Prado Museum Expansion

Jose Rafael Moneo, Arquitecto's expansion and restoration of Spain's renowned Prado Museum Expansionis simultaneously profound and respectful.

By David Cohn - David Cohn is RECORD’S Madrid-based correspondent.
This is an excerpt of an article from the March 2008 edition of Architectural Record.

The strength of Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, Arquitecto’s new addition to the Prado Museum Expansionin Madrid lies in his ability to analyze and resolve the conflicting layers of history that literally stratify the hillside site behind the museum’s original building. With the compact jewel box of brick-and-bronze fenestration, together with a more discrete connecting element that he has folded into the slope beneath it, Moneo has created a work that functions in a respectful but contemporary dialogue with the existing 1785 Neoclassical structure designed by royal architect Juan de Villanueva and the surviving remnants of the Royal Monastery of San Jerónimo. The monastery ruins include a 17th-century cloister, which Moneo has dramatically incorporated into the heart of his addition, and its Gothic church, still in use, which stands somewhat uneasily beside it.

For Spaniards, the Prado is hallowed ground, with its unmatched collections of works by Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, and other European masters, accumulated over five centuries by two royal dynasties. The need to update and enlarge the Prado’s ancillary services required an unusual alliance between Spain’s two opposing political parties, which have alternated in power during the 12-year span of the museum’s expansion. The project was entrusted to Moneo, who at 70 is the country’s most respected architect, after a circuitous process that began with an inconclusive open international competition in 1995. Ten finalists were selected from 483 entries and invited to participate in a second competition in 1998 with a more defined program, after which Moneo was awarded the commission.

Currently receiving two million visitors a year, the Villanueva building required new space for entry vestibules, ticketing, cloakrooms, group tours, and educational facilities, as well as a larger shop, cafeteria, and auditorium, all of which Moneo accommodated in the partially underground visitors center he added to the back of the building. The addition is organized longitudinally along a continuous line of clerestory glass that inundates the space with light, setting off its limestone floors and its bronze ceiling strips, windows, and custom chandeliers.

In addition to new entries at either end of this zone, Moneo created additional access by reopening the museum’s central porticoed entrance, previously used only for official occasions, and taking over the ground floor of the apse-shaped hall behind it—occupied since 1984 by an auditorium—as a new center of circulation for both the existing building and the addition. This strategy develops what Moneo calls a “transversal axis” latent in Villanueva’s original plan, although at the cost of breaking the continuity of the main circulation axis on the ground floor. The walls of the apse are finished in hot-pressed stucco in shocking red, a color taken from the royal sash in one of Goya’s portraits of King Carlos IV, which adds a slash of Warholian Pop contemporaneity to the subdued enfilade of the original galleries.

Formal name of project: Prado Museum Expansion

Location: Madrid, Spain

Client: Ministry of Culture

Architect: Jose Rafael Moneo, Arquitecto

 

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