2007 Mies Van Der Rohe Awards Winner!

Remember that article about the Mies van der Rohe Award finalists I posted a few weeks ago? Well, a winner has been announced yesterday in Barcelona, Spain.
The MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León, Spain, by architects Mansilla + Tuñón has won the award.

Dezeen explains the concept behind the museum's design:

"This is an art centre that constructs a set of chessboards on which the action is the protagonist of the space; a structure that develops from an open system, formed by a fabric of squares and rhombi, and permitting the construction of a secret geography of memory.

Each of the jaggedly shaped rooms constructs a continuous yet spatially differentiated area that opens onto the other rooms and courtyards, providing longitudinal, transversal and diagonal views.

Outside, the public space takes on a concave shape to hold the activities and encounters, embraced by large coloured glass in homage to the city as the place for interpersonal relationships.

Inside, a large area of continuous, different spaces, spattered with courtyards and large skylights, shapes an expressive system that speaks to us of the interest shared by architecture and art: the contemporary manifestation of the variable and the perennial, of equality and difference, of universality and transience, an echo of our own diversity and equality as people."