Josep Ferrando + Estrella Ordóñez + Pedro Garcia Health Center. Castelló d’Empúries

Fuente: Europaconcorsi, Josep Ferrando
Fotografía: Adrià Goula

The Project for a health care centre in Castelló d’Empúries allows us to use the landscape as an element that organises the brief.

We wanted to reconsider the brief as we thought that the typical long waiting rooms are an uncomfortable space for the ill. These waiting rooms are often connected directly to the exterior and pedestrians can look in. We thought to avoid the corridor-type waiting room and to scale down the waiting rooms to a more domestic scale.

This texture is engraved onto the façade as though time had stood still. As we enter the seasons seem to appear again –as the wind rustles the reeds in the patios you are in the waiting area, connected once again to the landscape. There is also a nearby historical landscape, defined by the cathedral, which is strategically located at the highest point of the terrain to avoid the floods. The health centre is raised at the entry point offering the user a sensation of shelter and entering into a dialogue with the cathedral. The entrance is a void almost like a great eye.

According to Alison Smithson, the idea of a “map building” is a growth model similar to nature.