Zonas de Caracas

JAC

The history of this cleaning and personal care products manufacturer starts in 1947, when the famous Ace deter-gent is brought to the Venezuelan market. In 1950, The Procter & Gamble Company creates its first subsidiary in Venezuela. After 40 years in the market, this multinational enterprise decides to summon a private contest to determine the builder of its headquarters in 1991, which were envisioned as a center for research and develop-ment of products for Latin America. The project from the Díquez, González and Rivas firm won this contest. This peculiar building is inserted in an important road intersection, occupying a lot of land in an important corner, and therefore stressing the symbolic feature of architecture and the idea of city-building. Conceived under a solid and coherent language, this structure, like many others in its authors’ work, stands out for its use of brick, inset windows, a magnificent covered concourse, pergolas in the terraces, and the spatial integration between the different environments and roof lighting. This building can be seen as a powerful parallelepiped emerging with other geometric solids, generating a sensation of full and hollow spaces; of mass and transparency. Being directly related to the Atrium building (1988), this structure replicates the atrium of the formerly mentioned construc-tion, but with a greater display of geometric purity on a larger scale. The parallelepiped shape that its corporate image conveys is completed by space frame trusses that are supported at each corner, which gives the idea of a great portico building. The ground floor incorporates a plastic metallic enclosing that is the work of the artist Rafael Ba­rrios (1947).