Convention Center and Hotel, Palma
Architect: Francisco Mangado
Year: 2017
Location: Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Category: Cultural / Congress center
Status: Unbuilt
About
With the idea of creating a new sector for visitors for the thousands of tourists that travel to this Balearic island every year, in 2005 a competition was called to design the new Congress Center and Hotel on Palma’s waterfront, parallel to the beach. As a result of this competition, with participants like Rafael Moneo, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Richard Rogers, Dominique Perrault, and Eduardo Souto de Moura, among others, the construction of the center started in 2008, and in spite of the temporary interruption of the works – between 2010 and 2012 – as a consequence of the economic crisis, the building was finally inaugurated in 2017. The proposal understood that working on a rich and suggestive site from its difficulty of geometry and dimension supposed to elaborate a new urban "plan" of the city. Narrow and extremely elongated, the plot -which forms a seafront almost 350 meters in length- refers more to an idea of a large urban boundary, capable of housing a significant building with a complex and diverse program. Measuring almost 500 meters long, the building follows the historic traces of the seafront, and configures a new urban border, becoming a landmark in the cityscape, together with the castle and the cathedral.