2019 - 2023
01.
NION
P. 04 - 09
02.
BELSENPARK
P. 10 - 13
03.
CASTELLANA 66 & FINSA
P. 14 - 15
04.
BOXES
P. 16 - 23
05.
CORELLIA
P. 24 - 33
EL BOSC 06.
P. 34 - 39
Size: 45,000 m2
Type: Office tower Frankfurt, Germany.
UNStudio
December 2021 - June 2023
Competition First Prize Schematic Design - Design Development
Located in Europaviertel West, along the EuropaAllee, NION is an answer to a city policy and client ambition for greener and more sustainable highrises in Frankfurt. Located in a plot with very tight urban regulations and height limits, it answers to them by splitting the volume in a continuous line along its edges and using the “cut-out” gesture as a green spine, which creates a gap in the tower and makes the volume appear more vertical and slender. The green spine also provides high quality outdoor spaces in every floor of the tower, that are conected in a continuous route within the building.
During the competition phase I was involved in the design development, tasks including: concept development, massing tests, BGF and MFG area calculations, structure and grid coordination with consultants, facade strategy, development and coordination with consultants, among others. In Following SD and DD stages I was in charge of the design development of the facade, coordinating both internally and externally all the way to 1:5 scale.
The workflow used for this project was an Open BIM workflow, which consisted on the coordination using IFC formats to coordinate and run clash detections with other disciplines.
Developed during the competition phase, the sequence shows the approach to urban restrictions and to the use of green in continuous, localized, parts of the building. It also introduces the central element in the public life of the building and the beginning of the route, the atrium.
The green corners are horizontal bands that appear in the parts where the tower is cut-out, and they represent an obvious break in the verticuality of the office envelope.
These cut-out spaces also represent outdoor areas in the tower, varying between terraces, balconies and loggias. Because the green spine acts as a continuous element, it means that every floor will have easily accesible outdoor spaces and greenery
Fassadenelemente und Ðnsolen sind blitzstromtragfähig und leitfähig miteinander zu verbinden.Únschluss des Blitzschutzpotentialausgleich an der Konsole
The office facade aims to enhance the verticality of the tower with the use of vertical fins. These fins also vary in size and shape depending on the orientation, working as both shading devices and also providing a surface where photovoltaic cells are mounted. Moreover, they contain an operable hatch that provices fresh air supply to every space in the building every 2.70 meters.
NION follows a very advanced modular system that governs all parts of the building: From structure, mechanical systems, and facade, to office layouts, desks, and audio outlets. This system, developed by Digitales Bauen, Consists of a basic module of 1.35 m that can be subdivided in 15 cm increments. This helps reduce significantly the complexity of the building, reducing costs by about 20%.
The main modelling tool for the project is Revit 2022, the CDE used is BiG (Building Information Grid) and BIMcollab is used for exchange and issue management. A fundamental part of the BIM process was to aim for the highest prefabrication rate possible, meaning a type-based model using modular elements was favoured in order to reduce complexity.
Size: 45,000 m2
Type: Mixed use tower Dusseldorf, Germany.
UNStudio
January - April 2022.
Competition First Prize Schematic Design
The site is located at the intersection between old and new, between living and working, between Seestern and Belsenpark - between fast and slow. The plot is an urban hinge, where two neighborhoods and many different uses are interlinked.
The proposal consisted of three mixed use buildings that create passage for pedestrian and cyclists, connecting the courtyard to the sorrounding neighborhood. The courtyard, acts as the central element of the proposal, fostering a sense of community.
The ground floor consists mostly of public uses, aimed to supply much needed public equipment to the neighborhood. The two small building blocks contain the affordable housing units, while the podium of the tower provides around 18,000 m2 of office spaces. Finally, the tower, with its alternating balconies and loggias, provides expansive views of the city and creates and embodies the identity of the Belsenpark development.
Massing sequence diagrams
The building is in the intersection between two neighborhoods, its uses refer to each of them. height levels and floor area relate to those of the sorrounding buildings. The bloks are positioned in the perimeter of the site, in order to create ain interior courtyard that is protected from the noise of the highway.
