DailyCelestialChallenge Structures-The sad story of the Agbar Tower

Greetings and blessings brothers of @steemchurch, today's Celestial Challenge I will talk about Agbar Tower.

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Since 2005, without it, you would not recognize the silhouette that profiles Barcelona in the sky. But there is no way to fit on solid ground. It is the Glòries tower, although almost nobody knows it by its real name. It was nicknamed Torre Agbar for hosting the headquarters of Aguas de Barcelona (Agbar) since its inauguration. And so it was during the ten successive years. But few more guests welcomed their more than 30,000 m2 for offices. During its first years, in 2006, the editorial office of the ADN free newspaper went into its seventh floor and in 2008, the Bull Information Technologies company, to occupy 961 m2 of the 23 floor. It also hosted Mediapro. All, in the end, ended up marching.

Controversial skyscraper

All the emblematic that is its exterior architecture is the cumbersome to manage inside. With a cylindrical shape, Jean Nouvel and Fermín Vázquez designed the work influenced by two of the most representative symbols of Catalan culture: the legacy of Gaudí in the city (above all, the Sagrada Familia) and the Montserrat mountain range. Its plants, without edges or faces, are covered with more than 4,500 holes of rectangular windows covered by 56,619 translucent glass slats. The light and the play of reflections through these windows, Nouvel's hallmark in his works, is the particularity of the building.

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However, it was built without forgetting who would be its main tenant and their needs, Aguas de Barcelona, who only occupied 19 floors of the 34 that the tower erects. The shape was designed to evoke water, but all these windows and that circular shape do not invite offices that are too practical, despite their architectural appeal. What seemed to be the takeoff of the Glòries square, the gazebo did not get rid of the curse.

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In November 2013, Aguas de Barcelona sold the building to the Andorran fund Emin Capital. The Andorran businessmen agreed that Agbar would remain their tenant until August 2015. Emin Capital saw there a possible exit to the iconic property: a luxury hotel. From CiU, what was the party that was then headed by the municipal government, was optimistic with the proposal of Emin and the City Council celebrated that Barcelona attracted international investment. In those moments, the project lived its highest point. Nearby they had a Me by Melià hotel, which gave the business district par excellence of the city a hotel offer at the height of the business proposals of the area. But beyond the meeting rooms, the hotels in that area did not meet their expectations. The luxurious hotel Me, for example, happened to be a simple Melià.

It was not going to be easy to release the new identity of the Agbar tower. To transform the building into a hotel it was necessary to change the license of use and modify the urban planning with which it was built. The plants are built free of columns. The height of the roof is 2.60 meters. All this had to be reformed to give it a new interior image. Emin Capital formalized the work request in 2014, so the moratorium imposed by Colau's team, the municipal government that entered in 2015, should not create problems for Emin's project. "We showed that we were out of this moratorium on building new hotels in the city," says Jordi Badia, director of Emin Capital.

They did not expect to have the problems that the Deustche Bank de la Diagonal tower gave them, but in September 2015 they had to make a new work request for Agbar. "We sent the blueprints of the project, it had to be revised even by the municipal institute of Parks and Gardens (regidoría of Ecology, Urbanism and Mobility) because we were going to implant trees", Badia details. "If the reform of an apartment requires fifteen days to have a license, a hotel of that size required 6 to 8 months. After 15 months we still had no sign of the City Council to have a license, "regrets Badia.

During all that time, since August 2015, the building was left empty. But not free of expenses: electricity, taxes, maintenance, security ... They were still running on behalf of Emin Capital. The operation was not profitable. The law requires a response from the City Council if it approves, or not, the license. "We could go to court, but it would be many years fighting," confess the Andorran businessmen. "We did not see the light at the end of the tunnel."

The City Council officially received on Thursday, January 12, the dismissal by Emin of the hotel adaptation project for the Agbar tower. The City Council refers to "a decision strictly by the promoter of the building, who was able to process the hotel license because he had a certificate of urban development". In all this time, the Consistory has been reviewing the license and analyzing that it was adapted to the current regulations, and they have limited themselves to act "as in any other project", explain sources of the municipal government. Finally, it is in the hands of Merlin Properties, which will give it a use of offices, something that will also boost a scarce market in the 22 @ district.

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