Viva Store by Roca + Paz

Matylda Krzykowski

1 December 2008

13 comments

Viva Store is a conversion by Bolivian architects Roca + Paz in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

The rebuild, completed last year, involved wrapping a new curving "cover" around the L-shaped building.

The “cover” is animated by changing light patterns at night.

The following is by Roca + Paz estudio:

Viva Store by Roca + Paz estudio

Santo Domingo City is the capital of Dominican Republic. It is a cosmopolitan, thriving city, marked by an impressive population growth, and massive constructions within its limits.

The project is located on a boulevard called “El Boulevard de la Churchill”, in a dynamic commercial area, at a corner of a main avenue, with date palms on the sidewalks, and wide routes.

Besides being the area of most consumption, it is over-stimulated by advertising signs, changing its urban landscape.

The project based on these urban conditions, generates a project with visual impact creating new human situations of interaction inside-outside the building-city.

The request was to renovate the building for a new company.

The demolition was excluded because of town-planning and legal considerations, for this reason we started working in the structure, where the main columns of the original edification were kept.

The interior structure of the columns permits us work with the crystal baseboard element, generating a continue front in its entire perimeter causing a direct communication between the activities and the public.

The movement of the crystal is according to the function performed in the inside.

It opens at the entrance creating a hall space and reception enclosed by the movement of walls and ceiling, taking the public in to free-flowing tour unifying all the different areas. In the exterior of the building the public parking lot is suitable for eventual big public events.

The flooring and the gardens are set in a way that lead people towards the entrance.

The generation of the tape or “cover” that surrounds the infrastructure marks a strong horizontal development, going with the plot proportion.

According to the line of sight, the major impact point is the affluence of pedestrians and vehicles, which produces a vertically expansion of the “cover”, generating a graphic space and giving more importance to the entrance at this point.

In the middle the “cover” flows and forms a curve; stretching in a determined point at the corner forming a tension till ending at level +/- 0.00.

The “cover” is used as a transmission device giving the language and information a new meaning which defines reactions, answers, and raises a dynamic and changing relation, able to show figures and animated lines based in digital patterns of light and color.

The proposal shows without losing or confusing a series of mutual relations, incorporating convenient urban data reaching to a clear and strong urban contribution.