Crisis Casualties: The Mallorca Congress Center

The City of Palma de Mallorca has halted construction on the waterfront Congress Center designed by Francisco Mangado. It made the decision after the request for bids from the private sector to operate the center produced only one submission, from Melía Hotels, which it found inadequate. The building has been under construction for several years and has accumulated a construction debt of 70 million euros. The city plans to finish enclosing the facades and wait for better times.

Reported in the Diario de Mallorca newspaper, July 20, 2012
Link from the Arquitectura Viva webpage

Rendering from arqa.com
Model photo from europapress.es

Congress in Pamplona

There's still time to sign up for the Architecture and Society Foundation's next Congress, Lo Común, to be held June 20-22 in Pamplona. Special grants are available to help students attend.

The Congress is directed by Luis Fernández-Galiano. Speakers include Foster, Moneo, Siza and Souto de Moura, as well as Peter Buchanan, Vasa Perović (Slovenia), Manuel Aires Mateus, Roger Diener, Dietmar Eberle, Anna Heringer (Austria), Solano Benítez (Paraguay), Patxi Mangado (Foundation founder) and others.

The proceedings cover the themes "Architecture and Shelter," "Architecture and Efficiency," and "Architecture and Pleasure."

To give  an idea of the calado of the event (Spanish metaphor meaning the draft of a ship), the congress will be kicked off with welcoming remarks  by Carlos Solchaga, former Socialist Minister of Economy and the President of the Foundation, and Ana Pastor, current Minister of Development, as well as the president of Navarra and mayor of Pamplona. Other active and former politicians are sprinkled through the proceedings.

Detailed information can be found here.

The Language of Bronze

The eighth issue of the Russian journal Speech has come out with my article on Francisco Mangado's Archaeological Museum in Vitoria, Spain. The issue is dedicated to the theme of the detail. Altho I have written about the same project in Architectural Record this past July, this is an entirely different article (though it inevitably covers some of the same ground).

Free of Record's thorough editing, for good and for ill, I was able to get in some cherished bits, such as the not-so-far-fetched comparison to  Mies' Seagram Building which, as I was pleased to find, got an article all to itself in the same issue.

Speech is now preparing its ninth issue for this June, with more from this quarter.  

The Language of Bronze
Archaeology Museum of Álava, Vitoria, Spain, by Francisco Mangado
Speech 08/2011, December 2011, pages 80 - 91

Construction photo
Courtesy of Francisco Mangado

Mangado in Architectural Record

 

The cover story in this month's Architectural Record is my report on Francisco Mangado's Archaeological Museum of Álava in Vitoria, Spain. 

Like his other projects, the Archaeological Museum exemplifies Mangado’s identification with the Modern movement that many Spanish architects have maintained with great vitality over the last few decades. In all of his work Mangado upholds the ideals of a functional layout and structural logic of 20th-century masters, and applies them to expressive ends chiefly through the sensual qualities of the materials he chooses and the spatial relations he establishes  between them. 

Mangado has been offering for some time what international architecture has just discovered that it needs; 3 or 4 years ago he was a very hard sell in the United States.

Archaeology Museum of Álava
Mangado and Associates
Vitoria, Spain
By David Cohn
Architectural Record, July 2011

Read full story here.

Photo: © Roland Halbe. Used with permission.

Public Housing Gets the Prize

The awards of the XI Biennial of Spanish Architecture and Urbanism were announced early this month.

The event is organized by the central government's housing office, architects' professional associations and other sponsors. A jury headed by the architects Félix Arranz and Joaquín Sabaté chose 40 finalists and prize winners in several categories from among 734 entries, over twice the number of previous editions and an all-time record.

Jury members included Lluis Clotet, the urban planner José María Ezquiaga, Manuel Gallego, Belinda Tato of Ecosistema Urbana, and Llàtzer Moix, architecture critic for La Vanguardia newspaper in Barcelona, among others.

Prize for Architecture
Subsidized housing, Mieres (Region of Asturias)
Zigzag Arquitectura (Bernardo Angelini + David Casino)
(Pictured above)

Mentions:
Residential development in Caramoñina, Santiago de Compostela
Víctor López Cotelo

 House in Paderne (Province of Lugo)
Carlos Quintáns Eiras
(Pictured above)


Special Recognition:
Álava Archeological Museum, Vitoria (Province of Álava)
Francisco Mangado

Museum of Water, Lanjarón (Province of Granada)
Juan Domingo Santos
(Pictured above)

Can Framis Museum, Barcelona
Jordi Badía
  

Young Architects' Prize
Rowing Center, Alange (Province of Badajoz)
José María Sánchez García 
(Pictured above)

Mentions:
Mercat de Ferreríes Civic Center, Tortosa (Province of Tarragona)
Josep Camps + Olga Felip

Municipal Environmente Services Headquarters, Zaragoza
Jaime Magén + Francisco Javier Magén

Prize for Subsidized Public Housing
22 Apartments for renters under 35, El Rastro, Madrid
Mónica Alberola, Luis Díaz-Mauriño + Consuelo Martorell
(Pictured above)

