Beyond Sustainability: Alday Jover Architects

 

 

Originally puvlished in: Iñaki Alday, Margarita Jover Editors, Cities & Rivers (Spanish edition, Ciudades y Ríos), Actar, Barcelona, 2023.  © David Cohn

 

 

The architectural culture of Spain in the last 20 years of boom and bust has been an important incubator for a paradigmatic shift of vision in the profession, a process in which the architecture of Iñaki Alday and Margarita Jover, with their firm aldayjover arquitecture and landscape, has played a pioneering role. 

 During the boom years, interest in architecture was mainly focused on the iconic, inventive formalism exemplified by Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, opened in 1997. But this creative euphoria was left in moral ruins by the crash of 2008 and the revelations of overspending, mismanagement and corruption on the part of many politicians involved in public building, exposing a culture of ostentation and excess in which the architecture of the Guggenheim era was inexorably implicated. In the wake of that disillusion, the pursuit of formal novelty could no longer in itself sustain architecture in its aspiration to address the public good, to work towards improving and humanizing everyday life – an aim, I would argue, that has been the fundamental motivation of architectural innovation since the origins of the Modern Movement in the 18th century.

 Ten years have passed since 2008, but the profession in Spain has yet to recover a normal level of activity, and many of its most talented members, including Alday and Jover among them, have found their best opportunities abroad. But the end of the period of plentitude has also been a time of reflection, investigation and the development of alternative strategies, especially for a new generation of architects that has come of age just before and during  the crisis. These new initiatives have explored issues of sustainability, environmental ecology, and a focus on immediate, local problems within a global understanding of the issues at stake, as opposed to the media-hungry focus of the icon builders. Architects have joined neighborhood activists in projects such as community gardens, alternative cultural spaces and participative planning efforts. They have developed radical new approaches to the adaptive re-use of existing buildings in response to principles of sustainable practice. There have been exhibitions exploring alternative building systems and materials of traditional cultures from around the world. Others have developed methods incorporating Big Data into the design process, and the global issues it can encompass.

 Well before the crisis, however, aldayjover began its practice with what could deceptively be termed "landscape" projects, as in their Gallego Riverbank Recovery in the town of  Zuera, in Aragón (1996-2001), but that in fact anticipate many of these concerns, and offer the first complete profile of the emerging paradigm that brings them together in a coherent, renewed vision of architecture and its role in culture and society. Their work is no longer strictly contained within the conceptual boundaries of the individual building or project as the principal object of design and study. Instead, their attention has shifted to a holistic overview of the habitat, of the environment and its mix of urban and natural features, as the true field of action for architecture and its ambitions.

  As a consequence, on the one hand, their buildings can be understood as almost equivalent to the role of street furniture in the design of an urban plaza. This is evident not only in the various pavilions of the Zaragoza Water Park, for example, which are subsidiary to the broader aims of the park design as a whole, but also in specifically architectural commissions, such as the Molino Cultural Center, in which the new structure is conceived in relation to the original mill building and the surrounding context, and assumes a modest protagonism, entering into a quiet dialogue with its environs. Buildings in both cases become functional, minimal elements conceived in terms of a larger frame of reference.

 On the other hand, and more importantly, this approach implies that the true subject or responsibility of architects today is found in the environment, the livable habitat, and the full spectrum of issues at stake in its maintenance and adoption to human needs. This principle has led aldayjover from the limits of specific commissions to take on the broader issues that arise in the course of studying the problem at hand. A case in point is their project for Zuera, where their studies for a modest bullfighting ring led them to organize a new riverside park on its site, with an innovative design that accommodates, rather than resists, seasonal flooding. This in turn led them to a new development plan for the town, an environmental clean-up and new sewage treatment measures, resulting in a coordinated plan that established a new, positive relation between the town and its river (including an amphitheater that serves other uses besides bullfighting, and that is designed for periodic flooding). Alday explains, "The idea was to bring together different stakeholders with different interests. The town wanted its bullring. The watershed authority was concerned because the river was eroding the banks below the town. And ecologists wanted to clean the river of trash and raw sewage. By bringing together these different stakeholders, we received the support of the European Union, and the final investment was 2.5 million euros, instead of the initial 250,000. And it solved many problems instead of only one."

