Reina Sofia Museum (MNCARS)

Location Madrid (Spain)
Client Ministry of Culture and Sports
Area 27.000 m²
Year 2000
Status Completed-Built
Typology Cultural
Collaborator Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Alberto Medem
Photography Roland Halbe
Team Fermín Vázquez, Agustín Miranda, Pedro Baltar

The project aims to create a new public square (which arises from the arrangement of the new buildings: temporary exhibitions, auditorium and library) and also includes the southwest façade of the current museum. Furthermore, the project responds to a differentiating and segregating sum of functions and spaces that are unified perceptively by a large canopy that embraces the buildings arranged around the new public square.

The space is materialized in a game of interstices that invite the visitors to cross the public routes – roads and sidewalks – establishing a complementarity of functions, a contradictory dialogue between the two buildings, the old and the new. From the massive Sabatini building (and the rotundity of its simple and orthogonal volume) to the lightness and dematerialization of the new complex, in which glass is the protagonist, together with the recession of the facade at higher levels. All this is counteracted by the cantilevered roof that recovers, at least at the sky level, what was lost at the level of the passer-by: the definition of the limits of the museum in its relationship with the city.