Showroom Ofimodul 

Project name: Showroom Ofimodul.
Architects: S-AR + Armando Cantú
www.s-ar.mx
Associated Architect: Armando Cantú (Savvy Studio, www.savvy-studio.net)
Location: Monterrey, México
Architects in charge: César Guerrero, Armando Cantú, Ana Cecilia Garza, Carlos Flores, María Sevilla.
Programme: Showroom and design room for furniture.
Client: Ofimodul S. A. de C. V.
Size of the project : 272 m2. 
Project year: 2008
Construction: 2008 - 2009
Materials: Concrete, Steel and Glass.
Photographs: Eduardo Hernández

The Project is a small showroom and the design center for a company specialized in office furniture.  The site of the project is inside a terrain of commercial use where the furniture is manufactured for the Ofimodul Company in Monterrey N.L., Mexico.

In this space both the first and the last steps of the manufacturing process of the furniture should be unified: the design stage as well as their exhibition and sale.

It was chosen to make an intervention that will put in manifest each program of the building, making a constructive operation that transcends the site’s structure, composed by one side of the manufacture building (factory) and by the other a loading and parking area for trucks, both already existing in the terrain.

So the building is formed by two parts, one heading to the front yard of the terrain and the other that is embedded in the factory.  Each part is separated one from the other by a different ground level and by a basic services core.  The exterior part of the building was built over a former parking lot, as a condition that the same program will be respected in the intervention.  This way the volume rise over the vehicles of directives and clients and its connected with the interior part of the building, built over a former storage space of the factory that is now used for the design and monitoring of what takes place inside the warehouse were the furniture is manufactured, so it requires a high degree of acoustic insulation between both activities.

This way half the interior part of the building (inside the manufacture area) is closed and opaque meanwhile the other half in the exterior (front yard) is open and almost transparent, because is there where the access and exhibition zone of the finished furniture takes place, making its function of a big shelter.

A wall of concrete and metal column serve as a mainstay of the building, across a flat slab structure that determine the mezzanine and the roof. The mezzanine floor slab is perforated to generate the access side a metal ladder which shows the structural strain of the slab and supporting wall.

The finishes of the building are as simple as possible and consistent with the capacity building and the industrial tradition of this city in northern Mexico: concrete, steel and glass. Concrete for the main building structure, finish apparent in walls and slabs for floors and polished interiors. Steel forges bearing coatings and window, details such as doors, railings and stairs, the structural element in a column. Glass transparent to generate the identity of the building, following the logic of its function. The materiality of the project is bound to the importance of companies located in this part of the country, whose main products are just concrete, steel and glass. The blacksmith made directly in the workshops of the company manufacturing office furniture, try to also recognize the labor of it as an integral part of the proposal.