The Sabatini building of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is the result of successive historical transformations. Conceived by José de Hermosilla as Madrid’s General Hospital and later adapted by Antonio Fernández Alba into the Museum’s first headquarters, it gradually acquired an orientation that no longer corresponds to the contemporary city. Its main public entrance turns away from the Paseo del Prado, limiting the relationship between the institution and one of Madrid’s principal cultural and urban axes.
The project originates from a simple intention: to open the Museum without adding architecture. Rather than extending the building through new volumes or attached elements, the proposal works entirely with its existing spatial and constructive capacities. The intervention reveals possibilities already embedded within the historical structure, allowing the building to be transformed through reconfiguration rather than expansion.
Antonio Joli, Vista de la calle de Atocha, ca. 1750.
This approach responds to the ongoing transformation of the surrounding city. The future redevelopment of the Paseo del Prado, the renovation of Atocha Station and the progressive pedestrianization of the neighbourhood will substantially modify patterns of movement and public life. The Museum is understood not as an isolated institution but as part of this evolving urban landscape.
Instead of reinforcing a single representative entrance, the project establishes a distributed system of access along the Prado façade. Existing openings are recovered and activated, replacing the hierarchy of one monumental doorway with a sequence of permeable connections between the city and the Museum. The intervention reflects both the rational organization of Hermosilla’s architecture and the plural condition of contemporary society, where access is understood as multiple rather than singular.
The Museum becomes more permeable, allowing visitors to enter, circulate and inhabit its public spaces with greater freedom. Exhibition areas, services, retail spaces, cafés and outdoor environments are reorganized into a continuous spatial sequence in which movement is no longer prescribed by a single route but shaped by individual choice. Transparency becomes both a spatial and an institutional condition.
The reconfiguration of the historic courtyard plays a central role in this transformation. Together with the extension of the external elevator cores to the first floor, it reconnects a level that currently remains detached from the Museum’s main circulation system. This new continuity allows visitors to understand the building as a whole, establishing direct visual and physical relationships between the galleries, the garden and the vertical circulation.
Nature, light and movement become integral components of the architectural experience. The courtyard is no longer perceived as an enclosed void but as part of a continuous sequence linking the Paseo del Prado with the vaulted wings of the historic building. Interior and exterior are brought into closer dialogue through the recovery of existing spatial relationships rather than through formal intervention.
The proposal ultimately restores an urban relationship that had remained incomplete for decades. Without altering the identity of the historic architecture, the project reorients the Museum towards the Prado, integrating it physically and conceptually into Madrid’s cultural landscape. Architecture operates here through continuity rather than addition, demonstrating that the transformation of a building can emerge from revealing the latent possibilities already contained within it.
