Ana Rodríguez San José

Luxury hotel . Barcelona

+ isarch

The Diagonal is the main arterial road in Barcelona, which coordinates all avenues ranging from mountains to the sea and brings a large number of high-rise buildings together.

Located next to the Forum, the hotel consist in a slim shaped tower, which dimensions are 25x25x150m. As an urban response to the city it represents a clear limit of the Diagonal when it flows into the sea.
The concept of the project starts from the relation between two squares with the same dimensions 25x25m rotated relative to each other. They are grouped forming a geometric body in the basement, while on the surface emerges only one.
The presence of this two squares, one positive and the other one negative, gives to the project an importance in an urban scale. In fact, it offers a variety of services to the public and a luxury hotel to the private.
In particular, the negative one offers a public area and, at the same time, it is the access to the hotel and the auditorium. It creates a new space, a square that is complemented by an art gallery for exhibitions and a bar. However, the prismatic volume that emerges in positive is the tower, a volume that comes to the surface on the green garden.
In this way, the tower becomes a milestone, a benchmark to Diagonal and which is not accessible from the street level of the Forum. The unique access to the inside of the building is from the buried square that opens to the outside in the middle of the public garden.
The tower, pure volume, is dematerialized at angles where hanging gardens appear. Vertically segregated, the double-height terraces are related directly to the hotel’s public areas, such as restaurants, gym and spa, library / open space... and offer various types of natural spaces depending on the program they are connected to: vertical garden, landscape garden, zen garden, etc.
This layout could make possible the presence of an outdoor space even in a closed building as a skyscraper.
The facade of architectural bronze slats accentuate the verticality of the tower, which is sometimes interrupted by the light and shadow variation. This effect could be possible thanks to the double layer of slats.
There is a slats density variation that opens (dilates) to north and gets closer (contracts) progressively to the west side, where there is a higher density of vertical elements. Therefore, a visual filter is created between interior and exterior that changes with the different programs and different room areas that are located behind the facade.