KF arquitectes Splits a Ten-Story Hybrid Tower Into Andorra's Poplar Grove

A ten-story building housing a warehouse, two parking levels and four floors of offices has risen in Les Bons, Encamp, Andorra — a narrow high-mountain valley where centuries-old poplar trees set the design agenda. KF arquitectes, led by lead architects Gemma Aznar and Manel Pallares, completed the 6,033-square-meter Mixed-Use Office, Warehouse and Parking Building in 2026.

The project confronts a problem specific to its territory. "In a highly built-up territory under intense urban pressure, the project begins with a fundamental question: how can a large-scale building be inserted without imposing itself on the landscape?" the architects state. Their answer: fragmentation, topographical adaptation and a façade that borrows its rhythms from the surrounding poplar grove.

The site's seasonal cycle became one of the project's main references. The poplars transform the perception of the site throughout the year, and the architects treated that change as a design condition rather than an obstacle. The building, they say, "is not conceived as a static object, but as a presence whose perception evolves together with its surroundings."

The program stacks activities with sharply different requirements. Logistics operations involving heavy trucks sit alongside comfortable working environments across ten stories. According to the architects, this coexistence "calls for a precise organization capable of preventing conflicts while allowing each use to operate independently." The firm resolved the problem with a clear hierarchy of entrances and circulation routes, plus a vertical organization that integrates the programs within a single architectural system — functional complexity resolved through the architecture itself, avoiding fragmentation of the building despite its multiple uses.

Massing strategy drives the project's relationship to its site. The building follows the existing topography, preserves vegetation wherever possible, and breaks its volume apart to reduce its perceived scale. Rather than competing with its surroundings, the architects conceived the structure as "a quiet backdrop, integrated between the mountain and the vegetation." Materials, textures and façade composition draw on the tones and rhythms of the poplar grove, so seasonal changes continually alter the visual relationship between architecture and landscape.

Sustainability operates through architectural decisions rather than bolt-on technology. The architects cite the compactness of the program, the optimization of circulation, natural light in the working spaces, and preservation of the existing ecosystem as the mechanisms reducing the building's environmental impact. The stated goal is "an efficient and durable architecture, closely connected to the specific conditions of its site."

In a particularly sensitive environment, the project stakes a clear position: restraint over monumentality. The building acknowledges its scale and functional complexity while integrating into the territory through topographical adaptation and fragmented massing. The result, in the architects' words, is "a building conceived not as an isolated object, but as part of an evolving landscape, where architecture, human activity, and nature can coexist without any one of them having to impose itself upon the others."

As urban pressure intensifies across Andorra's narrow valleys, the Les Bons project offers a model for inserting large corporate programs into fragile high-mountain terrain without erasing it. Photography is by Pol Viladoms.