OFICINAS APLAPLAC
Design Team:
Albert Tidy, Gabriel Cáceres, Daniel Lazo (as TCL Architects).
Collaborators:
Sebastián Cruz
Location:
Santiago de Chile / Chile
Total Area:
600 m2
Built Area:
110 m2
Project Year:
2013
Materials:
2x4” pine wood slats, 4 mm. polycarbonate honeycomb sheets, 25mm plywood boards.
Photography:
Pablo Casals Aguirre
Description
As side effect of an important commission for designing a multi program complex in an old hat factory, we were given the opportunity to establish our architecture studio temporarily in what’s perhaps every architect’s dream: a huge old industrial warehouse.
The warehouse -kindly provided to us by the clients of the project, for as long it takes to see it through- possess remarkable qualities in terms of space, sun light and openness. Its precarious thermic conditions, however, made it also uninhabitable.
To solve this issue, we required of an ephemeral and disposable enclosure that allowed us to operate in conditions of comfort and livability, but achieved in a minimum amount of time and as cheap as possible.
The final result is a modest structure of 2” by 4” pine wood slats, completely cladded in translucid 4 mm. thick polycarbonate honeycomb sheets (105 x 290 cms.), including the ceiling. The measurements of every element involved were done considering the commercial dimensions of all materials, reducing the left over loss. In addition, to avoid any interior structural element, we used prefab H beams -manufactured in pine wood and OSB boards- capable of covering the whole span of the structure while supporting the weight of the entire ceiling.
This 8.5 x 8.5 x 2.9 meters box allowed us to reduce the air volume to control, and achieve thermic comfort without much effort. Two “Split” HVAC units keep the entire box at constant 21 degrees Celcius.
After publishing our temporary installations, we were contacted by “Aplaplac Production Company”, creators of the hit children TV show “31 minutos”, entirely played by cloth puppets -in the tradition of Sesame Street- and of a budget inversely proportional to its genius level of creativity.
Till this point in time, the whole production company operation was dispersed and precarious, with their offices located in one place and the storage space in another, while having to rent the recording studio when filming each season of the tv show. In 2013, they finally decided to consolidate each individual element of the program under one roof: a new industrial warehouse located in an old residential neighborhood in downtown Santiago.
Faced with the same challenge we had already encountered, Aplaplac decided to hire us to repeat the same solution, but adapting it to its new requirements. Needless to say, the opportunity to design the offices of puppets stars such as “Tulio Triviño”, “Juanin Juan Harris”, “Bodoque” and “Guaripolo” proved to be impossible to resist.
This time around, the proposal was to repeat the strategy but with three different boxes, varying in sizes to accommodate each individual part of the program. From the warehouse access, the first box contains the administrative and executive offices of the show. The second box and the biggest in size, holds the scriptwriters offices. The third and final box is the show’s workshop, where the puppets are manufactured. The rest of the warehouse´s space -more than half of the total space- remains free for storage use as well as for the recording & filming studio.
The parallelism of the boxes layout is deliberately broken as to create tension and vantage points between them, in reference to works such as the “Metaesquemas” (1958-1959) created by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica.
The in-between space generated by the layout, creates a relationship between each individual element and the others as well as with the warehouse that contains them. These spaces allow more informal events to happen, like small rooms for leisure.
The entire project was built in 3 days, and the end result left the cast of “31 minutos” happy enough that they insisted in being part of the photo-shoot that we’re now publishing.
