JORBA LABORATORIES
VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY THE MODERN FACTORY FACTORY AS AN ARCHITECT’S DOMAIN
MIGUEL FISAC, MADRID, 1965
Miguel Fisac (1913–2006) capitalized on the ability of architecture to communicate the progressive zeitgeist in his experiments with material and structure, which harnessed the optimism of Modernism, and responded in his design to the rise of corporate culture. Based in Madrid, he was a prominent Spanish architect in the second half of the twentieth century. His approach and formal interests were similar to Antonio Gaudí (1852–1926), in that Fisac experimented in material and structure and embraced an organic Modernist style. He worked at every scale, from furniture to urban planning. The latter resulted in the Urban Molecule, a system of organizing cities. Moving beyond the rigid concrete grid of the early Modernist factories, Fisac’s work was formally playful yet unabashed in its structural rigor. He imbued materials such as brick and concrete with a new tactility. Fisac molded, stacked, structured, and curved brick, a local material, and played freely with concrete — hollowing, reinforcing, and sculpting this initially liquid substance into a voluptuous solid. He exploited these material properties to create new roof systems as well as craftsmen-like wall panels and window details. For Madrid’s IBM headquarters (1966), Fisac created vertical brise-soleil from curved concrete — as they wrapped the building they resembled butterfly wings opening and closing. In later works Fisac experimented with concrete panels in a softened flexible polyethylene lamina, which gave them the effect of geometrically decorated, pillow-like tiles. The son of a chemist, Fisac was familiar with the program and spatial needs of pharmaceutical companies and had designed laboratories for the companies Alter (1960) and Made (1963), both in Madrid. For Alter he introduced a ribbed roof structure that turns a seemingly flat roof into a variegated volume, allowing light to penetrate between the beams. This solution went beyond utility and incorporated the fifth facade — the roof — as the company’s new identity. For Jorba Laboratories, located along the main highway to the Madrid airport, he exploited the simplicity of structural concrete, forming a unique sculptural stacked and rotated volume. Fisac’s design approach to Jorba’s sloped and compressed urban site included a six-story
tower for visibility from the road. Within it he stacked the labs on the lower floors and administrative and research offices above, placing the more spacious workshops in an elongated three-story rectangular adjacent building. This lower building slid into the tower’s first floor, maintaining the stepped ground plane. The configuration was similar to Fisac’s 1960 Center for Hydrographic Studies, also in Madrid, which had a larger multistoried volume with offices that abuts a lower laboratory workshop building. The form and structure of Jorba’s tower was unique. Like a spinning top or “pagoda,” as it was fondly nicknamed, the design displayed a rare dynamism for a static form. This unusual achievement was the result of a series of 16-meter-square floor slabs stacked and rotated 45 degrees off the previous, or upper, slab — with a floor sandwiched between each one. Built from top to bottom, these units were connected by hyperbolic paraboloids that were hung from the underside of the floor. Fisac described that, “It began to give me surfaces that we love in geometry: hyperbolic paraboloids that have the advantage of not resolving to curved molds, [so that we could] instead use straight planks that twist slowly. I arranged the hyperbolic paraboloid pieces to make them fit the geometry, and then what was left was quite eye-catching.”99 At the point of load resistance, the stacking forms made an octagon, which was reinforced so that the cantilever could be reduced in weight in order to project out from the core. The central stairs were hung from the roof slab and then the elevator was installed within a steel structure with all four sides in glass, allowing views into the floors. The bands of windows also fluctuated, either projecting beyond the core or flush with it, creating variety for the workers and visual interest on the exterior. On the roof he placed a more decorative element, using vertical triangular slabs arranged in a crowned pinnacle onto which the company sign was mounted. The tower was not the only place in which Fisac explored the plasticity of concrete. The roof of the lower volume continued the development of his thin, hollow, prestressed tubular beams. Continuing the research previously executed in the concrete work of his Hydrographic Institute — where staggered triangulated concrete slabs created openings — Fisac reinterpreted the standard ribbed concrete roof systems by using hollowed tubes with the assistance of
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VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY THE MODERN FACTORY FACTORY AS AN ARCHITECT’S DOMAIN
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consulting engineer Vicente Piero. Fisac realized that “the pieces that I have obtained using this architectonic-static means have resulted in sections with forms very [much] like the bones of vertebrates. It’s not that I wanted to make them like bones, it’s just that they turned out that way. That makes you think that, naturally, some parallel exists. You could interpret it as proof that this is the right path, [as] it corresponds to concepts, which we see in Nature. My collaborators, in many cases, have called these pieces bones, in a pejorative sense, because setting up their production entails numerous difficulties.”100 The distance between the exterior walls was 11 meters, which he realized he could span
Y Miquel Fisac, tower of Jorba Laboratories, Madrid, Spain, 1965
X Jorba Laboratories under construction