Eisenman in Santiago

As the first completed section of Peter Eisenman's long-awaited City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela is set for its official inauguration on January 11th, journalists are looking around for someone to blame for its cost overruns, delays and uncertain future.

Besides the project's original political backers, headed by ex-regional President Manuel Fraga of the conservative Popular Party, their list now includes the jury of the original competition back in 1999, as seen in a recent article in El País. Jury member Luis Fernández-Galiano, editor of Arquitectura Viva and the former architecture critic of El País, does his best to defend himself, together with Pep Llinás, while Wilfried Wang gets points for having opposed Eisenman's scheme.

Fernández-Galiano blames continued changes in the plans for the project's cost overruns and delays. Originally set for construction in three years at a cost of 100 million euros, the project has suffered various changes in program under three different elected governments, and has more than doubled in size, to 148,000 m2 (1.6 million square feet). The projected total cost at the moment is nearly 400 million, and not even half the buildings are completed. Next Tuesday, the Princes of Asturias will inaugurate a library and a regional archives. Other buildings still underway include a regional museum, a museum of contemporary art and an opera. Work on the opera has scarcely broken ground, and the project has been scaled back, according to Eisenman in an interview in a local paper, the Correo Gallego.

The previous government of Galicia, a coalition of Socialists and the regional BNG Party, organized a foundation to complete the work in partnership with the private sector. But Spain's current economic crisis and cutbacks in government spending make the future completion of the center uncertain. The current government, now back in the hands of the Popular Party, has allocated less than 34 million for the project in its budget for 2011 (according to another account in the newspaper El Mundo, the 2011 budget for the project is only 13.44 million).

According to Eisenman in the Correo Gallego, "8,000 square meters of the Music Theater have been built, and we're going to start the Art Center this year. When it's finished in three years, we'll start the Music Theater again. With luck, the PP [Popular Party] will be in Madrid and so we'll have a better chance finding collaborators." (Translated from Spanish by DC).

What is really under question, as in so many other pharaonic projects of the last decade in Spain, is the attempt to outdo Frank Gehry in Bilbao at whatever cost and without any realistic program in mind.

In the meantime, reports from the site are better than expected. Much of the credit for the design's credibility is given to Andrés Perea, a respected Madrid architect in his own right, who has developed the project and overseen construction based on Eisenman's initial design. Eisenman himself told El País this about Perea's work in an interview on September 11th:

"[I find the project] intense and very well built. It has been managed incredibly by Andrés Perea. If it weren't for him it wouldn't exist. When we began ten years ago, we made decisions that today I can't even remember why we made them. Perea's work as architect of the executive project has thus been exhaustive....

Honestly. I look at the project and I ask myself, "Did I do that?" I even find it difficult to image who conceived this project, because its so wonderful. Normally when I visit a work, I only find problems, and I end up distancing myself." (Translated from the Spanish by DC).

The City of Culture is buried into the top of Mount Gaiàs outside Santiago, a historical pilgrimage city that is now the regional capital of Galicia. Eisenman's design creates an artificial topography on the hilltop, superimposing the fan-shape of a Vieira shell, a traditional symbol of the city for pilgrims, with the plan of the city's historic core and other devices. I have never had much patience for Eisenman's work, as can be seen in the following quote from an article I wrote for the Galician College of Architect's magazine Obradoiro in 2005. But judging from early photos I may have to take another look:

The City of Culture also manifests an acritical acceptance of the reigning rules of territorial development, despite its pretensions to the contrary. It is a work generated entirely by its own internal logic, in which the strategies supposedly employed to bring the work closer to its site --the superposition of the plan of Santiago and the vieira shell on Monte Gaiás and their subsequent deformations-- are in fact nothing more than strategies to generate an apparently reasoned but unfathomable internal complexity. And underneath this layer of busy nonsense, the plans reveal that the different program spaces have been laid out with an apparently capricious indifference and expediency, suggesting little more than amorphous, anonymous quantities of built space.  

The architect thus plays his obtuse formal game, in terms completely abstracted from the reality of materials, site, context and use --these factors are rather translated into the abstract terms of the game and thereby neutralized as potential sources of true formal dialogue-- and leaves the logistics of programing and construction to the specialists who have reduced them to blunt instruments of technical determinism. The architect thus apes the indifference with which other forces impose their will on the built environment. Eisenman's project, however interesting it may turn out to be in formal terms, has no more relation to the site, the city or the surrounding territory than a typical commercial shopping center.

