New Professional School in the Catalonia Automotive sector by Caas Arquitectes

New Professional School in the Catalonia Automotive sector (CFPA) is an educational and highly technical building, focused on being a landmark building in the industry for their type and use.

The project has been designed from 2 different scales (man-industry) and with 3 distinct bars (classrooms / teaching center – vertebrate / hallway axis – area workshop / warehouse) that makes the new CFPA have a suitable configuration allowed to grow without distorting its buildable space without affecting the common.

The project is located north of Martorell, in the industrial estate of Can Amat, close to the Highway N-II. The plot has a trapezoidal shape with an approximate 15,000 m2 of area and a gentle slope downward toward the north.

His relationship with the environment is complex (industrial and noisy environment next to the highway) but its proximity to the industrial sector of the automotive make this place a very important HUB to create a Formative and Technology Center where Industry and Teaching coexist in the same building.

The Concept
College building + Building research center + Automotive trainning workshop = Automotive Technology Center

1 Scale – The project has two different scales (Human – Auto); an industrial scale related to the vehicle and its dimensions, and a human scale related to people and their size.

2 Dimension – This fact implied the emergence of two buildings radically different. The issues to solve were: How to merge these two elements to form a single building? And How to hide large volume of the workshop space to turn this building into a friendlier element for environment. The solution was the compaction of the building program grouping those programmatic areas most related to the human scale

3 Perception – A project that includes two different scales with two unequal volumes, should also have two different perceptions. The CFPA has two different facades; the representation of the main facade responds to an acoustic and thermal improvement of the teaching area (human scale) by applying physical formula “Helmholtz resonator effect”. The Building Floor plants and sections

4 Compare – in the projected building relative to a conventional teaching center building, we see that have been incorporated different climate, energy and sustainable criteria, which make the CFPA is a teaching center highly technical. One example is found in the design of the main facade, an element of double skin extracted directly from the constructive solution of a car (chassis + bodywork); a facade design strategy is not linked to solving thermal requirements and Health (DB HE + DB HS), also responds to the acoustic conditions (DB HR) site by applying the “Helmholtz effect” on its design.

The result of this system is an “All in 1”, making this “closure” in a complete, optimized and very low cost system. The provided solution significantly reduces the limits set by the “Decree of eco-effi ciency” reducing by 41% the average coeffi cient of thermal transmittance Km of the building and manages to improve its performance in sound absorption at low frequency (63 Hz – 200 Hz) in a 4 dB improved the sound insulation against the N-II highway. Source by Caas Arquitectes.