4* Seventy Hotel on Córcega Street

The building is located on a plot between party walls, with its main facade on Córcega Street. It integrates a large-scale building within the urban fabric of the Eixample. Three different types of facades are proposed, responding to different conditions of their immediate surroundings: the facade facing Córcega Street, the facade facing the interior of the block, and the facades of the hotel patios.

The facade is peeled back into two planes, one of glass and the other ceramic.

On the main facade, the openings are set back from the facade plane using brass boxes, creating a play of light and shadow that reduces the building's screen effect, achieving a better proportion at the city scale. In the same vein, the two large galleries recall the "skyline" of the old Bayer factory.

At night, these boxes are illuminated, creating the effect that the boxes float over a black canvas. Thus, these mechanisms help to fragment the longitudinal view of the facade, which occupies almost the entire block.

On the ground floor, the double-height metal portico structure helps to build a base that seeks the view of the interior garden and gives presence to the building. The facade here is designed in reverse, this time with the glass recessed, achieving up to 1 meter of depth from the base to its crown.

It is a facade that acknowledges its views in foreshortening and arises from this condition with the maximum possible advantage, constructing a facade with thickness, with shadows, which from its complexity in this case allows it to simplify itself to integrate into the environment.

The rear facade, with joinery also situated on the interior plane, creates a play of voids and groups the first two floors into a single opening to achieve greater verticality.

The interior courtyards of the hotel acquire special significance and not only provide ventilation to some simpler rooms but also open up to the interior distribution corridors. To address the potential visual interference between corridors and rooms, a skin of vertical metal tubes in a diamond shape has been constructed, which, like large curtains, resolves this issue.

At night, hidden LED strips backlight the tubes, creating an image of the lightweight metal element suspended in front of its enclosure or the facades of the courtyard.

One of the main challenges has been the industrialization of the entire construction solution.

It is a very lightweight ventilated facade constructed from large modules of almost 5x3 meters that came fully finished from the workshop. This solution has had many advantages, including absolute control over its finish and greater speed of assembly.

The fact of minimizing the number of different materials (black ceramic panel, glass, and brass-clad structure) has allowed for the simplification not only of its formal solution but also of its construction.