Kursaal Congress Centre

Those two enormous translucent cubes glowing at the mouth of the Urumea River are not office buildings. They are what architect Rafael Moneo called Two Stranded Rocks -- his competition entry imagined a pair of massive boulders washed ashore by the sea and left sitting on the riverbank. That poetic concept beat out proposals from Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, and Mario Botta in the nineteen ninety design competition. When the world's top architects are competing and the guy who describes his building as washed-up rocks wins, you know the jury saw something special.

The Kursaal was inaugurated on August twenty-third, nineteen ninety-nine, with a concert by the Basque Country Symphony Orchestra and soprano Ainhoa Arteta. Two years later it won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture -- the Mies van der Rohe Award -- which is essentially the highest honour a building can receive in Europe.

At night the effect is extraordinary. The translucent glass panels glow from within, and the two cubes look like giant lanterns sitting at the edge of the water. The larger cube houses a one thousand eight hundred seat auditorium where the San Sebastian International Film Festival holds its main screenings. The smaller one contains a chamber music hall and exhibition spaces.

What stood here before was almost equally famous -- a legendary casino and concert hall that was a fixture of the city's Belle Epoque social scene. When that building was demolished, the site sat empty for years while the city argued about what to build. Moneo's rocks ended the debate. Love them or hate them -- and plenty of locals had strong opinions when they first appeared -- they have become as much a symbol of modern San Sebastian as La Concha is of the old one.