TORRE NOVA DIAGONAL. BARCELONA

This project falls under the Master Plan for the south elevation of the Diagonal avenue extension from Les Glòries plaza to the sea. The plan proposes an elevation of 8 floors with one continuous parapet which is interrupted every now and again by a system of taller buildings located equidistant from one another.

The prismatic volume of the tower, ground floor and twenty-one floors, is aligned to Diagonal avenue by its slender face and articulates with the building on the avenue front through a three-story arcade.

The building is arranged with two vertical communication cores, located at the ends of the floor, giving access to a variable number of homes, from four to eight per floor according to the different housing compositions. The main housing units occupy the façades, and the services are concentrated inside the floor; the living rooms are almost always located in the corners. The dual orientation of the housing ensures sufficient sunlight.

The façade is a continuous, tense plane made from dark aluminium that integrates the windows, doors and blinds. This plane is superimposed with a grid of white light concrete, prefabricated elements that draw a slightly protruding grid that runs along the structure’s harder items: pillars and framework edges. Some of the mesh bars are hidden to achieve effects of order and scale catering to the views of the building from mid- and long-distances. Like a trompe l’oeil, the discontinuities of the mesh overlap certain shapes of a neoplasticism nature to the prismatic volume and contribute to blur the edges and the precise boundaries of the prism.