25-09-2020

The new headquarters of the Boa Mistura collective in Madrid

Estuyo Studio, Boa Mistura, Imaginean,

Javier de Paz García,

Madrid,

Headquarters,

Refurbishment, Interior Design,

Located in the Puente de Vallecas district, near Madrid’s M-30 ring road, the new headquarters of the famous creative collective of artists, Boa Mistura occupies the ground floor of a 1960s building. A project completed with the professionals from Estuyo Studio and Imaginean.



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The new headquarters of the Boa Mistura collective in Madrid Livegreenblog’s regular readers are fully acquainted with the Madrid-based collective Boa Mistura. We’ve been keeping track of the multidisciplinary team rooted in graffiti art for a long time as they use their work as a tool to transform cities around the world and to create links between people. They use Street Art as a tool for social change.
They’ve been working together since 2001, and the time has come to expand their horizons and embrace new headquarters where they can meet up and work in their hometown.
Of course, their choice fell to an unusual location, without moving out of their district. They discovered a former car repair shop near Madrid’s M-30 ring road, in the part of the Puente de Vallecas district closest to the city centre and which has always been a working-class neighbourhood. Bordered by train tracks, the motorway and the Manzanares river, Vallecas has a long and troubled history, from the civil war to the ETA attacks in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
They split the old car repair shop lengthwise to divide it into two separate areas (an office and a storage area) that converge at the back of the premises into a new workshop. Each of the two parts has specific spatial sequences, gradually transitioning from public to private to end in the workshop and real heart of the activity of Boa Mistura.
The artists from Boa Mistura approached Estuyo Studio, founded by Jaime Yndurain, who worked with the interdisciplinary team from Imaginean to revamp the old car repair shop and convert it into the collective’s new headquarters. Estuyo Studio has been designing and refurbishing buildings for ten years. The design team looked at the old building as if it were a rough diamond that needed polish. They focused in particular on the wellbeing of the creatives and on the energy consumption and lifecycle of the building and its component parts, to reuse and/or recycle them in a circular economy system. This led to the solutions that explore the interaction between smart technology and traditional artisan work in this structure with 4 to 6-metre high walls. The installation of an aerothermal radiant and cooling floor gives the artists all the comfort they need. The rest of the construction materials were left exposed, giving it all a kind of rough, industrial feel. The vestiges of the previous life of the premises were retained, and the space was simply adapted with partition walls made from concrete and ceramic blocks. The new wood and metal carpentry and hardware were left with their natural finishes.
The result is a new headquarters that reflects the multidisciplinary soul of the Boa Mistura collective and still remains faithful to the Puente de Vallecas neighbourhood, where the presence of a creative hotbed like theirs sends an important message to citizens. This is a demonstration of the respect and affection for a part of the city that many people do not know and which, not least because of the decision not to move to a more central destination, stands out on Madrid’s creative map

Christiane Bürklein

Project: Estuyo Studio with Imaginean
Location: Madrid, Spain
Year: 2020
Photographer: Javier de Paz Garcia

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