El B Cartagena Auditorium
El B is this long construction, a body, that feeds on the heritage -the continuity- of a sites treatment: THE Cartagena harbour, which is nothing but a harbour in Cartagena, borderline of the city from the sea. A very pleasant walk can be designed for the city along this strip, a daily procession following the immutable edge. In fact, this romenade is what we encourage; it is what we insert in the building, in a dimensional continuum that seems to dig out an artificial beach, but is actually a continuity of history, because the old El Batel beach was right here, on this very spot. The harbour is artificial, not the beach. This reclaimed beach-ramp gradually submerges us below the waterline, with the piers horizontal line as a constant reference. At this point we cease to belong to the outside world and start to belong to ourselves, ourselves in movement, ourselves strolling, working on the 210 metre scale reserved site for ourselves.
We refuse to include the harbours beautiful orthogonal monotony; we exclude the hardness of the port from the interior, and instead, we seek something that is completely the opposite: translucent, delicate, light, aquatic; something that has to do with what Luigi Nono defined as a space for water music.
All the material, both aluminium and plastic, is manufactured from a single extruded section, varied in placement and colour to give the appearance of multiple pieces. These pieces are all set parallel to the pier edge to underscore the idea of horizontality and achieve an even longer rectangle than it already is, in this case extruded like a churro (wrinkled doughnut), only on its immediate scale: overall, it seems to be the result of an accumulation of different components, stacked neatly on the pier. The memory of a former use.
SITE:25000M2 BUILDING:18500M2