Fine Arts Museum. Badajoz, Spain
FIRST PRIZE, international competition 2007
The backbone of the architectural strategy for the extension project of the Fine Arts Museum in Badajoz is meant to regain an Identity: a new built environment (Architecture) that interacts with the urban context (City) through its cultural content (Museum).
We project a complex whose starting point is the expansion of the existing museum, located in a listed building in the center of Badajoz. The complex includes two new buildings that are connected through a courtyard and are opened to two different streets of the city. Due to the difficult circumstances that come together in this place (archaeological remains, party walls and the rehabilitation of the listed building) a powerful and coherent architectural response is required.
A typological scheme organized by an inverted “L”, responds to the functional, spatial, structural and technical aspects. This scheme is fostered (inside and outside) through a cladding, a perforated prestressed concrete panel, whose scale and pattern seem to print a message in the skin of the building.
The efficient and silent result allows the building to be integrated into the city without resorting to a compositional exercise, overflowing the physical limits of the buildings and turning the proposed spaces into real stars of the urban environment. This project represents an encounter with beauty where the memory and its power remain in time; convert the whole museum into a new social, urban and artistic reality in the center of Badajoz.
