Type: Corporate
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SEPE Offices
SEPE is Spain’s national public employment service. We won the public competition to design a compact architectural intervention consisting of office spaces for this important institution. Although the project is relatively simple, it is located within an existing building. The “site” therefore occupies part of the ground and second floors of a residential block in a recently developed neighborhood of San Sebastián.
Located in the north of Spain, San Sebastián is a vibrant city defined by the meeting of sea and rock, and by a particular condition of light.
Also, it is the city of the two lights of Europe. The first is the dense, atmospheric light of Northern Europe, a deep, material blue, as seen in La Concha Bay and captured in The Comb of the Winds by Eduardo Chillida. The second is the clear, white light of Southern Europe, associated with public life and the use of the street. Together, these contrasting lights define the city’s spatial and cultural identity.
The project seeks to create a space with a strong public character, not through imposed symbolism but through qualities intrinsic to the city’s culture and environment.
The solid blue light of the North of Europe. La Concha Bay, San Sebastian.
Our approach was to unify these different lights, embracing their diversity while establishing a meaningful relationship with the exterior and the surrounding geography. That is, with nature within the city. In this context, light becomes our primary material.
At the core of the project, a central vertical space is filled with the white light of Southern Europe. A system of suspended white panels reflects and diffuses light, bathing the interior with a clean, soft, and transparent luminosity, while increasing the overall amount of natural light.
The perimeter of the intervention enhances the presence of natural light through a blue glass façade supported by a black steel structure. This element evokes the dense, colored light of Northern Europe, producing a heterogeneous and vibrant atmosphere. Perforated wooden panels filter the incoming light while protecting the offices from excessive exposure and external views.
Above, a transparent skylight allows visual continuity through the interior of the block, while also acknowledging the presence of the residential terraces and domestic life on the upper floors.
These two types of light, dense and diffuse, are familiar to those who inhabit the space. They form part of their everyday landscape. At the same time, they contribute to the public character required by the institution, transforming the project into an open and welcoming space for all.
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Software and Biotechnology Plants
The Technology Park brings together high-tech industries within a consolidated research environment. In its latest phase of development, two new buildings were commissioned for software and biotechnology, each developed through an independent architectural competition and conceived to operate autonomously.
Both projects were later selected for exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum, in recognition of their exploration of verticality and urban presence within a low-density industrial context.
Our relationship with nature has shifted significantly over the course of the century: it has become less invasive, more mediated, yet at the same time more intense. The Software and Biotechnology buildings respond to this condition as compact volumes wrapped in a ductile envelope—resembling a mass of grass or a plant stem—suggesting forms that could have pre-existed the surrounding infrastructure. They appear as autonomous fragments, establishing a direct yet non-invasive relationship with both users and landscape.
The architecture pursues a stripped-down, “fat-free” approach. Construction is conceived as a direct system, without superfluous layers. Natural light is filtered through the constructive elements, while materials are presented with clarity: exposed concrete in its most raw and unembellished state, and glass sun visors fixed with untreated stainless steel plates. The outer glass layer, carrying a subtle hand-drawn pattern, produces a soft, almost silky appearance from one angle, and complete transparency from another.
The façades operate as environmental devices. Conceived as double ventilated skins, they allow the buildings to breathe, mediating between interior and exterior while regulating energy and spatial conditions. The interstitial space between the two layers becomes an inhabitable zone, maintaining a continuous relationship with the surroundings.
Through their geometry and material continuity, the buildings dissolve clear boundaries, allowing light to pass without obstruction. Notably, their configuration avoids a defined north-facing façade—traditionally associated in this region with cold and humid conditions. Their compactness and softly articulated surfaces enable a fluid perception in motion, allowing both pedestrians and drivers to experience them as continuous, rounded objects.
At ground level, an entry plaza integrates shared amenities for workers, including a kindergarten, café, gym, and beauty salon, reinforcing the buildings’ role within a broader social and urban framework.
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Health Department Headquarters
The new Basque Health Department headquarters is
located at the last site that still remained unbuilt on the
administrative and Business Center of Bilbao. Up to now,
the institution was suffering the spread of its staff in several
buildings, hardly recognizable by citizens, away from each
other and uncomfortable for both users and technical
services. The project at the same time involves both economic and property profits.
