Trapped within a curve of a motorway, this unfriendly site gave AMP Arquitectos very little to work with beyond the harsh desert landscape of the surrounding Chasna rock and the distant sea horizon. Therefore they designed the Magma Convention Center to be part of the landscape, to merge both physically and conceptually with the rock. Located right in the heart of the South of Tenerife, Magma Convention Center is an architecturally unique multifunctional building that is designed to satisfy the needs of any event.

Resembling a series of growths rising from the ground, the building recalls a sophisticated composition put together with irregular and coarse volumes under a white roof recalling the molten lava of the surrounding environment. To prepare for the commission, the architects adapted the American model of a single, raw, multifunctional space for convention centers rather than breaking the facility into the separate elements of a fixed-seat auditorium, an exhibition hall, and a meeting center, as is common in Spain.

Services, offices and amenities, requiring functional independence, are housed within the artificial rock formations, strategically scattered around the building. The spaces in between these ‘rocks’, sources of light and ventilation, are then created as ‘negative’ spaces, apparently leftovers, which provide flexible areas that can be divided up as necessary. Magma Convention Center is column-free, with 30,000 sq ft of main hall that can be divided into up to 9 separate rooms of different sizes, has an area of 2,840 m², as well as a 300 m² stage, and can achieve a maximum capacity of 2,500 persons. It uses mobile platforms to assemble raked seating and different stages.

The building’s upper floor accommodates up to 26 smaller meeting rooms. At the entrance to the building, there is a reception hall of 1,219 m². On the first floor, there is another hall with an area of 1,865 m², where spaces can be separated with capacity for 20 to 200 people. Modern technical equipment ensures excellent results for audiovisual presentations, lighting, sound and communications, to which must be added quality catering services, hostesses, interpretation and decoration totally made to measure.

Apart from all those features, Magma has a number of auxiliary rooms such as VIP or press rooms. It also has a restaurant, cafe and a wide area for commercial displays. It has two large parking areas too. Furnishings and fittings are in keeping with this rough-hewn approach, and show the architects’ appreciation for salvage, also seen in their other works and characteristic of an isolated island culture. Interior doors, partitions, and folding walls are finished in sheets of perforated, galvanized steel.

The construction system is consistent with the strategy behind the plan. Its principal structural elements are 12 concrete piers, which some are small buildings in their own right, such as the administrative block, arranged around the interior spaces in a roughly rectangular configuration, alternating with sections of glass or fiber-cement-panel infill, their angled planes providing vivid chiaroscuro effects under the high subtropical sun.

A simple metallic structure of surprisingly regular flat beams and a telescopic substructure, with Chasna stone aggregate used for all walls and coverings, achieve a building at one with its landscape. The Chasna is a sandy-colored compressed volcanic ash that blends with the exposed volcanic terrain of the surroundings. The piers support the wavy roof, which sags over the narrow ends of the building like a spongy pillow or overflowing custard, and the seemingly semicollapsed lines of the spandrels. With its rough-cut, unflashed edges, the fiber-cement roof offers a softer, weightless variation on the concrete’s rich textures.

Although AMP Arquitectos had hard tasks, they solved these complexities with helpful experts. For example, they began with a common mechanical “scanning” of a model made of papier-mâché and sand molds, and refined the process over more than a year. They were aided in their works by students from the Madrid School of Architecture, along with AMP’s engineers, and the use of CATIA, the only design program capable of resolving the roof’s irregular curves into smooth planar surfaces. The fact that the architects had to resort to CATIA, the aerospace design program that Frank Gehry used to design the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, is a reminder that Magma Convention Center is clearly an episode of the post-Guggenheim euphoria.

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