Studio In The Woods In Madrid By SelgasCano

Iwan Baan continues to astound us with this fantastic project amongst the woods by the Spanish group SelgasCano: Their own architecture office.

The goal of this studio is fairly simple: to work under the trees. To accomplish so, they will need a roof that's as clear as feasible. At the same time, they must protect the desk area from direct sunlight.

As a result, the northern section is translucent. On the north side, a curved sheet of 20mm colorless plexiglass is used to hide the section. The south side, where the desks are located, must be closed in considerably more, but not totally, therefore there is a double layer of fibreglass and polyester in its natural color on the south side, with translucent insulation in the center. All three combine to produce a 110 mm thick sandwich.

The outward perspective is clear and transparent in the first scenario. The views in the latter situation are transparent, hampered slightly by the cantilevered metal structure left within the sandwich, with the trees' shadows softly projecting onto it.

This simplicity, which is so basic, will sadly evolve into an immensely complicated structure later on. Meaning the complex in the sense that it was impossible to persuade a company to get involved in such a small building from start to finish, with components that may or may not have been straight from the catalogue, but were not for catalogue-style assembly, forcing us to contract out the work under what is known as "the administration" procedure, with a timetable that more or less fit in with when the construction companies were available.

The polyester portion of the sandwich is made up of two sorts of pieces, both pultrusioned and catalogued: a straight piece with minor strengthening ribs and a curve that is exclusively created for the roofs of a few train carriages in Germany. They had to wait for an order by the German railways because the few meters needed did not warrant the recomposition of the production line. To keep the polyester's translucence, they put translucent white polyethylene insulation foam in between.

The transparent component was created using conventional sheets of curved plexiglass that had been cut at the edges to allow a layer of silicon lant to be injected between the sheets. One business bent them, another assembled them, and still another created the two sides, which are constructed of 10mm white opaline methacrylate on a steel frame and can be fully opened to allow air circulation using a system of pulleys and counterweights.

Half-burying the entire thing occurs before all of that to allow horizontal views of the plot where the arm is mounted, but it's OK to do it later as well. Everything below ground level is made of concrete with wood formwork, hardwood planks that are also used for pavement, is tightly bolted together, and is coated in two colors using two-component paint with an epoxy base.

Finally, to made it a tad less... slightly more... moist touch: on rainy days, the raindrops hitting the plastic, as they strike, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes a lot... sometimes a sound...