Designed by Fernando Parrilla, Madrid’s Centro de Arte di Alcobendas is a new-build, multi-purpose cultural centre for the local community. It hosts exhibition and teaching rooms, a 348-seat auditorium, a media library for children and adults, audiovisual rooms, a large meeting room available to private individuals and associations, internet access and areas simply for the community to come together. The building’s mission as a place for the community to meet and exchange is fully borne out by its eye-catching architecture. Organic forms stand out against the surrounding urban fabric inviting people to enter across a canopied public square in front of the building. Multi-coloured glazed façades draw the eye to the community hub, which has been built to strict sustainability standards ensuring minimum CO2 emissions. The southeast façade has an external photovoltaic skin behind which a ventilated air space separates a double-glazed inner wall equipped with motor-actuated (SL27M) and manual (SL27C) ScreenLine® blinds. All blinds have been tailored to fit each panel profile. An encoder system governs the operable blinds, allowing the panels to be adjusted either singly or simultaneously as a group. On the northwest façade where there is no outer photovoltaic skin, a colourful series of green, yellow, red, violet and blue blinds create a graduated play of reflected coloured light on the interior. As well as affording an extraordinary aesthetic, theScreenLine® blinds turn the building into a community landmark recognizable from afar. A further advantage of the integrated ScreenLine® systems is their ability to regulate light transmittance and solar factor in the interior while in no way interfering with the hygroscopic properties of the airspace in which they are placed. As a result, sunlight into the interiors can be limited during summer and optimized in the winter, thereby helping to save on air conditioning or heating as the case may be. The blinds themselves are contained in a sealed environment and so do not come into contact with dust or atmospheric elements. Consequently the patented magnetic mechanism involved in blind working remains permanently clean with no maintenance requirements.
