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Equipo 01 in Angola

30/09/2016


Among the new quarries that Spanish architects are looking to for the obtainment of new commissions, Africa is still the least exploited. Because of this, the success that some pioneering firms have garnered there is newsworthy and cause for celebration. A case in point is provided by Equipo 01, the team led by Jesús San Vicente that began working in Angola with the market of Kibala, a totally industrial building raised with trusses that were shipped from Spain packed up in containers (see Arquitectura Viva 171). The Madrid studio now has a new Angolan project, the Mario Santiago Stadium in Luanda, which should be thought of in the context of local government policies to remedy the scarcity of public facilities that is endemic on the entire African continent. Intended as a focus of the renewal of one of the most depressed areas of the Angolan capital, the enlargement of the stadium will be doubling its capacity from the 8,000 initial seats, and giving it a roof meant to put the facility at a par with Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) standards. As the fundamental element of the project, the roof will provide the stadium’s characteristic image while complying with the restrictions imposed by a very limited budget and a highly precarious level of technology. As in the design for the Kibala market, the solution adopted is given by the logic of serialization: formed by structural modules arranged in an irregular sequence, the roof ends up taking on a faceted geometry that recalls the logic of origami, the art of folding paper.  


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