Congress Center Manuel Rojas

Although we lacked a more detailed map of the city of Badajoz during our summer trip, finding the former city walls where the new congress center was supposed to be located shouldn’t have been too difficult according to our assumptions. After several fruitless attempts, our confidence slowly waned, and we began asking the local residents for directions. Since the center had only been open for a few months and our Spanish was not great, each person we approached pointed us in a different direction. In the end, completely disheartened, we asked a local police patrol, and they accompanied us with their Xara Picasso straight to the desired center Manuel Rojas. There was a competition for mezzo-sopranos being held here, but the security let us in without any problems and allowed us to take photos. (pš)

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José Selgas and Lucía Cano designed an interesting congress center in Badajoz near the Portuguese border. “The structure is embedded between two historical interfaces, a pentagonal bastion of the city fortifications and a circular footprint of a nineteenth-century bullring. A series of fiberglass rings encircling a solid cylindrical volume, within which the main hall is located, serves as both an entrance hall and a place for informal meetings. On the eastern side, the space between the outer circle and the surrounding fortifications is filled with smaller underground meeting rooms. At night, light emerges from the auditorium, filtered through the fiberglass wall, giving the building an abstract sculptural expression that easily blends into the mythical place.”
Although the Spanish architects were well aware of the difficulties posed by modern buildings set within historical urban environments, the new congress center in Badajoz presented an unprecedented challenge. On this site, in the capital of a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural, and isolated region of Extremadura, there had stood a bullring since 1857 (demolished in the 1980s). The arena was placed between the walls of an 18th-century pentagonal bastion built to protect the city near the Portuguese border. The expanding city completely engulfed this ingenious fortification over the next two centuries.
The competition project presented the painful history of the site associated with the bullring. In August 1936, Badajoz was one of the first significant sites of the Spanish Civil War, and in this arena, Franco's soldiers executed hundreds of Republican prisoners. Many people in the city still resist lingering in a place with such a traumatic past, thereby expressing their opposition to the currently ruling socialist party, the client of this project. Madrid architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano won the competition – their first significant commission – with a design that skillfully navigated between conflicts with the past, its rejection, and the desire for further development. Their office selgascano arquitectos has since won competitions for congress centers in Plasencia, also located in the Extremadura region, for the Spanish coastal city of Cartagena, and they are building residential buildings in Madrid. In Badajoz, the architects carefully inscribed an inventive structure into the outer footprint of the original bullring, achieving a fresh and dynamic urban environment that pays homage to both the past and the future.
The design made of translucent plastics recreates the concentric volume of the former bullring: a cylindrical grid (75 m in diameter, 14 m high with a total length of 12 km - translator's note) made of fiberglass tubes encases a cylinder clad in translucent plexiglass tubes, behind which is a facade of transparent glass panels. The inner cylinder of the auditorium describes the footprint of the albero, a sand-covered circle where bullfights used to take place, while the uncovered space between the two cylinders occupies the place of former tiers. A large part of the 180,000 square feet (over 16,500 m² - translator's note) of the large congress center lies underground, including the entrance hall, where visitors descend from the square via stairs covered by a curved red cantilever. The main hall for a thousand spectators, which rises from the lowest level and fills the entire inner cylinder, can be used for opera, theater, orchestral music, and conferences.