A symbolic industrial landscape | From the shooter to the city

A thermal power plant cannot be seen. Although a building marks it, it is the effects of the plant – the distribution of heating water produced with renewable energy – that redraws cities.

Under the streets of Palencia, the company DH Ecoenergías circulates water heated with forest biomass and other alternative energy sources to replace gas and diesel heating and, thus, contribute to decarbonizing cities using national and renewable resources. It is this circuit that transforms the city’s air and it is the power plant that functions as the engine of that transformation. The building, designed by the FRPO architecture studio (Fernando Rodríguez and Pablo Oriol), thus fulfills a technical function: heating the water and initiating its distribution. Traditionally, technical buildings were hidden, disguised, camouflaged. FRPO decided to do pedagogy with architecture: communicate the urgency of the energy transformation. What could be the form of that message?

Communicating transformation requires drawing attention, and yet free architectural icons go through several decades of questioning. How to speak clearly without making noise. The architects chose to symbolize. Its form, but above all the materiality of its building and its insertion into the city, had to communicate the desire for a gradual energy transformation: the one that the building initiates and the underground network makes possible.

Thus, the main symbol of the building is its circular geometry. It alludes to energy circularity. The material is also symbolic: on a circular concrete plinth that protects all the machinery and the underground biomass silo, a polycarbonate façade seeks transparency, lightness, almost the disappearance of the property. Architects thus opt for subtle communication. These new factory buildings do not build a brand, they seek to erase themselves, that is: to integrate. Change the idea of ​​infrastructure and factory buildings with necessary gadgets but aware of their presence.

With experience in the construction of homes, stations (San José Station in Toluca, Mexico), laboratories (Unolab in Getafe) or the Master Plan for the Magnificent Factory that they build in Lambrate (Milan), Rodriguez and Oriol have developed a trajectory from which, with current means and industrial materials, they have sought – with artisanal care – to question typologies not through rupture but through care. They monitor the forms, control the encounters between elements, the management and effects of light and the emergence of architecture as a brand in the city. That is what this Palencia headquarters achieves: arriving to change a lot, making very little noise.