Except in Zaragoza, where Carme Pinós built a new building, most of the CaixaForums are located in rehabilitated pre-existing buildings. In Barcelona, the Casaramona de Puig i Cadafalch factory was mimetically recovered. In Madrid, Herzog
La Caixa's interest in installing a CaixaForum in the Ágora is therefore a blessing for Valencia (where Caixabank now has its headquarters). And the criteria with which Enric Ruiz-Geli, at the head of Cloud-9, has proposed his transformation has been correct. Unlike other projects that competed, the author of the MediaTIC and the Fundació El Bulli did not propose a single building inside the Calatrava cathedral, but several: "a landscape".
Said landscape is made up of several organs scattered in the ribcage that is the Agora: the brain (the administration and the shop), the heart (the exhibition halls), the stomach (the restaurant) and even the soul (the “cloud”, its centerpiece, dedicated to education and AI).
Each one of these organs obeys, with its biomorphic characteristics and its benefits, the environmental and investigative story of Ruiz-Geli. He does it with energy savings and low emissions, with vertical gardens on curved walls, with Catalan ceramic and fiberglass vaults, with 3-D structural exoskeletons or with the work (a thousand oak trunks) by Frederic Amat in the auditorium .
Ruiz-Geli thus builds a discourse of coexistence, but also disruptive, with respect to Calatrava: colors versus white; organic and capricious shapes versus symmetry; lightweight materials versus the weight of steel.
All this was important, but it was not enough to find the balance and prevent Calatrava's power from eating up the new intervention. Ruiz-Geli has managed to avoid it, although sometimes its components seem more scenographic than architectural. Even so, the most important thing is not that, but that thanks to him the Agora revives as a cultural center. It has not been a cheap undertaking – the work cost some 100 million in its day, it required 4 more to seal the roof and repaint it, and now 19 to turn it into CaixaForum. But, as the saying goes, all's well that ends well.
