IMO BARCELONA
Eduardo Cadaval.
Located in the upper area of Barcelona, the Institute of Ocular Microsurgery (IMO), is part of a new series of facilities built along the Ronda de Dalt; a road belt built in the context of the 1992 Olympics and which has proven to be one of the most important urban transformations for daily life in contemporary Barcelona.
The Ronda de Dalt is also a dividing line (in many cases more imaginary than real) between the city and the mountains. The IMO building is located on the edge of the urban fabric of the affluent Sant Gervasi neighborhood and the beginning of Collserola Park, the largest nature reserve in the city. This boundary condition between the built city and its natural spaces is probably one of the keys to understanding a building that voluntarily renounces monumentality by burying more than 60% of its built area. A respectful stance on the possible impact that a large-scale building could generate in the area; an attitude of dialogue with the environment that leads him to dissolve its limits in search of being able to merge with an urban and natural landscape at the same time.
This ambiguous condition between nature and urbanity is reflected in the building’s proposal. This is integrated into the topography of the mountains, but does not pretend to appropriate its language; in fact it is a totally geometrized construction and therefore highly artificial; vectorized energy emerging from the mountain.
The building is divided into two clearly differentiated areas: the part of the light, public area, reception and interaction between patients and families; and a dark part, of consultations and operating rooms with orthogonal order and rigorous efficiency. This part is an orderly and compact body, which is buried in its entirety, generating absolute darkness in the operating room area. It is in the light part where architecture allows great artifice both in the construction of spaces and with the treatment and incorporation of natural lighting. A continuum of ramps weave a swarm that builds a variety of unique spaces, of chiaroscuro games and views that surround and enrich the rest of the spaces in the complex.
It is in the weaving, in the clothing that the great virtues of the proposal are found: that frontal filigree is the body and the intelligence of the project, where the stakes of the building are largely resolved. The definition of a façade that is respectful and distanced from the ring road, which is faced with a slight twist that responds to a position facing the city and the views it offers; the relationship through patios and games of light, cadences of silence, from an individualized interior space to an extremely public exterior space; the creation of an exterior space constructed, lived in and incorporated into the building as an interior space, common to the three upper levels and capable of erasing the spatial barrier that the slabs between them represent. A facade of air contained by folding and terraced planes.
To explain the essence of the project, Llinás refers to a cloak that covers the building, -that so prohibited by the modern movement-, he says. A language that began with the Jaume Fuster library and has continued to explore in recent projects. A playful twist of a prolific architect who with his buildings has been able to enrich the daily life of the inhabitants of the city in which he lives and works, a deep trace of architectural sensitivity and urban quality.
Criticism of the Institute of Ocular Microsurgery of Barcelona for the magazine Domus published in number 930.
