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This Dental Clinic is located in Orlândia, SP. As we can see, there isn’t traffic on the streets in such a small city. Despite this, the corner, where the building is located, has some flow of cars and people; it has some visibility to the pattern of a calm place.
This dental clinic was intended to attend children, so we could design this building more opened to the external and public space. Then we could unmake the wall line that defines all those little private property called lots. Although the building location marks clearly the square’s corner, the wall that usually encloses the lots doesn’t exist there anymore.
There are two main activities in this building: a dental clinic for children and a dental prosthetic device.
They are disposed in two different levels, but we kept the natural ground level exactly in the middle height between them. Therefore, coming from the street, we can go upstairs, just a very short distance, to arrive in the clinic. On the other hand, we can go downstairs a short distance to arrive in prosthetic laboratory. An internal staircase directly connects both.
The cross section shows how we made the vertical distances as short as possible. The upper level floor was made with a slab without beams, which has 15 cm of thickness.
By this way, the three levels results very near one each other. With this arrangement of the levels, the building has the same height those neighborhood’s houses, single level houses.
The upper level floor shows the arrangement of a typical dental clinic, this is the area allow to the public access. There are two parallel corridors which connects all the spaces and dentist’s rooms; the corridor in front of the street is dedicated for publi access and the other one is dedicated for internal acess only.
This picture shows the lower level that is partially underground, it is smaller than the upper level, so it became on the background when we look to the building from the street, it is protected by the shadow made by the overhang of the slab above. This level isn’t allowed to the public access, it is a laboratory to make the prosthetic devices.
Although everything is enclosing with glass (glass used like panels always without framework), we took some care to protect it from the sunlight in such a hot place. The entrance has a covered space like a verandah, the main entrance door and the glass, at the same plane, are protected from the west sun by a concrete wall. A wood “brise-soleil”, which can be moved only to cleaning and maintenance, protects the north façade.
All the glasses on the upper level are fixed. When we cast the concrete slab, we leave a piece of steel to receive the glass panels that were just placed there. This detail makes glass and concrete as an only surface.
[Alvaro Puntoni&Angelo Bucci]
Alvaro Puntoni
Angelo Bucci
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