Alessandro Mendini1, Alfredo Häberli3, Álvaro Siza1, Antoine et Manuel1, Antoni Gaudí17, Arquitectura-G1, Cristian Zuzunaga1, Doshi Levien1, Eduard Samsó1, Ettore Sottsass3, Eugeni Quitllet2, Färg & Blanche1, Isabel Gamero1, Jaime Hayon29, Jordi Badia1, Jordi Pérez1, Josep Maria Jujol1, Klas Ernflo5, Konstantin Grcic7, Lluís Clotet5, Muller Van Severen7, Oscar Tusquets20, Otto Canalda2, Pepe Cortés6, Ramón Úbeda1, Ronan Bouroullec9, Sabine Marcelis1, Salvador Dalí11, Serban Ionescu4, Stephen Burks2, Willo Perron1, Xavier Mañosa1
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Alfredo Kraus Auditorium
Designer
Oscar Tusquets
Location
Spain
Located in an exceptional place, at one end of Las Canteras beach, the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium is an icon of the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In this building, beauty and functionality go hand in hand to offer, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, a space of 16,750 square meters of useful surface, with 25 rooms that can accommodate up to 4,600 people. The building, designed as a “fortress that protects and a beacon that guides”, is the work of the Catalan architect Oscar Tusquets, who had the collaboration of Carlos Díaz and the project management of Agustín Juárez and Marcos Roger.
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“The Canariensis was born from the experience acquired during the development of the auditorium version of the Varius. Everything we learnt with the Varius about the acoustics of seating for concert halls was applied in this new series.
The Canariensis owes its name to the fact that it was specially conceived for the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Given the design of this concert hall—with stepped terraces and areas of seating oriented in different directions—we did not want each seat to be individually noticeable, rather that each row of seating should be understood as a whole. For this reason the Canariensis has a completely horizontal backrest, and the back of each seat practically touches its neighbours in such a way that the overall impression is of a continuous bench. To achieve a coherent shape, the arms are completely horizontal and the side supports are completely vertical; this makes the seating as a whole geometrically very simple, and therefore highly suited to places where the seating should be inconspicuous.
Given that there is an unquestionable collective tendency to associate wood with good acoustics—and that a wooden laminate is a very suitable material, warm, which we are particularly fond of, we used it for the structure of the backrests, leaving it exposed at the back.”
Oscar Tusquets
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