Escuela Nacional para la Calidad del café / Julián Larrotta + Carlos Andrés Montaño

Architects: Julián Larrotta + Carlos Andrés Montaño
Location: Armenia, Quindio, Colombia
Promoter: SENA-regional Quindío – Centro para el desarrollo Tecnológico de la Construcción y la Industria.
Collaborators: Equipo de proyectos del CDTCI-SENA, Aprendices de Desarrollo Grafico del CDTCI.
Area: 1200.0 m2
Year Of Project: 2015
Pictures: Visualbit

Text description provided by the architects. The Project is conceived as an institutional policy with the aim of promoting the development of the coffee sector throughout formative actions that allow us to produce and market a high quality product.

The building counts on: classrooms, qualified laboratories, cupping, roasting and threshing rooms, and an auditory available for an audience of 200 people; all of these rooms are set in a 1200m2 edification, located on a plot of land with an elongated morphology in the middle of a wooded relict, in which you can enter by a little square.

The program has been developed within a two level rectangular base volume linked by a big ramp in the second floor. Additionally, a central hall and double heights manage the different spaces that the building has so that all the classrooms and labs keep a direct relation with the landscape around them.

The construction orientation, crossed ventilation, the rainwater harvesting, and the use of solar control devises foster the efficiency in energy consumption. Also, plinths, eaves, halls and roofs reinterpret the local architectonic language of the Coffee Cultural Landscape throughout spaces brought to the present in a new image that redefines a young, dynamic, productive, and high qualified coffee culture with great ambition and innovation.