Factory Conversion in Barcelona
- Frank Kaltenbach
The site of the textile works Fabra i Coats in the district of San Andreu forms part of a restructuring programme of the city of Barcelona that embraces numerous former inner-urban industrial locations. Having moved into the extensive brick halls where wool was formerly spun, the creative scene has found venues for dance, music and multimedia. The two-storey-high strip, 100 metres long and 14 metres wide along the high northern wall to the site now provides an outer enclosure to 46 artists’ dwellings and a training hall for the Catalan national sport of castellers, in which teams of roughly 20 men, women and children form high human towers. The architects’ aim was to retain the character of the existing building as far as possible, and the restructuring measures were to be reversible. For that reason, all inbuilt elements were to be in a lightweight, modular form of construction and self-supporting, without interlocking directly with the existing structure or disrupting it.
