- Client
- King
- Location
- Barcelona, Spain
- Category
- Offices
- Project with
- TP Bennett, JG Ingenieros, Artec3, Aecom, I2A
- Photography
- Enric Badrinas
- Drone footage
- Anthony Finocchiaro
The gaming industry is booming in 22@, the innovation district in Barcelona, with new offices popping up all around. The latest neighbour of the hood is King Digital Entertainment, a video game developer specialised in the creation of social games like Candy Crush and Farm Heroes. With the London based architecture firm TP Bennett by our side, we were in charge of the construction of their new offices, spanning across 6,700m² and providing a new workspace for over 600 people on their team.
THE NEW GAME INDUSTRY LEADER
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE INNOVATION DISTRICT
As Oriol Canudas, VP and head of the King studio said in an interview, “Barcelona has a rich conglomerate of multinationals, together with small, local companies that make it a rich ecosystem. Barcelona is a tech hub, meaning that other businesses complement our sector.” Aligned in essence with the Ildefons Cerdà plan in 1858, 22@ has become a centre for innovation thanks to its core idea of the sustainable city -live/work/education model, attracting growing business and talent to the area.
The fact that King, a leading gaming company, choses the neighbourhood is a statement. As innovators and tech developers, they want to belong to the 22@ idea and ecosystem. In turn, they also contribute to the cluster, as they are part of the new creative economy that the district hosts.
ARCHITECTURE AND THE GAMING INDUSTRY:
AN INNOVATIVE OFFICE FOR AN INNOVATIVE COMPANY
The gaming industry is a very distinct sector to design offices for. As an actor in the innovation sector, the need to incorporate the latest technologies and privacy systems is high, in order to nurture and safekeep the development of new ideas, software and products. An innovative company asks for an innovative office space, whose layout inspires collaborative work, agility and a friendly atmosphere, while still having individual space to think, create and develop.
The new King offices are set in the “Iqonic Building” by the hand of fellow architects Battle & Roig. It’s a highly technological and sustainable building, right next to the Glories plaza and Avenida Diagonal, and good for 24.000m² distributed over a total of seventeen floors. The new King office occupies six, making the office the brand’s second largest development center in Europe.
QUALITY BUILDING CULTURE:
THE POWER OF COLLABORATION AND TRANSPARENCY
Construction is as old as humankind, and continues to shape our daily experience. Businesses rely on the construction industry to provide and maintain their accommodation, plants and infrastructure, determining the way in which we live, work and play. The process of building is compex, it has many phases and an equal amount of collaborators, each with a different set of knowledge, expertise and priorities.
As builders, it’s our job to guarantee coherence. One of the most intriguing aspects about what we do is the way in which our sub-designs and sub-solutions all become part of the same whole, defining the quality and resilience of our buildings. As an office, we strongly believe in the power of collaboration, transparency and conversation, not only as working method but as a way to transfer knowledge, contributing to the building culture we create together as an industry.
