In 2011, Grupo Angelini, one of the largest Chilean concerns, decided to create an Innovation Center in the capital of the country, Santiago, where entrepreneurs, researchers and students would work together: such an interdisciplinary collaboration should improve the process of generating ideas and their practical implementation. The Catholic University of Chile has allocated a site for the construction of this center on the territory of its San Joaquin campus.
The architects are sure that such a "creative" center requires a variety of spaces for direct interaction between people. In the traditional structure of an office building, such a place can only be the lobby of the first floor: after all, employees make their way from the street to the desktop in a closed elevator car that delivers a person exactly to the level he needs, so the likelihood of an accidental meeting with a colleague is minimized.
To change this situation, instead of the traditional space-planning solution with an opaque core and a hinged glazed perimeter, the Innovation Center uses a high atrium around which a massive but permeable ring of offices, meeting rooms and conference rooms is formed. This solution not only meets the functional requirements, but also increases the overall "performance" of the building.
Since the new center is called "innovative", the client wanted the building to keep up with his name. However, according to the architects, a superficial search for the "modern" in Santiago led to the fact that the city was overgrown with glass towers, inside of which, due to the hot subtropical climate, a greenhouse effect is created, and therefore a huge amount of electricity is consumed for air conditioning.
To avoid unwanted overheating and improve energy efficiency, the Innovation Center building is built as an inward-facing opaque massive shell with recessed window openings. As a result, electricity consumption decreased by about 267% and amounted to 45 kW / m2 (for comparison, a tower glazed around the perimeter consumes 120 kW / m2 per year). In addition, due to the chosen solution of the facades, the intensity of the incoming sun rays is muted: with the standard "glass" scheme, this effect is achieved with the help of shutters, blinds and curtains, which lead the desired transparency more into the realm of rhetoric than practice.
The biggest threat to a building that has been labeled as innovative is obsolescence, both stylistic and functional. Therefore, the rejection of the transparent facade was dictated not only by the danger of low thermal performance, but also by the search for a visual solution that could withstand the test of time.
Alejandro Aravena offers his own recipe for fighting aging - to design a building not as architecture, but as infrastructure. And thanks to the strict geometry and strong monolithic shape, the building can not only stand in one line with time, but also be outside it.
