AMID (Cero9) . + AMID . AMID . afasia
The Cherry Tree Palace is organized around a central space surrounded by a concrete ring occupied in the upper level.
The main hall is connected with the surroundings through the basement level, what we call the crypt, and through a big ramp that leads directly to the upper level. Just upon this concrete ring and crypt there is the steel and ceramic dome, composed basically by a non structural lower part which covers the concrete ring, the main structure and the holes.
The interior is a big room understood as a three-dimensional structure of interwoven steel plates that form rhomboid patters and ensure a similar behaviour to that of a dome. This is replicated towards the interior with a mosaic of rhomboid figures that serve to fine-tune the acoustics of the hall.
Several big openings are introduced in the shell, connecting the interior of the dome with the significant points of the surrounding landscape. The surface of the shell is therefore bent towards the interior to both modulate the light coming in and to produce the holes. The openings deform the surface and help to stabilize the structural behavior of the dome and to provide it with rigidity where the continuity of the surface is broken, thus deforming and transforming the tessellation of the surface.
The irregular shape of the Jerte Valley Dome is a double curvature surface with variable curvature in each point. The shape was established to follow a Gaussian distribution of curvature. This concentrated distribution makes possible to control the variation of curvature between adjacent points, and therefore the construction of ribs perpendicular to the surface in each of the points, minimizing the amount of material.
The ribs of the structure are formed by 60mm tubes and a 15 mm steel plate situated in its inner edge. Connecting both non parallel edges, there are V shape 2mm lateral steel plates, slightly deformed with single curvature to save the changing curvature at each point of the dome. The joints are formed by different diameter steel tubes and metal rods that connect both edges almost without visual presence.
