King of Spain.

Hard on the heels of the completion of the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, Jean Nouvel's second major Spanish project was unveiled in Madrid at the end of September. The new extension to the Museo Reina Sofia, Spain's national art museum and the home of Picasso's Guernica, marks the culmination of a competition-winning project six years in the making and the first to be completed in the series of high profile additions to Madrid's famous Museum Mile. Along with Nouvel at Reina Sofia, Rafael Moneo is refurbishing the Prado, Manuel Baquero and Francesc Pla are extending the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, while Herzog & de Meuron are working on a new cultural centre for the Fundacio La Caixa.

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Capped by a huge, hovering, tongue-like roof (a device familiar from Nouvel's Lucerne cultural and congress centre, AR October 1998), the new extension occupies a neighbouring wedge-shaped site. Within its imposing bulk are a library, documentation centre, bookshop, auditoria and two temporary galleries, all organised around a cavernous central courtyard. A series of open-air top floor terraces set just under the roof provide different sorts of social and exhibition spaces with vertiginous views over Madrid.

Though the juxtaposition between the original building, an eighteenth-century former hospital, and Nouvel's more exuberant and very un-Iberian addition seems at times slightly uneasy, the new spaces will allow the museum to develop its programmes of education and research as well as improving conditions for showing its great collection of historic and contemporary Spanish art.

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