Vázquez Consuegra's CaixaForum Sevilla

Photo courtesy Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra

The theme of my latest article in architektur.aktuell is "the limits of  even the best architecture in the face of an inappropriate site." Excerpts from the text:

"The story of how the CaixaForum ... ended up in a basement is a tortuous one. In 2009, Vázquez Consuegra won a limited competition to install the Forum in the dramatically-vaulted medieval ship-building halls of the Atarazanas Reales. The proposal provoked concerns for the historic integrity of the building, a dispute abetted by political infighting among local administrations. Apparently unhappy with the controversy and the lack of progress, La Caixa pulled out of the deal in 2012, and announced instead a plan to install the center in the Pelli tower. (The Atarazanas is currently being converted into a city-run cultural center, also designed by Vázquez Consuegra, and with a 10 million euro donation from the Caixa Foundation)."

"The Pelli tower had fallen into the hands of La Caixa in the same year, when it took over Cajasol, a local savings bank that had initiated the project in the boom years of the 2000s and had collapsed with the crash."

The existing buildings are clad in glass and terra-cotta-colored metallic elements, and the plaza between them is finished with rather vulgar cement pavers. Vázquez Consuegra responds with his characteristically cool, silvery surfaces. He clads the entry canopy in panels of  Stabilized Aluminum Foam (SAF), spongy and lightweight in appearance. For his addition to the finger, he uses elements of galvanized aluminum, breaking the horizontal lines of the Pelli building with vertical shading fins.

"The canopy's forms are redolent of all the qualities that neither it nor the spaces below it possess: an excavated, carved solid, vaulted and heavy, references that may also remind us of the vaults of the Atarazanas Reales. And yet the canopy is clearly nothing of the sort. It is a ghostly evocation of tectonic muscle, rendered in a space-age material for a junkspace setting: a true architectonic poetics for our time."

In Search of Place
CaixaForum Sevilla by Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra
architektur.aktuell 449, July - August 2017, pages 66 - 77

Amanda Levete's MAAT in Lisbon

© Francisco Nogueira

Architektur Aktuell has published my report on the addition to the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon (MAAT), designed by the London-based architect Amanda Levete (not available on line). Here are some excerpts from the article:

"Stretching out along a riverside pedestrian walk, the building is conceived as something like a ripple or a bump in a rug, in which the ground plane gradually rises and falls, climaxing over a grotto-like entry opening. The ramps and stairs on each side of this arch rise to the accessible roof, also slightly arched in two directions, with views over the river at its edge, and finished with a stepped amphitheater and greenscaping."

"The structure thus reads as a long, twisting ribbon along the river bank, clad in custom-designed tiles, which flares out horizontally at its central peak to shade the entry arch, and to reflect dancing river light from its underside, via skylights, into one of the building's underground galleries, which are grouped around the oval hall."

"With its ribbon-like, tile-clad forms, the MAAT is remarkably similar to another recent waterside building in Portugal, Luis Pedro Alves' Porto Cruise Ship Terminal, designed in 2005 and opened in 2015, which features long arms extending along a dock and coiling up into a drum-like central mass. Both designs constitute interesting and valid interpretations of the particular opportunities offered by a waterside site. Both aim to fuse building and landscape, creating contemporary public icons that function at the broad geographic scale of the horizon, establishing points of focus along a sweeping plane of vision that attract our far-off gaze."

Luis Pedro Alves, Porto Cruise Ship Terminal. Photo © Fernando Guerra

Despite its spectacular appearance, I did not come away from my visit without some "quibbles" about the design. The most notable:

• "The architects describe the central vault as "a gently expressed arch," which may be true when seen from the water, but it can also suggest other readings. Visitors actually approach the building from the riverside walk, with its foreshortened views, in which the vault rears up much more dramatically, suggesting perhaps the open maw of a gigantic shark, or a breaking wave."

  

  
  

  © Hufton Crow

• "Despite this elaborate choreography [around the entry], the archway fails to establish a real sense of connection between the outside world and the main interior spaces. Only the restaurant and shop directly overlook the water – although curatorial reasons may justify this decision."
• "The access stairs and ramps to the roof on either side of the arch are unexpectedly steep, and feel crowded in by the adjacent buildings on either side; they would seem to want to stretch out more comfortably along the quay. Once up on the roof, the arching ground plane and the abrupt drop in elevation at the rear, all suggest that we are astride a building rather than strolling through a landscaped park as the architects seem to have intended. It's rather uncomfortable, like riding the back of a tortoise."

  

  
  

  © Hufton Crow

• I was also not too convinced by the curving interior spaces, which the architects describe as intended to accommodate "the changing relationship between art and visitors, the growing importance of interaction and performance, and the emergence of a less didactic relationship between museum and public." I comment, "The kuntshalle's curves are not apt for conventional displays of paintings and other dusty stuff, for which the MAAT provides more conventional spaces on the power plant's premises." 

Oval Gallery. Photo © Hufton Crow

Kuntshalle for the MAAT Museum, Lisbon
By AL_A (Amanda Levete)
architektur.aktuell 443, January - February 2017, page 84 - 93