Client: Gestur Tenerife

Location: Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain.

Date: 2004

Architects: Alejandro Zaera-Polo y Farshid Moussavi.

Collaborators:

Nerea Calvillo, Kazuhide Doi, Laura Fernandez

Traffic Consultant: INTRA. SL

Cabo Llanos is the largest urban development in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a large area formally used by an oil refinery which is now being developed as a new central business district, very near to the city centre. This development has been taking place for the last ten years and, due to a very insufficient and unimaginative planning strategy, evolved into a new, crammed and unattractive residential district very near to the town centre.

Our commission consisted in redefining the urban planning strategy in an attempt to improve the urban environment and to allocate the remaining 90,000m2 of offices, commercial and hotel program, and 4,500 parking spaces dictated in the general masterplan for the city of Santa Cruz. The proposed buildings have been designed to occupy footprints of no more than 1,000m2 and their plan is intended to be centralized, either in the form of a square, a circle or another polygon with polar symmetry, in order to maximize the multidirectional flow across the plaza.

The effect in the skyline will be dramatic, especially in the building for Multiple Uses for the Canary Island Government. This building will occupy the central position in the plan, articulating the east-west axis that connects with the Urban project and the city centre on one side and with the fair grounds on the other, and the north-south axis that links the site with the waterfront. Due to the footprint restrictions, this building will rise to nearly 30-storey, that we have designed with a skin of brise-soleils that change orientation depending of the sunpath, forming a scale-like crust that resembles the skin of a palm tree trunk.