Madrid-based multidisciplinary architecture firm Murado & Elvira Architects has converted an old 17th Century hospital into a "punched" wooden library to create a sense of "coziness" and "domestic" environment within the old city fabric.

Called Baiona Public Library, the interior of the library is entirely covered by wood material to give the readers a feeling of warmness, like a "wooden dress", tailor-made for the ancient building. Furnitures, shelves, seating platforms or angular windows are all embedded to the whole wooden surfaces and become a part of the interior and reading act. 

The inner courtyard, with the statue of Santiago Apostle, provides plenty of spaces where to seat and convene when there are gatherings, workshops or other outdoor activities. Image © Imagen Subliminal

The 1,077-square-metre space is located at the heart of Baiona in Spain and creates an intimate atmosphere with its natural interiors. Murado & Elvira Architects won a competition to transform the old Sancti Spiritus Hospital into a Public Library and Historic Archive in 2010. 

"The city of Baiona, located on the west coast of Spain, is located along the Camino de Santiago and is visited every year by thousands of pilgrims. In addition, the Baiona Historic Archive is one of the most relevant in the area, preserving documents dating back to the discovery of Americas," said the architects in a press release.

"Baiona was in fact the port where La Pinta, one of the three caravels led by Christopher Columbus towards the New World, arrived on its way back in 1493."

The curved wooden walls of the children’s library integrate the shelving and some openings to hidden spaces behind, such as a wardrobe and a puppet theater. Image © Imagen Subliminal

"Accommodated within the former Sancti Spiritus Hospital, an existing structurebuilt in the 17th century behind the ex-collegiate church of Santa María, the Baiona Public Library is a two-level building embedded in the sloped historic city center with a garden and an inner courtyard. The building is listed, protected as a Bien deInterés Cultural (BIC), continued the studio.

"Despite its status, it has suffered major alterations in thecourse of the centuries, some affecting the patio and garden, that had come to lose their significance; others heavily modifying the interiors, that due to an intervention occured in the 1970s were obliterated and deformed."

Perimetral rooms embracing the main reading room. Image © Imagen Subliminal

The architects' aim was to restore the building carefully and elegantly, to have desirable role of the outdoor spaces and redefine the historical identity of the building through the careful design of a succession of rooms in which to host its new public functions.

"When we first visited the old building we felt the need for our project to create a new interior identity, connecting and giving continuity to the old structures," said Clara Murado and Juan Elvira.

Inner façades are cut out creating a distinctive identity to the space. Image © Imagen Subliminal

By questioning the historicity the building, the architects created a spacial sequence that guides visitors from the open spaces of the urban fabric to the most intimate condition offered by the reading rooms. 

On the ground floor, a large hallway transverses the building like an indoor street that leads to the patio and the garden. It is a real introduction to the new nature of the building, an immediate and unexpected overview of time that passes through it. This main axis is marked by a thick stone wall, reminiscent of the old granite structure, that gathers archeological pieces from the original building, bonding memories and heritage to the new function of the building.

View from one of the perimetral spaces facing the main reading room. Image © Imagen Subliminal

The solid and materic wall structure is counterbalanced by the soft and warm appearance of the wooden box containing the Historic Archive and all the service rooms to the right of the entrance path. The building thus immediately reveals its dual nature and its ability to reaffirm its vocation for welcoming visitors.

To the other side, opening towards the courtyard, is the children’s library, with a distinctive irregular shape that gives it a playful identity. Murado & Elvira used the asymmetric perimeter of the building to their advantage in order to design what may be the most characteristic room of the complex. Its position allows sunlight to come in, while giving to the kids a quiet and safe place to play inside. Textile floors offer a comfortable surface to sit on while some folding surfaces, made of the same material, give shape to inclined planes to recline upon.

Linear shelving and skylight in the South corridor. Image © Imagen Subliminal

Similarly to the Historic Archive, rooms are completely wrapped in warm maple wood: the architects used curved wooden walls to integrate shelvings and some openings to hidden spaces behind, such as a wardrobe and a puppet theatre.

Three stairs connect the ground to the upper floor, where the main reading room
is located: two outdoor stairs in the courtyard, one indoor stair directly accessible from the inner accessway. Encircling the patio, this open space, where the wooden inner envelope is celebrated, is composed of a series of interstitial rooms, individual study alcoves, bathrooms, offices and bench reading rooms. 

Wooden interiors seen from the patio. Image © Imagen Subliminal

A double maple wooden skin embraces this space completely, from the floor to the vertical walls. The same maple wood has been used also for the ceiling in a triangulated surface that, whiledescribing an ever-changing volume, adapts to the structure and to the dimensionalneeds of the mechanical systems. All around the reading room windows open up to the garden, surrounding the North and East sides of the facility. The garden is accessible from the main entrance through a hallway.

