Excerpt: PRF’s Headquarters, a refurbishment project by Impare Arquitectura, is focused mainly on spatial expansion and redesigning the facade. The ground floor was redesigned with a new auditorium space, extending the reception area and creating work and meeting rooms. The auditorium, which receives natural light through one façade, acts as a visual extension of all rooms on the floor.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] The renovation project of the headquarters building, built in 2001, was recently completed as part of a series of interventions carried out at PRF – Gas Solutions’ facilities. The work focused mainly on the ground floor, where the reception area was enlarged and visually extended into a new auditorium space. Work and meeting rooms were created, which receive natural light through one of the façades and through the auditorium, which acts as a visual extension of all the rooms on this floor.
The façades underwent the necessary changes to create the auditorium’s relationship with the outside, also optimizing the openings on the upper floor to achieve a more generous entry of natural light and relating the expression of the building extended in 2018, unifying the whole. A more fluid spatial solution was thus achieved, qualifying the reception area, and creating an auditorium that effectively participates in the adjoining spaces.
The interiors were standardized in their coverings, lighting, design and materials of the openings, giving continuity to the spaces, which were conceived in different circumstances. The auditorium, due to acoustic requirements, was given special treatment for its cladding and ceiling design.
The 2018 extension arose from the need to expand its administrative, warehouse and workshop areas, and the exterior cladding solutions proposed at that stage have now been taken up again – sheet metal and openings with a light, semi-hidden aluminum façade system – giving a clearer expression to the building’s two volumes and the relationship between “full and empty”.