Auditorio de Tenerife
Interesting facts
- The project took some 33 years from first plans to completion, and the final bill of about 72 million euros was more than double the original budget.
- The great cantilevered roof projects about 100 metres horizontally and rises around 40 metres, with a base about 60 metres wide.
- The organ, designed by Jean Guillou, was built by Albert Blancafort, who also made organs for Alcalá de Henares Cathedral and Gran Canaria's Auditorio Alfredo Kraus.
- The building appeared on a Spanish postage stamp in 2008 and on a commemorative 5-euro coin in 2011.
- Bill Clinton visited the Auditorio in 2005, and Stephen Hawking appeared there in 2014.
- The whole complex occupies a 23,000 square metre plot, while the building itself covers about 6,471 square metres.
- The main foyer offers some 1,200 square metres of open space looking straight out over the Atlantic.
Why it is worth it
Santiago Calatrava's Auditorio de Tenerife rises on the waterfront of Santa Cruz like a breaking wave or a sail caught in the wind. The concert hall was planned for decades, moved between several sites and redesigned before Calatrava took over in 1989; construction began in 1997 beside the old Castle of San Juan Bautista and the building was inaugurated on 26 September 2003 by Felipe, then Prince of Asturias, with Penderecki's Fanfarria Real. In 2011 it was renamed after Adán Martín, who had championed it as head of the island government, though almost everyone still calls it simply the Auditorio.
Its defining gesture is a great curved concrete "wing" that sweeps up and over the building and projects far forward, anchored at only two points, with its tip seemingly hanging in the air; the shell tapers to 15–20 cm thick. The surfaces are clad in white trencadís, the broken-tile mosaic of Catalan modernism, with coloured trencadís on the walls of the surrounding plaza. From the sea, the silhouette has invited so many comparisons with Sydney's opera house that Santa Cruz has been nicknamed the "Sydney of the Atlantic". It has appeared on Spanish stamps and a commemorative coin.
Inside, the domed symphony hall seats 1,616 people in an amphitheatre around the stage, with organ pipes rising on both sides of the pit, designed by the organist Jean Guillou; a chamber hall of 422 seats repeats the plan in miniature. The building is home to the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra and hosts the Tenerife Opera Festival, jazz and dance seasons. Two terraces look out over the Atlantic, and at night the white shell is floodlit, sometimes in colour for special occasions.
Getting there
The Auditorio stands on the Avenida de la Constitución by the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, about 1.4 km from the city centre and close to a stop of the Tenerife tram. Tenerife North Airport (TFN) is about 9 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Auditorio de Tenerife "Adán Martín" is an auditorium in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. Designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, it is located on the Avenue of the Constitution in the Canarian capital, and next to the Atlantic Ocean in the southern part of Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Construction began in 1997 and was completed in 2003. The auditorium was inaugurated on 26 September of that year in the presence of Felipe, Prince of Asturias, and was later visited by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. The building is framed within the tenets of late-modern architecture of the late 20th century.
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