The ancient port town of Águilas in the south of Spain is a tourist favorite that maintains a small-town, old-world feel. Six years ago, the city announced an open competition to build a concert hall that—like Águilas itself—manages to be both cosmopolitan and provincial, intimate and impressive: the Auditorium and Congress Palace Infanta Doña Elena, named for King Carlo’s eldest daughter. It seats just 750 in the main performance space, but does so in an effortlessly airy style. Surface sat down with architect Alberto Veiga, whose Barcelona-based Estudio Barozzi Veiga won the commission in 2005, to talk about the new building.

This project was a real breakthrough for your firm.
This was our first building. To win a competition in front of the sea, to do an auditorium—it’s dangerous from an architectural point of view, because you want to do everything, and you want to do a building with a lot of vanity.

But you managed to repress that impulse?
It’s a building that only tries to work with the wind, with sound, with the moving of the waves. We tried to manage the shape of the building with only a few movements. We tried to develop it in a simple way; it tries to be very clear.

Why the all-black interior and all-white exterior?
We didn’t want to use too many materials inside and outside. To work with white is very natural in Spain. Inside, we chose a black box because the client wanted something multifunctional. We were also looking for a big contrast. It’s like a television set, like a theater box.

How did the site itself influence you?
The city has two [curving] beaches. We started to work with the shape of these forms. To work with concave forms permits you to do something very dynamic. It’s an element that changes during the day. You can see the movement of the sun over the concave surfaces.

To some extent, you got to create the site—because you did the landscape, the grand staircase, and so on.
We decided to do this because it now works as a meeting point for all the people, and it works well at night—even better than during the day. The main reason is that a public building has to generate public space. The building has to generate something for the people, for the city.

Was the broader context of the project a challenge?
This was one of the last competitions for this type of building in Spain before the crisis, so we were lucky. Everything worked well during these six years. We’ve had a lot of problems to finalize the building, but we did it. It’s a building that’s clear and simple, but in the end strong. We wanted to create a new reference point for the city.

Estudio Barozzi Veiga
Photos: Julian Lanoo