Special brew: reusing existing buildings makes good environmental sense. In Madrid, this redundant brewery has been converted into a regional archive and library.

By its very nature, the reuse of historic buildings is an act of environmental awareness, calculated to conserve materials, energy and land compared with a new structure. In densely populated European cities, with their large legacies of old or redundant building stock, the potential for reuse is particularly fertile, but it often requires a leap of political and architectural imagination to coax life back into individual buildings and urban areas.

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In Madrid, the Arganzuela district is undergoing a gradual renewal, in a now familiar pattern of a former industrial district close to the city centre gentrified through residential and commercial development. Key to this process has been finding a new use for the EI Aguila brewery, a heroically scaled industrial complex lying close to the Atocha station in the south-east part of the city. In the mid '90s, the site was the subject of a competition to house an arts and cultural centre that would extend the Prado Museum axis southwards, but this foundered and the programme was redefined to become the city's regional archive and library, eventually executed by the local Madrileno partnership of Mansilla & Tunon.

Occupying an entire city block and dominated by a cluster of twelve monumental metal silos, EI Aguila dates from 1912, when its offices, malthouse, brewery and cellar were erected, built of brick in the Neo-Mudejar (Moorish) style. A refrigeration plant was added in 1925, followed eight years later by the barley storage silos, which in their soaring scale and stark geometry have become familiar urban landmarks. The new centre encompasses a 30 000 sq m archive, for the preservation and storage of books, records and documents relating to all aspects of civic history, and a 10 000 sq m library for their consultation and study by the public.

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Within this self-contained industrial campus, Mansilla & Tunon have sought to tactfully renovate the existing buildings and add a series of new pieces to the jigsaw. With their tautly detailed skins of white concrete, aluminium louvres and translucent glass, the new orthogonal volumes are legibly contemporary additions that take their formal and material cues from the industrial functionalism of the silo cluster rather than the more robust, ornamented brick structures of the earlier era. In some ways they resemble modern factory buildings, being impassive, neutral containers for the efficient processing of a commodity (in this case, knowledge). Individually they might seem elegantly understated (an inevitable hallmark of architects who graduated from Rafael Moneo's office), but this project is not about singular gestures, more about how the complex is read and experienced as a whole and the resonance generated between new and old. A six-storey archive on the eastern edge of the site is the largest intervention, linked at right angles to a smaller volume housing workshops for document restoration and preservation. With 85 000 linear metres of bookstacks, the archive is essentially a big, simple giant of a building, its facade of vertical strips of translucent glass evoking the hypnotic repetitiousness of an Andreas Gursky photograph. Inside, all is climate controlled calm, but perimeter access spines are colour coded according to floor, thus assisting user orientation. Now remodelled as offices and a reading room, the old brewing hall in the centre of the site forms the third element in the triumvirate of archive buildings.

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The regional library occupies the west side, and with the exception of a small technical processing building, makes inventive and sympathetic use of existing structures. Reading rooms are inserted into the old malthouse, its paraphernalia of brewing--vats, cylinders, hoppers and the like--retained as a slightly surreal backdrop and reminder of the complex's original function. Protected by a metal canopy, the reading room entrance is located under a former loading bay, leading to a dramatic triple-height foyer lined with the same panels of translucent glass used on the exterior of the main archive building. The silo cluster now houses the book deposit, its hermetic volume adapting readily to its new role.

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On the south-west corner, the block containing the brewery offices has been converted to become the library's legal deposit, where newly published books are received and catalogued. Drawing expressive power from the contrasts between history and modernity, the west side is more heterogeneous, alluding to the brewery's accretional development. The west street frontage reads as a diverse conflation of styles and eras (silos, brick malthouse and two new volumes), but each part is clearly distinguished in its own right as well being a varied and vital urban landscape.

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On the south side, a low wall wraps around the site embracing a new single-storey cafeteria overlooking a minimally landscaped entrance courtyard. The courtyard is enclosed by the archive reading room to the north and an exhibition space and lecture theatre to the east, carved into the former refrigeration plant on the south-east corner. Throughout the site, courtyards and external spaces frame views, assist navigation and encourage dialogue between existing and new elements. Elevated walkways connect the network of buildings and help rationalize circulation.

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Executed with great sensitivity to both past and present, Mansilla & Tunon's thoughtful transformation of EI Aguila gives an industrial monument an invigorating new lease of life and shows what can be achieved with an apparently difficult and disconnected set of buildings. It also seems especially appropriate that a complex devoted to documenting the history of a particular place should itself be part of that history. CARLA BERTOLUCCI

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Architect

Mansilla & Tunon, Madrid

Project team

Emilio Tunon, Luis Moreno Mansilla, A. Prats, M. Peralta, O. Fernandez-Aguayo, J. Gimeno, A. Regueiro, S. Hernan, J. C. Corona, F. Garcia-Pino, M. Linares, D. Nadal, R. Reininger

Engineering consultants

J. G. Asociados, Alfonso Gomez Gaite

Graphic design

Grafica Futura

Furniture

Fritz Hansen

Lighting

Louis Poulsen

Photographs

Roland Halbe

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ARCHIVE AND LIBRARY, MADRID, SPAIN