Yet you never feel isolated: Whether you are walking in solitude around the building or passing through it, the materials envelop you like a cloak. Throughout El B, the overall effect of frozen light, of extreme silence and calm, makes you feel as if you were inhabiting a space outside time.
From one perspective, you see the lines of different colors clearly then they disappear, and the building seems transparent. By varying color and layout, the architects achieved an infinite array of light-reflection effects that enhance the visitor's experience. But closer observation reveals the opposite. The long facades produced by this radical design strategy may, at first glance, appear too closed to activate an underused area of the city. The building's opposing qualities create an interesting spatial tension: An exterior that is an abstract volume, like the nearby generic dockside structures, is juxtaposed with a playful interior, where the architects manipulated the horizontal and vertical spaces to animate the longitudinal section. Opal white polycarbonate, backlit, wraps the 500-seat auditorium, covers the ceilings of both auditorums, and clads the conference room walls. Inside, walls of transparent aquatic blue-green polycarbonate, backed by a silver mirrorlike screen, enclose the 1,500-seat concert hall. On portions of the exterior walls of the auditorium proper and the stage house, the architects laid polycarbonate tubes in an irregular profile of three layers (see section detail, page 61) to underscore the building's horizontal linearity with flecks of color. The transparent methacrylate of the elongated facades is double-layered yet admits daylight into the building. Both plastic materials are mounted on the structure by stainless steel hooklike extrusions. To achieve the vibrant, colorful surfaces, the architects used transparent methacrylate (with UV protection) for the exterior facades, and transparent and translucent polycarbonate (which is fire resistant) for the interiors. Pedestrians and joggers on the dock become engaged in the exterior's bright surfaces, which shift and change according to the observer's vantage point-a polychromatic exercise intensified in the hall's interiors. In Cartagena, they have taken their investigation a step further, designing asymmetrical, custom-made extrusions in two different plastics, in order to introduce color into the cladding. José Selgas and Lucía Cano, who both graduated from Madrid's Polytechnic School of Architecture in 1992, are well known for their research into materials: With their Badajoz Conference Center, they explored polycarbonate's translucency and acoustic properties, employing standardized panels. Syncopated variations in color, light, and reflection make the segmented structure distinctive but still blend in with its watery surroundings and the historic city walls behind it. The roofline, interrupted by vertical cuts that introduce daylight into the interior, adds drama to the building's silhouette. The effect is soft and shimmering, like movement captured by a photograph taken with a long exposure.
Its innovative use of plastic responds to a tight budget yet gives the light, flat-looking cladding over a steel-frame and poured-in-place concrete structure a surprising luminosity. Running along the Paseo Alfonso XII, a 3,300-foot-long dock overlooking the Mediterranean, the 690-foot-long building echoes the stacked shipping containers on the neighboring wharfs.
Now the city is reinventing itself as a cultural tourism destination-as shown by the construction of a museum by José Rafael Moneo, that celebrates the city's ancient Roman amphitheater and more recently by the opening of the exuberant new El B auditorium and congress hall, designed by the Madrid-based firm SelgasCano. With a natural harbor, it served as a naval base for centuries, its ramparts dating back to the eighteenth-century reign of Charles III. Cartagena, Spain, has a long, rich history, beginning even before it became an important western Mediterranean port during the Roman Empire.
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