Property
S pr pa o in in per ’s b En ty es gl ma t ish g
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MARCH APRIL 2025
Coal to culture
As the Art Deco movement reaches a century, we celebrate Spain’s contribution
ONCE a towering titan of industry, the iconic Tres Xemeneies power plant is set to become the beating heart of Barcelona’s cultural future. The 1970s relic, named after its three colossal chimneys (that’s Tres Xemeneies in Catalan), has been gathering dust since it shut down in 2011. But not for much longer. Architecture dream team Garces de Seta Bonet Arquitectes and Marvel have just released dazzling visuals of their wild new vision: E la nave va - a name borrowed from a classic Fellini flick. Out goes coal and in comes creativity. This bold transformation will morph the hulking plant into the ‘Catalunya Media City’, a buzzing hub for media, tech, and public arts. The mammoth turbine hall will be reborn - with vibes straight out of London’s Tate Modern and NYC’s Park Avenue Armory. We’re talking 17-metre ceilings, epic sound studios, labs, and enough flexible free space to host everything from film fests to virtual reality showcases. And the origins of the station have not been forgotten, with it still producing power - 4,500m² of solar panels are to crown the roof, and its smart eco-friendly design will help shrink its carbon footprint. “This is about turning an industrial past into a cultural future,” said architect Jonathan Marvel. And with views over the Med and Badalona, it’s looking like the power plant's second act will be nothing short of electric.
A forgotten Spanish power plant gets an epic makeover, writes Dilip Kuner
IT was a clever way to utilise a waste product from a local industry in Andalucia. A team from Spanish and British universities have worked out a way to create eco-friendly building materials from sugarcane. The group from the University of East London ( U E L ) and the B aga c e i r a Project, in Barcelona, worked out how to repurpose
DECO DOZEN
SWEET DEAL Andalucia has become the centre of a groundbreaking sustainable building project using sugarcane instead of concrete By Tom Ewart Smith
‘bagasse’, the fibrous pulp left after extracting sugarcane juice. Their research found that products made from this waste outperformed traditional concrete and clay bricks. Bagasse is typically burned for fuel or used as cattle feed, both of
which release carbon into the atmosphere. In contrast, their project traps carbon in the new building materials, reducing environmental impact. Made by combining bagasse with sand, the bricks have a carbon footprint six times lower than conventional clay bricks. The project launched in 2022 when UEL researchers Alan Chandler
and Armor Gutierrez (far left) began exploring agricultural waste as a potential construction material. The project is now exploring industrial-scale Sugarcrete production, which could utilise up to 8 million square metres of sugarcane plantations in southern Spain. Estimates claim it will capture carbon emissions equivalent to 46,000 cars. If given the go ahead the team will turn a number of former concrete factories into bio-based production hubs, boosting the local economy.
CARBON TRAPS: The Sugarcrete bricks used at Burning Man Festival
Further research is planned in Granada this summer, while they have already used the product to build a school in India as well as a prototype at the Burning Man festival in the US.