Architects Norman Foster and Carlos Rubio winners of the "Hall of Realms Competition"
24/11/2016.
[MAD] Spain
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
Official Release
Iñígo Méndez de Vigo, Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, this morning led the plenary meeting of the Royal Board of Trustees of the Museo del Prado in which the jury announced the winner of the international competition for the architectural restoration and museological remodelling of the Salón de Reinos [Hall of Realms] of the former Buen Retiro palace. The winning proposal is the one presented by the team of Foster + Partners L.T.D. and Rubio Arquitectura S.L.P., as decided at the jury’s meeting on 22 November.
The winning proposal, entitled HIDDEN DESIGN, makes maximum use of the building’s museological aspect and creates a large entrance atrium on the south façade, making this space semi-open and permeable to the exterior but sufficiently controlled for it to function to protect the original façade of the Hall of Realms, the windows and balconies of which will be reinstated. Emerging over the top of this façade will be a large exhibition space on the third floor, which is higher and wider than the present one, forming the roof of the atrium and a terrazza facing the Museum’s “campus”.
Press Release by Foster + Partners
Foster + Partners and Rubio Arquitectura have won the international competition to revitalise and refurbish the historic Hall of Realms (Salón de Reinos) as a new addition to the Museo del Prado campus in Madrid.
The vision is to create a new public focus for the city by bringing together the various buildings that comprise the Prado with public spaces and underground links.
The Hall of Realms is a noble structure and one of the very few that have survived from the former Palacio del Buen Retiro of the seventeenth century. It has been the subject of changes and expansion, gathering many layers of history over the centuries.
The interventions will bring fresh life to the magnificent interiors from the past as well as adding new state-of-the-art galleries and public spaces. The proposal goes back four centuries to re-discover the original three storey southern façade. This becomes the backdrop for a spectacular new space within the building. The existing outer walls have been delicately opened up to bring light and views in from the new civic plaza.
The transformed Hall of Realms will be permeable, offering a new public route through the building with terrace cafes on the north side.
Working within the outline of the original building envelope a new roof will harvest energy from integrated solar cells, give natural light to the galleries below and cantilever as a shade to protect the southern façade. It also heralds the rebirth of this historic monument.
Lord Foster said:
“On behalf of the team that I led at Foster + Partners in collaboration with Rubio Arquitectura, I would like to say how honoured we are to contribute to this next phase of the expansion of the Prado – one of the truly great museums of the world. The Hall of Realms, built by Crescenzi and Carbonel in the 1630’s, is one of the very few remains of the former palace and predates the Museum which was conceived in 1819. Two centuries later the transformation and expansion of this historic hall will add significant new galleries and related public spaces to the Prado. It will also create, as a setting, a new urban focus for the city of Madrid.”
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of a high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
METALOCUS > 05.2017