Valencia, Spain

People/Products

Aspiring to give Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, cultural clout and a tourist magnet rivaling Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao, the regional government set out to develop an 86.5-acre site on a dry riverbed, midway between Valencia’s old section and its coastal district. In 1991, architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, a native son of the city, won the competition for a telecommunications tower on that land and soon after gained the commission to develop the entire City of Arts and Sciences there. Governmental changes in 1996 prompted the decision to create the Reina Sofía Palace of the Arts (Palau de les Arts), to include an opera house, at the site’s western end, in place of the planned telecommunications tower.

Reina Sofía Palace of the Arts
Photography © Alan Karchmer

Ten years later, the $454 million, 475,000-square-foot palace, one of the last pieces in the grand scheme, finally reached completion. In Calatrava’s surreal “city” of gardens, reflecting pools, and all-white, structurally exuberant buildings of steel, glass, and concrete, the monumental opera house stands along the main axis, linking it across the vast site to the Hemispheric Planetarium/IMAX theater of 1998 (an iconic structure evoking a human eyeball, socket, and lid, all set over a 260,000-square-foot “mirror” of water) and longitudinal Prince Felipe Science Museum of 2000.

Rising to a 760-foot-long, purely gestural crest of cantilevered steel, the sculptural Palace of the Arts bears an unmistakable resemblance to Calatrava’s opera house in Tenerife. For the Valencia version, a pair of steel shells, covered in white trencadís (the traditional ceramic-shard mosaic famously adopted by Antonio Gaudí), embraces a mostly concrete structure. With a total audience capacity of 4,000 indoors, the building includes four performance spaces—most prominently, a 1,390-seat opera theater, 1,585-seat upper auditorium, and 380-seat Magistral Hall—a cafeteria, café, and restaurant, plus an open-air, 2,000-seat performance venue, sheltered only by the roof overhead.


People

Architect:
Santiago Calatrava
Zurich, Valencia, New York
(212) 452-1046
FAX (212) 452-1047

Engineer(s):
Santiago Calatrava

General contractor:
Acciona–Dragados (Temporary Business Union – Palacio)

Scenery/Staging contractor:
Thyssen-Chemtrol and Waagner-Biro (Temporary Business Union – Palacio)

Photographer(s)
Alan Karchmer (ESTO)
(202) 244-7511
ak@alankarchmer.com

 

 

Products

Structural system:
principal body based on load-bearing walls and slabs, composed of reinforced and pre-stressed concrete; external structure (“shell” and “feather”) made of structural steel; internal substructures (restaurant and one auditorium) based on portal steel frames
Montcor, Emesa, y Treycal

Metal/glass curtain wall:
Facin Glass

Concrete:
Hormicemex.
Concrete laid by: Cimes Grupo

Roofing
Elastomeric:
Gevasa, Mapsa

Metal:
Talleres Centrales de Acciona

Tile/shingles:
Aluminum Siding
Acieroid

Windows
Wood:
Blasco Carpintería y Madera

Steel:
Treycal

Aluminum:
Fasin Glass

Glazing
Glass:
Berca Cristaliería

Doors
Metal doors:
Fichet Carpentry

Wood doors:
Frapont Carpentry

Upswinging doors, or other:
Stainless steel
Ramón Gabriel, S.A.

Exterior finishes:
See “roofing” section

Interior finishes: mostly done in wood
Paneling:
Plaster
Panegen

Floor and wall tile:
only on wall, not floor
broken ceramic tile
Renau Tiling

Resilient flooring:
inside and outside - stone Comarpi

Raised flooring:
Wood
Tecnipark

Lighting:
All lighting done by Electrocimbra

Conveyance
Elevators/Escalators:
Kone

Accessibility provision (lifts, ramping, etc.):non-mechanical—built-in during construction

Plumbing:
Fonsa Installations

Climate Control:
ECI

Building Security:
Honeywell

Landscaping:
Dalmau, S.A.

Fire Safety System Protection:
Unisersa

Artworks:
Santiago Calatrava has designed permanent art installations for significant spaces within the building.

For the main auditorium and the principal restaurant, Calatrava has created two large murals, the first measuring 20m x 2.4m (65.6 ft x 7.9 ft) and the second 31m x 3.6m (101.7 ft x 11.8 ft).

Calatrava also has created two bas relief sculptures in ceramic, each measuring 2.4m x 1.2m (7.9 ft x 3.9 ft), and has designed exterior door handles in terracotta for each auditorium.