City of Culture clear winner

THE competition to find the best design for Almeria’s City of Culture project has a clear winner.
The jury unanimously chose the proposal entitled “El Palmeral”.
Revealing the name of the top design, Almeria Mayor and jury president Ramon Fernandez-Pacheco stressed the “difficulty” of first whittling it down to the three finalists from among the 67 ideas presented in the competition and then choosing the best overall.
He drew attention to the “imaginative solutions” featured in the winning proposal for remodeling the Maestro Padilla Auditorium, its enlargement with an adjacent building to house the Almeria city orchestra and the municipal band, and a completely new look for the surrounding area, “giving shape to a cultural project which will put the city at the heights it deserves.”
Jury member and highly respected architect Federico Soriano Pelaez, whose projects include the Malaga Municipal Auditorium, commented that the winning design fitted best with “the standards society demands on environmental sustainability” in architecture.