Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes and MARVEL have won a contest to create a new home for the Catalunya Media City in Barcelona The Barcelona-based studios won a contest organised by the Catalan government which focused on adapting and expanding the landmark Three Chimneys factory in the city’s Sant Adrià de Besós neighbourhood. The project – planned to complete in 2028 – will deliver a new audiovisual and digital content hub for the Catalunya Media City initiative within the waterfront complex. The winning scheme will retain the building’s three chimneys and turbine hall while also delivering a new extension. The complex was originally built in the 1970s as part of a larger thermal power station and features three, 200m-tall chimneys. Once complete, the restored and converted building will feature training areas, research spaces, an open space 5,600m² exhibition zone, an auditorium, performance studio, library and meeting rooms. Jonathan Marvel, co-founder of MARVEL studio, said: ‘Transforming an infrastructure that has had a significant environmental impact in the past into one that promotes the future of media collaboration, leveraging the existing structure to reduce the energy consumption of the new program, seems like a key objective for the architecture of the future.’ Anna Bonet, co-founding partner of the Garcés de Seta Bonnet studio, said: ‘The turbine hall nave is a powerful prismatic body with a contrasting interior, where a forest of pillars, voids, and solids at different levels coexist in fortuitous harmony. ‘The new intervention is superimposed on the richness of this interior landscape without obliterating the pre-existing scenery. The large hall on the third floor is reminiscent of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, the Aviva Studios Warehouse in Manchester, or the Park Avenue Armory in New York.’ Bonet added: ‘All of these unique spaces from a recent industrial past offer generous elements in terms of dimensions, proportions and remarkable capacity. In the specific case of the third floor of the turbine hall, the space is 17 m high and 160 m long. ‘The project enhances the void character of this magnificent space, only fully equipping the ceiling and the floor, allowing this flexible space to host any activity, from intimate performances to large-scale installations with capacity for up to 4,500 people.’ Located on the north-eastern coast of Spain, Barcelona is the capital and largest city of Catalonia with 1.6 million residents. Last month, the winners of an open international contest to remodel various venues on the city’s Montjuïc trade fair site were revealed. The latest appointment comes almost a year after a competition – backed by Barcelona City Council and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe – was launched to remodel 10 permanent blind walls which are spread across the city’s 10 districts and could ‘leave a lasting legacy in Barcelona’. An open call for participation in the upcoming UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 Barcelona was announced earlier this month.