CAP Ripollet, health facility
PRIMARY ASSISTANCE HEALTH CENTER, RIPOLLET DEL VALLÈS, BARCELONA
The location of the building allows a double access to the health center. To meet the program’s needs of maximum continuity and extending the building into the park, the design proposes an inverted L-shaped center organization around a central axis. In this way the building engages and becomes integrated into the public space and improves one of the Park’s current blind and irregular facades.
The difference of level between the Street and the Park determines the location and characteristics of both accesses, opposed endings of the plan, at different levels. The principal access, the most direct one, is through the Park, and the secondary access leads to the Street at a level three meters higher.
In the center, a fourteen-meter wide space in between party walls, a system of interspersed patios, has been generated in order to obtain opti- mum levels of ventilation and illumination. The inner pattern of the center is established by the three patios, around which the space is organized and modulated, creating a rhythm and illuminating the examination rooms, the hallway and the waiting rooms.
This results in a “branched” typology, with sequences of waiting rooms and examination rooms, separated by patios.
In each floor, a main axis defined by a distribution hallway acts as a hinge between the two bays in which the building is divided and program- matically organized. The two bays differ in their use: the wider one accommodates the examination and waiting rooms and the narrower one accommodates the support areas.
The space that extends into the Park, which includes the underground and ground floors, hosts the internal operating areas for the exclusive use of the Center Staff.
The facade to the Park has two parts: a podium two stories high, aligned with the neighbor building, and a third floor set back from the podium alignment. The façade to the Park has a central and more transparent plane that corresponds to the entrance and to the most collective areas in the center: the waiting rooms and the circulation area (hallway and the stairs). This facade interrupts the plane and expresses by the change of scale and the spacing of the shutters’ slats the singularity of the space behind.
The facade to the street does not follow the street alignment and inclination. It is set back to indicate the entrance that is also outlined by the access ramp and by an awning, the only element that follows the continuity of plane of the neighboring building.