ESCALERA URBANA, hostel Barcelona, Spain, competition 2011
As a never-ending path of a backpacker, the ESCALERA URBANA© rises from the city to the clouds, even further than the lands horizon.
Designed for housing Barcelona’s “observation”, ESCALERA URBANA links the city’s mixed typology into its skies.
The building program is divided into two special program partitions, of equivalent surface amount.
The roof and the body.
The roof as an exterior and semi exterior public terrace, and the corpus conceived of interior common and residential hotel units.
The revolving building creates an extended public terrace from entrance up to the top roof level, open to all hostel visitors, from each floor. The ramp and all hostel rooms are wheel chair accessible, the revolving ramp floor mounts with a less than 12% slope.
ESCALERA URBANA serves as a continuous space of encounter, contemplation, as an instant panoramic colonnade.
The ground Hostel plaza is defined into tree programmatical bands, 1/entrance- as a public cafe, 2/hostel building- emerging from a water basin, 3/court- a calm pool park, garden with shading trees alleys.
sustainibility
As spiral helix structure, the building shape itself, provides cooling to the interior, during hot summer days, capturing the wind breeze, and accumulates sun energy for extended heating periods.
For the necessary air transmission the proposed building effectively takes advantage of the natural air flow.
structure
The entire ESCALERA URBANA is a steel frame body composite with concrete block walls, stabilized by its three vertical pylon structures, two elevator and one spiral staircase tower.
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