Mentions:
Housing block in Salou (Province of Tarragona)
Toni Gironés

Student housing, Bellaterra Campus, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Eduard Bru

Prize for Urbanism
Municipal Plan, Montmeló (Province of Barcelona)
Jornet, Llop + Pastor

Mentions:
Port of Malpica (Province of A Coruña)
Juan Creus + Covadonga Carrasco

The Munch Area, Oslo, Norway
Juan Herreros Architects

Special Recognition:
Waterfront Promenade, Poniente Beach, Benidorm (Province of Alicante)
Carlos Ferrater

Prize for Research
Ex Aequo
Media-TIC Building, Barcelona
Enric Ruíz Geli

Territorial Plan for Housing in Cataluña
Josep María Vilanova +Ricard Pie

Mentions:
"Esto no es un solar" Program, Zaragoza
Patrizia di Monte + Ignacio Grávalos

Font de la Mina Library, Sant Adrià del Besós (Barcelona
Alfonso Soldevila

For pictures of more winners,
see the Arquitectura Viva web page

Like the bright plumage of a bird

Color in Spanish architecture is the theme of a long article I've written for the latest issue of the Russian biannual journal Speech. It is a theme particularly apt to Spain, for some reason – the most radical experiments anywhere in the use of color in the past six or seven years can be found here. We cover the spectrum, from well-known works by Nouvel, Miralles + Tagliabue and Hadid to virtually unpublished works, such as the medical clinic in St. Martín de la Vega by Pedro Urzáiz and Carlos Pérez-Pla, which uses glass with an inner layer of a prismatic gel that reflects and solarizes the surrounding context in surreal colors (photo top © Miguel de Guzmán) and a secondary school in Las Mesas (Province of Cuenca) by Blanca Rosa and Natalia Gutiérrez of GRG Architects in Madrid (photo below © Roland Halbe).

Color plays at least four different roles in contemporary Spanish architecture. In the first place, we find it used in a traditional way, as an integral sensual quality of finish materials. Secondly, color is used as a system of coding building elements, although this "functional" approach is often mixed with more sensual intentions. Thirdly, we find works that feature a random rainbow splattering of many different colors over finish surfaces, a manifestation of the current recourse to aleatoric or irregular compositional methods, and a response, it seems, to the sensual pleasures of the simple, unmediated experience of color. Finally, we sometimes find color used to create an experience of total immersion, in which colors flood and stain space itself, making space manifest and transforming the normal perceptual conditions of reality.

Like the bright plumage of a bird
Color in Spanish architecture
Speech 06/2010, December 2010 (received March 2011), pages 208 - 226.
Table of Contents

Projects by the following architects (in order of appearance): 
Nouvel, Miralles - Tagliabue, Mansilla + Tuñón, SelgasCano, Mangado, Rogers - Lamela, Haiku Architecture, Amann, Cánovas + Maruri, Pino - Paredes, Aguinaga, Camacho + Macía, RCR Architects, Hadid, GRG Architects, Urzáiz - Pérez-Pla, MI5 Studio, Estudio Entresitio.

Francisco Mangado & John Pawson in the Glossies

Two of my articles have come out in glossy Spanish magazines this past week. The first focuses on Francisco (Patxi) Mangado's Centro Hípico in Ultzama, built for his daughter, a champion horseback rider, and for the retreats and seminars organized by his Architecture and Society Foundation. The article appears in the weekend color supplement Fuera de Serie of the business newspaper Expansión (no web page version yet, but stay posted). The editors used the oversize newspaper format to great effect with a double-page spread of the Olympic-size covered training track. It was an opportunity to present Patxi's arguments for a more restrained and disciplined architecture to a wider audience.

Incluso en sus obras más pequeñas, se nota su sello característico, lo que él mismo describe como una cierta "mineralización" de sus formas. "La arquitectura más que nunca requiere un tiempo de reflexión que se traduce en densidad, en intensidad," mantiene, una actitud que contrapone a las "caligrafías superficiales" que ve en las obras de muchos arquitectos de moda. Lo que Mangado está buscando, y lo que encontramos en el Valle de Ultzama, entre las líneas de los robles y el río, es una arquitectura intemporal, sin fecha de caducidad. 

The second article is a brief introduction to John Pawson in the November issue of Gentleman, which you can still find on Spanish newsstands. Pawson has a show, Plain Space, at London's Design Museum through January, that is accompanied by a new monograph by Phaidon.

"Es muy complicado hacer que algo parezca sencillo." John Pawson

Minimalismo al servicio de la hípica
Ultzama Equestrian Center by Francisco Mangado.
Fuera de Serie, No. 304, Expansión, October 29, 2010m pages 18 -20.

El arquitecto nómada
Introduction to John Pawson interview
Genleman 79, November 2010, pages 68 - 72.


Photo 1:
Centro Hípico, Ultzama by Francisco Mangado
© Pedro Pegenaute

Photo 2:
John Pawson, Ceramic Goblet 
Available in the Design Museum gift shop.