Ofimodul showroom / stación-ARquitectura Arquitectos + Armando Cantú

Architects: stación-ARquitectura Arquitectos
Location: Monterrey, México
Associated Architect: Armando Cantú
Project team: César Augusto Guerrero Rodríguez, Armando Cantú, Ana Cecilia Garza Villarreal, Carlos Raúl Flores Leal, María Sevilla Gómez
Programme: Showroom and design room for furniture
Client: Ofimodul S. A. de C. V.
Size of the project : 272 sqm
Project year: 2008
Construction: 2008-2009
Materials: Concrete, Steel and Glass
Photographs: Eduardo Hernández

The Project is a small showroom and the design center for a company specialized in office furniture. The site of the project is inside a terrain of commercial use where the furniture is manufactured for the Ofimodul Company in Monterrey N.L., Mexico.

In this space both the first and the last steps of the manufacturing process of the furniture should be unified: the design stage as well as their exhibition and sale.

It was chosen to make an intervention that will put in manifest each program of the building, making a constructive operation that transcends the site’s structure, composed by one side of the manufacture building (factory) and by the other a loading and parking area for trucks, both already existing in the terrain.

So the building is formed by two parts, one heading to the front yard of the terrain and the other that is embedded in the factory. Each part is separated one from the other by a different ground level and by a basic services core. The exterior part of the building was built over a former parking lot, as a condition that the same program will be respected in the intervention. This way the volume rise over the vehicles of directives and clients and its connected with the interior part of the building, built over a former storage space of the factory that is now used for the design and monitoring of what takes place inside the warehouse were the furniture is manufactured, so it requires a high degree of acoustic insulation between both activities.

This way half the interior part of the building (inside the manufacture area) is closed and opaque meanwhile the other half in the exterior (front yard) is open and almost transparent, because is there where the access and exhibition zone of the finished furniture takes place, making its function of a big shelter.