T6 (Torre Seis) | Diez + Muller Arquitectos

ARCHITECTURAL PROFILE

The Torre Seis building intends to insert itself in the city as an atypical piece of Quito’s contemporary office design. The proposal seeks an expression in which volume plasticity and materiality predominate. Torre Seis is a building with a significant ecological awareness, as it seeks to connect street and city through public and semi-public spaces that reinforce its urbanity.

The building is nonconforming in the sense that it does not try to permeate, like most office buildings, through large panes of glass. Instead, it is wrapped in a solid skin of exposed concrete that breaks depending on the different visual foci of the buildings urban orientation towards the city. This skin is made up of exposed concrete modules, therefore allowing an ease of clean and low-maintenance construction. When contrasting with the glass panels, the concrete envelope combines the desired plastic and sculptural conditions for its volume and also regulates internal thermal impact.

PERMEABILITY AND PUBLIC SPACE

Since the site has two fronts at an important intersection, a corner plaza has been created both for building users and public life. The design of green areas with trees and urban furniture makes this congested corner a pleasant space for pedestrian life and urban dynamics. Facing its main front, the Argentina park was of special influence for the building and its plaza. Through a triple-height outdoor covered space, you enter the main lobby where a large glass screen links the outdoor plaza with a double-height space, thus humanizing the scale of the tower at street level.

SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability was a very important aspect in the design and performance of the building. Having achieved a LEED SILVER certification, the intention of both the promoters and the architects was to exceed the conventional in terms of ecological contributions.

Torre Seis has several wooded plant surfaces that invigorate the exterior spaces of the building at different heights. Vegetation is abundant and overflows at various points of the building, making it highly visible from various points of the city. On the roof terrace, a large garden park, endemic plants, trails, and leisure spaces are present for the enjoyment of its users as they witness stunning views of the Pichincha volcano.

Given the site’s adjacency to an “Eco Vía” public transportation stop, Torre Seis encourages the use and benefit of public transport and bicycles. The building complies with the minimum number of parking spaces required by local building code, while additionally providing 30 parking spaces for bicycles and low-emission vehicles.

The project specifications propose efficiency in the performance of the building towards optimum comfort of its users in matters of air conditioning, temperature control, sunlight, and recreational areas. All windows are low-emission chamber glass with thermal and acoustic properties required by LEED certification. The outer skin is made up of low maintenance exposed concrete panels that also contribute to thermal control of the interiors by reflecting heat on sunny days. The use of concrete, as opposed to other local materials, minimizes the transport of raw materials to the construction site as well.

In its facade with the highest solar incidence, which coincidentally offers the best views, we opted for horizontal shaders that double the effectiveness of the glass used.

These and other aspects of the project contributed towards its LEED SILVER certification, as well as the project’s vision for a better ecological conservation of the city.

CITY AND ART

The promoters vision to carry out a project of not only architectural, but also of cultural contribution led them to call for an artwork contest for both the interior and exterior of the building. Consequently, two large-format pieces from Marcelo Aguirre and Juana Cordova now decorate the lobby and the covered plaza respectively. This lost tradition of bestowing buildings with art pieces has now been recovered in Torre Seis, where architecture and art converse once again, providing a cultural legacy for its users and passers-by who choose to walk our city.