RCR's Les Cols Restaurant

Main dining room, Les Cols. Photo © Hisao Suzuki

In 2003 I visited Les Cols, the restaurant in Olot, Spain designed by Pritzker Prize winners RCR Architects, for Architectural Record. Well established then, the restaurant has lately earned two Michelin stars.

As part of my research I was treated by the chef to the 12-course "Menu de Degustación", together with the architects. We were seated in the long golden banquet hall, in the middle of its long golden table (custom designed by the architects, like the chairs, of thick, heavy folded steel plate with a baked enamel finish, and with 22 place settings to a side). The architects were grouped one side, and I was alone on the other, as troops of waiters filed round and round the table with each course, whisking away each dirty plate and serving each new one with a flourish of explanations and instructions. Everyone was very interested in my reactions to each of the twelve little plates - the architects, the waiters, and the hosts, chef Fina Puigdeval, and her husband, who appeared from the kitchens from time to time. I got through the experience as best I could. As I've said before, this can be a tough job.

The food was along the lines of the contemporary experiments of Fernan Adriá at El Bulli, with globules of liquid stuff that exploded on the tongue, edgy contrasts of sweet and salt, and so on. Not really my thing, I'm afraid, but certainly an experience.

The one course that lingers most in my memory (besides the third or fourth entry, which included a bit of tocino that lingered on my palette disagreeably through several more courses), was the post-desert cheese board, with rustic breads and a host of creamy, unpasteurized cheeses from nearby farms in the Pyrenees. Other ingredients too were local, as seen in the lush gardens on the grounds, complete with chickens other fowl, as well as (am I making this up?) rabbit hutches and a fish pond.

In following years, the architects added a suite of guest pavilions under the trees in the garden, made entirely of glass, thus extending the unique sensorial experience of dining at Les Cols into the night and the morning, and into far more personal corporeal rites involving the bed and the bath, as well as bringing the garden into the total experience more thoroughly. More recently, the added a semi.enclosed banqueting pavilion, spanned by a tensile structure of catenary arches infilled with sheets of polycarbonate.
 

© Hisao Suzuki

Below is my original text from Record Interiors (not elsewhere on line), and excerpts from other texts about the later additions.

 I. A daring menu meets its match with interiors served up by RCR Arquitectes

Like its adventurous menu, the interiors of the restaurant Les Cols are designed to provoke "strong sensations" in their users, engaging all of the senses to create a "unique interior world," as Ramón Vilalta of RCR Architects explains. The project is built almost entirely of thick plates of steel, including walls, floors, tables and chairs. In much the same spirit as the culinary creations of chef-owner Fina Puigdeval, the architects' aim was to see how many different qualities they could draw out of the material and the spaces it gives shape to, pushing beyond its normal sensorial limits to approach effects more proper to earth, wood, vegetation, liquid water or shimmering, evanescent light.

Located on the outskirts of Olot, a small city in the north of Catalonia, Spain, the restaurant occupies the former ground floor stables of an old stone masia or farmhouse dating at least to 1784, and a one-story pavilion added when Puigdeval opened the restaurant in 1990. In 2001, she asked Vilalta and his associates Carme Pigem and Rafael Aranda to transform the dark spaces of the former stables and the outdated pavilion into a memorable setting for her signature 12-course meals.

The architects streamlined the confused amalgam of existing spaces into a clear axial organization in the shape of a "T". Following a garden path of rusted steel plates, guests first approach the altered 1990 pavilion that forms the head of the T, and enter the restaurant at the crossing point of its axes. The spaces opening around this point offer contrasting environments, like "independent worlds," as Vilalta says. To the right, a pair of vertical openings reveal the machined precision of the kitchen, completely finished in stainless steel, and arranged around a patio walled in frameless sheets of glass, with a bubbling pond that extends into the entry garden below a screen of ivy. To the left of the entry, the dark, earthy enclosure of the main dining room is bathed in natural light from the garden, with oxidized steel walls, screens of twisted vertical steel ribbons along the windows, whose graphite-finished silhouettes recall the climbing ivy, and floors of raw steel planks, lightly waxed, that mix natural colors from different mills: deep blues, purples, reds and browns. These somber hues set off the brilliant reflective finish of the tables and chairs, painted in a hard-baked enamel of pale gold, the tabletops mirroring the brilliant sheen of light from the garden.

Kitchen, left; main dining room, right. © Hisao Suzuki

Straight ahead, the long trunk of the "T" plunges through the body of the masía in the form of a dazzling banquet room finished entirely in gold, with a continuous table seating 44. This space occupies the central structural bay of the house, and gives access to private dining rooms on either side, where the dark steel floors and gold furnishings are set under the original masonry vaults. At the end of the hall, doors open to a stone portico and enclosed garden for receptions on the opposite side of the masía.

The challenges presented by the banquet hall carried the architects beyond the influences of traditional Japanese architecture and minimalist sculpture evident in the main dining room. Vilalta explains, "the original space was windowless and disagreeable. The big decision was to open it to the exterior and convert it into a destination." The architects exaggerated its awkward length for dramatic effect, and covered its surfaces in gold to maximize the sense of light and splendor. Twisted golden ribbons of 5 mm steel along the long walls vibrate under the light of continuous fluorescent tubes at floor and ceiling; they screen air diffusers and acoustically-absorbent walls. The long table, also used for regular dining, is bolted to the floor, and was welded and finished in place. Like the rest of the furnishings, its design is vegetal in inspiration, with two continuous 8 mm thick steel plates that fold symmetrically from a central stem to produce twin cantilevered leaves (elsewhere, dining tables repeat this design with oval, round or rectangular tops). Tall serving tables ceremoniously line the walls; their small bisecting tops recall the leaves of an open book, or a pair of hands proffering a serving platter. The chairs are built of two symmetrical 5 mm plates, folded like origami around a diagonal cut that runs across the seat, with casters and thin cushions. The steel ingeniously opens below the seat to produce the curving back and single side arm, inviting diners to assume a relaxed, almost reclining posture, as if at a Roman feast.

