© Roland Halbe - www.rolandhalbe.de . Published on July 22, 2011.

This project is the result of an open competition organized by Madrid’s City Hall in 2007. The aim was to reuse one of the buildings of the old slaughterhouse of Madrid as a new cultural and contemporary multi-functional space. Depending of the needs, the space had to be used as concert hall, exhibition space, conference room or fashion catwalk, so basically we were asked for a mobile system that transforms the space according with the required program: the provision of a large and versatile multipurpose exhibition space that can function as the largest exhibition hall in Madrid or, conversely, as a set of independent smaller exhibition spaces.

© Roland Halbe - www.rolandhalbe.de . Published on July 22, 2011.

The most important value of this bulding is that has become part of the image of the city at the beginig of the century. It´s´not very interested in itsself but it´s part of the memory of the city. Our proposal tried to value the memory of the place by recoverying some of the systems that the old slaughterhouse had used for hanging the cattle, but employing them in a different way, this time for hanging the art pieces. At first we thought about the possibility of leaving the graffities of the walls as part of this history but afterwards we decided to remove the plaster of the walls in orden to show the original fabric and construction systems used at the beggining of the XXth century. When the brick emerged, the scale of the space was transformed, reinforcing its monumental proportions.

© Roland Halbe - www.rolandhalbe.de . Published on July 22, 2011.

In 2009 the budget for construction was reduced by halve, and we were forced to rethink our intervention, first of all by reducing the quality of materials and secondly by erasing some of the planned devices. We decided to limit our intervention to one material and one construction element. Instead of using sliding pannels for dividing the space, as the rest of the participants in the competition had proposed, we used a conventional and ordinary element as the door to solve all the dificulties mention in its basis. A battery of doors, enclosing a central rectangular space with the possibility of segragating it from the rest of the nave, offered the possibility of attaining a neutral void, suitable for avant-garde installation art and projections. When openned, this set of doors connects the central void with the rest of the space, achieving full flexibility.

© Roland Halbe - www.rolandhalbe.de . Published on July 22, 2011.

The introduction of the double-height space enclosed by the doors contrasts with the tectonic nature and timeless architecture of the remaining shell of the slaughterhouse. Even thought the client wanted this central space to be totally dark, we have mantained the possibility of having natural light. The same doors we used for dividing the space are also used as windows shutters in order to get darkness inside. The different position of the doors in this two levels defines an arbitrary image wicht is the result of the natural use of the building. . All doors are steel, which acts in chrommatic contrast with the existing brick surfaces. When openned, an abstract and enclosed space dissaperars, revealing again the original enclosure of the old building. The rest of the windows and open holes of the walls were covered by the same steel structure but with different mobility systems, for instance the main door witch was solved with the same steel element as the ones in the main space, pivots in its middle lateral point in orden to transforms the door in a marquee that defines a threshold before the main space.

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