Kursaal Palace
| Kursaal Congress Centre | |
The Kursaal Congress Centre
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| Location | Donostia-San Sebastián (Basque Country, Spain) |
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| Type | Convention center |
| Opened | 1999 |
| Website | |
| Official website of the Kursaal | |
The Kursaal Congress Centre and Auditorium is a complex comprising several spaces: a great auditorium, many-use halls and exhibition halls. It was designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, and is located in Donostia-San Sebastián (Basque Country, Spain). It opened in 1999.
It consists of several spaces, including the 1,800-seat concert hall, the Palacio de Congresos-Auditorio Kursaal, and is the home of the biggest film festival in Spain, the San Sebastian International Film Festival, in existence since 1953.
The Great Kursaal was an elegant palace built in 1921, incorporating a casino, a restaurant, a cinema theater, complementary rooms and an 859-seat theater, placed in front of the Gros beach, and next to the mouth of the Urumea river, but it was pulled down in 1973. An empty plot (later called K Plot) was freed. The absence of any architectonic structure in such a privileged site for so many years was remarkable.
At the time the old palace was pulled down, a competition was held to find a replacement. However, the winning project was never constructed due to its complexity.
A new project proposal was submitted in 1972. After a few changes to the design, building work was started in 1975, but after the perimeter wall was complete and the foundations in place, works was halted. The plot of land then passed from private hands (as the Great Kursaal had been private) to public hands, so a public consortium was created for the purposes of constructing a new building.
Once the 1972 project discarded, and facing the possibility of building a great auditorium in the K Plot, six architects were consulted in 1989: Mario Botta, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, Rafael Moneo, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and Luis Peña Ganchegui. Of the six projects, the one of Moneo was chosen (the motto of which was "Two beached rocks").
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Wikipedia