[ Abalos + Sentkiewicz Arquitectos ] Fundació Antoni Tàpies

Architects: Ábalos + Sentkiewicz Arquitectos
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Project Director: Iñaki Ábalos
Collaborators: Víctor Garzón, Renata Sentkiewicz, Alfonso Miguel, Ismael Martín, Elena Cuerda, Haizea Aguirre
Client: Fundació Antoni Tàpies
Structure: BOMA (Agustí Obiol, Javier Asensio)
Services: AB2, FLUIDSA, PREFIRE
Contractor: SAPIC
Technical Architect: CASOBI (Eduard Casanovas)
Lighting: SPAILLUM (Jose Mª Civil)
Furniture: MAIREA
Project Area: 4,150 sqm
Budget: 8,000,000 €
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: José Hevia

The first goal of the renewal of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies was the necessity to adapt the building to new safety regulations and evacuation, in an overall improvement of the complex, opening up the historic building to the public with new exhibition, archive and educational areas, in order to concentrate administrative areas on a new three-storey pavilion located at the bottom of the plot and with an access to the courtyard of the block.

But the new Fundació Antoni Tàpies seeks, above all, help to consolidate a new generation of museums as centers of cultural production, presenting a multi-spatiality, adapted to the diversity of artistic practices, the application of thermodynamic equilibrium, the supply in value of inherited assets and the atmospheric dissolution for the intensification of the visitor experience, offering an entire program that supports a complex experience of cultural production and the modernist building itself as part of the display system itself.

The dialogue established between the original work of Lluís Domènech i Montaner -built between 1881 and 1884- and the intervention of Roser Domènech Amadó and Lluis Domènech between 1987-1990, especially the installation of the work of Antoni Tàpies in the cover -Nuvol i Cadira (Cloud and Chair, 1990) – includes now another piece of Tàpies -Mitja (Calcetín, 2010) – and a roof garden that opens the museum to further dialogue with the internal courtyard of the Cerdà plan.

In environmental terms, the expansion represents a substantial improvement in the natural lighting of the original building and the overall form factor, encompassing the intervention in a single volume for the benefit of control and reduced energy exchange.

from  archdaily