From thermal power station to audiovisual hub open to the sea

The architectural firms Garcés De Seta Bonet and MARVEL will transform the Tres Chimeneas (Ed.: The Three Chimneys), located near the Spanish city of Barcelona, into a large digital and audiovisual arts centre. This is a project about memory and future, that encompasses the urbanisation of a privileged area in a state of limbo.

Seen from the Collserola mountain range, which surrounds the city of Barcelona and forms an amphitheatre facing the Mediterranean, the Tres Chimeneas in Sant Adrià del Besos rise out of the sea like Poseidon's trident. The old disused thermal power station has an impressive profile. Its height of 180 metres is also imposing when you reach the foot of the building. Built in the 1970s and closed in 2011, it has become the new icon of a metropolitan Barcelona in transformation, seeking new futures.

The project E la nave va (Ed.: And the ship sails on) by the architectural studios Garcés De Seta Bonet Arquitectes and MARVEL was the winning proposal to convert the old turbine hall - the enormous prismatic structure that stands next to the three chimneys - into a centre dedicated to the development, production and experimentation of digital arts and technology, christened Catalunya Media City. According to its creators, the title ‘is an ode to Fellini and his visionary world suspended between memory, fantasy and life. It is based on respect for the unique character of this building, halfway between the archaeology of a recent industrial past and a spaceship from future landscapes’.

The adaptation and extension of the warehouse for this new facility, promoted by the Catalan Regional Government, must respond to an ambitious functional programme that includes training for some 2.500 students per year, the promotion of research and an incubator for business projects in collaboration with various universities and the corporate sector. It will also be a resource centre for the Catalan audiovisual industry, with innovative technical infrastructure to promote the digital sector. In total, the winning project will generate a usable area of 26.550 m².

The generous volume of this industrial facility, which at its peak as a thermal power plant employed up to 1.100 people, now offers multiple opportunities, including symbolic ones. It also represents a city that is committed to not demolishing, but rather reviewing and revaluing its recent past. The third floor of the turbine hall will be maintained as an open-plan space of 5.600 m² with a clear height of 17 metres for exhibitions and audiovisual experiences. It aims to be a spectacular environment for showcasing new forms of expression in the digital and audiovisual world. The project enhances its empty character and only fully equips the ceiling and floor, providing flexibility to the space to accommodate everything from intimate performances to large-scale installations with a capacity of up to 4.500 people.

Overall, the proposal by E la nave va keeps the existing building virtually intact and designs a new building that extends it, connecting the interior with the exterior spaces, thanks to a technological skin capable of projecting images and videos that are visible from near and far. A second new longitudinal volume is located in front of and parallel to the turbine hall, and its roof functions as a walkway and connection with splendid views.

The great success of this project is undoubtedly the inclusion of the pending urbanisation of a large area of the Barcelona coastline, which will link Barcelona, Sant Adrià del Besos and Badalona. The landscaping resolves the transition between the beach and the turbine hall through a progression of dunes, which also act as a filter for the new elevated street-building.

Daria de Seta, co-founder of the Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes studio, points out: “We designed a proposal that plays with connections and nodes: temporal, landscape and territorial. Cross-sections will create a more porous and permeable block, allowing users and residents to pass through it to go from the city to the sea. The native vegetation will infiltrate the interior voids.” She also points out that this facility will serve as a link between the coast of Barcelona and the Maresme, as for the first time there will be an open balcony facing Badalona: “The architectural elements will offer new landscape perspectives, as if it were a work of Land art.”

In terms of sustainability, it could not be otherwise: the former thermal power plant, with high levels of pollutant emissions, closed five years ago, and must be converted into a model facility. On the roof, 4.500 m² of solar panels will generate renewable energy for an energy-efficient building, integrating passive architecture concepts and reducing energy demand through bioclimatic strategies.

Jonathan Marvel, co-founder of the MARVEL studio: “Transforming an infrastructure that has had a significant environmental impact in the past into one that promotes the future of media collaboration, taking advantage of the existing structure to reduce the energy consumption of the new programme, seems to us to be a key objective for the architecture of the future.”

The completion of this project brings good news for municipalities such as Sant Adrià del Besos and Badalona, which have been heavily polluted for decades and are satellites of Barcelona, as they will acquire a new centrality in the metropolitan conurbation.