ARX

A Regional Blood Centre is essentially a highly complex laboratory building, where donated blood is separated into its three components and processed for medical purposes. As the second Centre we have designed (the first was in Porto), it reflects greater ease and precision in handling the complex technical paraphernalia inherent to these buildings. This understanding gave us, on this second occasion, a greater sense of freedom.

The site is of a beauty reminiscent of landscapes more common in northern Europe. It is a dense forest where the pine trees stand only two to three metres apart and reach heights of nearly 25 metres. Inside this wood, half-light prevails. The sky appears only here and there, through the few gaps in the green "canvas" formed by the overlapping treetops.

Although there are urbanised areas relatively nearby, there is a strong sense of isolation, as if one had passed through a kind of filter. The site lies along the undulating ridgeline of a hill, before suddenly plunging down a very steep slope. A building in this place always seems "out of place". It is a disturbance to the balance of this landscape.

The design of the building reflects a clear intention to embrace its "displaced", strange and unexpected character. It is a large grey volume, entirely clad in zinc, which, from its site, registers only a response to the undulation of the terrain, following the sinuous topography with its form.

The entrances to the building, as well as all its openings, windows and skylights, are like grooves or protrusions that underline the tension created by the folded volume: on the convex side they project outwards; on the concave side they are flush with the body of the building. In both cases they reveal the warm, luminous interior.

In the design of the interior spaces, we embraced a fascination with the need for smooth, antiseptic spaces, taking the form of a radicalised aesthetic interpretation of the purely functional obsessions we encountered in the laboratories we visited during the design process.