Norman Foster is among international architects one of the most experienced and competent in the creation of spaces for art. The purpose here is not to present the extraordinary, brilliant career of the British architect in terms of this architectural type, let alone to analyze the general proliferation – everywhere in the world in the last decades – of architecture of and for museums, however much the Spanish case offers a very unique perspective for doing so.

I will now refer only to Norman Foster’s relationship with successive projects for expanding the Prado Museum, and more specifically the project he drew up with the Madrid architect Carlos Rubio which this year won the competition for refurbishing the Salón de Reinos (Hall of Realms) of Buen Retiro Palace.

A decade has passed since the opening, in 2007, of the Prado extension designed by Rafael Moneo around the cloister of the San Jerónimo el Real Church: a valuable addition of close to 25,000 square meters behind the original building by Juan de Villanueva, in the same direction that halls were added in the course of the two centuries of the museum’s existence. The great challenge for Moneo was to connect Villanueva’s huge colonnade on the Paseo del Prado, in what is now called the Velázquez Entrance, with the ruined cloister of the Jerónimos Monastery; an unprecedented development of the central axis of the historic building that would give the grand museum what it urgently needed, a modernization of its facilities...[+]