Factoría Cultural – A Sustainable Design Office in Spain

FCMM, or Factoría Cultural in Matadero Madrid, is an upgrade of a medium-sized hall in Matadero Madrid to host an incubator of cultural industries.

Idealized and developed by the Office for Strategic Spaces, this creative office borns in an Era where European crisis is one of the most discussed topics. The space is made of cheap and easy to install materials where the main goal was to create distinct working areas and adapted to different needs.

Three volumes born near the entrance, folding and compressing the circulations around it. We can find from compact to expansive and from busy to silent environments helping creating different working spaces.

To house the needed 120 work spaces in a 399 sq. m. floor area (that needed to be further reduced to 340 sq. m. in order to maintain a public pass-through) was impossible, unless the architects found more space using the height of the hall. This created additional problems since there was not enough money to achieve the construction of a second floor by traditional means.

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The OSS have resorted to simple building systems like the cheapest local pine lumber and multi-wall polycarbonate which allowed the walls to be finished in just one day.

They achieved 85 more sq. m. which allowed the creation of two different levels. Construction-wise, the most economic pinewood from local, sustainable forests was used. Nearly 8,80 tons of CO2 are captured in its structure.A little more effort at the time of calculation and the ability to explain its spatial qualities (the fact that the space is maintained open and high-ceilinged, and circulations clear) allowed us to argue the possibility of keeping the wood untreated with fire-retardant chemicals, which makes the environment free of noxious chemicals.