Gabriel Ferraté Library

Architects: Ramon Artigues Codó / Ramon Sanabria Boix
Location: Barcelona (Catalonia)

The building contains the libraries of the varied faculties of the UPC. Its introduction comes from the Management Plan for the south area of the North Campus, which determined the placement of large parts with simple volumes that allowed a better adaptation to the irregular shape of the whole area.

The building of the library takes a prismatic shape of trapezoidal layout, with two relevant cuts: one of them, three storeys high, marks the entrance and serves as a vehicle for the introduction of light; the second, on the opposite side of the main facade, serves primarily to identify the signs. The traces of both cuts are arbitrary regarding the program and the place.

Located on the southern edge of campus, highlights from the rest of the brick educational buildings with an autonomous language and materials which give it a representative role. Skewed geometry of the plants generates fragmented facades whose skin adapts to the surfaces in form of glass curtain walls or opaque planes, which are folded about the axis of the edges.

One of these foldings leads to a covered atrium at high altitude (southern sun screen), through which we reach the street-lobby who cross the building and breaks it up into two bodies: the one that contains the served spaces (reading and study rooms), with a triangle-rectangle shaped plant, and the server spaces (services).

The geometry has its greatest expression in which we might consider the zenithal facade of the building, a cover with a sawtooth skylights whose guidelines favor the entry of natural light to the reading room on the top floor.