The aim of the new building is bringing together
staff in a recognizable place, in order to increase the
efficiency of the service and identify easily the corporation.
The site is located in the crossroad of two important streets
of the Ensanche, designed in 1862. The restrictive city rules
compel to repeat the shape of the neighboring walls,
reducing penthouses according to a curved directive,
chamfering the corner and building a tower on it.The folded façade generates multiple visual directions from
inside to the streets bellow, and also from the highest floors
to the landscape that surrounds the city, a highly effective
mechanism for the incorporation of urban vitality inside the
building.
The double façade solves not only all the mentioned urban
requirements but also those concerning energetic, fireresistant
and acoustic insulation. This climatic improvement
enables the elimination of the conventional air-conditioning
installation as well as the false ceiling. Thus, the sound
produced by the building is reduced, air recirculation in
workplaces disappears, with a significant increase of health
conditions, and the volume occupied per floor is also
reduced, saving resources consumed by the construction.
The façade responds to the investigation launched in the
previous projects, which considers the wrapper as a
system. The construction techniques, the operation of the
building, the energy exchange, the city and also the very
fact, the desire to be… take part in the system definition, but
never the elevation or the composition. The system must
provide a valid response to the different situations
generated in the façade. Instead of merely set the building
on the one hand and shaping the urban space on the other,
the façade system should become a social vehicle.
The building concentrates services and communications in
a vertical spine attached to the longest party hedge and
generates seven open floors assigned for offices. Above
this, there are two floors for local representative and
institutional use. The workspace benefits of the permeable,
passable and livable volume of the building. The board hall
takes up the double height of the tower. The auditorium, its
foyer and its appendages are situated in the first basement.
Further below there are two parking floors and one fourth
level for archives. The car lifts allow access to all the
basement levels.The project emphasizes the place to sit on the threshold, at
the doorway of a house, looking down the road and the
back into the home.
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Satellite Air Traffic Center
In 2000, an international ideas competition was launched to design the first facility capable of controlling the new constellation of 30 Galileo satellites, the European system conceived to ensure the continent’s strategic autonomy from the United States GPS network.
This initiative represented a technological challenge not only for Spain but for the European Union as a whole, demanding a level of performance and technical complexity unprecedented within its field.
Spain would thus become the first of four countries to host this new generation of satellite-based air traffic control infrastructure. Located on the outskirts of Madrid, the project integrates this emerging guidance system with existing centralized control operations and a range of international platforms associated with advanced air traffic technologies.
The site is highly singular. Set within the Jarama river basin, it embodies both the measured horizontality of the Castilian plateau and the latent dynamism of its open, expansive condition. The proximity of military runways reinforces the perception of an uninterrupted, stratified landscape, where ground and sky establish a continuous visual and operational field.
The building is conceived as an interface with this vast territorial horizon. Its northern façade unfolds as a continuous glazed plane, extending beyond its limits to frame distant views across the plain, while foregrounding the powerful presence of aircraft in motion along the adjacent runways.
Simultaneously, the project establishes a precise relationship with the sky. A longitudinal skylight, running parallel to the glazed façade, introduces calibrated natural light into the interior while enabling visual continuity with the celestial sphere. This device operates both atmospherically and symbolically, evoking the trajectories of flight and the orbital logic of satellites.
The roofscape emerges as a topographical construct. It extends and reinterprets the existing embankments and paths of the site, transforming the building into an artificial ground that preserves and amplifies the memory of the terrain. In this way, the project does not simply occupy the landscape but becomes a continuation of it, a constructed plateau. In this gesture resonates the metaphor proposed by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, who described Madrid as a condition suspended upon an elevated plane.
Two decades later, the building has not only fulfilled its initial ambitions but has intensified its relevance. It now accommodates the European satellite-based air navigation system, centralized air traffic control platforms, and a range of European and international space-related infrastructures. It continues to develop Galileo-related programs, anticipates the expansion of its activities through emerging technologies, and plays a strategic role within the current critical geopolitical context of the European Union. It stands at the forefront of airspace management, contributing decisively to the security and operational autonomy of the Union.
The building has proven its civic and institutional value, a realized vision that remains open to further evolution. On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, a return visit reveals a facility fully in operation, yet still oriented toward the future. Its directors reflect with quiet determination, their gaze still fixed on the satellites: more remains to be done.
