FM Industrial Warehouse / Emilio Alvarez Abouchard Arquitectura

Text description provided by the architects. The FM warehouse is an industrial facility adjacent to an existing steel foundry meant to grow in space. The building was designed according to what we consider the most important characteristics site-wise: its location next to the existing construction and its access from two streets (north and south). The street on the south is a commercial corridor for the city of Morelia, due to its importance, we decided to emplace the warehouse facing the north part of the site, in order to eventually design another type of building facing the main street. An open-air lane is placed on the west side of the terrain in order to take distance from the neighbour. The north-south lane material is a concrete cobblestone pavement that lets the rainwater drain into the earth.

We designed a steel structure made out of steel IPR beams for columns and boyd beams for the ceiling. The structural system repeats every 6 meters for 6 times. The first two sections are divided into two floors with a corrugated steel floor decking and they house the parking on the street level and offices on the second floor. The other double-height sections are considered as open spaces for working and/or storage. These 6-meter sections allow us to grow the facility towards the south side of the site if needed. 

Very few materials were needed to arrange this space and we used the same metal panels for walls and ceiling systems. We consider the structure is everything so we chose the corporative orange colour for the whole metal structure system. With this decision, we aim to praise the material that the foundry works with, and its identity and trajectory of more than 40 years of work.