Despite being the result of a series of private promotions, the project reflects on the site and the program as if it were a public facility. The university area is read as a periphery with a great urban vocation, marked by the presence of several university faculties and some sports facilities. The place is read as a reference-laden environment, to which the building responds with a set of built-up volumes that show a great vocation for unity. The plan is organised in three main crevices separated by two longitudinal streets, which connect the highest elevation of Diagonal Avenue with the gardens at the back. The white concrete of the entire façade unites the volumes of various dimensions, and the openings are adjusted to a very strict repertoire in order to create a stylistic coherence. The building promotes the urban character of the area and presents a continuity with the existing uses.
The Palau de Congressos de Catalunya is located at the south-western end of the city of Barcelona, at the access to the A-2 motorway. Located next to the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos I and its gardens, the Fitness Center, the Turó Tennis Club and the Polo Club, it offers its two main façades on Torre Melina Street (west), and on Diagonal Avenue (north).
Therefore, it is located at one of the gates of Barcelona, close to many university, sports, financial, commercial and hotel facilities.
The axis of Diagonal Avenue has a large hotel capacity of three, four and five stars, and the location of a congress hall at one end makes the most of the conditions offered by the city.
The project has sought to provide the complex – made up of privately promoted buildings – with a certain institutional vocation as a public building.
This facility is located in an area of large urban zones. The group formed by the different facilities and their gardens accepts this vocation, generating its own and autonomous formal and functional references. A place located at a high altitude that dominates the urban landscape and opens up views of Montjuïc and the coast.
The building is decomposed into bodies facilitating its settlement on the sloping topography, taking advantage of the difference in level between Diagonal Avenue and the gardens of Torre Melina.
This mechanism makes it possible to locate a large volume built with a friendly presence for the city, and discovering the interior space, it is surprising for its large volumetric and spatial unity, at the same time as it is fragmented on the outside.
White concrete, as almost the only exterior material, emphasises this contrast with an aggregation composition.
The building is divided into three bodies separated by two inner streets that allow visual communication between Diagonal Avenue and the Torre Melina gardens, and also provide natural light to the different rooms.
