H Porta Fira (Toyo Ito)

The Porta Fira towers were designed by Toyo Ito as a symbolic gateway to the trade fair site in L'Hospitalet. The architect, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2013, completed the complex in 2010. The two towers stand 110 m high and draw inspiration from the Venetian towers in Plaça Espanya. They are connected by a single-storey horizontal section. The first tower, with its organic forms, houses the Hotel Porta Fira, and the second, which is parallelepiped-shaped, is used as an office building. At first sight, the volume of the hotel resembles a mushroom-shaped column with a circular ground plan. In truth, the geometry of the building is highly complex, as the ground plan is closer to a cloverleaf in shape. It also twists and turns in on itself, varying on each level. The exterior has a dual façade. A sophisticated curtain wall forms the inner layer, while the outer layer consists of a system of red aluminium tubes, which are cut into sections and placed at a slightly sloping angle to reinforce the rotational effect of the volume. The metal jalousie is pierced by window-like openings. The hotel floor plan is arranged around a circular, structural core, surrounded by a ring-shaped corridor that provides access to the guest rooms. The office building, with its rectangular floor plan, also uses a type of curtain wall but leaves the edges of the floors protruding. The floor plan has a central core to ensure smooth circulation throughout the building, in a similar way to the hotel, but this time it has been placed on the outside and is slightly oval in shape. This red, protruding section on the façade resembles a sinuous vertical axis that engages in a dialogue with the shape of the hotel.