Inditex comes up with new building to improve head office in Arteixo

12 Mar '21

4 min read

Pic: Inditex

Inditex has built a new building at its head office in Arteixo (A Coruña, Spain) which will house the new zara.com studios and the Zara Man central design department. The exercise is part of a total investment of €130 million to improve Inditex’s head office complex. The building features the latest developments in sustainability and technology.

The building will be inaugurated on March 17. Inditex’s executive chairman, Pablo Isla, highlights the importance of the new building as “representing the best visual example of the company’s strategic transformation, due to its investment in store and online integration technology and advanced sustainability systems”.

Spanning square metres 67,000 and with a height of 28 metres, the building stands out for the 720 high-energy-efficiency glass modules that clad the entire façade, intertwined with structural pillars made from aluminium. The modules allow the interior to be flooded with natural light.

The use of innovative engineering solutions, whereby all the structural weight runs through the external supports, paves the way for spacious and diaphanous interior work areas. Modular solutions will enable a highly flexible configuration of the new studios, enlarging or shrinking them as required. All of the interiors are open-plan and are articulated around a central agora, or open space, designed to provide a meeting point and area for relaxation, exchange of ideas and innovation that characterise the other recent expansions of the Arteixo head offices, which were designed by the same team of architects, Batlle i Roig, who have also worked with Inditex on the headquarters for Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti and Stradivarius.

The building is equipped with the latest connectivity solutions -WiFi 6 and 5G -, which facilitates the use of innovative technology such as double-sided LED screens allowing users to project on them wirelessly through the local Wifi connection.

The ground floor and the first floor will be occupied by Zara Man's central design department and will provide room for an extensive pattern design area and extended showrooms. The pattern design area is an essential part of the designers' creative process - the designers work constantly with the pattern experts to create samples and prototypes which, following input from all the members of the product department, are destined for the new collections that arrive in store and on customers' devices. All those samples are displayed in the showrooms, where the upcoming collections are presented, debated and coordinated.

The second and third floors will accommodate the large, multidisciplinary Zara.com team: from the image professionals who work with the designers on the best way to present Zara's collections each season to the team of engineers and programmers who tirelessly service the needs of the integrated store and online platform. The latter do so enabled by the proprietary digital architecture known as the Inditex Open Platform (IOP), developed in-house, which services each phase of Inditex's business model. Thanks to modular solutions that are being added to the general architecture, the IOP responds to customers' needs in real time.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the new building is its sustainability credentials. The building was designed using bioclimatic parameters and environmentally-friendly materials and is equipped with high-efficiency installations. It complies with the stringent requirements of the sustainable building benchmark US Green Building Council (USGBC) –and hopes to achieve its highest certification, LEED Platinum.

The building as a whole represents conservation and efficient use of resources. The roof is fitted with 554 photovoltaic panels which, together with the 2,826 panels installed in the outdoor car park, supply half of the building's electricity. All the building’s energy comes from renewable sources. It also reuses rainwater for watering and sanitation thanks to a subterranean tank. The façade's design, with its high-performance glass modules and light-coloured finishes, also replicated on the roof, delivers energy savings of 22 per cent with respect to the USGBC threshold.

The systems, managed centrally from a monitoring room, also play an essential role in energy efficiency and water consumption. The materials used comply with Inditex's environmental and circularity commitments. The pre-fabricated structure was made from recycled materials; the interior finishes are low in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), so helping improve indoor air quality, and the furniture and fittings come with environmental product certification (EDP); specifically, the timber fittings have FSC certification.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (SV)

More Inditex News... More Retail News - Spain...