OOIIO, an emerging architecture studio based in Madrid with projects in Spain and Latin America, decided to move its headquarters because the team is growing thanks to a series of new commissions and some competitions won.
To this end, they undertook the refurbishment of disused spaces located just in front of the Madrid River Park, a large green urban space built after the burial of the M-30, one of Madrid’s ring roads.
The new OOIIO´s office benefits from this new large linear green area, and the enormous transformations that it is provoking in the former degraded neighbourhoods that grew along the highway, nowadays neighbourhoods with life quality, in front of park and finally cohesive with the Rest of the city.
In the basement of a rationalist building from the middle of the 20th century, the architects of OOIIO were able to get a cheerful, fresh, bright and pleasant office to work.
Where previously there was little more than dirt and abandoned spaces for years, now they can enjoy a comfortable and spacious studio, connected with parks on both sides that communicates them with the rest of the city, so that makes easy to get to the office cycling, walking, skating, …
For the interiors design, OOIIO´s architects decided to play with a very special material: handmade talaveran pottery, which they knew very well thanks to a couple of urban interventions that the studio executed in Talavera de la Reina, Spain.
In these projects OOIIO´s team worked hand in hand with local ceramic craftsmen to revitalize degraded urban spaces of that city, using this local material of centenary tradition, normally used in cooking pots and objects, but in these projects the architects decided to use it on an urban scale because of its cheerful colours and resistance, enlarging the size of the old ornamental motifs, as if they were advertising posters.
The large size of the Renaissance themes hand-drawn tile by tile for the talaveran artisans, produces some very suggestive sensations now also in an interior space, in OOIIO´s Madrid office, while demonstrating to the workers and clients that the ideas and experimental concepts that are thought in this studio can be brought to reality. Source and photos, Courtesy of OOIIO.