Torre Glòries

Nouvel described the tower's silhouette as recalling a geyser rising from the ground, though Barcelona quickly read it instead as an echo of Gaudí's nearby Sagrada Família spires, and the double debate followed the building from its 1999 groundbreaking to its 2005 opening as the headquarters of the water utility Agbar. Two concentric cylinders of reinforced concrete, one structural and one not, carry a smooth-topped tower wrapped in a perforated aluminium screen of 4,500 operable louvres set over a glazed inner skin in some forty shades of red, orange and blue; the louvres open and close with the sun and, since 2010, the whole surface can also carry a programmed LED light show of nearly 4,500 points after dark. Agbar sold the tower in 2017 to the real-estate group Merlin Properties, which renamed it Torre Glòries for the plaza at its foot and reopened its upper floors to the public as an urban viewing space and events venue in 2022.