City of Arts and Sciences
Introduction
The City of Arts and Sciences (in Valencian and officially Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències) is an architectural, cultural and entertainment complex in the city of Valencia, capital of the Valencian Community, Spain.[1][2].
The complex, in a neo-futurist style, was designed by Santiago Calatrava and Félix Candela.[3] It was inaugurated on June 9, 1998 with the opening of El Hemisférico. The last major component of the City is the Ágora "Ágora (Valencia)"), located between the bridge of l'Assut de l'Or and l'Oceanogràfic.[4].
The City of Arts and Sciences is located at the end of the old channel of the Turia River (Turia Garden), a channel that became a garden in the 1980s, after the river was diverted by the great flood of Valencia in 1957. In 2007, it was one of the winners of the 12 Treasures of Spain contest.[5].
History
Project origins
In 1989, the then president of the Valencian Generalitat, Joan Lerma, after a visit to the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie, in Paris, and through the then general director of planning and studies of the Presidency of the Valencian Generalitat, José María Bernabé, officially commissioned the scientist Antonio Ten Ros to draft a first proposal for a City of Science and Technology for Valencia.[6].
Ten Ros prepared a first preliminary project, entitled "Vilanova, A City of Sciences for Valencia", which was officially presented to the Generalitat in May 1989. Following this, he was formally commissioned, in 1990, to direct the drafting of a general preliminary project, for an amount of 92,650,000 pesetas (556,000 euros), to be managed by the University of Valencia. Antonio Ten Ros formed a team of 56 scientists, museologists and designers, among whom he included prof. José María López Piñero as head of the space "A walk through history", who presented the preliminary project, in 32 volumes, to President Lerma, in the Palace of the Generalitat, on December 21, 1991.[7].
The museum was going to be the center from which a complex would revolve, half cultural, half tourist, which was going to serve to "make Valencia an emblematic place", as Lerma himself expressed in the presentation of the works, two years later. The City of Sciences, which was the name that the regional government gave to the initiative, consisted of a 382 meter high communications tower - the third tallest in the world at that time -, an IMAX cinema, with a planetarium, for which the then director of "La Géode", in Paris, Armand Benatar, was integrated into the Ten Ros team, and the scientific museum. The total cost of the works was estimated at around 20,000 million pesetas, around 120 million euros.[8].