 

A[D1] ldayjover's case for architecture's role in solving territorial issues can be understood as a -bid to rescue the living habitat from the blind and uncoordinated technical management of the planner, the sociologist, the civil engineer, the environmental scientist and so on, to the degree that such professionals, in their rational and scientific methodologies, tend to objectify and quantify the habitat in the sense defined by Martin Heidegger in his essay, "The Question Concerning Technology,"[D2]  which identifies a way of thinking in which, for example, a lake becomes nothing more than a quantifiable amount of stored water, a "resource".⁽¹⁾  All of these specialists are necessary in solving problems at a territorial scale, but they are not sufficient in themselves. As in the building trades, architects are not only coordinators of different specialists. They bring to the table the humanist values of architectural culture, its awareness of history, its sophistication in visual, spatial, sympathetic and associative or poetic thinking, and its full participation in cultural and intellectual concerns in the broadest sense.

 In aldayjover's encompassing approach to design, the habitat is no longer the tabula rasa of the technician. It is a palimpsest replete with traces of the interactions of human history and culture with the natural habitat and the givens of geographic circumstance. Any new intervention simply joins and modifies this accumulated natural and cultural history. Territorial planning is thus transformed into the cultural activity that it always has been, though most often unconsciously so. Memory, history and cultural values are inseparable, not only in literature or the arts but in the landscape as well.

 

 

 

Thus, for example, in the Zaragoza Water Park, the water channels follow the course of the existing irrigation canals, which aldayjover simply widened. This solution not only preserved the memory of the site, a meander in the Ebro River, as a zone of produce gardens. It also preserved the hidden wisdom of the waterways' orientation. The architects found that the canals ran perpendicular to the prevailing winds, so that their borders –raised berms made from the earth excavated to widen the channels– protect boaters and strollers along the bank side paths from the wind. In another case, in the Aranzadi Park on the floodplain of the Arga River in Pamplona, the architects learned from local farmers that hedges were a better flood barrier than solid walls, because they trap and deflect debris from the floodwaters, and create a gradual inundation rather than the precipitous and damaging overflows or failures of a solid barrier.

 Aldayjover's approach to architecture and landscape develops ideas latent in certain aspects of Spain's architectural culture. Alday himself observes the roots of the team's thinking in their architectural education: "At the Vallés School in Barcelona, landscape, or you could say, the site, was an essential part of design. Enric Battle and other professors taught us to begin a design with a deep understanding of the site. That training was instrumental for our approach."

 Alday also refers to the example of Barcelona's urban planning program in the early years of the democracy, when Oriol Bohigas was in charge of city planning. In retrospect, in the parks and plazas program he directed, and the preparations for the 1992 Olympic Games that followed, Bohigas' principal objective was not so much to build memorable works of architecture –though the overall quality of the works built was extraordinary– but rather to transform the city, to bring Barcelona out of the depressing effects of neglect and poor planning of the years of Franco's dictatorship (1939-75), and introduce fundamental structural changes in its development, conceived in the generous, humanistic, urban terms of architectural culture. 

 Under Bohigas' mantra, "To substitute the project for the plan," urban planning issues were treated in many ways as architectural design problems. In what could be termed a technique of urban acupuncture, limited interventions could have a far-reaching impact on perceptions and attitudes. Alday describes how, in poor working-class districts, Bohigas' proposed to "monumentalize the periphery", applying architectural sophistication and significant works of public art to build "the most beautiful, luxurious and carefully designed plazas in order to create pride in those neighborhoods, so that the relation between the residents and their district was completely changed." 

 At a larger scale but following the same principles, Bohigas' master plan for the Olympic Village opened the city to the Mediterranean, and a new belt highway was conceived not simply as a civil engineering work, but as a problem involving issues of visual design, landscape and the point-by-point study of its impact on every neighborhood and intersection.

 A more subtle influence on aldayjover's formation is Barcelona's history as an industrial city and the bourgeois class that this industry produced, two factors that help explain the special importance local architects have traditionally given to questions of interior and industrial design. As contradictory as it may appear, this orientation is particularly conductive to a concept of architecture and design in territorial terms. Urban planning in this sense can be understood, at least in part, as a matter of furnishing the living habitat, like a bourgeois interior, applying to its problems the same concern for dignity, comfort and convenience, the same fine taste and finishes, with all the necessary services and utilities perfectly organized out of sight.

 While a similar concept of design could be ascribed to the phantasmagorical forms of Antoni Gaudí in all their dimensions, from his furniture and buildings to the Parque Güell, and to the formal exuberance of contemporary Barcelona architects such as Enric Miralles or Carme Pinós, aldayjover align themselves with a tradition of formal contention that finds its maximum point of reference in the Madrid-based, mid-century architect Alejandro de la Sota. As his career progressed, De la Sota practiced an increasingly self-effacing architecture that found its raison-d'être in technical details and understated formal ambiguities, a position he maintained against the current of the architectural trends around him, from Spanish Organicism to Post Modernism. For De la Sota, the pleasures of architecture were mainly appreciated by architects alone, and it was best to try to exercise them unnoticed, in the context of an indifferent if not hostile public. "To give them hare for cat," was one of his famous mottos, reversing a popular saying about a cook tricking the customer with the ingredients of a stew. In De la Sota's world, you had to slip the architecture in on the sly.

