Youth Center by MI5 Arquitectos

The building owes its strange appearance to the fact that the architects, responsible for the project, worked with some of the local youth.

From MI 5 Arquitectos:

From the beginning, the project was conceived as the possibility of making the “underground” visible, a construction devised as a radical manifestation of Madrid’s outskirts youthful spirit in general, and of Rivas’ youth groups in particular.

The project aspires to become an explicit “teen” communication vehicle by appropriating their language and their voices as the ingredients of the project. In this way the project’s team embraces all Rivas’s youth groups by means of an open participation process, in which the future users of the centre, combined with technicians and polititians, will contribute their decisions, their concerns, their fantasies and their aesthetics to create a contemporary “social monument”.

The end result of this process is a public structure with a punk spirit, intensely burdened with content and articulated around programmatic centres conceived as activity explosions, which are erected as meeting and exchange points of the emerging communities.