Geometry by the sea

Tarragona public passenger terminal

(★★★✩✩)

Architect: Juan M. Rojas. Hombre de piedra Architects

Location: Port of Tarragona. Balearic Islands Pier

The main façade of Tarragona's public passenger terminal is on its roof, because that's the first view cruise passengers see from the decks of their ships upon docking in the Catalan city's port. Its designer, Sevillian architect Juan M. Rojas, says that with this upper façade, in nautical blue and white tones, he intended to make a nod to Mediterranean traditions such as Roman mosaics and modernist trencadís, evoked here with irregular pentagonal pieces.

This first impression might associate the project with that of a fairground, colorful and sometimes trivial. But it encompasses a complex approach, which prioritized the creation of a lightweight building—weighing 1,758 tons—that was industrialized, modular, and quick to construct, adaptable to new needs, easily expandable, and even, when the time comes, dismantled and recyclable without major difficulties.

The facade is on the roof: it is the first thing that cruise passengers see

Citing as references the Spanish pavilion by Corrales and Molezún at the 1958 Brussels Expo, or the Stansted Airport completed in 1991 by Norman Foster, Rojas proposed a structure with ten tree-like pillars, on which he placed a structural mesh also defined by irregular pentagonal shapes, assembled on the outside and subsequently lifted by cranes and resting on the pillars. A beautiful structure, free of installations—hidden behind a continuous strip around the interior perimeter—which takes center stage and integrates four skylights.

The building that derives from this geometric option, whose logic has been decisive in its configuration, is considerably more suggestive than the large orthogonal boxes usual in this typology. It contributes to the fluidity of transit in its 2,800 square meters of open surface, and generates forms that allow us to intuit organic references.

On the vertical facades, a system of blue slats has been combined with another of canopies, both with the aim of protecting the interior of the building from summer sunlight and, at the same time, giving it a certain movement, not unlike the nearby surface of the sea.

In short, this terminal, operational since the end of May 2024, brings a touch of color and geometry to a stark, kilometer-long port environment that oscillates between an industrial atmosphere and that of De Chirico's uninhabited canvases.