When the Skyscraper Becomes the Public Program: Rethinking Cultural Towers in Resort Cities

The Paradox of Programmatic Imbalance

What happens when a cultural brief is so lopsided—a theater-auditorium claiming most of the square footage, leaving museum and library as vestigial appendages—that the conventional response (a low-slung campus of discrete pavilions) becomes architecturally incoherent? This was the condition facing Madrid-based practice Soriano & Palacios when tasked with designing a cultural center for Benidorm, the Spanish resort city whose skyline is already a forest of residential towers. Their answer was to invert the problem: rather than disguise the imbalance, weaponize it. Make the small programs essential to height. Turn the auditorium into a plinth, and let the library, museum, and conservatory become the vertical arms that push the building skyward.

The Cultural Center of Benidorm remains unbuilt, but its conceptual clarity has aged well. At World Archi Design, we've been tracking how practices worldwide are revisiting the tower typology not as luxury commodity but as civic infrastructure—projects like OMA's Axel Springer Campus or MVRDV's Rotterdam Markthal, where public program and structural ambition are inseparable. Soriano & Palacios's Benidorm scheme predates many of these, yet it articulates the same thesis: in cities already committed to verticality, the skyscraper can be the most generous urban gesture.

Massing as Argument: Three Towers, One Logic

The parti is deceptively simple. The auditorium—a 1,200-seat theater with full stage infrastructure—floats above a covered pedestrian street, freeing the ground plane for public circulation. Above this hovering mass, three towers rise at staggered heights. The first, barely taller than the auditorium volume itself, houses the stage comb and fly tower. The second accommodates the conservatory of dance and music, its rehearsal rooms doubling as flexible event spaces. The third and tallest—reaching approximately 100 meters—stacks conference halls, museum galleries, and library reading rooms in a vertical sequence.

This is not arbitrary stacking. The sectional strategy prioritizes typological coherence over programmatic literalism. Each floor is dimensioned to structural rhythm rather than specific use, meaning future program changes can occur without rearranging circulation or shared amenities. It's an approach we've seen in adaptive reuse projects like David Chipperfield's Neues Museum or Herzog & de Meuron's Tate Modern—buildings that resist functional obsolescence by foregrounding spatial structure over prescriptive fit-out.

In Benidorm, the logic is particularly resonant. The city's urban fabric is already defined by repetitive structural grids: residential slabs marching down the coast, each floor identical to the last. Soriano & Palacios accept this tectonic reality and repurpose it for civic ends. The tower becomes an abstract armature, its concrete frame capable of hosting theater, library, or gallery with equal facility.

Envelope as Temporality: Metal Fabric and the Question of Skin

The most striking formal decision is the building's cladding: a continuous metal mesh of interwoven stainless steel wire, applied across all three towers and the auditorium plinth. The mesh varies in pattern and density, creating zones of opacity and transparency. Its undulating surface catches light at different angles throughout the day, producing what the architects describe as "oscillating reflections"—a shimmer that registers time and weather.

This is not curtain wall in the Miesian sense. It's closer to the textile logics explored by Shigeru Ban in projects like the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where a woven PTFE-coated fiberglass roof mediates between structure and atmosphere. In Benidorm, the mesh performs similarly: it diffuses direct sunlight (critical in a Mediterranean climate), provides visual privacy without total enclosure, and—crucially—allows the building to read as a single sculptural object rather than a stack of discrete programmatic boxes.

The material choice also speaks to Benidorm's coastal context. Stainless steel resists corrosion in salt air, aging gracefully rather than catastrophically. Over decades, the mesh will accumulate patina, its reflections becoming more muted, its transparency more selective. The building is designed to change—not through programmatic renovation, but through material drift.

The Skyscraper as Urban Void: Liberating the Ground Plane

One of the project's quietest achievements is its treatment of public space. By consolidating program into a vertical tower, Soriano & Palacios free the majority of the site for a pedestrian plaza. This is not leftover space; it's the primary urban gesture. The covered street beneath the floating auditorium extends the plaza into the building itself, blurring the threshold between interior and exterior.

