Intempo is a 47-floor, 202.5-metre-high skyscraper in Benidorm, Spain. The design of the building was officially presented on 19 January 2006 and work began in 2007. Originally scheduled for completion in 2009, work was significantly hampered by the economic crisis of 2008 which seriously affected the real estate sector in Spain. Construction was almost completed in March 2014, but the sponsor undertaking the project went into bankruptcy. In 2018, the building was acquired by SVP Global, and was fully finished by mid-2021. The building is the tallest in Benidorm and the fifth tallest in Spain.
Project In 2005 a 92-million-euro loan was obtained from Caixa Bank to begin the tower's construction. The building's inauguration was initially scheduled for 2009, then rescheduled to 2011. The building project was initiated by the developer Olga Urbana, and the design was the work of the Alicante-based architecture firm Pérez-Guerras. The building plans were presented in 2006, and construction began in 2007. At that time, Spain was experiencing a real estate bubble, and completion was initially projected for mid-2010. However, due to the onset of the financial crisis and the emergence of numerous problems, both financial and technical, it was delayed for several years. Furthermore, several aspects of the initial design underwent modifications due to a lack of foresight, the innovative structural elements, and the complexity of the project. The structure was finally completed in March 2012. The original developer entered administration in 2014. The majority creditor then became the Sociedad de Gestión de Activos Procedentes de la Reestructuración Bancaria (Sareb), a public limited company managing assets from bank restructuring, or "bad bank", as the heir to the mortgage loan granted by the defunct savings bank Caixa Galicia. Sareb attempted to recover part of the loan through a full auction of the property after the developer's failed attempts to reach agreements with foreign investors. In April 2018, SVP Global officially acquired ownership of the property through a payment in kind of approximately €60 million. The developer resumed construction in the autumn of 2019 and it was completed in July 2021, fourteen years after it began. The skyscraper is notable for its peculiar geometric configuration consisting of two parallel straight towers, joined together by an inverted cone with an elliptical base at a height of 150 meters. The structure's fundamental characteristic is its very high slenderness.
Building site The building is located on Avenida de Colombia, in the Murtal district, an area colloquially and commonly known as Vía Parque. It is situated at an altitude of 35 meters above sea level and approximately 500 meters in a straight line from Poniente Beach, an area with a lower residential density than Levante Beach. The site occupied by Intempo is part of the urban development plan approved in the 1950s.
Architecture
Design The building, which houses a total of 256 apartments, consists of three basement levels plus 52 floors (including five technical floors) in two straight towers—separated by 20 meters—180 meters high above ground level, with a perimeter of 24.15 by 16.7 m (403.3 m² area). The towers are connected at both the first three floors (basements) and the top nine (floors 37 to 45) by an elliptical cone with its apex at the bottom, 30 meters high. This peculiar geometry at the top means that the floor areas of both towers decrease with height, as the floor areas of the cone increase. The towers' structure is made of reinforced concrete, with the side walls left exposed, interrupted only by a small window on each floor for bathroom ventilation. The front façade is a discontinuous glass curtain wall with golden tones. The façade underwent wind tunnel testing using a scale model and performed well, with the cone-shaped design effectively channeling the wind. The plot on which the building stands is 12,879 m², of which the Intempo building occupies 6,442 m². The total built area is 36,223 m². The structure of the blocks contains 90 tons of rolled steel and 2,200 tons of corrugated steel. The concrete used in the towers amounts to 23,037 m³ and the floor slabs occupy an area of 43,000 m². The concrete used is capable of withstanding a maximum of 50 MPa in the foundation, in the walls and the supports up to the 15th floor slab, which is reduced to 40 or 30 MPa in the slabs of the upper floors. Due to the building's high slenderness ratio, the floor plan configuration of the apartments, and the small size of the vertical circulation cores, the overall rigidity or indestructibility is explained by both the cantilever effect (lateral shear walls) and the frame effect, developed through the floor slabs, as well as by the stiffening belts located on the four upper technical floors. According to data from the study carried out by Florentino & Regalado, the cantilever effect contributes 50% to the structure's solidity, the frame effect 37%, and finally, the stiffening belts 13%.
Height It is the tallest building in the city of Benidorm (surpassing the Gran Hotel Bali), the tallest in Spain outside Madrid, one of the tallest in the world in a city of less than 100,000 inhabitants, the tallest residential structure in Spain, and the tallest residential building in the European Union. Initially, the building's height was 187 meters above ground level but after its completion in 2021, a new floor slab was added, reaching a height of 202.50 m. This height is still pending approval by the CTBUH.
Structure The building consists of two parallel towers separated by a gap of 20 metres (66 ft) and connected by a cone-shaped structure between floors 38 and 44. Its frontal view, vaguely resembling the number 11 and the letter M, has led commentators to speculate about a possible reference to the terrorist attacks of 11 March 2004 in Madrid. It is one of the few skyscrapers in the world which has the shape of an arch (another in Europe being the Grande Arche in Paris). The façade of the building is of glass, a first for a residential building in Benidorm.
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