Media-Tic Building

The immense suppository of the Torre Glòries may attract the lion's share of attention in Poble Nou's up and coming 22@ district, but there's another, even more innovative building that has been receiving kudos in architecture circles. The €23 million Media-Tic building is an extraordinary high-tech, super-sustainable quilted cube, so innovative and energy efficient that it was awarded several patents.

The goal was to create a building that would function like a tree, as an energy factory, ‘an architecture that performs the way nature does’, according to its designer, Enric Ruiz Geli of Studio Cloud 9. His creation has already been dubbed the 'Digital Pedrara' in homage to the organic forms of Gaudí's La Pedrera.

Media-Tic is one of the world's first examples of digital 'performative' architecture, using new materials, nanotechnology and connectivity to respond to the sun. The southeast and southwest façades, which receive six hours of sun a day, are covered with 106 'pillows' covered in energy-efficent EFTE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene), a powerful, transparent, elastic, anti-adhesive membrane that never needs to be cleaned.