C.N.A.R.
Enric Miralles-Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT)

Photo: arcspace

Enric Miralles (1955 - 2000) was one of the most closely watched young architects in Spain thanks to a number of promising and unorthodox projects. The National Gymnastics Training Building (C.N.A.R.) was the first major building of this rising star of Spanish regional modernism.


Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

The C.N.A.R. initiated a new building type in which a large audience focuses on individual performances, and therefore requires a setting less formal than that associated with team sports.

The building, composed of a series of interacting elements; ground-scape, sky-scape and walls of varying permeability, relates closely to its site, growing out of the hill and making visual and physical connections to all sides.


Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

The order is complex and fragmentary, allowing the landscape to remain primary, as though crowds had gathered in the shadow of that hill for millennia and Miralles has merely added shelter, ranks of seats, and a winding ramp for the approach.


Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

Photo: arcspace

The building belongs to its site, it enhances the genius loci; yet it makes no concessions to the local style of Alicante. This was the new regionalism of the 1990s, taking its cues from the immediate locality, yet also derived from, and addressed to, an international architectural debate in which Miralles has long been involved.