Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

Casa Mediterraneo

This is a project by Manuel Ocaña Architecture & Thought Production Office and it is located at Alicante, Spain. Project's program: Auditorium, events & exhibitions center. There are eight images for Casa Mediterraneo.

: © Manuel Ocaña Architecture & Thought Production Office

Project details

Project name: Casa Mediterraneo
Location: Alicante, Spain
Program: Auditorium, events & exhibitions center
Area: Project size: 3,249 m2
Year: Design: 2010 (competition, 1st prize) • Completion: 2012
More details: Cost of construction: 6,000,000 €
Client: Casa Mediterráneo Foundation
Project by: Manuel Ocaña Architecture & Thought Production Office
Team: Principal designer: Manuel Ocaña • Design team: Miguel Molins, Karolina Kurzaz
Others: Contractor: Tragsa

Project images

Designer's statement

Casa Mediterráneo is an institution born to cater for public diplomacy. Its main aim is to foster the common identity of the Mediterranean cultures.

Its new headquarters are to be established in the old Benalúa railway station. The new institution needs spaces in order to host events, exhibitions, concerts, projections and all kinds of parties.

The most valuable element of the old building is the awesome space above the railway tracks: a 20 m. span covered by slender iron work almost impossible to achieve nowadays.

The project focuses on the sophistication of that simple, linear space for trains and thus on turning it into an experience space for people. A space intended to be blue, liquid, central, excited, changing, consecutive, zenithal, cabriolet, tinted, rhythmic, indivisible, programmable, thermodynamic and profitable.

The most experimental uses or activities are to be developed in and between two volumes that are lightweight, translucent and faced. These volumes enclose and help to centralize that main space of multiple properties allowing for simultaneity of different events.

The space works the colour white in its brand new volumes and also in its walls and pavements. The colour white is used in a phenomenological and sensual way. White is a colour which can easily be excited and tinted. It is the colour of the cinema screens.

The Costa Blanca sunlight is going to be tinted blue in the inner space by means of the colour and translucent effects of the roof boards, and tinted orange in the interior of the auditorium at sunset. This sunlight will also excite the facing of the space and the volumes with the help of colossal blades in rotational movement, its motorized and textile covering and with the moving-shade provided by lattice work of aluminium rings, which also pacifies the encounter between the old walls and the new volumes.

In the blue space the air is not climatized. People are climatized. How? By means of gigantic ceiling fans, the well-known chimney effect, the cabriolet covering and the possibility of activating a fun, cool, and artificial fog system.