A core part of this project was our proposal for the sorrounding landscape. With our landscape advisors, OKRA, we developed a concept that integrates the architecture with its environment. For this we took into consideration the existing green corridors within the city that pass through our site, the local green typologies and biodiversity, rainwater collection and management and accesibility and circulation to and within our site. All of these systems coincide in the inner courtyard.
Office: Modelical
Type: Existing conditions model
Location: Madrid, Spain.
June - August, 2020
For this project we had to develop the model of the existing conditions of a building in Castellana, one of the main streets in Madrid, set for renovations.
We started with on-site work to scan and obtain point clouds of the existing interiors and exteriors of the building. Later, we had to develop the core and shell model from the mentioned point clouds, and also from 360 images taken during the same site visits. The Revit model consisted of the main structure of the building, along with the entire envelope and the main service areas.
During more than a month I was the main person doing the modeling of the facade and the service cores, this taught me a lot about Revit modeling, how real buildings are constructed and how they adapt and change over their lifetime. It also showed me a great deal about attention to details and precision in architecture and construction.
Finally, I believe this project was very instructive for me because I was able to see the entire process of it, from getting familiar with the building in its physicality, to modeling different parts of it with as much accuracy and detail as possible.
Office: Modelical
Type: BIM Advisory
Location: Madrid, Spain.
September - November, 2020
During this advisory project I was in charge of developing the Revit families for the different applications of Gradpanel panel facades that Finsa, the manufacturer, had to offer to its customers. This part of the Advisory project consisted of modeling over 20 Revit families, one for each application (sliding, lift, projecting, fixed, pivoting) and one for each lattice model (CL W 35, CL W 50, CL W 80, PW 140).
The main challenge was developing the parametric families, which consisted of a complex set of nested families alongside with formulas and other parameters that would allow interactivity within the use of the family: For example, having a Type Parameter that would allow each instance in a model to pivot between 0 and 180 degrees, as shown in the pictures attached. Another challenge that I faced was economizing the weight of the families in order to make them user friendly: Say, a regular user wouldn’t want to import a family over 1,000 kb into their Revit models.
Overall, this project taught me a lot about the complexity that is embedded in every single architectural element, something that needs to be translated as accurately as possible when working with detailed models, such as the ones inteded for these families.
Finsa Gradpanel Catalogue
High-detail pivoting family
Size: L
Type: Hybrid Building Valencia, Spain.
Undergraduate Thesis Project
Individual Academic Work Madrid, 2021.
Faced with the dilemma of preservation or urbanization, Boxes proposes an alternative way of dealing with protected industrial patrimony. It creates a perimeter and finds its own justification for urbanization in the same act of preserving: The building, and the life happening in it, become the reason to maintain what is old intact. At the same time, what is being protected serves as the symbolic center for what is new.
The saturated perimeter around the patrimony is developed as a hybrid building that works in a continuous route along which boxes are articulated. The route serves as the organizing principle, but as an ambiguous element itself, there are no clearly defined boundaries within urban life in the building. Without recurring to complex forms, Boxes aims to find richness in the use of simple elements that when colliding create new and unexpected experiences.
Site Analysis
“What is dumb about the box?
Well, it’s actually we, when confronting it, that are able to be dumb. We know what it is. We don’t have to think about it” (Woods, 2008).
Territorial Analysis
PROTECTED LAND
Urban growth of Valencia has absorbed and integrated La Patacona into the fabric of the city. Located at the Northern edge, Patacona has looked for ways to embrace the urban condition, but the road is full of challenges. Sorrounded by protected orchards to the North and West, and by the Mediterranean Sea to the East, Patacona must head South towards its urban destiny.
In the absence of strong contextual anchors, the building pushed to develop itself around the only existing reference: the bodegas. The answer to the context, at least initially, was one proper to the architecture of Bigness.
The result is a perimetral hybrid around the existing bodegas. A building that serves the dual function of preservation and urbanization. It urbanizes by protecting.
BOXES proposes a large building that commits Patacona on a metropolitan scale, embraces its urban condition and serves as an anchor for future development of the area . At the same time, an intervention that provides the functions that the area requires for a steady urban growth. A strong element that becomes a symbol of urbanization.
A building that becomes an icon of urbanization as long as its generative principles are simple and clear. An architecture of example rather than an architecture of contrast towards its context.
