Zonas de Caracas

JAC

The history of this cleaning and personal care products manufacturer starts in 1947, when the famous Ace detergent 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 development 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 construction, 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).