The new CaixaForum Valencia has passed the halfway mark within Valencia's City of Arts and the Sciences complex, as explained by La Caixa Foundation deputy general director, Elisa Duran, on a site visit alongside the architect and Could 9 leader, Enric Ruiz-Geli.
In mid-October, the CaixaForum València construction works had completed the closure of the exhibition spaces and multipurpose rooms, as well as the slab and structure of the plaza inside the Ágora building. The installation of the structure of the upper floor of the restaurant has also been completed as do the structure of the Agora stand, while the escalators that give access to the great Plaza Ágora have been installed.
Currently, the construction process advances on tasks related to cladding and wrapping the «cloud», a multipurpose space that will fly over the exhibition halls in the central area of the Agora. The team also works on the general installations of air conditioning, electricity, firefighting and audiovisuals, furniture, and signage design.
Elisa Durán has announced the collaboration of two artists in the project: Frederic Amat will be in charge of an intervention on the ceiling of the Auditorium, while ceramicist Toni Cumella has been commissioned to tile the Administration building and the Vip Room with ceramics.
On April 21, the deputy general management of the ”la Caixa” Foundation also announced the permanent installations of two works of art in the future center by the Valencian artists Inma Femenía and Anna Talens. Femenía has designed an intangible piece for the center that reproduces the optical phenomenon of the rainbow. Arc al cel represents the combination of art, nature, science and architecture that the artist has interpreted as the essence of CaixaForum València. On the other hand, Talens proposes with Palafit a sculpture that has as a reference the agrarian architecture typical of aquatic ecosystems. It is a golden palafito with a triangular section, designed to remember and sanctify the way of life of the farmers of the Albufera and the aquatic areas of Levante.
The project to equip Valencia with a new 8,200-square-meter CaixaForum cultural facility inside the Ágora building of the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències is the work of the architect Enric Ruiz-Geli, director of the Cloud 9 studio and professor at the university Virginia Tech, and has an investment by the ”la Caixa” Foundation of 19 million euros.
Ruiz-Geli has stated in a public release that "it is a public space that makes possible a dialogue not only between people but also between buildings. It is a living space that comes from a living, vivid, and collective intelligence.”
