Dezeen Magazine

Youth centre by Mi5 Arquitectos

Spanish studio Mi5 Arquitectos have completed a youth centre with a star-shaped interior on the outskirts of Madrid.

Called New Youth Centre in Rivas Guzman, the single-storey building features faceted interior surfaces in clashing colours.

A room with a star-shaped plan at one corner of the building was designed to represent an explosion of activity within.

This theme is continued to the outside of the building, where surfaces are bright purple and orange with star-shaped metal railings.

Photographs are by Miguel de Guzman.

The following information is from Mi5:

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NEW YOUTH CENTER IN RIVAS VACIAMADRID

From the beginning, the project was conceived as the possibility of making the “underground” visible, a construction devised as a radical manifestation of Madrid’s outskirts youthful spirit in general, and of Rivas´ youth groups in particular.

The project aspires to become an explicit “teen” communication vehicle by appropriating their language and their voices as the ingredients of the project.

In this way, the project’s team embraces all Rivas’s youth groups by means of an open participation process, in which the future users of the centre, combined with technicians and politicians, will contribute their decisions, their concerns, their fantasies and their aesthetics to create a contemporary “social monument”.

The end result of this process is a public structure with a punk spirit, intensely burdened with content and articulated around programmatic centres conceived as activity explosions, which are erected as meeting and exchange points of the emerging communities.