Building-City: The National Post Office

Headquarters, Buenos Aires

“ … Moreover, if, according to the thinking of several philosophers, the city was a kind of enormous building; and if, contrariwise, a building was a kind of miniature city … And, why not to posit that the elements comprising a building are miniature housing units?…”
L. B. Alberti–-De Re Aedificatoria, Book 1, Chapter 9.

The project for the Headquarters building of the National Post Office envisions a superposition of a rotating series of helical volumes, providing work spaces successively open to different sections of the skies and the horizon.
An innovative eco-technological device, providing a second layer of transparent outer walls made of EFTE, ensures an efficient thermal protection of internal spaces at a very low cost.
Inside, the undulating double facades offer an uninterrupted horizontal flow, in which each variation in the vantage point triggers rich variations in the display of panoramic views.

Seen from the outside, the building appears as a diaphanous block, with partitions only hinted at, whose integrity stems not from its geometrical shape, but from the unfolding of different degrees of luminosity, encompassing a wide gamut of shades, translucent to transparent, shining to muted, brightly coloured to colourless.

Instead of appearing as an immutable mass, the Post Office Headquarters appears like a gleaming building, alive with all kinds of visual transformations, subtle or spectacular, from the inside or from the outside.

Arnoldo Rivkin, Remi Rouyer, Sébastien Rinckel, Maud Godard, Gad Benarroch (DV-lab)