ABSTRACT
In central Madrid, an 1899 electrical power station has been transformed into a multipurpose art gallery, music concert hall, film screening center, and conference venue. The Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron's innovative strategy for the reuse ofthis industrial building is at once to keep and preserve it, but also to unexpectedly and wholly lift its brick fa c:,:a de up off the ground so as to make it appear that the building is floating in the air. The masonry wall thereby becomes truly a "curtain" wall hanging off a completely new structural framing system inside the building - in fact, the old brick walls are lined by new reinforced concrete walls that effectively act as deep beams bracketing off interior vertical concrete cores. The ground floor is left open, so that access to the entrance and spectacular ceremonial staircase is achieved by rather disconcertingly having to walk underneath the bottom edge of the newly "floating" building.
