The search for energy efficiency presides over the work of architects attentive to the climate emergency. For many of them, planning is now an exercise in innovation, guided by the need to save resources. For example, for Manuel Sánchez-Villaneuva and Carol Beuter (Hazarquitectura), authors of the Trinitat Vella Community Life Center, inaugurated a year ago and now reopened after a few weeks of closure.
For these professionals, it is just as important to respond to the client's program –a multipurpose civic facility– as it is to do so while minimizing the carbon footprint. This is achieved in this case with three steps. First, a dry construction, with a mixed structure of metal and wood, material, the latter, also omnipresent in the building envelope, except for the concrete block panels on the ground floor, which control the insolation of the lobby. Second, a combination of wood, which lacks thermal inertia, with geothermal energy, through an underground coil that, two meters below ground level, captures outside air, moves it, renews it, and sanitizes it at 17 degrees underground. . Third, by means of two light and ventilation patios, in the center of the construction, which redistribute said air throughout the building –in itself, an air conditioning machine–, ensuring inside, without energy expenditure, minimum temperatures of 19 degrees in winter and highs of 27 in summer. These passive strategies are combined with the active ones provided by photovoltaic panels on the roof; or with the folding of the building that allows space to be gained on its side for a summer cinema.
Achieving this high level of comfort at low cost is a priority for architects, who dispense with any ornament in their work and, formally, are content with a building that is a parallelepiped with an abstract air, not very expressive, closed in on itself. Something understandable in a harsh urban environment, and on a depressed lot next to the intersection of Meridiana with the Ronda de Dalt, between humble residential blocks from the 50s and 60s.
