Endesa Headquarters
Madrid, Spain
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates

Kohn Pedersen Fox and rafael de la-hoz stretched a high-tech patio roof to conserve an electric utility’s energy—and urbanity

© H.G.Esch Fotografie

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By David Cohn

The eight-story atrium at the center of this corporate headquarters is actually a kind of condenser, combining aspects of identity, urbanity, and climate control in much the same way as the traditional patio in southern Spain does. The spreading table of its shade roof offers a ready corporate identity. Its main floor, surrounded by services and overlooked by the changing drama of light filtering through the roof’s louvers and struts, brings a measure of urban intensity to its suburban setting. And with its sophisticated control of sun, heat, and air, it makes effective use of the traditional patio’s climatic benefits, offering a model for office-building energy conservation. This last is a particularly appropriate feature, since Endesa is one of the country’s major electric producers.

In the Campo de las Naciones business park outside Madrid, the building brings together the 1,300 employees and various divisions previously scattered around the city. Its 370,000 square feet of office space and 240,000 square feet of lower-level and basement services “creates a more efficient and interactive working environment,” as Kohn Pedersen Fox’s (KPF) brief explains. (KPF’s London office designed the building with Rafael de La-Hoz, a Madrid-based architect specializing in corporate buildings.) The company initially expected to fill the facility gradually, leasing what it didn’t use, although in the end it occupied the entire structure.

The project had to create a strong identity for Endesa on a limited budget (the total cost, according to La-Hoz, was $81.6 million). This required, for example, the use of standard components for the facades to partially compensate for the extra expenditure of the atrium. The building is the first in a line of commercial offices that occupy a narrow strip of land between a railroad cut and the M-40, a major ring highway. The design had to contend with isolation, noise, and pollution.

KPF, which has designed several atrium-centered projects in the colder climates of northern Europe, and La-Hoz divided the office floor area into two continuous blocks embracing the atrium. These are concrete structures with modular plans and floor plates over 50 feet deep. Open offices predominate, lit by continuous floor-to-ceiling windows. The layering of the facades, and the shadows they cast, further enlivens the indoors. The facades vary according to the exposure, with fixed aluminum brise-soleils on southern elevations of the comb-shaped block that faces away from the highway, with its northern corners marked by crisp folded planes of white Córdoba limestone.

The dramatic atrium changes its mood with the shifting of roof louvers and the moving clouds and sun. Despite this grand public gesture, the atrium feels oversized at ground level, and it lacks the hoped-for buzz of activity. Security measures keep the general public out—as would the isolation of the site to pedestrian traffic in any case—and the café tables and landscaping the architects envisioned have failed to materialize. The atrium feels more like a religious cloister, an inward-looking space of retreat and meditation, than one of southern Spain’s livable residential patios. Replacing the dedication of religious life for the industry of enterprise, could there be a more thoroughly European interpretation of the American corporate campus than this?

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Formal name of Project:
Endesa Headquarters

Location:
Madrid, Spain

Gross square footage:
972,505 sq. ft.

Owner:
Endesa S.A.
Mr. Jesus Sanz (Patrimonio y Servicios, Direccion General de Servicios)
Ribera del Loira, 60
28042 Madrid, Spain
Tel : 0034 91 566 8798
Fax : 0034 91 566 8973
E-Mail : jesanz@endesa.es

Architect:
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (International)PA
13 Langley Street
London, WC2H 9JG
UK
Tel: 0044 207 836 6668
Fax: 0044 207 497 1175
E-Mail: info@kpf.com
www.kpf.com