Altamira Museum and Research Centre

Navarro Baldeweg Asociados (1)
Navarro Baldeweg Asociados
Juan Navarro Baldeweg

For many years, conservation problems at the Altamira cave imposed restrictions on the number of visitors. Consequently, the need arose to create a replica as well as a new museum and research centre in which to preserve and display archaeological finds. The site for the museum was chosen in the area surrounding the original cave, located to the west, on the other slope of the hill in which the cave is situated and separated from the latter by abundant vegetation. The gentle slope’s northward orientation allows access to the neo-cave similar to the real one. The site lies outside the natural runoff area of the original cave, thus avoiding any alteration that the new construction's proximity to it might cause.

View gallery

The new Altamira museum and research centre was required to house a programme of considerable size, and the formal aspects of the work also had to be carefully studied in order to maintain the original cave’s fragile surrounding landscape, which contains the evocative aspects and the mystery that such a natural entity as a cave generates.

Navarro Baldeweg Asociados
Navarro Baldeweg Asociados

The museum, the replica and the research centre are divided into two differentiated areas of construction: the diaphanous area of the neo-cave and research library suspended above it to the east, and three lines stretching west of the main entrance, containing exhibition halls, a small auditorium for presentations and a restaurant that extends onto an open-air terrace. The architecture represents a natural geology, recreating a piece of the hill and manipulating it following actions and movements frozen in expressive attitudes - in static, architectural poses. The building opens up expressively to the landscape without appropriating it, making room for and living congenially with an environment that has always existed there.

Duccio Malagamba

Through a color code, the construction clearly shows this operation of sectioning and restoring of the topography that is embodied in the museum. The ocher of the aluminum sandwich panels is associated to the thickness of the raised layer of land, the red delimits the sectioned surfaces, the masonry walls of golden stone that enclose the replica and delimit the open air terrace refer to the dug out rocky stratum, and the stonework of large vertical slabs that encloses the exhibition rooms speaks about spacial definition, of a fenced in space, recreating the geological tectonic that conceptually supports the project by way of this chromatic strategy.

Navarro Baldeweg Asociados

General information

Altamira Museum and Research Centre

YEAR

2000

Status

Built

Option to visit

Visit by appointment

Address

Ave. Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, s/n

39330 Santillana del Mar - Cantabria

Latitude: 43.377509669

Longitude: -4.122111211

Classification

Building materials

Stone

Aluminium

Concrete

Construction system

Aluminium sandwich panels with golden stone masonry walls together with the large vertical stonework that encloses the museum rooms.

Built area

501 - 5000 m²

Awards

ACUE 2001

Involved architects

Juan Navarro Baldeweg

Involved architectural firms

Navarro Baldeweg Asociados

Information provided by

EUMies Award

MITMA

Website links

(2017). Juan Navarro Baldeweg. Ministerio de Fomento Secretaría General Técnica Centro de Publicaciones.

Arquitectura Viva

EUMies Award

Navarro Baldeweg Asociados

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Location

43.377509669 -4.122111211 3c782fee-35e0-4d36-a3d2-14629383b53c Built
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Built
Temporary
Lost
Unbuilt project

Itineraries

Cantabria

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