BILBAO POLICE DEPARTMENTFIRE TRAINING DEPARTMENT

AND SOCIAL MATTERS DEPARTMENT HEADQUARTERS

The modern, 15,000 sq. m. building, with groundbreaking design throughout its exceptional infrastructure, house the headquarters for Public Security and Civil Protection.

This last edifice is work of Juan COLL-BARREAU architectural firm, also responsible for the design of the Basque Health Service Building in the Ensanche district of Bilbao.

The complex is comprised of two interconnected buildings, the Department of Public Security building, with an irregular glass façade, and the austere rectilinear Civil Protection building, both connected to one another by an overhead walkway.

The most notable element of this complex will be the construction of a

50 m high training tower.

Thanks to its strategic location, it is visible from many points to the City,

including from the A-8 and A-68 motoways. The facilities

also boast a training tower and a smoke room.

Memory Extract

From the site Bilbao’s dense urban length is visible, squeezed on the narrow and deep banks of the river Nervión. Also visible is the green landscape, with water and vertical slopes that confine the city and compress it against the estuary.

Biscayan’s rainy atmosphere seems to lie dormant on the site. The land, the nearby hills, the city in front and below, the mountains from the opposite bank and even the moist air come together in an almost complete continuity, as if they were the same subject.

The soil itself is unstable. It is uncertain. It is the result of having quickly filled an open mine, with pits up to 50 m deep, which formed a cavernous place in its physical reality and its memory.

Upstream, other mine sites have been transformed, also visible from the site, which confirm the history of this exchange between matter and soil, the life of the city and that of men, the densification of the territory and the air.

Above this vacillating place, buildings do not have any mass. Folded aluminum sheets acquire enough inertia to be supported in the air.

To the North, Public Safety’s concatenated planes are perceived from distant areas and set up a close relationship with the steep topography of the slope.

To the South, the Civil Protection areas are emptied towards the valley. Like the old fire stations, they take the public presence of the building to a new and large urban area.

In these buildings, there is still a reference to some industrial constructions, those building-machines or process decanters that have transformed the history of the city and set off the lives of its people. Probably, both programs could be interchangeable through their high umbilical cord.