Batallas en las Colinas / Battles in the Hills
Obradoiro 31, COAG, Vigo, March 2005, pages 8 -13.

Photo © Iñigo Bujedo Aguirre. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Siza in Granite

(c) Luisa Lambri

Álvaro Siza
Galician Center for Contemporary Art
Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo
Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Published in:
Bauwelt 19, May 13, 1994, pages 1038 - 1045 and cover.
© Bauwelt, David Cohn 1994. All rights reserved.


Alvaro Siza's Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, completed last September, is the best of a number of works of architecture commissioned by the regional government of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela to celebrate the Año Xacobeo, the 1993 Pilgrimage Year. It is arguably Siza's most important completed work outside Portugal, his first museum, and, together with the recently completed Architecture Faculty in Porto, his most significant public building to date.

As is often the case with politically-motivated public projects in Spain, Siza's 7.000 m2 building was erected, at a cost of 2,200 million pesetas (about 27.5 million DM), before the institution that it will house was even established - the museum still has no director, no program, no collection and no budget. Opened with a retrospective of local artist Maruja Mallo just before the regional elections of October 17, the building was closed a month later, at the end of the show, still without much of Siza's custom-designed furnishings. It will still be a year or more before the Museum is organized and in full operation, although a series of architecture shows may be organized there this summer.

Galicia is the northern neighbor of Siza's Porto, with a similar language and culture, a slightly harsher climate, and a similar historic isolation from the rest of the peninsula. Siza himself speaks eloquently of the experience of working in Galicia: "You feel at home, but everything is slightly, or even very, different. There are different seafoods -- you can still find oysters. There are tapas and strollers; the streets are full of people. The language has the same origin and the same words, but its music and expression are unmistakable: it is at once harsher and yet more tender."

He speaks of Galicia's granite walls covered with lichens and moss from the constant rain, and of the intimate outdoor spaces it conceals: "When we abandon the main road, magical places begin to appear: margins of streams or ancient granite waterways, innumerable branches of the pilgrimage route to Santiago, threshing floors, granite granaries..."

For Siza, the site of the Museum is one such space, situated at the foot of the baroque Convento de Santo Domingo de Bonaval, one of a ring of monasteries surrounding the old city. The Museum occupies a small triangular plot that once formed part of the monastery's gardens, a series of terraces facing a small street, the Rúa de Valle-Inclán, and a row of modest houses.

The site was, in fact, quite difficult. The monastery, like a fortress, is focused inward on its cloister, presenting a hard shell to the exterior. Siza's building had to be subordinate to the massing of the adjacent structure, like a flanking dependency, but at the same time turn its back on it, opening to the street. The modest street, in turn, hardly offered the building the public presence that its character would seem to demand. In response, Siza designed the building like a raised terrace or mirador, overlooking the street, and with views and passageways to its rear gardens, creating an awkward new space between the monastery and the Museum that is expressive of all the difficulties of the situation.

Initially, Siza wished to finish the building in exposed concrete, to make it stand out from the granite of the monastery and Santiago's other public buildings, and to express the modern character of its long-span construction. He was persuaded instead to face the building in granite, although he uses a thin modern veneer instead of solid blocks, an abstraction of the material which will change in time as moss and lichens grow.

The monastery stands on the upper slopes of the steep hill which Santiago straddles; its upper windows (and the sculpture terrace of Siza's museum) claim privileged views of the city's spires and the profile of the Obradoiro or Cathedral. Its entrance, raised behind shallow flights of steps and set well back from the street, fascinated Siza: a curious double facade on the two faces of an inside corner, opening to the cloister and church respectively, placed exactly on the most accessible part of the slope, where the high point of the street meets the low point of the hill, with the church bell tower perfectly aligned behind it. Siza placed the entrance to his museum here too, inverting the monastery's corner facade in the two overlapping angled volumes of his design, reinforcing the shallow cascade of stairs with a long ramp across the length of the Museum's facade.

In the former gardens, reports Siza, "granite channels, the remains of rusted pipes, currents of water, mines, springs, a long-buried staircase, capitals from some demolished convent" were found and excavated. The front of the building seems to span over the site, like a shelter over an archeological dig, scarcely touching the ground, in an extraordinarily long horizontal opening that points us towards the entry with its curious angled soffit. The end wall of this opening stops just above the ground, leaving a narrow horizontal slot with a fragmented view of the monastery's doorway. From the exterior, the building directs all of its formal energy to this point, before we enter the vestibule looking back at the street and the rear wing with the Museum's galleries.

