the recovery of old buildings that revitalize the place in which they are inserted.

"The most significant aspect of project consisted in devising a façade that would make this operation visible, with minimum cost and maximum expressiveness. The proposal is a uniform metallic skin that covers the exterior structure, creating a smooth and larger scale plane.. For this purpose, we have chosen a common material in installations that has been given aesthetic virtue: galvanized steel cable trays", says Luis Suárez, professor at department de Proyectos. 

According to the jury, the projects have presented different attitudes in the way they intervene on heritage, the city and the landscape with innovative and qualified solutions. They constitute contributions that improve the urban and landscape environments in which they are located, with proposals in line with the problems and resources available, with the capacity to become references of a context and testimonies of their time. 

The project of Suárez Santas Arquitectos will be part of an informative catalog and an itinerant International exhibition . Both have as goal recognize and reward a set of high quality works; representative of the best panorama of our architecture and a way of doing and intervening on the existing that serves as reference letter for the outside.