Josep Ferrando Architecture

El Roser Social Center

El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula

El Roser Social Center 

Josep Ferrando Architecture + Gallego Arquitectura

ARCHITECTS
Josep Ferrando, David Recio, Xavi Gallego

STRUCTURES
Calmat

TEAM
Alex Font, Arnau Sumalla, Ilaria Caprioli, Albert Chavarria, Adrià Maldonado, Maristella Pinheiro, Clara Ebert

ENVELOP
Xmade

ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Aiguasol

QUANTITY SURVEYORS
Bim Arq Eng + Asc-arquitect

PHOTOGRAPHS
Adrià Goula

AREA
1323 M²

YEAR
2022

LOCATION
Reus, Spain

CATEGORY
Visitor Center, Adaptive Reuse, Cultural Center

Text description provided by architect.

El Roser Social Centre is laid out in the old prison in Reus, a building listed as a Cultural Asset of Local Interest and included in the Inventory of Architectural Heritage of Catalonia.

El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula
El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula
El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula

The facility is an innovative program in Spain. It comprises a shelter for the homeless, a soup kitchen, and a community space, bringing together all the social services of the city, which makes it the first comprehensive facility of its kind.

The proposal is the transformation of a transformation. The prison, built in 1929, was transformed into a school in 1979.

El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula

This earlier intervention is taken as the basis for a project in which the various time strata dialogue with each other in a selection process that shows the concealed construction layers and draws attention to their various transformations.

The project respects and recovers the original building, revealing its structure and the construction typology of the time, previously hidden, in order to evoke an image of austerity.

El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula
El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula
El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula

The intervention works at different scales. Firstly, a dialectic is established between the new more ethereal, light, tectonic elements, and the composition and stereotomic mineral materials of the heavier existing structure.

Then the geometry of the H-shaped floor plan laid out around two courtyards is given new openings to create lines of sight and a Palladian-style permeability that marks the end of closed spaces.

The interpretation, functioning, and routes around the building’s interior are reassessed, as they are at the urban level, changing its relationship with the immediate environs.

El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula
El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula

Entrance to the prison used to be from the street via a monumental doorway with minimum pavement space, but this latest proposal eliminates the wall around the yard of the prison building, turning it into a public space, open to the city, that lets passers-by recognize the facility by the continuity of its façades.

El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula
El Roser Social Center
© Adrià Goula

A slender steel structure is a gesture that recalls the now-absent wall, at the same time threading together three different historical periods. In turn, the conservation of the monumental doorway bears witness to the missing wall and enhances the facility’s heritage value. At a more domestic scale, elements such as windows and wet areas are introduced at a tangent, reinforcing the idea of palimpsest.


El Roser Social Center
Long Section
El Roser Social Center
Trans Section


El Roser Social Center
Project Axonometry
El Roser Social Center
Axonometry
El Roser Social Center
Interior Axonometry
El Roser Social Center
Detail


El Roser Social Center
Ground Floor
El Roser Social Center
Site Plan

Josep Ferrando Architecture
T +34 932 040234
Josep Ferrando Architecture
C/ de Bailèn, 232 bis, Gràcia, 08037 Barcelona, Spain