Javier Agustín Rojas

OBJETIVO

Florida Building is more than a parking building, it is a structure that enables spaces and takes the opportunity to understand its strategic location in an intense urban environment. Internally and externally, the project aims to transcend what is normally understood as space for the car. Its dimensions and finishes, a delicate appearance to its structure and the subtle relationship to the surroundings allowed by its translucent facade, contribute to a more complex, hybrid and friendly city for all.
Materially, the Florida Building was conceived entirely as a detailed system of prefabricated and assembled parts. The prefabricated structure, composed of 140 pillars, 1,050 beams and tensioners and more than 30,000 joints, bolts and lamps, was produced in China and shipped to Uruguay. The on-site assembly of all the structural components together with the opaque precast facades of GRC (Reinforced Concrete with Glass) and steel deck slabs took only a few months of construction.

CONTEXTO

Florida Building belongs to the urban surroundings of Plaza Independencia, one of the most emblematic spaces of the city of Montevideo, in Uruguay, where the seat of the government and the financial, cultural and historical center of the city is located. The area is undergoing an intense urban transformation with several medium-scale architecture endeavors that range from office buildings and housing to public facilities and urban infrastructures. Consequently, it is a place with an increasing dispute for parking spaces.
The project takes this scenario as a starting point to build an adaptable and as-neutral-as-possible infrastructure building that gives a solution to the particular needs of the area in these particular times —parking spaces— while leaving space for a complete transformation of its use in a future without cars.