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Spain's most famous art museum took a step into the 21st century when it unveiled a budget-busting modernist new annex after five years' work. The red brick, granite and oak £91.75 million ($251 million) extension to Madrid's Prado Museum was designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo.
It will give one of Spain's most popular attractions extra space to put on show scores of paintings at present languishing in storerooms. The new space has a neo-classical style, blending well with the museum's original 19th-century design, but allowing plenty of natural light.
The Cloister of Moneo is situated next to Los Jeronimos church, across from the museum's Velazquez room, which holds the Spanish master's most famous work, Las Meninas. Moneo, a winner of architecture's Nobel, the Pritzker Prize, initially caused controversy with his design because he wanted to incorporate the cloister of the 15th-century Los Jeronimos church, which was removed stone by stone and reassembled inside the extension.
A group of Madrid residents took Moneo to court, claiming the project would upset the architectural heritage of the area and the cloister would be ruined. The legal cases were dismissed.
The relocated cloister sheds daylight on exhibition spaces three floors below and is intended to be devoted principally to sculpture. Gabriel Finaldi, the Prado's director of conservation, said: "This extension lets the Prado breathe. It brings us in line with other major modern museums."
The new exhibition space is connected by underground passageways to the original building. The addition completes the first phase of the controversial extension of the Prado which began in 2002 with a budget of £29 million and was expected to end in two years. But after a succession of delays and legal squabbles, the building has taken five years to complete and the bill has soared to £92 million. The complex adds 17,000sq m to the museum.
One of the highlights is a temporary exhibition space which will allow the museum's authorities to show 1000 prints by Francisco Goya which have remained in storage.
At an inauguration last weekend, Spain's culture minister, Carmen Calvo, said: "We have finished the biggest extension to the Prado in its more than 200 years of existence. It was a question of modernising the Prado in harmony with its past."
The extension will be open to the public from April 28 with an exhibition of 19th-century Spanish art.
Madrid's "big three" art museums, essential stops on any tourist trail in the Spanish capital, are undergoing expansions to meet the booming demand to see the great masters. Extensions have been completed to the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sofia museums.
All three museums are now within a short walk along the Paseo del Prado boulevard.
Moneo, 70, from Tudela, in northern Spain, won the Pritzker prize in 1997. He also built the Atocha commuter train station in Madrid and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles.
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