The future Ciutadella del Coneixement continues to advance. Its first action will consist of the creation of a research complex formed by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), with an investment of almost 93 million euros. Located in the Old Fish Market, where there is now a B:SM parking lot, the new centers will have a total area of 7,500 square meters and 46,000 square meters of buildable roof. This scientific, cultural, and urbanistic initiative aims to create a knowledge hub in the Ciutadella Park, extending over a total of 300,000 square meters and creating a new centrality in the city.
The selection of the five architecture firms that will compete for the construction of the UPF buildings and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), shared between Pompeu Fabra and the CSIC, marks a new milestone in this project. A total of 41 teams from ten different countries have submitted proposals for the competition that was launched in June 2021. Of these, the Girona-based firm Camps Felip Arquitectura and the Irish studio Allies & Morrison have been chosen; the Japanese studio Kengo Kuma & Associates and BCQ Arquitectura Barcelona; the temporary union of the Barcelona firms Miba Architects and DATAAE; the Madrid firm Moneo Brock ---the first in Spain to win the Pritzker Prize and responsible for the expansion of the Prado museum---, hand in hand with the Catalan firms BAAS and Casa Solo Arquitectos, and the team formed by the Californian studio ZGF Architects and the Barcelona firms MIRAG and Double Twist.
Once the first phase of the competition has been completed, the five selected teams will have to work on drafting a proposal for the two research buildings and the urbanization of the surroundings. They have approximately three months to present it.
The competition includes, first, the UPF building, which will have 8,300 square meters of buildable roof and three floors high, and will be dedicated to research on planetary well-being. The second building, with 6,000 square meters of buildable roof and five floors high, will house the new headquarters of the IBE, bringing together its researchers, who are currently in two separate buildings, under one roof.
Next to the UPF and IBE buildings, will be the BIST building, which already selected an architecture firm last summer. The winning firm was the Barcelona-based Barozzi Veiga, which will build for the first time in its city of origin. With a budget of 50 million euros, this building will be the one that occupies the most space and the tallest, with a constructed area of 25,000 square meters distributed over eight floors. It is expected to host 500 researchers and about sixty research groups from BIST centers such as the CRG, IBEC, ICN2, and IRB Barcelona.
Despite the progress being made, the project shared between UPF, CSIC, and BIST is seeing the start of works being delayed. In the last update, when the urban plan that made the new research complex possible was approved by the municipal plenary, it was foreseen that works would begin this April, but now it is estimated that they will have to wait until September.