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Mayor of Barcelona and president of the Zona Franca Consortium (CZFB), Jordi Hereu, and mayor of Sant Adrià de Besòs, Jesús Maria Canga, presided over the ceremony to lay the first stone of the Spiralling Tower today, beginning construction on this emblematic building which will be the symbol of the future Diagonal-Besòs Campus, located in the Forum area.

Others present at the event included Manuel Royes, Spanish delegate to CZFB, developers on the project; Antoni Giró, rector of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and Iranian architect Zaha Hadid, who designed this innovative building with 11 floors and a basement located on the border of Barcelona and Sant Adrià de Besòs.

The Spiralling Tower aims to connect bordering areas of these two municipalities in order to boost their potential. It brings together the Forum area and the technological developments of the 22@ district. Additionally, Hadid’s building is a new architectural jewel on the spectacular Barcelona waterfront, linking De Meuron’s Forum building and Enric Massip-Bosch’s Telefónica tower.

This project is the architectural gateway linking the Forum area with the Campus and the 22@ district, located at the intersection of these large urban areas on a 6,700-m2 parcel (between Taulat, Sant Ramon de Penyafort and Eduard Maristany Streets)

The Barcelona Zona Franca Consortium is a public institution working to drive urban development in Barcelona. They are developing the Spiralling Tower through an agreement with the City Councils of Barcelona and Sant Adrià, and the Diagonal-Besòs Campus, among others. The Zona Franca Consortium will invest 55 million euros in the building, constructed on a parcel to which they have been granted surface rights. Construction on the tower is scheduled to finish at the end of 2011.

The entities that granted CZFB surface rights, for a period of 53 years, are the Barcelona Regional Council, the Metropolitan Transport Authority, the City Councils of Barcelona and Sant Adrià, the Besòs Consortium and the Diagonal-Besòs  Campus Consortium.

Zaha Hadid, 2004 Pritzker Architecture Laureate and one of the top international architects, has designed a building that makes the most of the beauty of the materials (glass, steel and concrete) to create a surprising project. The tower’s trademark is its dynamic spiral and Hadid has created overlapping volumes, following urban-planning directives, that help the new campus mesh with the city.

Hadid uses the parcel’s natural slope to begin the spiraling shape of the building. In all, the project will have an aboveground surface area of 20,600 m2 (48 meters at its highest point), divided into 11 floors in two sections, and 5,600 m2 of underground space for parking.

The building’s irregular spiral matrix overlays nearly rhomboidal floors, creating breathtaking views and open spaces in atriums, terraces and overhangs. The building will be covered with a curtain wall, leaving the interior space almost completely open.
This way, occupants will be able to take advantage of natural light and beautiful views, either of the sea or the sinuous façade of the building itself. The design also pays special attention to traffic flow inside the building, given its special morphology.

The structure of the building, which merges different spaces and establishes connecting bridges, favors interaction between private and public usage. In fact, the terrain will include both office space and facilities. This way, it will house both business and university offices, connecting the business world with that of research. The combination also contemplates intelligent co-existence of public spaces for residents and private use.

With offices located mainly on the top floors, the distribution of activities changes as you move through the different layers, which get larger as they approach the base of the tower. The campus spaces will be located on the lower floors and the tower base will house an auditorium as well as retail and
Night view community spaces.

The Diagonal-Besòs Campus will occupy 2,260 m2 in the Spiralling Tower. Concepts like engineering, innovation and multidisciplinarity are key to the new university space being developed by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia at the Diagonal-Besós Campus.

The new campus will integrate engineering education and innovation-related research spaces, particularly focusing on water and energy. This way, the UPC plans to establish their College of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (EUETIB) and School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (ETSEIB) as motors of both knowledge and business.

This new campus will allow the university to make their dream of creating a benchmark technology park in this area a reality. The park will include educational centers as well as technology and engineering zones, to combine university usage and encourage research in emerging fields, based on the Triple Helix model of synergies between universities, institutions and innovative companies.

The Diagonal-Besòs Campus Consortium (which is made up of the City Councils of Barcelona and Sant Adrià del Besòs, the Barcelona Regional Council and the Metropolitan Transport Authority) created the B-TEC Foundation to manage this technology park and to structure the project around the fields of energy, water and mobility.

B_TEC plans to use this space for innovative energy initiatives like ITER –from the European Fusion Agency-, which is an international project working to create an experimental thermonuclear reactor.