The Valencians of the Senior wing remembers this building at the foot of the Navy as the home of a long -awaited restaurant that a few decades ago … He triumphed with his bourgeois kitchen among the best families in the city. Nobody forgot, of course, his best known facet, which even serves to baptize his figure: The Terminal Hub is called that because, in effect, he housed the facilities for the boat journey to Palma, frequent destination of initiatory excursions for the adolescence of the place and for the family summer. But this majestic building, of suggestive charm, has a more unique attribute that makes it worthy of being included in the best pages dedicated to modern Valencian architecture: it is an example of brutalist style, a fashionable position by the recent homonymous film. A little known author that long after erecting continues to excite those who contemplate his skeleton or walk inside, objective of an accurate reinvention in charge of Ricardo Ort’s office. A reinvention as headquarters of a dynamic entrepreneurship center endorsed by its newly acquired headquarters of the Open House architectural festival, which this Friday presented its programming for the 2025 edition.
Until this key point of its trajectory, the building accumulates an interesting life, with a first chapter enshrined to highlight its authorship, unknown until not too long ago. There were those who, by Valencia,, it could be a creation of the Great Antonio Escario, because he found analogies among his style (that same propensity to brutalism that distinguishes his most disclosed work, the pagoda) and the syntax of this other example of haute architecture. But it was an erroneous attribution. Javier Escario, an architect like his father, recalled that it was a work that caught his attention a lot of attention for the accused quality of his invoice but not: it was not his. He was from an architect who died years ago in the tragic accident of Monte Oiz, along with Bilbao. He did not remember the name but Google did his job: originally designed by the engineer Federico Gómez de Membillera in 1914, the property was partially destroyed during the civil war and later rebuilt in the 80s by the architect Antonio Espinosa, “in a bold and rupturist reinterpretation for his time.”
They are the words they use from The Terminal Hub to explain the characteristics of their headquarters, on the eve of which Open House’s activities welcome up to next fall. The festival is committed to each edition for claiming not only the expression of architecture in the cases that make them available to those who wish to visit them but also take the opportunity to defend the relevance of underlining before the public opinion the value of icons as is the present example, just as before the organization that now captains Sara Portela did the same with the veles e vents or more recently the Luis Vives.
It is the turn in the 2025 edition for this overwhelming paquebote stranded on the banks of the Mediterranean, beneficiary of a successful rehabilitation whose author describes in these terms. “It is very important the sensitivity that one has as an architect to understand that although it is not a protected building, it has an architectural value in its design and its conception that not only requires respect in action: it also requires enhancing its virtues.” “In this way,” he continues, “everything becomes much easier when addressing its adaptation thanks to that conductive thread that greatly helps make decisions.”
Other authorized voices are pointed to that same plot thread. For the architect Luis Sendra, the old terminal “is not a brutalist building ‘per se’, but it is when comparing it with its surroundings: that it is out of place because at that time it was sought to do something disruptive.” According to this theory, Antonio Espinosa, influenced by the modern movement and by figures such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, designed a building that dialogues with the great referents of international contemporary architecture, as another prestigious Valencian professional, Carlos Salazar, points out. “The great skyscrapers of New York and Chicago and the vaults that remind me of Le Corbusier,” he says, “they are an example of this hybrid between two architectures, of which The Terminal Hub is heir.”
A complex proposal that is very present in the approach of the recent conversion of the building, as highlighted by its car. For Orts, “despite the change in use, the operation of the building at broad strokes is similar”, a thesis that explains in more detail: “The degree of privacy of the plants corresponds to a greater or lesser extent to the old passenger terminal”; In other words, a more public floor with less access restrictions, a more private intermediate “corresponding to old offices and servers spaces of the building” and finally a second open plant “with an intermediate restriction where passengers that would correspond to the users of the fixed positions” of the present. In summary, “in the use of building as hub,” the itinerance of new users equals “in another order of magnitude” with the paths of the old passengers. Also now, he concludes, “The User of The Terminal Hub is traveling”; Consequently, identify how the original idea and its ancient function do so that it adapts to the current use embodies a certain guarantee of success. And in a sense it represents a tribute to an architect, Antonio Espinosa, little known, who according to his Valencian colleague Tito Llopis deserves superior recognition: Valencia has already put the first stone.
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