A seafront auditorium in southern Spain has concave walls that resemble the deflated cheeks of someone taking a deep breath (photographs by Julien Lanoo).
Designed by Barcelona-based architects Estudio Barozzi Veiga, the Auditorium and Congress Palace Infanta Doña Elena provides a hall for theatre and concerts in the town of Aguilas.
Located on the seaside promenade, the building provides sheltered terraces within recessed balconies.
Two large rectangular windows on the south facade offer sea views from the central lobby and stairwell.
This auditorium is the second sea-facing building featured on Dezeen this week, following a cliff-top house in Sydney inspired by a Picasso painting.
Other auditoriums recently featured on Dezeen include a convention centre crowned by a ring of mesh thorns and a performing arts centre resembling a pair of shells.
See also: a house with a concave roof also by Estudio Barozzi Veiga.
Here's some more information from the architects:
Auditorium and Congress Palace Infanta Doña Elena in Águilas, Spain
The project is a natural response to the particular stimulus, offered by the location.
On one hand the need to respect the urban tissue that growths inside, on the other, the one’s to preserve the expressive hue of the natural landscape.
It is through from this contrast, that we define and articulate tensions which allows the project to organize itself while a coherent response to the constraints of place.
The building is a dialectic reflection, simple but at the same time strong, between the urban artificiality and the organic naturalness.
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Thus, the building results in a large mass, shaped in function of the tensions that proceeds from the different character of the spaces surround it.
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Tangent to the town, the facades are clean, orderly and paused, while tangent to the sea, the facades translate the surrounding space and the configuration offered by the landscape and geography, through large and concave surfaces, that provides a direct and intensive relation with the surrounding natural environment.
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International Competition: I Prize
Project: 2004
Construction: 2008- 2011
Investor: City of Aguilas
Use area: 10 200m2
Architects: Estudio Barozzi Veiga S.L.P.
Team: Alberto Fernandez Veiga, Fabrizio Barozzi, Luca Colomban, Paulo Lopes , Tanja Oppowa, Antonio Pinto, Agnieszka Samsel , Antonis Vourexakis
Simplicity which Ghery and Hadid seem to miss – a display of finesse.
This already looks terribly dated… imagine in 10 years!
It doesn't look dated, and who cares anyway? Why does everything have to look new. When I visited it works well, has great plan, v elegant and striking on exterior and nice, calm spaces inside. Approach is nice too.
Nice form; exterior color, curves and the window-to-wall proportions contribute reducing the heavy mass of the auditorium.
Yet the 4-storey high gallery is too strict in comparison to the exterior. The exterior form could have continuation here. Moreover, this gallery's void and the materials used will help aggrandize the noise coming from the crowd.
wonderful! Barozzi+Veiga rock.
would be interesting to see some pics of construction process
lovely– walls like sails
My thoughts exactly :) Very simple and yet it works rather well
Welcome to the latest fashion in architecture; buildings that look like giant foam core models.
Seb,
What have you built? Seriously? I would like to see your offerings to the built environment in light of this comment……Please enlighten us.
exterior forms are really seductive but it seems to stop there. The language of the exterior and the interior space do not have a strong relationship.