Francisco MANGADO
 
fM
FRANCISCO MANGADO

Nou Palau Blaugrana+

2015-

Barcelona-Spain

41.878 m2


The objective here was not just to raise a building with a certain program content, but also to make the most of the opportunity to create a Barça Campus, a complex in continuity with public space, cohesive functionally as well as formally and symbolically. A unitary scheme naturally based on and recognizable by its urban identity and clarity, thanks to spatial continuity between the football stadium and the new Barça Arena complex, but also to the formal boldness of the proposal.

A unitary scheme which is also identifiable through the principles underlying it:

  • Barça (Football Club Barcelona) is above all a brand, a trademark with a worldwide reach. One is either for Barça or not. Whoever is, is part of a family. This identity must get across in conceptual and formal terms in any architectural proposal for Barça Arena, including for its complementary uses.
  • Barça is the quintessential Mediterranean team, and the Mediterreanean is where Western civilization and sport began. In architecture, the Mediterranean as a concept fuses with a sense of the classical and with a sense of the value of time.
  • Recourse to the classical and to time is coherent with a search for a structure and an architectural image in the new Barça Campus.
  • The Barça Campus is a small city with a spatial, formal, and especially functional continuity of its own. The stadium and complex surrounding the Arena are two parts of a single functional axis.

The Barça campus has an urban identity, it is a small city on its own, but it has to be properly fitted into a larger urban structure. Its immediate environment is part of the urban structure that the entire city of Barcelona is. The new campus must generously contribute to improving this part of the city, helping to form and put order to it. The formal clarity sought in the design of the campus translates into its capacity to structure the city. There is absolutely no incompatibility between both strategies, but in fact much coherence. Order and urban hierarchy, both necessary, are the order and hierarchy achieved in the definition of the Barça Campus.

The main thing proposed is an almost classical, unitary scheme that gives urban identity and presence to the complex. To achieve the unified whole that the Barça Campus is to be, these are necessary:

  • Connect with the field by means of a large public space: a large Barça plaza, not just a bridge. A plaza that stretches over the street and ensures continuity between the two large buildings and also the future auxiliary uses. A plaza for celebrations which also serves as the main access into the Arena.
  • Connect the entire Arena program with the football fields, generating a functional unity that puts order to the area but also makes for clarity and formal and compositional unity, an agora structure – in the classical and Mediterranean manner – that will ensure unity between the arena, the stadium, and the playing fields.

C. Aristides Maillol, 25, 08028 Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain