Red Eléctrica's Regional Operation Centre

The project was conceived as a restricted, secluded place, somewhat isolated from the island as a whole. It consisted of three buildings contained within the open space framed by four tall translucent marble screens. The three buildings contained the following uses: one of them (the glazed one) the offices of the Centre; the second, attached to the larger one (enclosed in opaque marble) basically the high-tech facilities of the Centre: control room, with its mimic and communications; and a third isolated building, also enclosed in opaque marble, with the distribution and dissemination activities of REE (Red Eléctrica de España).

The three are linked by a service and parking plate in the basement. The three are located in a free, controlled and intense space in the form of a courtyard or open market, a silent room, with a pool of sprayed water at a height of one metre "a tapestry that will play with the light, giving rise to another motif of suggestions and iridescence related to the family of the marble veins of the membrane that houses it...". And it will produce a continuous, "cleansing" sound (from the Competition Memory).

Timeless, abstract building, closer to infrastructures than to buildings. No façades. And yet, the envelope becomes the basic energy and sensory balancer of the whole (temperature, light, ventilation and acoustic insulation). A levitated "walled" enclosure. In the crystallisation of the marble (found in the Portuguese Alentejo and cut in Cintra, near Lisbon) is the homage to the light, which passes through it and contains it. By day inland and by night in the city. The light coming from the controlled electrical energy and the emerging light diffracted in the pulverised water offer their reunion in the different registers of the building's life.