BILBAO TOWER. BARCELONA

The Bilbao tower is located on the seafront in Barcelona, where the series of public parks that accompany the city’s Ronda Litoral coastal bypass converges with Bilbao street, a street which crosses it from the Turó de la Rovira towards the beaches of Bogatell and Mar Bella.

This is a 15-storey moderately tall tower, and it is one of the intermittent series of tall buildings that stand above the cornice of five-storey buildings that characterise the urban environment of the seafront.

The seafront’s urban façade emphasises the horizontal nature of the road and the public spaces running parallel to the coast. This system of vertical buildings, with a distinctive profile of the presence of the cross-directional streets facing the sea, creates a pattern with significant vertical emphasis on an excessively uniform and horizontal coastline, which is therefore difficult to recognise as a whole at a distance.

The tower, in which three homes per floor are distributed around a central entrance, uses various compositional resources to accentuate its slenderness from distant visual perspectives. This is the source of the asymmetrical tripartite composition of the façade facing the sea, with the glazed corner gallery, which is treated as an almost separate volume within the column.