Type: Sport&Leisure
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Textured Tower
We thought that we could take the cultural problem of identity and personalization and translate that idea into our work, into the process itself and the people who are working on the building. We wanted to think about the intellectual concern of personalization, just in technical or constructive terms.
Construction is literally making the building. Then at that point we can translate it and think about personalization as a kind of constructive issue.
The tower is made with exposed reinforced concrete, one of the few materials able to resist a heavy daily training with real fire. The formwork has been made and assembled with industrialized procedures, a really complicated technology. But the external molds, the external layer of the formwork —that is, the internal layer, the one in contact with the concrete, facing it— were handmade. So the thin layer which is going to be the actual mold, the current form, of the concrete and the building, was handmade.
We asked all the people who worked on the building to build their own particular, favorite formworks. We gave the workers some instructions, a few simple recommendations about the number of wedges and the distance between them. From there, each person could organize the panel molding at her or his discretion or particular taste for the entire building. So each point of the surface was responding to a manual activity, and at the end, it seems like the envelope was alive —because it really is alive.
Reference to Alberto Giacometti’s slender figures, whose vertical tension and material presence informed the conception of the Textured Tower.
The tower is compressed in order to get more structural inertia, make a more efficient structure, save material and, therefore, energy. The tower is compressed and textured also to become more essential and not fill the air, as Giacometti’s “thin figures”.
We fold out the elevation not only because it is the only way to communicate the real drawing, but because you can cut it and fold it and make your own textured tower at home.
Multiple mobile filters separate the outside of the interior through deep apertures. Inside, the tower is extremely tough and spartan, built with concrete and galvanized or lacquered steel. The textured tower is filled with the drawing marks, so from inside we can know —as it happened before the Renaissance— the technical dialogue of the builders.
Again, design lives during the work process. We can still see the paper. We can still see the marksof the making process, not only the marks of the construction, but also the marks of the drawing: numbers, notes, including digital icons… the paper and the screens of the designers are still here, the process is still here, consequently we are still in the place for designing, for freedom and possibilities. Paper, texture and concrete show that designers, builders and users are part of the same community.
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La Peña Sports Pavilion
La Peña (The Rock) is one of the areas most deeply affected by both Bilbao’s industrial past and its subsequent post-industrial transformation. For much of the twentieth century, the site functioned as an open-pit mine, encircled by workers’ housing. By the end of the century, it had retained the form of a narrow, curved strip of land caught between the excavation and a steep natural hillside. This condition was further intensified by the insertion of new infrastructures, with the area crossed by two highways and several railway lines.
In this context, the sports complex is conceived as an instrument for the social transformation of the neighborhood in the twenty-first century, and currently stands as its only public facility.
The project had to be developed on an almost impossible site: a residual, reduced, and irregular plot, constrained between a vertical rock face of approximately 120 meters, two highways, three superimposed railway tracks, a metro station, parking accesses, narrow pedestrian paths at the rear, the misaligned façades of adjacent housing, and the metallic structure of a pre-existing fronton. In addition, the perimeter presents a continuously shifting topography, with multiple levels and highly diverse urban conditions.
The building emerges as an irregular volume directly shaped by these constraints. Rather than imposing form, the project results from the accumulation of easements, infrastructures, and spatial tensions that define the site.
The design strategy consists in defining a single constructive system capable of responding to this complexity: a prefabricated reinforced concrete element that adapts to all conditions. The project explores how broader urban reflections—industrial, infrastructural, demographic, and social—can be condensed into a minimal architectural operation.
This system is based on a simple, almost elementary component: a black precast concrete strip. Through limited variations—incorporating glass panels, operable elements, lattices, and different degrees of openness—it is able to resolve all the requirements of the building envelope.
The repetition of this element generates a semi-transparent concrete skin, a unified solution capable of negotiating the building’s multiple relationships with its surroundings. Its variability allows the façade to respond differently depending on orientation, proximity, and programmatic conditions.
Internally, this system defines a continuous social space that overlooks both the stacked sports facilities—arranged vertically due to the limited footprint—and the city beyond. This intermediate space, located between the envelope and the program, operates simultaneously as entrance hall, circulation system, and spatial organizer. It makes the vertical structure of the building legible and, in a region characterized by low natural light, introduces overhead illumination that fills the interior with a dense, almost material light—particularly significant in a former mining environment historically deprived of it.
The porosity of the envelope activates the collective dimension of the building, engaging with the social intensity of the city. The concrete system produces an architecture that is simultaneously open and intimate, allowing users to modulate its degree of transparency. In this sense, the building does not impose a fixed condition; it enables individual decisions about exposure and privacy.
