The Hotel Plaza, located in the Plaça d’Espanya, is a fundamental part of the urban operation of the new Tarragona Street, due to its location and the great load of activity and representation.
The Hotel has been designed with an annular floor, in the manner of large urban hotels with an extensive Hall, connected to a large inner courtyard equipped with exterior dimensions and qualities. These two pieces act as an internal binder of the wide range of uses that the Hotel contains. On the outside, the resulting volume is enriched with a smooth inflection in the definition of its faces. Freed by its urban situation from the automatism of the alignments, the building finds its own identity in the undulating movement of its façades. A tower of orthogonal composition placed at the corner ends and distinguishes the building and the urban ensemble of the Plaça d’Espanya in which the bullring “Las Arenas” and the entrance portico to the fairgrounds. The six floors above the ground floor and the tower accommodate 338 rooms and 8 suites, one of them with the large clock as a stained window overlooking the square. The four façades are built with prefabricated concrete panels that incorporate granite slabs of two colours, gray and red, and different sizes, on the exterior. The chosen cutting covers the mechanical subdivision of the prefabricated, fleeing from an automatic construction division to approach a textile-stony outlook, with more unified results. The same composition of orthogonal lines solves the carpentry. The large central courtyard’s interior, close to 30 m. x 30 m., has been finished with ceramic materials of five different colours, distributed in a graduated order, from the darkest ones to the lightest ones, in the manner of some modernist courtyards that contrasted their chromatic variation with a stony, stern and urban exterior. The building has four basements, destined for: parking, facilities, services and warehouses.
