Directorate of Documentation and Archive Services

Around the presidential palace, this new construction for a documentation centre is designed with a series of terraces, a kind of gardened platforms which are articulated through a large patio. There is a strong feeling of earth as a contained mass, from which the vegetation and trees sprout. Seen from the outside, the place is delicate and small in scale. Its quality has more to do with the open spaces around it: terraces, loggias, verandas and green spaces. When one enters, one immediately has a sense of the clear assumption of the palatial scale and purpose. The verticality of the rooms gives them an unexpected elegance. The intervention introduces one more earth platform that is built in a more complex and sophisticated way than already in existence. The new structure assumes its secondary role in relation to the first palace in the nation but also confers representative dignity.