In Siza's poetic approach to architecture, his regard for the site is transformed into a peculiar personal formal geometry. Siza uses regulating lines in plan to lay out, from the point of entry, the two intersecting volumes of the design. These regulating lines fan out from their point of origin as if from the viewing point of a perspectival construction, producing strange intersections, collisions and incongruities deep in the body of the building. The access ramp and tilted horizontal soffit of the facade reflect these same visual lines in the vertical plane. When seen from other points in the building, it is as if Siza had scrambled the rules of perspective and the abstract geometry it was designed to portray, returning us to a more immediate, anarchic register of perception, a mannerist retake on modernism which complements the eccentric baroque monastery next door.

Behind the vestibule, a small triangular atrium with a clerestory window occupies the space between the two angled volumes of the design and leads to the galleries for temporary exhibitions on the ground floor. The galleries for the future permanent collection above these are reached via a wide staircase overlooking the atrium. The galleries are arranged en filade, with a parallel access corridor which allows Siza to play spatial games along the route, the most dramatic of which is a two-story gallery, crossed by an inaccessible bridge (for mounting the lights, he says), which we miss on the ground floor, but which opens suddenly below us from the upper galleries. The long central corridors open on their other side to a ground floor auditorium and first floor library, which are also accessible directly from the vestibule.

Light from the skylights over the upper galleries is directed towards the walls via a large suspended floating soffit in the center of each gallery, a typically original and effective Sizian device. In many other incidents, such as the library's angled clerestory, the stair's sculpted window overlooking the atrium, or the atrium itself, defined by a wall on one side and a floating soffit on the other, meeting in a single implausible point, Siza demonstrates his delightful genius for shaping space and light.

Surprisingly, there is much in Siza's design which recalls I.M. Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington of the 1970s. Like Pei, Siza here is enamored of seemingly impossible long spans and cantilevers -- when I saw the building under construction, the improvised space trusses of welded bits of I-beams under the concrete slabs belied the ease with which the ceilings seem to fly from point to point. Like Pei, Siza uses his stone facing abstractly, as a purely planar finish, without visible weight or articulation. With his Barcelona Weather Station of 1992, this is Siza's first work in many years that is not finished in stucco, an indifference to material reflecting the low budgets he is accustomed to work with. The mortarless granite is supported on metal studs held away from the waterproofed structural concrete walls, a permeable skin with sufficient space behind it to conceal the downspouts (a stratagem which explains Siza's sparse use of openings). And like Pei, Siza uses here an elaborate triangular geometry.

As a development of Pei's late, high modernism, Siza's fractured geometry reminds me of a passage in Theodor Adorno's "Critique of Logical Absolutism", in his book Against Epistemology, in which he attacks certain aspects of the scientific spirit which have been well represented in postwar art and architecture, in the cult of formalism:

"But the more hermetically the unconscious of the mathematician seals his propositions against any inkling of involvements, the more perfectly pure forms of thought, from which memory is expunged in abstraction, come to appear as the sole "reality". Their reification is the equivalent for the fact that they were broken from that objecthood without which the issue of "form" would not even arise. Unconscious objecthood returns us to the false consciousness of pure forms. It produces a naïve realism of logic".

Adorno's criticism is applicable not only to Pei's geometric formalism but also to the reductive, memory-based Platonism of Aldo Rossi.

Siza's form making, on the other hand, full of accidental encounters and revelations, opens the closed process of logical, mathematical determinism to new, uncharted terrain, where the circumstances of program, site, chance and vision can play a new, unscripted role. According to Kenneth Frampton,

Siza "makes us see that building is, to a large degree, contingent, that any construction is both topographically and temporally determined, and that all we can do is to modify the fabric as it passes in a moment of transition between one historical moment and the next."

In Siza's words, "Architects don't invent anything, they transform reality."

1. Álvaro Siza, De granito eterno: Viaje al otro lado del Miño, A & V Monografías de Arquitectura y Vivienda 41, Galicia Jacobeo, 1993, page 4.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, English edition, The MIT Press, 1983, page 55.
   
3. Kenneth Frampton, The Architecture of Álvaro Siza, A + U, June 1989, Special Edition, ÁLVARO SIZA: 1954 - 1988, page 178.
   
4. Siza, Ibid, page 177.