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\n Chipperfield has not touched the facades of the building, which is listed as a Property of Cultural Interest, but he has completely renovated the interior. The most surprising thing is that he proposed the core of the project inside the existing large arch, which now serves to connect the two parts of the building. “The arch gave an apparent unity to a quite complex spatial structure. In reality, it was a building with a void in the middle. Although it seemed to join the two buildings, it only connected them at the upper levels,” Chipperfield explained this morning during the inauguration. “The arch becomes the heart and lung of the building,” says the director of Faro Santander, Daniel Vega, who also highlights that the arch visually connects the city’s Eixample with the bay.<\/p>\n
\n Even so, the decision to pacify the passage through the arch has raised a controversy that is not yet resolved: the court has ordered as a precautionary measure that the passage under the arch be restored, at least for taxis, buses, residents, emergency services, and delivery services. Currently, the Santander City Council maintains the closure and will reopen the passage on September 20th for the inauguration and activities of Faro Santander.<\/p>\n
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A vertical museum center<\/p>\n
\n Faro Santander has more than 10,000 m\u00b2 across ten floors, 3,000 m\u00b2 of which, distributed over five floors, are intended for exhibitions. And in the basement, there is an auditorium with a capacity for 150 people. The foundation has not made the budget public, but this Monday the city’s mayor, Gema Igual, thanked the Bot\u00edn family for “the highest private investment in the city’s history.” It should be noted that Faro Santander is an initiative of the Banco Santander foundation, and the Centro Bot\u00edn, located very close by, is an initiative of the Bot\u00edn family. “A lighthouse helps people find their way, connects the sea and the land, welcomes those who arrive from other places, and is there for the land. A symbol of the commitment to our roots, our culture, and our heritage. With Santander, with Cantabria, and with Spain. And with future generations,” said Ana Bot\u00edn, the chair of the board of directors of Banco Santander.<\/p>\n
\n Chipperfield’s proposal is that of a vertical museum center. It may seem like a challenge, but it has the reward that at the top of the building there is a bar, a restaurant, and terraces, in a new lightweight steel construction. In his style, the interiors stand out for their minimalism: the architect has used only four elements \u2013 stone, wood, steel, and glass \u2013 to distinguish the new from the old. The only license he has allowed himself is a sculptural spiral staircase in the lobby, which connects to the interior of the arch, where one can see Juan Mu\u00f1oz’s sculptural group Conversation piece I. “The exterior is monumental, but the interiors have a human scale, they have a domestic character, to be able to have an intimate relationship with the works,” says art historian and director of public programs at the Faro, Ana Botella.<\/p>\n
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Creating a museum center from scratch<\/p>\n
\n The management of museums and cultural centers has a major challenge on its hands: at the same time that they must carry out traditional conservation and dissemination tasks, they must adapt to social changes. How is the offering defined? What does the public want? At Faro Santander, Vega and his team have opted for a hybrid model, the most significant part of which are the galleries where exhibitions can be seen: one of the Gelman Collection, by Jacques Gelman, the historic producer of the Cantinflas films and friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; a second one of a selection from the artistic funds of Banco Santander, and a third one of the dramatic passage of Leonora Carrington through Santander. All three will be open until January 10 (with admission at 14 euros). On the other hand, in the lower part of the building there is a space for immersive experiences, El Cubo; another for the emerging projects that the foundation supports, Marisma, and a pedagogical and play space called Llamita. At all times, Botella emphasizes that the center will be a very “lived-in” place. <\/p>\n
\n The management of the works that make up Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection has not been simple either. In fact, it caused the opening of the center, which was scheduled for June, to be postponed for a few months. In January 2026, the Banco Santander Foundation announced a long-term agreement with the Zambrano family, the owner of the collection since 2023, to “manage, conserve, research, exhibit and internationalize” some 160 works from the fund, renamed as the Gelman Santander Collection, by great artists and photographers including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jos\u00e9 Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Manuel \u00c1lvarez Bravo Gabriel, Tina Modotti and Graciela Iturbide.<\/p>\n
\n The works are a guarantee for twelve and a half years for a 150 million euro loan that Santander granted to the collectors. The transfer caused a stir in Mexico, because it was feared that the departure of the works from the country would be permanent. The temporary export permit is for two years, so the works will return to Mexico in 2028 and will be able to be seen in a major exhibition. But this does not mean that they cannot leave again. After Santander, some of the exhibited works by Frida Kahlo, among which stand out two magnificent self-portraits, Self-Portrait with Monkeys and Diego and I, will be able to be seen in a retrospective of the artist at the Beyeler Foundation (Switzerland). In a recent video, Madonna, who owns another portrait of Kahlo with monkeys, said that the artist trained them to spy on Rivera and start screeching to betray Rivera when they saw him leaving with another woman.<\/p>\n
\n The Banco Santander collection is the result of the merger of the funds of banks it has absorbed, collections of artworks, and other acquisitions. Regarding the exhibition Masterpieces of the Banco Santander Collection,Mar\u00eda Dolores Jim\u00e9nez creates a dialogue between modern and contemporary works, from El Greco, Titian, Rubens, and Goya to T\u00e0pies and \u00c1ngela de la Cruz, in areas dedicated to sacred art, landscape, portraiture, and still life. At the beginning of the tour, one can see one of the last paintings by El Greco, a gigantic Annunciation that he left unfinished.<\/p>\n
\n Finally, Symptomatic Surrealism: Leonora Carrington shows for the first time together in the city the two paintings, Villa Pilar and Down below,which the artist painted during her internment in Santander in 1940, after being raped in Madrid by a group of soldiers. This exhibition is a new version of the one that could be seen at the Freud Museum in London. Villa Pilar, Carrington gave to her doctor at the sanatorium, Dr. Morales, and it now belongs to one of his heirs.<\/p>\n
\n In a territorial dimension, the Faro Santander joins an ecosystem that includes the Bot\u00edn Center and the Lafuente Material Culture hall, owned by businessman Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Lafuente. Lafuente himself sold his archive to the State, and this space he maintains is an appetizer for the great headquarters of the Lafuente Archive, which the Ministry of Culture is building in the former Bank of Spain as an associated branch of the Reina Sofia Museum. The Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology of Cantabria (MUPAC) is also under construction. Unlike some museum franchises installed in Malaga, for Vega the Santander model is “very genuine, because it is very connected to the local.” “What we are looking for is to integrate ourselves in a relevant way into what already exists. We come to contribute, to complement, to try to bring things that we think are not there or for which there is space. By no means to compete,” says Vega.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SantanderAmong the star architects, the British David Chipperfield (London, 1953) is one of those who have rehabilitated the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[7335,144,30559,30547,28916,284],"class_list":["post-82131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-banco-santander","tag-banco","tag-banco-santander","tag-beacon","tag-cultural","tag-lights","tag-santander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}