This move recalls Cedric Price's Fun Palace or the metabolist megastructures of 1960s Japan—projects that imagined architecture as infrastructure for urban activity rather than enclosed container. In Benidorm, the plaza becomes a shaded commons, protected from sun by the building's mass and animated by its reflective skin. The architects describe it as a space "where any activity can take place effortlessly," a programmatic open-endedness rare in civic architecture.

The strategy also responds to Benidorm's existing urbanism. The city's towers are overwhelmingly residential, their ground floors given over to parking or service. Public life happens in the interstices—beachfront promenades, narrow streets between slabs. The cultural center proposes a different model: a tower that generates public space rather than consuming it.

Precedent and Provocation: The Unbuilt as Critique

Soriano & Palacios's Benidorm scheme sits in a lineage of unbuilt cultural skyscrapers that have nonetheless shaped discourse. One thinks of Rem Koolhaas's 1982 proposal for the Bibliothèque de France—a solid block of books with voids carved out for reading rooms—or Steven Holl's 2003 Linked Hybrid in Beijing, where public program threads through residential towers. Each project uses height not as spectacle but as organizational device, a way to concentrate civic function in a single vertical gesture.

What distinguishes the Benidorm project is its unapologetic embrace of local building culture. Many European architects of the 1990s and 2000s treated resort cities like Benidorm with contempt, viewing their high-rise sprawl as architectural failure. Soriano & Palacios take the opposite stance: if Benidorm has committed to verticality, then its civic buildings should be taller, bolder, more emblematic than its residential stock. The cultural center is not a corrective to the city's urbanism but an intensification of it.

This is architecture as double-down—"doble o nada," in the architects' words. Rather than retreat to low-rise contextualism or disguise the building's scale, the project amplifies it. The tower becomes a dare: can a skyscraper be as generous, as publicly accessible, as a horizontal campus? Can height itself be a form of civic infrastructure?

The Section as Site of Innovation

In their own description of the project, Soriano & Palacios emphasize that "a skyscraper is a problem of section." This is not rhetorical flourish. The building's entire spatial logic depends on vertical adjacencies: conservatory near stage for shared backstage access, museum and library stacked above conference halls to share elevator cores, auditorium hovering above the plaza to create covered public space below.

This sectional thinking distinguishes the project from most mixed-use towers, which treat vertical stacking as expedient rather than strategic. Here, the section is the site of programmatic synthesis. The auditorium's fly tower becomes the first of three ascending volumes, visually linking the building's base to its crown. The mesh skin unifies disparate floor heights, allowing the tower to read as a coherent form despite its internal complexity.

We've seen similar sectional rigor in recent projects like Diller Scofidio + Renfro's The Shed in New York or OMA's CCTV Headquarters in Beijing—buildings where program, structure, and circulation are resolved three-dimensionally rather than plan-by-plan. In each case, the section becomes the primary drawing, the armature around which all other decisions organize.

Reflection: The Civic Skyscraper as Ongoing Question

Nearly two decades after its conception, Soriano & Palacios's Benidorm cultural center remains speculative. No construction was ever initiated; the project exists only as drawings, models, and the architects' published monograph. Yet its provocation endures: in cities already shaped by vertical density, what role can the skyscraper play beyond housing and office space?

The question is increasingly urgent. As coastal cities worldwide grapple with density, climate, and land scarcity, the tower typology is being revisited not as luxury object but as urban necessity. Projects like Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67 or WOHA's Kampung Admiralty in Singapore demonstrate that verticality can support civic life—schools, markets, libraries, parks—without sacrificing publicness.

Soriano & Palacios's unbuilt scheme offers a template: use the skyscraper's structural logic to organize mixed programs, let the small functions justify the height, free the ground plane for collective use, and wrap it all in a skin that registers time and place. The result is not a monument but a machine for urban life—one that accepts the city as it is and pushes it further.

In Benidorm, where every tower is a bet on density, the cultural center would have been the ultimate gamble. Double or nothing.