Caja del Mediterráneo Office Building, San Juan
Miguel Fisac 

Caja del Mediterráneo Office Building, San Juan

Miguel Fisac 


While he was designing an urban plan for San Juan, in Alicante, Fisac received the commission to build a small administration building. To underscore its presence amidst a cluster of apartments towers, the architect displayed a formal freedom which was infrequent in his non-religious buildings.

“This commission came when I was preparing an urban development project on the coast, and the developer asked me to design some offices on a residual plot that had remained empty after raising a whole series of residential towers. It was a residual plot, with a strange shape and delimited by the curved line of the road that closed to enter the beach of San Juan. With the built area allowed it was possible to raise up to four heights – a volume that could not compete with the surrounding towers – and I decided to design slightly curved floor plans whose direction I alternated on each level. The program consisted essentially of offices for a real estate company of the area, and its curved facades were closed with prefabricated concrete panels made with flexible formwork by a local company which did a pretty good job... Whereas the front walls, made of glass and metal frames, came out awful.”... [+]