 The most directly Sotian design of aldayjover is the Delicias Sports Pavilion in Zaragoza, where the trusses that span the gymnasium carry smaller exercise rooms between them, spaces that alternate in bands between rows of clerestory natural lighting. This solution evokes a similar strategy in De la Sota's famous Maravillas Gymnasium in Madrid of 1962.  But at a more fundamental level, De la Sota represents both the clearest and yet the most subtle and profound expression of another characteristic of much Spanish architecture, one that is deeply implanted in the country's architectural education. Compared to their peers in other countries, Spanish architects are remarkably well-prepared for the technical challenges of building: structural calculations, detailing, construction supervision and so on. This solid, practical preparation is based on a vision of architecture as, first and foremost, a technical, scientific practice, and it tends to produce what we can characterize as elegantly understated, functional buildings.

 Of course, the danger of this technical focus is that it can blunt and over-simplify architecture in the same terms described in Heidegger's essay on technology. The great discovery of De la Sota in this regard is a Spanish version of Mies' "Less is more": by emptying the architectural vessel of extraneous content, one can free it to carry or respond to other, more subtle significations. This, I think, is why the work of De la Sota is so important to aldayjover. It serves them as an example of how they can free themselves from their contemporaries' obsession with creative form-making and seek, in its place, a more significant engagement with the issues that are found beyond the design of the building itself as an object.

 For aldayjover, the concept of the habitat as a cultural palimpsest emerges from this process of depuration as their guiding principle, within which the new, pressing issues of sustainability, environmental responsibility and response to climate change are elevated from strictly quantitative and analytic parameters into a tangible engagement with human history and culture in its relation to the land. The very act of converting a neglected riverbank into a park or a natural reserve is part of this process of engagement, as are subsidiary initiatives such as the open wetlands in the Zaragoza Water Park, where visitors can see at first hand the process of natural filtering and cleaning river water, or the Agriculture Interpretation Center in the Aranzadi Park of Pamplona, where the cultivation of endangered local varieties of vegetables is explained to school children and other visitors.

 

 

The transformative power of this strategy is highlighted in the ongoing academic research project for the Yamuna River in Delhi, India, led by Alday and Pankaj Vir Gupta, which they initiated at the University of Virginia, and which is now to be extended to Tulane University. In this collective effort to restore Delhi's relation to the river, the neglected traces of pre-colonial cultural and religious narratives and practices are proving to play a central role. The study proposes a number of infrastructural initiatives to clean the polluted river, treat the city's sewage and convert the river and its tributaries into the new, green structural trunk lines of the city. But in order for these measures to be effective, the team has concluded, cultural values must also be transformed, reviving the concept of "the commons," of common public spaces and resources that belong to all, and are the responsibility of all. The crux of the matter lies precisely in transforming a "resource" such as clean water from abstract quantified terms back into the tangible substance that is inseparable from its tangible place of origin in the river, and bears collective cultural values as embodied in the River Goddess of the Yamuna.

 Taken as a whole, aldayjover's work demonstrates the importance of understanding architecture in all its facets, from building design to landscape and territorial planning, as a unified cultural and a technical discipline that is capable of addressing complex problems in holistic terms. During the years of the icon builders, the cultural dimension of architecture was seen chiefly as a question of individual creative expression, of a personal poetics or sensibility, which was invested in the built object as if it were a work of art. Aldajovet's role, in contrast, is comparable in certain respects to those contemporary artists who seek to disengage the creative process from its focus on the objecthood of art, and seek, in its place, to engage more directly with the vital substance of life and experience. Aldayjover see architecture's cultural dimension as a question that arises from the problem itself, and whose solution is found there as well. They discover the hitherto unconscious narrative histories of the site or the landscape, the hidden currents of its cultural formation, and bring them to the surface in new configurations. In their work, the continuity of architecture's cultural dimension does not exclusively pass through the architect as am individual creator. Rather, they are highly-informed, thoroughly prepared and perceptive facilitators, like a wizard or a sage, if you will, who transform knowledge into action. And this, I think, is how architecture can once again prove its worth as a discipline capable of introducing positive changes in everyday life.

 

1.       Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1977.

---

 

 

xx