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Architects
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Location
Calle 73, Maracaibo, Venezuela -
Design Team
Farid Chacón, Francisco Mustieles, Claudia Urdaneta, Janeth Boza, Vanessa Rincón y Nicole De Candido -
Project Area
1200.0 m2 -
Photography
Text description provided by the architects. De Candido Express Supermarket stands on Bella Vista Avenue, one of the most commercial streets in the city of Maracaibo (2 million inhabitants). The attributes of the brand De Candido such as simplicity, firm softness, versatility to changing contexts, and continuity shaped the building. In turn, the building should be able to be replicated, but adapted to different environments and urban situations.
We seek precisely that continuity in the architecture of "express" in De Candido to set a position different from the conventional architecture of free-standing buildings, which are constructed by separating the roof from the vertical enclosures and the floor plane, and moved further away from the street.
For this purpose we turned to origami, for its simplicity, firm softness, continuity in the enclosures, and versatile replicability in changing contexts. In origami, continuity of matter is required. In this case we used a sandwich sheet of pre-painted white galvanized steel. This allowed us to obtain, from a square-based rectangular initial base, the manufacturing of simple models to highly complex folds.
In coming years, we want to generate many "express" buildings for the De Candido chain, and origami allows us to construct buildings that are not delocalized; the same paper is folded in different ways.
The interior is lined with an inner facade of colored stripes that delineate the different sections of the space, through a canopy that unifies both areas keeping the scale of the user.
Lighting recreated in the interior is highlighted under the interior roof with an industrial finish, which emphasizes linear corridors, creating a homogeneous reading of the space. As it opens onto Bella Vista Avenue, it adopts the shape of cylindrical rings at an urban scale, extending from inside the sales and register floor to the dining area.
Furthermore, the urbanity of this opening involves incorporating into it urban lamps in the shape of cylindrical rings; the urban scale demands, a lesson learned from Stirling in the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1984).
Towards Bella Vista Avenue and Santa Rita Avenue, the parking lot is designed without a severe floor treatment, with a friendly reading for the city. On 73rd Street, pedestrian access points to the building are located through friendly landscaping in offset bands of plant species with different colors and textures, which accompany pedestrians, keeping the continuity of the stripes of pavement parallel to this street, reaffirming the possibility of access to the "express" in both directions within the building.
Located in an anisotropic environment, the building chooses to open towards the main avenue, Bella Vista, to make public its interior. The building displays its contents to satisfy the curiosity of our way of being, seeking a meeting point with the city of Maracaibo, designing its immediate urban environment, with the experience of shopping as pleasure.