To establish a framework for the preservation of the industrial patrimony, while at the same time using it as a justification for a new itnervention.
To protect the existing by saturating the perimeter around it.
The Continuous Loop is a circulatory and programmatic element that creates a fluid route around the internal perimeter of the building. It becomes the “alchemist”, not only it organizes and articulates programs, but it also blurs their boundaries. It organizes the interdependance of activities by expansion and contraction along its route, at the same time becoming indeterminate itself.
L
First
Second
Fourth
The stacked section goes from hotel lobby, to bar, to terrace, to cinema, to offices. The constant flow towards the internal facade is a by-product of the loop. Here, it interacts with something as banal as a popcorn cue for the cinema aficionados.
The library is housed within a three storey volume, starting in the second floor, whichcantilevers out of the main structure of the building. The central space is an atrium filled with antural lighting with two intersectning platforms that activate the section of the box. The book shelves are arranged in the perimeter of the volume, except in the southern facade, which is left completely transparent with views of the bodega in a four storey height atrium.
The envelope of the library showcase the different envelopes of the building: Its northern, east and west facades, which are filled with bookshelves are covered with wire mesh to protect them, while the southern facade, facing the bodegas and hiding the atrium, is covered with full height transparent glass.
The core activities of the building take place in boxes which vary in dimension, qualities and structure according to their location in the building and their programmatic requirements.
Inhabiting this building becomes a life between boxes, where the spaces in-between are where collisions and complexity are found, creating endless variability and opening spaces for the unexpected to happen.
Size: XL
Type: Masterplan
Madrid, Spain.
Individual Academic Work
Madrid, 2020.
The space industry has experienced fast growth over the past decade. The privatization of many spatial activities and the growth of a new “Newspace” sector have diminished the gap between upstream activities and their commercial applications. With a global growth of 6.7% annually and an estimated 2.7 trillions of euros to be added over the next three decades, space is open for business.
Nevertheless, the industry faces many challenges, one of them being a poor communication with the general public, this produces barriers in terms of public opinion and access to financial resources. Two of the reasons that maintain the industry disconnected are: Physical, given that the big spaces it uses are logically outside of urban centers, and technical barriers.
Corellia aims to change this situation by using Castellana Norte, an area in the northern part of Madrid, as a new mixed development center that has the space industry as its thematic core, promoting its activities and closing the gap of the spatial sector with the general public, the finance sector, and the service industry.
Hypothesis: Proxy uses
The proxies are prototypical uses of the space industry that will showcase the different activities and certain parts of the space sector in an urban setting. The project becomes a model for introducing activities that are naturally kept outside of cities, and therefore, far away from most of the population, by extracting the key elements and adapting them to the spaces and characteristics of the city.
Programmatic Diagram
Highrise offices
Low density housing
ESA Offices + museum (Government)
Mars Yard
Space Labs (Upstream)
Space Incubator (Newspace)
Satellites Center (Downstream)
Padawanium (Education)
The Tissue of the second sector is developed as a multifunctional park, in which the space facilities are set free. The stripes create three thematic areas, clearly distinguishable by different approaches to vegetation and landscape quality.
Taking inspiration from the martial landscapes of Canarias, grasslands typical from the center of Spain, or a mediterranean forest; the symbolic center of the proposal
mixes a broad range of social uses and equipment with the unusual activities proper of the space sector.
Landscapes that once were the subject of science fiction are brought to life and introduced to our everyday spaces, creating endless possibilities for the unexpected to happen.
The highrise cells are mixed development buildings located in the first sector, their height and materiality are framed as a digestion of the dominant typologies in the Velarde district with elements that link them to the organs of the proposal.
The lower levels of the highrises form a new commercial hub that links the cells to the tissue of the entire proposal, the public-private transition is then experienced in the height of the building, only broken by the parasitic equipment, which are public programmes embedded in section, creating high contrast with the regular brickwork language.
The materials highlight a game of chaos and order, metallic surfaces from another planet latch onto very regular buildings, breaking their continuity, but introducing variation and disrupting the usual understanding of the peripheral residential building in Madrid.
Exterior skin made of glass reinforced concrete panels (GRC) with rigid insulation embedded.
