Municipal School of Music and Performing Arts
The project is located in a strategic place between the ring roads, the Contramurada and the outer ring of the Citadel. The building takes the shape of the site, occupying it in its entirety, but connecting the two small squares through a passage on the ground floor: the one located next to Avenida Capitá Negret and the esplanade that finishes off Plaza de La Pau where it meets the School. The former is an unobstructed space where the dividing walls are treated with vertical vegetation. At the heart of this square is a large Spanish plane tree which provides shade for a circular bench. The second square is a clear and slightly sloping space that meets the building through a linear grandstand and is conceived as an ideal stage for open-air musical performances and as a daily resting place for the students. The squares and the passageway are configured as a continuous space, without steps, with gentle slopes of stone paving that resolve the transition naturally.
The building expresses itself with a massive architecture, according to the compositional model established by the Conjunt Historic ordinance. However, it is empty and transparent on the ground floor towards the Plaça de la Pau. This creates a mutual visual continuity between the exterior public space and the interior public corridor that envelops the auditorium hall.
This generous, gently sloping circulation space is important in the project because it connects the levels of the opposite façades on Carrer Capità Negrete and Carrer Josepa Rossinyol and that of the main and secondary access to the building, so that the building has a single, continuous, accessible ground floor, without steps, which accommodates its different levels to those established by the regulations for both streets.
The project strictly respects the Estudi de Detall, both in its maximum volume and in its cornice heights and the free heights of its floors.
The construction of the building is approached in terms of sustainability, simplicity and durability of materials. It is a massive construction, mostly made up of load-bearing walls of marés stone, between 30 and 45 cm thick. On the ground floor, where greater transparency between interior and exterior spaces is required, the marés walls rest on short-span concrete porticoes. In general, the horizontal structures are made of conventional concrete slabs, with a pre-stressed slab in the auditorium ceiling slab. The horizontal roof structures are constructed with plywood beams and timber sandwich slabs, also in CLT. The interiors are completed with a very limited variety of materials and a few criteria that can be extended to the whole building. The marés is visible up to the lintels of the doors, above which there are friezes and acoustic cladding in pine wood. The exterior joinery, also in wood, is double, with an intermediate solar blind and a natural ventilation system between the two. The flooring will alternate between wooden surfaces in the rehearsal rooms and stone in the corridors and common areas. All partition walls will be dry-mounted, reusable, with natural thermal and acoustic insulation. The sloping roofs will be of ceramic tiles on battens.