Main access door to the reading room. Image © Imagen Subliminal

A warm and articulated architectural space

The architects explain why they used wooden surfaces throughout the building. The warm and light-colored maple wood surfaces that cover progressively the innersurfaces of the architectural body, as with an epithelial tissue that can protect but also transmit emotions, convey a sense of domesticity and coziness to the spaces. They create a continuum among the various rooms of the complex, thus overturning the more conventional design strategy of providing a building with a unitary external skin. 

This inner envelope emerges as the most distinctive characteristic of the library designed by Murado & Elvira Architects. While from the outside the Sancti Spiritus Hospital seems to have apparently remained untouched by their renovationproject, when stepping inside one is immersed in an unexpected and surprising environment. This new skin rejuvenates the building, which is for the most part mono-material, without erasing its history, making the Sancti Spiritus Hospital aplace where everyone can find his own spot, a pilgrimage center for citizens and tourists.

Flared window connecting the geometries of the interior and the exterior façades. Image © Imagen Subliminal

"The building could be understood as a solid stone plinth and a wooden fitment on top of it. The library becomes a furniture to be inhabited. We always had in mind the studio of Saint Jerome in Antonello da Messina’s painting where the whole studio seems to be built around the book," affirm the architects.

Emblematic in this sense is the ground floor, where the contrast between the maple wood and the grey of the granite stone welcomes users into a space where the past merges into the present. The archaeological finds embedded in the stones recall memories of the ancient Sancti Spiritus Hospital and are confronted with the wooden box of the Historic Archive, where the heritage is now preserved.

Accessing from the main hallway, the door to the children’s library is a pivoting shelf, a secret door that is invisible from the interior when closed. Image © Hector Santos-Diez

On the upper floor, instead, where the spatial organization recalls the historical sequence of rooms, the wooden surfaces envelope the spaces completely, from floor to ceiling, conveying a surprising condition of warmth. Here, a double maple wooden skin envelopes the entire floor, opening a concentric functional band composed by a series of interstitial rooms: individual studies, bathrooms, offices and bench reading rooms.

"The intention was to leave the reading room as open as possible. We placed all the ancillary spaces in the perimeter, in a double functional band. The thickness of this second skin is visible in these spaces and also in the ceiling, through the skylights that reveal the actual depth of the envelope," said Juan Elvira, co-founder of Murado & Elvira Architects.

View of the main reading room from one of the perimetral spaces. Image © Hector Santos-Diez

The scale of the reading room oscillates between the affective and domestic condition of the furniture and the grandness of the big ark embracing individuals and things. The design solution adopted for the interiors contributes to making spaces homogeneous yet, at the same time, immediately recognizable. 

The resulting environment is both graphic and spatial. Inner facades are cut out and the cut-outsbecome tables, whose shapes and materiality define a continuum between the scale of the building and that of the furniture, without apparent distinction. 

Individual study booths. Image © Hector Santos-Diez 

"While on the ground floor artificial lighting is organized in a linear way, following the steps through the hallway, rounded skylights and clusters of lamps form constellations in the reading room on the upper floor," said Clara Murado, co-founder of Murado & Elvira Architects.

South corridor. Image © Hector Santos-Diez

Murado & Elvira also designed the wayfinding signage and the logo for the Baiona library. The wooden surfaces are cut and engraved with a similar technique to the one used to extract the furniture directly from the walls. 

They also designed unique pieces, such as the lamps for the garden, conceived as curious devices to be used byboth humans and non-humans, with a fountain, a plate for birds to drink water fromand a mirror.

Ground level plan. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Upper level plan. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Section-1. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Section-2. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Elevations. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Axonometric. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Table design. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Table design. Image © Murado & Elvira Architects

Project facts

Name of the project: Baiona Public Library

Location: Baiona, Pontevedra, Spain

Client: Municipality of Baiona

Program: Public Library and Historic Archive

Architects: Murado & Elvira Architects

Project and site management, supervision during construction: 

Clara Murado and Juan Elvira (Murado & Elvira Architects) 

Óscar López Alba (OLA Arquitectos)

Manuel Cuquejo (technical architect)

Team

Eugenia Concha, Marta Colón de Carvajal (competition phase)
Cristina Gutiérrez Chevalier, Francesco Martone (design development phase)

Project size

Total floor area: 1.076,5 square meters
- ground floor area: 518,91 square meters - upper floor area : 557,59 square meters

Total site area: 1.464 square meters

Consultants

Technical systems engineering: Obradoiro Enxeñeiros

Structural engineering: Ezequiel Fernández Grinda

Contractor: Orega Coviastec

Top image: Main reading room on first floor. Image © Imagen Subliminal

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