Research and Laboratories

Bilbao, Spain
2003
Corporate, Security
43.000 m² / 462.848 ft²

A territorial administrative and research complex articulated through stratified prisms and permeable envelopes, where topography, atmosphere, and program converge to establish a continuous dialogue between landscape, infrastructure, and collective use.

The complex is conceived to accommodate 40,000 m² of programmatic workspace alongside nearly 1,000 parking spaces, delicately inscribed within a gently sloping, verdant site.

The architectural response seeks to preserve and reinterpret the latent spirit of the landscape, two undulating hills set against a distant horizon of low mountains. The built form is articulated into three elongated prisms, two rendered in glass, ethereal and permeable, and a third, more tectonic in expression, composed of granite and concrete. These volumes are carefully stratified along the natural topography. A fourth cubic volume, also glazed, establishes a measured dialogue with the stone prism, together framing a square that opens toward the broadest expanse of the valley.

The glass façades act as membranes, capturing and diffusing the humid, mist laden atmosphere characteristic of the region, allowing the building to dissolve into its environmental context.

Despite the considerable scale of the intervention, the project aspires to maintain a legible and humane proportion, ensuring that each workspace retains a clear spatial and relational continuity with both the ensemble and the surrounding landscape.

The composition is organized into four primary volumes. The two linear glazed prisms house office functions. The linear stone volume accommodates shared and communal services. The cubic glazed pavilion is dedicated to laboratory spaces.

Between the two parallel prisms, an enclosed atrium emerges, a suspended, almost immaterial void, within which a hovering volume is situated to house the Command and Control Center, evoking a sense of weightlessness and central oversight.

Within the glazed buildings, stone is deployed extensively, both as a partial cladding to the structural framework and as a means of constructing deep transitional thresholds along the curtain walls.

At night, the rear façade of the stone volume, facing the mountainous backdrop, is suffused with a blue luminescence, transforming it into a symbolic plane that expresses the civic and territorial vocation of the administrative headquarters.