Pere Garau health centre
Location: Palma de Mallorcia (Spain)
Year: 2023
Type: public competition. 3rd prize
Client: Servicio de Salud de las Illes Balears
Area: 2.650 sqm
Team: Pablo Valero Escolano, David Úbeda Sales, Francisco Garrido Roca, Rocio Martínez-Fons Delgado
Building enginier: Luciano García Hernández
MEP: Guillermo David Berenguer Solbes
Resource: La columna rota. Frida Kahlo
Our proposal for the new Pere Garau Health Center arises from the desire to enhance the urban values of the Son Canals neighborhood. The plot, together with the two adjacent ones to the north, currently forms an urban void, a diffuse and blurred area, lacking identity and morphological unity.
The pressing need of the area for this new healthcare facility is also a great opportunity to address the urban challenges of the site. The project emerges from the possibility of creating and consolidating a new urban axis that stitches the new health center together with the facilities planned for the plots behind. This axis, generated within the plot, allows us to properly organize the necessary accesses to the building without congesting the narrow Passatge Son Real. Transversal to it, an interior axis arises, structuring the entire program of the building.
The proposed volume completes the adjoining party walls both in height and in the rear ground floors, where the program is organized through comb-like circulations. This organization, together with void operations, enables us to effectively resolve the abundant program that must fit on the ground floor.
The internal organizational scheme of the building is clear and allows great flexibility and adaptability to future needs and program modifications, as well as an easy and quick reading for the user. It is structured into three bands: “waiting area – cores – healthcare program.” This banded scheme is repeated on all floors of the building. The position of the core band, separating the waiting areas and the healthcare program, allows us to achieve two vital points:
- The placement of all the consulting rooms on the southeast façade, enjoying sunlight, and the waiting areas on the northwest façade, enjoying a pleasant atmosphere and a distant view that will bring spaciousness and serenity to the space.
- Secondly, the placement of the core band creates a kind of preamble to the access to the consulting rooms, acting as a filter and providing an intimacy we consider essential. These transitional spaces generate a gradient of privacy from the most public (waiting areas) to the most private (consulting rooms).
On the ground floor, as a natural continuation of the new urban axis, a space is proposed that will function as the access, reception, atrium, and waiting rooms for the different uses on this level. This atrium is conceived as an immersion of the street into the building, a multipurpose space that articulates the ground floor and the mezzanine.