L'Oceanogràfic

Candela was in his mid-eighties, decades past his last major shell, when Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences commissioned him in the mid-1990s to design the entrance building and restaurant for what would become the largest oceanarium in Europe. He returned to the free-edge hyperbolic paraboloid he had spent his career refining — the same geometry as his 1958 Los Manantiales restaurant in Xochimilco, this time cast in steel-fibre-reinforced concrete rather than plain concrete, and built in overlapping petal-like pairs rather than a single circular vault, with glass curtain walls filling the gaps between the shells at ground level. Candela finished the design in 1997, the year he died in North Carolina; the building was constructed by others working from his drawings and opened, along with the rest of the Oceanogràfic, on 14 February 2003. It is often described as his last work, and the only major Candela shell built in Spain rather than Mexico. The rest of the wider City of Arts and Sciences complex is by Santiago Calatrava; L'Oceanogràfic is the one building in it that is not.