Cold Call in Aravaca

I'd been going past it for weeks on the bus and it gradually drew my attention. Was it some kind of office block, an unfinished parking garage, a bunker? The stonework was impressive, and those thick overhangs!

Going back on foot for a second look one day it hit me: it's the Sobrino House! One of Javier Carvajal's seminal works of 1965-66, where he mixes Wright's Falling Water, Mies' Concrete Country House and Le Corbusier's Maison Jaoul all in one ponderous, chilly spectacle. It's one of those houses of the period that go on forever, with servants quarters, bedrooms for half-a-dozen offspring and a regal spread of living spaces, terraces and patios.

Friends tell me it's been on the market for years. Instead of the big estate with ample grounds I imagined, its crowded onto a corner lot at a busy intersection in Aravaca, north of Madrid. It looks beautifully maintained, despite some changes. How long can it survive? You can't pick it up and take it somewhere else, like one of Wright's Usonian houses. Perhaps it could work as an embassy residence, a luxury medical clinic, an exclusive mini-hotel?

Ground Floor

See also my blog entry:
Javier Carvajal, 1926 - 2013 
August 9, 2013

Photos: DC
Plan: J. Carvajal, Arquitecto, Fundación COAM, Madrid, 1996, p 32.

El País: The Organicists Return

 Nieto & Sobejano

Andalusian Space for Contemporary Creation

Córdoba

© Roland Hable

Last Saturday, Babelia, the weekend cultural supplement of El País, published my article on the New Organicism. I have scanned the page, which can be found on my webpage here.

New Organicism is a movement in recent Spanish architecture that returns to some of the strategies of the first organicist architects of the 1950s and 60s, inspired in the writings of Bruno Zevi and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto. This was the Spanish equivalent to the New Brutalists in England and Team X.

As in previous articles in The Architectural Review, Bauwelt and the French journal Archicréé, I use Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano's Andalusian Space for Contemporary Creation to introduce this movement, and I cite other examples such as Mansilla & Tuñón's MUSAC Museum in León.

Cellular scheme of MUSAC. Courtesy of Mansilla & Tuñón

Model with cellular central galleries. Courtesy of Nieto & Sobejano

From the article:

"El organicismo nació en los años cincuenta del siglo pasado, casi a la vez que el resurgimiento del racionalismo ortodoxo, y entró en su plenitud con la expansión económica de los años sesenta. Mientras los racionalistas miraban hacía el rigor técnico y la abstracción espacial de Mies van der Rohe (Francisco J. Sáenz de Oiza en las viviendas en hilera de Entrevías), el organicismo surgió como una opción más barroca. Tomaba sus modelos espaciales de la naturaleza, substituyendo un concepto del espacio universal y uniforme por respuestas locales y particulares. Su teórico fue el italiano Bruno Zevi y sus modelos, las arquitecturas de Frank Lloyd Wright y Alvar Aalto. El concepto orgánico del espacio es frecuentemente celular, entrecruzando repetidas unidades geométricas en un tejido (la colmena de células hexagonales del Pabellón Español en la Exposición de Bruselas de 1958, de José A. Corrales y Ramón Vázquez Molezún) o en una flor (la Corona de Espinas de Fernando Higueras) o en el tronco fibroso de un árbol (las Torres Blancas de Oiza). Si el racionalismo se basa en líneas y planos, el organicismo encontró su estructura compositiva en la combinación geométrica de patrones repetitivos."

El nuevo organicismo
The New Organicism. Works by Nieto & Sobejano and others
El País, Saturday, July 27, 2013, Babelia, page 15


See also:
Concrete Arabesque
The Architectural Review, March 2013, pages 62 - 73

Grosse Fassaden
Bauwelt 14.13, April 12, 2013, pages 16 - 25, cover

Retour à l'organique
Archi Créé 361-362
June-July-August 2013, pages 168 - 175

The New Organicism

The March issue of The Architectural Review (London) has published my article Concrete Arabesque on the Andalusian Space for Contemporary Creation in Córdoba, Spain by Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano. It's not on the web yet, but here's an excerpt:

"This repetitive cellular design, non-hierarchic and "isotropic" in the terminology of the architects, belongs to one of the more interesting developments in contemporary Spanish architecture, the return to organicism. Inspired by Bruno Zevi's 1945 book, Towards an Organic Architecture, and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto, Spanish organicists in the 1950's and 60's used many of the same ideas, as seen in José A. Corrales and Ramón V. Molezún's honeycomb-like Spanish Pavilion at the 1958 Universal Exhibition in Brussels, or the hypostyle hall of José María García de Paredes' 1964 Almendrales Church in Madrid."

"In the past decade, a number of Spanish architects have stepped away from functionalist or minimalist formulas to return to such ideas, most notably Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón in their 2005 MUSAC Museum in León."

I'll be writing more on this theme elsewhere in the near future.

©.Roland Halbe

Concrete Arabesque
Andalusian Space for Contemporary Creation
Córdoba, Spain
Architects, Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano
The Architectural Review
Vol. CCXXXIII, No. 1383, March 2013, pages 62 - 73