At night, the façade transforms into a pixelated surface. The characteristic blue tone is not produced by artificial lighting or glass treatment, but by the reflection of the swimming pool water onto the interior surfaces. The optical properties of water—its fluidity and translucency—are thus projected outward, communicating with the surrounding urban environment.
This phenomenon establishes a connection between the interior and the city that is not strictly visual but experiential. It allows for a more nuanced and personal relationship between the building, its users, and its context.
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Olympic Ice Arena
The Olympic Ice Arena was the result of an important international competition for a building that was to house the first Olympic event ever in the Pyrenees Mountains, a two-icerings Olympic pavilion to celebrate hockey, figure skating, short track and curling competitions, and simultaneously be a recreational ice center.
The site is in northern Spain, in Huesca province. It is the Spanish landscape of the mountains, one of the idiosyncratic images of Europe. When we visited that place, immediately thought about the first Winter Olympic Games in history, held in 1924 at the Alps. At that time, all the tournaments were held in the outdoors, at the foot of Montblanc in Chamonix. When the competitors played hockey outdoors, it was magical the way both players and public experienced the nature. We can not do that today because sportive activities are hyper regulated, buildings became extremely technical and accomplish innumerable requirements.
When we started to work whit institutions, stakeholders and users we perceived other ancient powerful reality, present from the origin of the Olympics in Greece, obviously present also in 1924 and currently persistent: the fascination for both competition and triumph. There are people who devote their entire youths —that is, probably their entire lives— not to get an Olympic medal necessarily, but just to have the chance to get one Olympic medal. And these are the people who support the idea of having recurrent peaceful happy international meetings of nations.
We wanted to build something that would try to answer these two questions: first, the landscape, the city, the history; and then, the Olympic aspiration. We wanted a place for all these dreams. Focused on the idea of playing hockey outdoors, we wanted something more than a sustainable construction, but a place with no oppositions, a soft place. So this is a building with no façade, no vertical boundaries. We wanted content with no container. The content was able to take the strength of the nearby Oroel Mount and the Pyrenees peaks, and met directly the ground without any sort of façade.
A thin membrane is, at the same time, structure, façade, roof and technical systems. It contains the entire air conditioning system —included into the main structure to avoid the air conditioning ducts that typically are all around the ice arenas interiors—, and the lighting, sound and security systems. The importance of the membrane is revealed in the interior, where it organizes successfully all the functions and circulations in
the pavilion. In fact, the glass membrane is the only constructive detail of the building. Under that delicate efficient shell there is only concrete, brick and ice, with no constructive details.
A thin membrane is, at the same time, structure, façade, roof and technical systems. It contains the entire air conditioning system —included into the main structure to avoid the air conditioning ducts that typically are all around the ice arenas interiors—, and the lighting, sound and security systems. The importance of the membrane is revealed in the interior, where it organizes successfully all the functions and circulations in
the pavilion. In fact, the glass membrane is the only constructive detail of the building. Under that delicate efficient shell there is only concrete, brick and ice, with no constructive details.The membrane is perceived as a soft crystal of ice, and it must be crossed in order to accede —like in a natural experience, like a physical interaction with the landscape itself. This experience not only means that it is possible to see the landscape; it involves perceiving the physical substances on it: natural light, sun, water, or snow, because when it is raining the user is under the rain, or under the snow if it is snowing. In the winter, the sun comes into the building crossing layers of snow. Sometimes the sun enters through the glass dome, drawing on the floor shadows of the snow that has accumulated on top of the building. The perception of the landscape is really intense.
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Firefighters House
The building is the result of an international ideas competition and houses the central Fire Department of Bilbao, serving a European urban area of over one million people. Like traditional European fire stations, it establishes its civic presence through a large urban square, opening itself to the city.
The project emerges from the character of its environment. The rainy atmosphere seems to settle over the site, where the ground, the surrounding hills, the city below, the distant mountains across the river, and even the humid air merge into an almost continuous whole. Glass and crumpled aluminum extend this condition, becoming a material expression of that atmosphere while also recalling the industrial heritage of Bilbao and the Basque Country—those 19th-century building-machines and processing structures that transformed the region and shaped its identity.
Conceived as an efficient operational system, the building supports the work of first responders through a precise overlap of functions—rest, preparation, and action. A capillary network of fire poles and vertical connections ensures immediate response and continuous readiness.
Inside, the Firemen’s House opens toward the valley. From within, the dense urban fabric appears compressed along the narrow riverbanks, while the surrounding green landscape, with its steep and rain-soaked slopes, encloses the city and presses it toward the estuary.
The building deliberately avoids conventional finishing details. Rather than applying a superficial decorative layer, it preserves the construction process itself. The physical labor of those who built it remains present and tangible. Although fully operational, the building still carries the imprint of that manual effort—an essential part of its character.
