Zamora Offices / Alberto Campo Baeza

Situated within the medieval center of the city of Zamora, Spain, the new office building occupies the old church garden, near the river and facing the cathedral and its square. The architects, Madrid-based studio Alberto Campo Baeza, played with a simple and powerful dichotomy of material and space, the synchronicity and unity of heavy and light, earth and air. A mammoth stone wall encloses the angular footprint of the site with simple voids strategically creating apertures in the solid membrane, creating moments to view the outer world. At the entrance, a cornerstone with the phrase ‘HIC LAPIS ANGULARIS MAIO MMXII POSITO’ engraved into it’s face, representing the past, deeply rooted into the soil: the memory. Upon crossing the colossal threshold the feeling of weight and solidity are lifted in a serene courtyard where the floors and walls are made of the same tranquil rock, interrupted on occasion by a tree whose color is intensified by the soft neutral tones of the surroundings. In the middle, white slender columns support thin floor planes wrapped in a double glass skin made up of panels measuring 6 meters by 3 meters, 1.2 centimeters thick. Its crystalline structure is composed entirely of glass planes and clear structural silicon, including the corners, trapping within the interstitial gap the true material of the building: air. A complete inversion from the outer wall that defines the property, the office spaces in turn offer complete thermally controlled transparency, on the corner of which ‘HOC VITRUM ANGULARIS MAIO MMXII POSITO’ is marked with acid looking towards the sky: the future.

via designboom