The beauty of San Sebastian city lying in the midst of a complete geography, huddled by two mountains and a beach, around a river estuary in the edge of which The Kursaal Auditorium now stands, seemingly belonging to the surrounding landscape. The Kursaal site still has the flavor of the geography and Rafael Moneo proposed to erect a building that would not violate the presence of the river in the city, raising two gigantic rocks lying on the tidal wash where the river meets the sea. 

One addresses Mount Urgull which protects the Concha beach. The other looks toward Mount Ulía, a further promontory, which defines the city borders. The building does not belong to the urban fabric, but it belongs to the landscape. The auditorium and the congress hall, the key programmatic elements of the scheme, are conceived as separate autonomous volumes, as two gigantic rocks stranded at the mouth of the river forming part of the landscape rather than belonging to the city.

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