A symbolic industrial landscape | From the shooter to the city | Culture

There is no visible thermal power plant. Although a building marks it, it is the impact of the facility – the distribution of heating water produced with renewable energy – that redraws cities.

Among the streets of Palencia, the company DH Ecoenergías It circulates water heated with forest biomass and other alternative energy sources to replace gas and diesel heating, contributing to the decarbonization of cities using national and renewable resources. It is this cycle that changes the city’s air, and it is the power plant that acts as the engine of this transformation. The building designed by the studio FRPO architecture (Fernando Rodríguez and Pablo Oriol) thus fulfills a technical function: heating the water and starting its distribution. Traditionally, technical buildings were hidden, disguised and camouflaged. FRPO decided to do pedagogy with architecture: to communicate the urgency of the energy transition. What form could this message take?

Communicating change requires attention, and yet icons of free architecture have been questioned for several decades. How to speak clearly without making noise. The architects decided on symbolization. Its form, but above all the materiality of its building and its integration into the city, had to express the desire for a gradual energy transition: the one that initiates the building and that makes the underground network possible.

So the most important thing Building symbol It’s its circular geometry. It alludes to the circularity of energy. The material is also symbolic: on a round concrete base that protects all the machines and the underground biomass silo, a façade made of polycarbonate strives for transparency, lightness, almost the disappearance of the property. Architects therefore opt for subtle communication. These new factory buildings are not building a brand, they want to erase themselves, that is, integrate. Change the idea of ​​infrastructure and factory buildings with the necessary equipment, but be aware of their presence.

With experience in building houses, train stations (San Jose Station in TolucaMexico), laboratories (Unolab in Getafe) or the master plan for the Magnificent factory which they build in Lambrate (Milan), Rodriguez and Oriol have developed a career from which, using current means and industrial materials, they have tried to question typologies with craftsmanship not through breakage but through care. They monitor the forms, control the encounters between elements, the control and effect of light and the emergence of architecture as a brand in the city. That’s what this headquarters in Palencia achieves: arriving to change a lot while making very little noise.