The award-winning research centre for the environmental sciences and palaeontology departments of the UAB Campus (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) was developed to respond to ambitious sustainability criteria.
Designed by HARQUITECTES and DATAAE, the ICTA-ICP five storey building has a 40x40m2 footprint and comprises classrooms, meeting rooms and the administration area and bar on the ground floor; offices and laboratories on the next 3 floors; vegetable patches together with the resting areas at the roof level.
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Both offices and laboratories are spaces with a lot of internal load and therefore tend to be hot. Therefore, the building has been designed to take profit from this internal situation in winter while it tends to dissipate it in summer. It has been thought as an adaptable and flexible infrastructure able to suffer changes of use, developing several simultaneous strategies that work complementarily.
A long life and low cost concrete structure with a lot of inertia has been chosen as the main structure, contributing directly to the passive comfort of the building. The quantity of concrete has been optimized distributing its mass in favour of the thermal exchange. It uses a post-stressed concrete slabs with pipes in the central area where the air circulates, in order to build a lighter structure. At the top and bottom of the slab the thermal mass is activated by geothermal energy.
The concrete structure is wrapped and protected by a low cost environmental responsive building skin. Industrial greenhouse building systems are used to automatically protect the building against the solar and to regulate natural ventilation. This way, it is possible to raise the interior temperature naturally and guarantee a base of comfort in the circulation spaces as well as in the in-between spaces.
In the middle of the building four patios, with stairs that connect the different levels at certain points, guarantee light and ventilation across the workspaces minimizing power demand due to artificial lighting. These patios, as well as the in-between spaces and the perimeter gallery, contain several plant species that allow to improve the comfort through the adjustment of the humidity gradient.
The building also takes advantage of the contact of the two basements with the terrain to pre-treat the incoming fresh air of the building through two air chambers: one generated by “PI” beams that make up the retaining walls and the other, the air chamber underneath the basement floor.
Wooden boxes. Inside this improved micro-climate there are well-insulated wooden boxes, with practicable glass openings that help to achieve the comfort conditions of the workspaces. The distribution of these boxes is different on each floor depending on the needs of each user creating generous and indeterminate interstitial spaces. These spaces link with the circulations generating more informal meeting and resting areas.
Climate and management. The building has been designed to host three types of climates associated with different intensities of use: Climate A: in-between spaces, that are exclusively conditioned/heated by passive and bioclimatic systems; Climate B: offices, that combine natural ventilation with radiant and semi-passive systems; Climate C: laboratories and classrooms that have a more hermetic and conventional functioning. Each type of climate has its own associated systems.
The behaviour of the building is monitored and controlled by a building management system that processes and manages an important set of information in order to optimize both comfort and energy consumption. The system has been programmed in favour of the maximum passive behaviour of the building and to minimize the use of non-renewable energy sources.
The building reacts and adapts constantly, opening and closing itself, activating and deactivating itself, managing to use all the natural possibilities offered by the environment; therefore the comfort perception is much more real, less artificial than usual.
Materials. A selection of material mineral providing an adequate amount of thermal inertia together with a long service life has been chosen for the structure.
Recycled materials and dry constructive systems with a very low environmental impact have been, instead, considered for the secondary partitions, bearing in mind reversibility and reusability at the end of their life cycle.
Rainwater and greywater systems have been incorporated into the scheme to drastically reduce building water demand.
+ HARQUITECTES + DATAAE
Source: HARQUITECTES