Factoria Cultural Matadero Madrid | Office for Strategic Spaces (OSS)

"El trabajo es low tech y, sin embargo, de alto ingenio. (...) La intervención se beneficia de la magnífica escala y hechuras del antiguo matadero del barrio de Legazpi, pero no busca potenciar la estética povera sino, al contrario, trabajar con pocos medios para poder existir".

"The work is low tech, but highly ingenious. (...) The intervention benefits from the magnificent scale and structure of the old slaughterhouse in the Legazpi neighborhood, but it does not seek to enhance the povera aesthetic but, on the contrary, work with few means to be able to exist".

_ Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, architecture critic of EL PAÍS

Brief description:

Factoría Cultural is the adaptation of a medium-sized hall in Matadero Madrid to house an incubator of creative industries. The client’s money was very short but ambitions very high: what processes shape the modern workplace? Is space an agent for creativity? Could we program change as a tool for sustainability? The project is perhaps typical of crisis-stricken Europe, and particularly Spain, where the architect has to find a way out of the opposing tensions of having no money and big needs. We used very few, cheap, and easy to install materials, and we tried to achieve with them as many different and distinct work areas as possible, adapted to different needs.

Three volumes near the entrance organize the space, folding and compressing the circulations around it. This creates a gradient, from compact to expansive, from busy to silent, that helps achieve variety in work spaces. In a little less than one month we built a reversible, vacuum-packed, 105 eur/m2 work, adaptable to the multitude of situations the client asked for.  

Project description:

To house the needed 120 work spaces in a 399 sq. m. floor area (that needed to be further reduced  to 340 sq. m. in order to maintain a public pass-through) was impossible, unless we found more space using the height of the hall. This created additional problems since there was not enough money to achieve the construction of a second floor by traditional means. We decided to use very simple building systems: the cheapest local pine lumber, all in the same standard size, which simplified the supply and construction of the structure, and multi-wall polycarbonate, very lightweight and in large sheets, which allowed for the walls to be finished in just one day. We we able to achieve 85 more sq.m., and crucially to split functions in two levels, which allows for more flexibility in use that the client is now making very good use of.

 We were able to build three small volumes, or architectural objects, that changed and modified the quality of the available space, naturally producing the diverse working areas we thought necessary. These three distinct volumes near the entrance help organize the program, folding and compressing the circulations around it, making them as exact and compact as possible. This organization not only saves space by reducing circulation areas, but it creates a gradient, from compact to expansive, from busy to silent, that helps achieve the needed variety in work environments. 

The scarcity of means allowed us to research one spatial intuition: creative work, and workers, thrive in environments that seem not completely designed, not completely finished, spaces that seem to be caught in the middle of a process, surprised by a change in conditions. It also allowed for small experiments in architecture, with demonstrative qualities. Among them: the light fixtures are made up of the cut outs made to the vertical structural wood elements between the floor and the handrail; a ridiculously simple sound absorbing system corrects the sound conditions that would otherwise rely on heavy, traditional, and unaffordable wall construction.

Sustainability aspects of the project:

Our main worry was to make the work possible, and, to achieve that, we needed to make it financially responsible and socially sustainable. At 105 euros/sq.m. we are very happy to have helped with its basic architectural sustainability: to achieve a high social and usage impact for the money invested in it in a crisis-stricken Spain. 

Factoría Cultural is a reversible architecture work which enhances, with no negative impact, the visual and technical virtues of the existing Matadero Madrid, an industrial architectural heritage site. It is a space that requires minimal maintenance and, in the event Factoría's activity ceases, it can be removed without waste. 

The predominant materials are polycarbonate and wood.

Polycarbonate degradation is very slow: outdoors it achieves a usage period of about 20 years. It is very stable compared with other plastics or foams for everyday use. Indoors, where it is protected from extreme heat and UV, as it is used in Factoría Cultural, its degradation is even lower. The reason for using polycarbonate, other than for its safety, was its very competitive price: it was mounted in one day and a half, thanks to its low weight. And it was a material suited to allow the light through.

 The wood we used is pine from certified Spanish sustainable forest. It is also the most economical in the Spanish market. The volume of the wood we used corresponds to a carbon capture of 8.80 tons. 

 A little more effort at the time of calculation and the ability to explain its spatial qualities (the fact that the space is maintained open and high-ceilinged, and circulations clear) allowed us to argue the possibility of keeping the wood untreated with fire-retardant chemicals, which makes the environment free of toxic chemicals. 

 Much of the furniture was built according to a design by the architect, custom built with untreated pinewood. Some of the chairs have been commissioned to a Madrid based workshop, Taller Turpentine, which restores discarded furniture. For lighting, ceiling lamps were custom built from the waste wood of the main structure, to which LED strips were attached. The design of the lamps allows for changing star-shaped forms that are supported without the need to drill the exisitng columns.