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Architecture | Small Architecture

Can Zariquiey Health Centre Foyer


MIAS Architects



Short description

Undoubtedly, designing a space without a clear function or use is one of the most challenging tasks. It was about creating a welcoming space, a place for the families of the patients, a meeting point between families and the centre’s professionals. Therefore, it had to be a friendly, familiar space—very domestic in terms of dimension—with a focus on material, colour, and light, both natural and artificial. Above all, it needed to seamlessly connect with the existing building and spaces. However, it also had to incorporate the unique topographical and strategic conditions of the location. It presented an opportunity to recover and give new meaning to our previous intervention.

Before our initial intervention, the old Can Zariquiey building, due to its volumetric composition, assumed the protagonism and personality of the place. The expansion we previously carried out connected the existing auxiliary buildings—all very humble constructions—with new connecting buildings, primarily rooms and workshops. This shift made the central courtyard the new focal point, around which these buildings are situated.

This new reception space project highlighted the entrance we designed in our initial intervention, whose responsibility was initially unclear. The excavated volume in the new construction was not enough to highlight this entrance, which now offered an opportunity to incorporate this new space. This was achieved by actually extending the conditions of the interior courtyard.

The interior courtyard, around which the buildings are located, had been designed with broken metal structures covered with a permeable metal fabric, intending to create a perimeter porch for the courtyard. Simultaneously, it served as a new facade, covering and protecting the existing building, the new facilities, and the new circulation spaces from the sun, while deviating from the patio's geometry at specific points to provide new opportunities.

The new reception space belongs to this inner world of the courtyard, emerging outward. In reality, it's this same interior logic that escapes to the exterior through an already constructed space. The small pavilion we built for the families is a very domestic space which is not only built adjacent to the building we had constructed, but actually emerges from it.

It is a construction with a central pillar and mixed wood and metal radial and L-shaped beams, supporting the ground in a strange balance. In reality, this new construction resembles a spider. Louise Bourgeois's spider, "Maman," accompanied the design of this space—a necessary space, as we had constructed the spiderweb inside the courtyard, but had never found its builder.

Entry details
LocationArenys de Munt, Spain
Lead designerJosep Miàs
Photography creditsAdrià Goula
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