The first level of the building contains the main circulaton passages and the installations.
Seven vertical cores connect the first circulation level with the laboratories in the ground floor.
Vierendeel trusses support the passages and installations of the building. Steel beams provide additional support for the envelope.
The ground floor houses the laboratories, along with the social and public areas of the building.
The entire building sits on a bed of concrete.
Envelope structure made of steel space frame.and Clarke’s dream-
come to life. The laboratories for the future of space exploration become an attraction for students, aficionados, scientists, and everyone else, to come and dream together.
The landmark building is embedded 15 meters deep into the ground, the entry level is from above the laboratories and installations, but just under the 80-meter-high iconic skin that introduces natural light into the common areas of the massive facilities. Installations run free under the elevated passages, hung from vierendeel trusses. Laboratories are placed in a 12 meter high space, only interrupted by diagonal beams that brace the space frame above. A true experiment itself, the upstream facility is conceived as a radical reconceptualization of the rigid spaces of the industry, and it marks the beginning of a new era for the space sector, one that is closer to the public.
Size: M
Type: Residential and Education Barcelona, Spain.
Third Year Design Studio
Individual Academic Work Segovia, 2019.
Unaccompanied Minors are a growing concern in Europe. These children are a very vulnerable population, born to difficult situations, they face a huge struggle when leaving their home countries to seek better lives. Spain has lately become a major hub for the inmigration of this population, and Catalonia is one of the top destinations, receiving over 20% of them. This exercises a lot of pressure, and the Comunity struggles to provide the necessary housing options and much needed care that these children need. The existing framework of “Reception - Integration - Independization” has failed because of a lack of proper facilities to care in the two initial phases. There are not enough housing options and no viable training opportunities.
This project, located in Trinitat Vella, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Barcelona, aims to provide a viable housing option that is combined with realistic training and education opportunities at various levels. At the same time it seeks to create a new space for integration and interaction with the local community, in which lasting bonds can be established and safe haven can be found.
El Bosc embraces the geometry of the unfinished city and provides the final element of professional training needed in the community. This relegated space in-between the fabric of Trinitat Vella and the railway lines gains a new dimension with an open, low-standing building, sorrounded by greenery.
Provided with a public program and equipment to go with it, a new center for the community in which MENA can start the process of integration to society in a fresh and calm environment.
Residential typologies are arranged on the upper slab, creating passages in between that become places of constant activity and social life. A constant play of nature and material, light and shadow and visuals and obstruction create ever changing atmospheres, just like a forest.
Three initial typologies were designed provided with free interiors that can be easily modified. Rooms are located in the perimeter, so that the living space becomes the central element of the residence, with wide openings and skylights pointed south, private life takes place in contact with the sorroundings.
The main plaza
The entrance of the building consists of a double height space that pours out onto the exterior, creating a public plaza in which both the community and the MENA can play, share and enjoy. The permeability of the building becomes absolute, providing clear views of the sorrounding greenscape.
The residences are organized along a main axis that punctures the entire upper floor, passing through the common room and ending with the library. Passages, holes and roof openings activate the section of the building, creating a continuous dynamic space. These are spaces for enjoying and sharing life in community.
The residences
The elevation highlights the permeability of the building and its blurred limits. Merging with the green landscape at points, these unclear boundaries provide a layer of ambiguity to the space.
The section demonstrates the internal workings of the building. An extensive slab separates training modules and residential life, but clear punctures create a permanent dialogue between the two programs, merging private life with community living.
Clear, smooth, concrete creates simplistic internal spaces, to which a layer of playfulness is added with colors, materials and openings. The walls, with the pass of time have become an open canvas for painting, decorating, and creating a real home.
Slab openings introduce light to the lower level, which at the same time is activated using plinths to create height variations in the program. The building becomes a metaphor of its sorrounding landscape: columns become trees organizing the space, the plinth becomes the topography providing endless dynamism and the passages become the winding, indeterminate and polyfunctional paths of a park.
Laurierstraat 22-3, 1016PM. Amsterdam, Netherlands
+34617916086
imejiazubillaga@gmail.com
IGNACIO ANDRES MEJIA ZUBILLAGA