The exhibition ‘ÁLVARO SIZA – VISIONS OF THE ALHAMBRA’ arouses the interest of architecture schools in Europe and the united States

The exhibition ‘Álvaro Siza – Visions of the Alhambra’ has aroused the interest of numerous experts, architects of international renown and students from different Architecture schools in Oporto, Oslo and the United States among others, who have visited the Alhambra to find out more about the Puerta Nueva (New Gate) Project for the Alhambra’s new Reception and Welcome Area.

The architect, Juan Domingo Santos, who together with Álvaro Siza, drew up the plan for the new entrance to the Alhambra, explained that "experts and students from architecture schools from all over the world have come to the exhibition in the Palace of Charles V, to see the Puerta Nueva project for themselves”.  

The exhibition ‘Álvaro Siza – Visions of the Alhambra’ was inaugurated on 9th February and since then has received around 28,600 visits. It presents the project that won the International Ideas Competition organized by the Alhambra in 2010 to choose the design for a new entrance pavilion and a visitor reception and information centre. 

Juan Domingo Santos said that the exhibition has been visited by experts in architecture interested in finding out more about the project such as Jacques Herzog, a Swiss architect from the Herzog & De Meuron studio, who is well-known for finding imaginative solutions to architectural problems and is a winner of the Pritzker Prize, considered the Nobel prize for Architecture. Herzog travelled expressly to Granada to visit the exhibition together with the architect and architecture critic, Luis Fernández Galiano and the architect Emilio Tuñón. Santos also said that students and professors from specialist institutions such as the Oporto School of Architecture, the European University of Madrid, the Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States) have discovered the details of the project at first hand through the sketches, scale models, drawings and 3-D representations of the New Gate or Atrium. “The experts have congratulated us on our design and have emphasized that the project respects the values and the identity of the Alhambra and solves the problems with fragmented sections that have to be articulated together, something that is very typical of the Alhambra”.