Lolita by Langarita-Navarro Arquitectos

Spanish studio Langarita-Navarro Arquitectos have completed a road-side restaurant 

and event space on a motorway junction near Zaragoza, Spain.

Called Lolita, it aims to rethink the typical pit-stop restaurant and provide flexible 

facilities for everyone from long-distance truck drivers to local students.

The building features a cluster of white-rendered and timber-clad forms that take 

their cue from nearby industrial buildings.

Lolita presents a blank facade to the approach road and car park while the dining 

areas are arranged to provide views onto a landscape of gravel and trees.

Photographs are by Miguel de Guzman.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

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Lolita, infrastructure for events and meals
Km 45 A-122, La Almunia de Doña Godina, Zaragoza

Roadside restaurants are a rare species within the increasingly prestigious restaurant 

world. Such places superpose their condition as an infrastructure adapted to the 

commercial, informational and social flow of the road network on mythical scenarios

 taken from road movies and literature.

In recent years, their structures have evolved in order to offer services for large-format

 events without this having involved anything more than a change in scale.

The project rose to the challenge of changing this trend by building a structure capable

 of managing a programme subject to constant reorganisation, with the presence of a 

heterogeneous public and the expectation of diverse uses, a flexible space capable of 

setting itself up as a scenario for almost any type of activity. The aim was to transform

 a roadside restaurant into a versatile infrastructure for events and meals.

Lolita is located in La Almunia de Doña Godina, junction 270 of Autovía A-2, in a 

strategic position from a logistical point of view between the commercial routes of 

Madrid-Barcelona and Valencia-Bilbao, just a few kilometres from several towns 

and in the vicinity of the university campus of the EUPLA.

The building seeks to exploit a variety and mixture of activities, on one hand attending

 to the different groups of users and on the other to the diversity of lengths of stays, 

that can go from the 10 minutes spent by the occasional visitor on a coffee break to the

 lunch taken by the regular patrons that follow the commercial routes, the compulsory

 rest times of the haulage drivers, the afternoons of the students who take advantage 

of the Wi-Fi networks or the full day spent by guests at a celebration.

The project is configured as a cumulative space of experiences that, by linking two 

autonomous and differentiated systems, explores the compatibility of the open-plan

 model with one of specific and designated spaces.

The soft system configures a continuous space of irregular geometry perforated by 

patios where the camp-style grouping of furniture and the flexible lighting enable 

different ways of organising the space.

The interior is characterised by a patterned/semi-perforated concrete slab and by the 

wood, glass and polycarbonate of the walls. The façade is a variable-section double strip 

that establishes a dynamic and variable relationship with the exterior space, facilitating

 the full view of the surrounding landscape while in the interior creating a complex 

play of reflections and transparencies.

The rigid system is a build-up of specialised boxes made from 8-metre-long alveolar 

panels and brick walls that house specific and to some extent ritualised programmes.

In the interior the spaces are customised by combining the criteria of the programme 

with elements taken from popular culture.

The system is connected with the surroundings through well-chosen and fragmented 

vistas, generating a hermetic image that allows the large blind surfaces to be used as a 

support for road signage.

Click for larger image

In the project, the grouping of systems builds a new installation in the landscape that 

accrues images from nearby reference points (industrial premises, greenhouses, sheds, 

improvised lorry parks, road signs) to expand the concept of a road facility and thus 

situate it closer to that of a public infrastructure.

Click for larger image

Architects: María Langarita and Víctor Navarro
Collaborators: Marta Colón, Cristina Garzón

Roberto González, Juan Palencia, Julia Urcoli
Structures: Mecanismo S.L.

Mechanical: Inés Plaza
Surveyor: Fernando Cornago
Completion date: 2010