zooco crowns cantabrian maritime museum restaurant with a vault of brutalist pyramids

the addition of four triangles that regularize and complete the paraboloids of the original building set in santander, spain.

lea zeitoun January 10, 2024 3 min

cantabrian maritime museum restaurant in spain

Architectural practice Zooco Estudio introduces its latest completed project, the Cantabrian Maritime Museum restaurant located on Severiano Ballesteros Street in Santander, Spain. The newly opened dining space was conceived as part of a brutalist architectural complex that also includes an Oceanographic Center designed by Vicente Roig Forner and Ángel Hernández Morales, built between 1975 and 1978. The original building consists of two square bodies connected by a canopy with a concrete structure. The interior, meanwhile, distributes itself over three floors around a central courtyard covered by a vault of paraboloid membranes. In 2003, a renovation and extension was carried out, which included the extension of the west facade and roof terrace with a pyramidal aluminum structure, thus altering the initial conception of the building.

zooco crowns cantabrian maritime museum restaurant with a vault of brutalist pyramids - 1 — all images © David Zarzoso

zooco’s concrete revival within an existing building

The the Cantabrian Maritime Museum provides the museum with a new space on the second floor to house its restaurant and terrace by Zooco Estudio (see more here). To accomplish this, the project involved creating a new volume that provides ‘a solution to the pathologies present in building’s roof and facade’. The square morphology of this volume results in the addition of four triangles that regularize and complete the paraboloids of the original building, thus directing the protagonism towards the interior to the rawness of these concrete paraboloids. In a sense, the geometry becomes a recovered element, a vestige of the past, and the protagonist of the interior of the restaurant. Treated as an artistic element, the triangular wooden false ceilings frame it. Moving on to the restaurant exterior, the architects featured a glass box seeking maximum transparency (nuanced by textiles in the form of curtains, depending on the orientation), allowing expansive views of the extraordinary landscape of the Bay of Santander, lending to a feeling of being at sea.