Description

The light-filled, plastic-clad buildings of the Madrid-based couple José Selgas and Lucia Cano hark back to a time in the late 1960s and early 70s, when the technical evolution of architecture seemed headed towards ever more lightweight and insubstantial materials. Based on a competition won in 2005, designed in the time between two other congress centers for the Spanish cities of Badajoz (2006) and Cartagena (2012), but built only in 2017, Plasencia is in many respects the most radical of the three. Standing at the edge of a modern suburb with sweeping views of the surrounding hills, it appears as an irregular, windowless polyhedron, clad entirely in translucent EFTE (Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene), breaking with any resemblance to conventional building forms.

Plasencia is a historic but small and remote city of about 40,000 inhabitants, located in a semi-arid region in the foothills of the Sierra de Gata in the western province of Cáceres. The natural landscape around the Congress Center is almost lunar – it stands on a precipitous slope, 17 meters below the street, on a pitch scattered with low brush and granite boulders.

Beneath the EFTE, which is mounted on a frame of metal tubes and tension wires, a concrete shell encloses the program spaces, which pile up on top of one another. The 760-seat auditorium lies at the bottom, followed by meeting rooms, multi-purpose halls and a space for a cafeteria and banquets. Wrapping around the concrete shell is a thin outer layer, a maze of circulation ramps, stairs and passages enclosed in floor-to-ceiling sheets of transparent Plexiglas. The EFTE cuts 40% of the solar heat, and the circulation layer protects the concrete walls from excessive thermal shifts, so that major interior spaces require little cooling or heating, while the corridors must be air-conditioned on sunny days.

The compact volume is pierced through its center by the high entry portal, which houses a one-story entry lobby and ends in a lookout terrace over the countryside. This cross-axial space is located over the ceiling of the auditorium underneath. Together with the auditorium’s fly tower, which rises beside it on one side, it divides the upper stories, which are connected only on the highest level.

Driving this compact scheme was the architects’ decision to occupy as little of the site as possible, in order to preserve its natural character. SelgasCano’s plastic space ship is also, ironically, the gesture of a pair of dedicated ecologists.

The pale outer skin of EFTE, softly glowing by day and by night, is violently interrupted by the hot orange, red and yellow of the entry portal. Inside, this contrast comes into play between the spaces inundated with the glowing refracted or reflected light of the EFTE – the perimeter passages and the multi-purpose hall and café on the top floors – and more fully enclosed spaces, such as the auditorium with its strident red seating and carpeting, which Cano describes as “the warm heart of the building.” When visitors walk up the gangway entry, they leave the mediocre suburban sprawl behind and enter a glamorous, glowing geode, a soft, warm cocoon, a star ship lost in space – a self-referential, self-enclosed world of glowing, pulsing, almost living space, as made manifest through the astonishing effects of light and color.

Originally published in Bauwelt 23.2017, pp. 30-37, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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