TFG
Bilbao's city museum/balcony
This Degree Final Project started with the idea of renovation one of many degraded areas of Bilbao’s township, specifically the one located at Artxanda’s cornice, one of the greatest balconies to the city. This place is an strategical enclave on the central area of Artxanda which has been a leisure and spreading place for township inhabitants for years. Its connection with the city it is made by a funicular, a great entity that behaves as a door to its natural parks.
It is a place with an amazing potential that it should not be wasted; at the moment it has marginal areas without any care and in general, with a poor link between items of the area. It is because of that that it is a must its activation and for that a new arrangement of the site is foreseen. The excellent location offers an unparalleled sight of Bilbao, which gives a new perspective for the urban study as well as for the design of an explanatory space for citizens history, organization and future development.
A balcony over the city ¿Why? The area is located at the top of Artxanda's mount. This confers it some privileges that must be exploited, such as: an elevated place over the city, it offers a sight, a new perspective which is not possible in any other way. The idea of transforming this area into a spreading area for the city, goes along with the aim of creating a retirement place, where you can rest, ponder, watch calmly the city and its evolution, both past and future.
The balcony, sighting place, it's a space with a wide field of view and focused towards what has needs to be observed with care. It pretends to offer a city clarification, explain its history (focus) and help its future (width).
The project takes the funicular as its main axis of the entire area because, as I am going to creat a building that links visually with the city, it is the physical-tangible link which has to define the direction to follow. After this I decide to place the building near the higher funicular station and honor the park balcony as much as possible. This place is the one immediately adjacent to the path from the station to the balcony, currently occupied by a deck which covers an rink that is used very little. This deck will be unmounted and it will free the path to the project.
The building is a rectangular prism which places on the site introducing one part into the balcony platform and standing out over the existing platform creating behind itself an exposition square and a great staircase next to it. This staircase allows going downstairs from the height of funiculars arrival (+5.00) to the piece of the building (+0.00) that frames the sight of Bizkay's topography ahead and Bilbao at the bottom. From this height or even from balcony's (+8.00) you can access to the museum and to the urban interpretation center which dispense the scheme all along 3 floors in a rectangular floor building.
The building, with 73 metres long and 10 width, only rests its weight over reinforced concrete elements, loading walls, planes that generate crossed vision spaces between the place and the environment. To save these large spans of 23 and 32 meters pre-stressed reinforced concrete slabs and 4 large Vierendeel beams will be used. The structural scheme is summarized in a structure that combines reinforced concrete for everything "in contact with the outside", while steel is reserved for the interior of the building. 4 Vierendeel beams, with an edge that covers an entire floor, are responsible for supporting the pre-stressed slabs that make up each floor. For each 2 beams, 2 floors are created, the one that reaches the lower beam and the one that rests on the upper one. This type of beam of rigid knots is chosen to save the light of 32 meters and does not require diagonal elements that obstruct the vision inside the building, since as a condition of viewpoint it would be a contradiction to prevent the correct enjoyment of the views. This scheme can be analyzed graphically in the annexed plans.
Each floor forms a platform that turns over the city, so the rear facade is completely blind, to concentrate the vision on what is important. To achieve a more suggestive aesthetic, a facade is composed of perforated backlit metal panels that generate an abstract drawing of the Gran Bilbao region. These panels without drilling will be used in the rest of the facade but in this case they will be mobile to adapt to the needs of internal lighting or external focusing. The panels used are from the Trespa house, specifically the Meteon Metallic model, Graphite Gray Rock and Satin finish on the back. The anchoring system is the TS 300 provided by the same company; this anchoring allows the joint to be practically imperceptible. A joint like the one that also tries to hide in the curtain wall of facade, in this case in charge of the company Technal and his system of structural Glass Geode SG that eliminates the flashing with a strip of silicone.
