The Nouvel Building
Jean Nouvel (Born 1945) · 2001 to 2005
On the south west side of the old hospital the museum suddenly turns modern. Three glassy buildings in dark red and glossy black wrap around a triangular plaza, and floating above them all is a huge flat roof, painted a deep red on its underside and cut with an oval opening that frames the sky. Walking under it feels like standing beneath the wing of an aircraft. This is the extension that the French architect Jean Nouvel completed in 2005, which increased the museum's size by more than half and gave it a new public face on the Ronda de Atocha.
Nouvel's idea was not to compete with Sabatini's stone box but to build around a void. The three new volumes hold temporary exhibition galleries, two auditoriums, the library and a restaurant, and the space between them is a covered plaza open to the neighbourhood, with the old hospital wall as one side. Look at the reflections: the polished red surfaces mirror the Sabatini facade and the sky, so that the old building seems to appear inside the new one. The library reading room, with its wall of glass and its book stacks rising like a ship's hull, is one of the best rooms in the museum and free to enter.
The extension was controversial for its cost and its colour, but it solved the museum's chronic shortage of space and allowed the permanent collection to spread into the old building. The rooms of Collection 3, covering art from the 1960s to the 1980s, are in the Nouvel building, and its entrance is usually far less crowded than the Sabatini one. Stand in the middle of the plaza at dusk, when the red roof glows and the lights of Atocha come on.
Did You Know? The red of the roof and panels was chosen to echo the terracotta and painted facades of old Madrid, and the oval opening in the roof is aligned with the sun at midday.
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