Service Center for food distribution (SDA). Camp Clar, Tarragona, 2014
Located in Campclar neighbourhood, Tarragona, the new centre for food distribution was designed and built in only three months with very low economic resources, and 120 volunteers completing the build on the final morning.
The neighborhood, formed in the early 1960s to accommodate a big number of the new city’s chemical industry workers, is part of a quickly developed area that works related to the city of Tarragona and at the same time within its own autonomy. This part of the city has an easily recognizable morphology based on big isolated blocks with many open spaces around them.
The project is an abstract object, and the intention was for the new facility to be recognized as a building belonging to the neighborhood, setting up a material and geometrical relationship with the ceramic church and its surroundings.
As a result of a collective discussion with the volunteers searching for the most efficient, economical, and logical organization, the center is formed by three spaces separated and connected at the same time: a storage room located close to the street, a service space in between, and a distribution zone connected with the church square.
The decision was to use local construction techniques in order to integrate the design into the site and also to minimize transportation costs. The structural system, the roof, and the lateral facades were built with prefabricated metallic elements in order to shorten the construction time, and all the transversal walls and the frontal facades were constructed with a fabric skin, which contextualizes the new center with its surroundings.
In the interior, the interest of the project resides in seeking an optimistic atmosphere., while the compact and hermetic nature of the building responds to climatic and security requirements. However, when the center is in service, it opens to the users, allowing natural light inside.
