Pedro Machuca designed the palace, and his biography explains much about the building's character. Machuca had trained in Rome under Michelangelo and moved in the artistic circles of Raphael and Giulio Romano. He was steeped in the culture of the Italian High Renaissance, with its reverence for classical geometry and the idea of the perfect building. His design for the palace expressed this education with startling confidence: a square exterior enclosing a circular interior courtyard, a geometry that had been theorized by Italian architects but never realized on this scale. The contrast with the Alhambra's Nasrid palaces could not have been more deliberate. Where the Islamic architecture dissolved surfaces into infinite pattern, Machuca carved clean columns and classical proportions. Where the Nasrid builders hid their courtyards behind blank exterior walls, Machuca presented a facade of rusticated stone asserting its presence outward.

Charles V was not merely building a residence. He was writing a narrative in stone. His grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, had conquered Granada in 1492, ending nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia. By placing a monumental Roman-influenced palace in the heart of the Alhambra, Charles was asserting the triumph of Christianity over Islam and of classical European culture over its Islamic counterpart. The palace's circular courtyard echoed Roman amphitheaters and the centralized-plan churches that Renaissance architects dreamed of building. Its position -- literally surrounded by the Nasrid palaces of the Court of the Lions and the Comares Palace -- made the symbolic confrontation inescapable. Yet the irony is that by choosing to build within the Alhambra rather than demolish it, Charles preserved the very buildings his palace was meant to supersede.

The construction of the palace faltered almost from the beginning. Funding was intermittent, competing with the demands of Charles V's far-flung empire. After 1637, work stopped entirely, and the building entered its long period as a magnificent ruin. Without a roof, the interior deteriorated through centuries of exposure. During the Peninsular War, French troops occupied the Alhambra from 1810 to 1812 and stripped the palace of any remaining wooden furnishings to fuel their fires. The building became a storage facility for gunpowder and military supplies. It was not until 1923 that Leopoldo Torres Balbas, the architect responsible for much of the Alhambra's restoration, began the process of completing what Machuca had started nearly four hundred years earlier. The roof was finally finished in 1967.

Today the Palace of Charles V houses two museums. The ground floor contains the Alhambra Museum, with artifacts spanning from the early Islamic period of Granada through the Nasrid era -- carved stucco fragments, ceramic tiles, bronze lamps, and architectural elements recovered from across the complex. The upper floor holds the Fine Arts Museum of Granada. A small Arab museum was first installed in the building in 1928, evolving into the Archaeological Museum of the Alhambra in 1942 and taking its current form in 1995. The circular courtyard, originally designed to host imperial ceremonies that never took place, now serves as a venue for performances and cultural events. It is a fitting conclusion to the building's strange history: a palace that failed as a home for emperors succeeded as a home for the art of the civilization the emperor sought to surpass.