The length of the room adds to the sense of hushed religious ceremony (as does the background music, including Gregorian chant, Baroque viols, and a Balinesian gamelan). Couples separate like partners in a line dance to find their seats on either side of the table, while the waiters whisk round and round announcing courses. Despite the drama of the room, its overall effect is of amplitude and ease, combining the free horizontal flow of modern space with the masía's slow, thick density. The banquet hall gives radical form to the architects' concept of an interior world, a space which, instead of seeking light and warmth from the exterior, burns with a gentle inner fire.

At Restaurante Les Cols, a daring menu meets its match with interiors served up by RCR Arquitectos and featuring steel as the key ingredient
Architectural Record, Record Interiors, September 2003, pages 136 - 141

Publicity image, author not listed

II. Guest Pavilions 

RCR has realized another experiment in the limits of transparency, understood as a form of nudity, or a stripping down to essentials, in a group of guest pavilions in the garden of Les Cols Restaurant in Olot. With the exception of an interior closet housing mechanical equipment, all the surfaces of each pavilion consist entirely of transparent glass: walls, ceiling and floor, this last suspended over the ground of the patio in which each pavilion is set. The patios are enclosed in turn in walls rent with gaps and reflections, composed of stainless steel tubes and vertical strips of translucent glass installed at different angles, producing an effect of visual veiling, like that of a falling sheet of water.

There are no televisions in the rooms, nor enough artificial light to read, nor any furniture other than the bed. In the minibar you will find only volcanic mineral water. Only the pale light of the firmament entering through the roof might distract you, or the rustle of the wind in the trees. Alternatively, you can pull all the black-out curtains across the walls, creating an enveloping cocoon within the cold glass capsule, or take refuge in the deep bath, with its floor of rounded river pebbles laid on edge, and its views into its own little patio. After a lengthy and sumptuous dinner in the restaurant (also designed by RCR, and with a Michelin star), the architects offer a re-encounter with nature and our own corporeality, in a moment of isolation and curative repose from the stresses of contemporary life. Together with the Museum of Glass in Toledo, Ohio by Sejima and Nishizawa, this is one of the few projects [in this article] that approaches technical innovation as a tool for exploring new frontiers of experience.


Translated from Spanish by DC.

Source:
Edificios transparentes 
Fuera de Serie No. 205
Expansión, September 19, 2008, pages 20 - 23

III: New Banquet Pavilion

For their part, the Spanish architects of RCR have produced a serene, Arcadian arbor for a banqueting pavilion at Les Cols, the two-star Michelin restaurant in Olot. The partially sunken structure is entirely enclosed in the polycarbonate sheeting used in greenhouses. Its roof is supported by steel rods slung in a long catenary arch, while the floor is a rustic pebble paving (canto rodado). The architects' previous interventions at Les Cols include the main dining rooms, with finishes and furnishings of heavy steel plate, and hotel rooms entirely enclosed in glass. Here they offer diners the immediate sensorial thrill of the rippling, blurred transparencies and reflections of the plastic sheet amid the earthy garden setting, and the ambiguous play between enclosure and openness, in which the limits of materiality are overcome by technical prowess. The Emperor here is both with and without clothes.

Source:
Adam's House in Paradise Revisited 
Arquitectura Viva 151, April 2013, pages 7 - 13, cover

 

Typologically Rooted and Thermodynamically Tuned

Contemporary Art Museum, Zhuhai, China, 2013 -

I kick off August with an introduction to an issue of the Spanish magazine AV Monografías dedicated to the firm of Ábalos + Sentkiewicz. 

"In the new, thermodynamically-tuned practice of Iñaki Ábalos and Renata Sentkiewicz, the aloof, prismatic volumes of the Ábalos and Herreros era, heirs of Alejandro de la Sota in their technical directness and formal austerity, have evolved into buildings that grow like organic tubers, mushrooms and trees, or emerge as eccentric landforms at a macro-urban scale, while inhaling cooling downdrafts and exhaling ascending columns of heated air."

The couple is now in Boston, where Ábalos is head of the architecture department at Harvard, and their portfolio of projects has become international.

Project Highlights:

Solar Tower (Subsidized Housing), Sociopolis, Valencia

High Speed Train Station, Logroño, Spain, 2013

Contemporary Art Museum, Zhuhai, China, 2013-

Performing Arts Center, Taipei

Tour Port de la Chapelle, Paris (project)

My 2500-word essay explores the dialectic in the firm's concept of "thermodynamic beauty":

"The firm has taken on the current mantra of sustainability ... not as a call for formal restraint, nor as merely a set of technical standards unrelated to the theory and methodology of design. Instead, they are treating the issues raised by sustainability as something of a paradigm shift in the way that architecture is conceived. They refer to this new paradigm under the general theme of the thermodynamic..."

"A second critical concept, which Ábalos makes reference to with terms such as "beauty" and "the picturesque", also underlies this new work. The firm adapts these 18th century aesthetic categories as a dialectical position, which they counterpose to the merely rational management of the quantified data that largely comprises what was formerly known as the design problem. Beauty, and the search for new forms of beauty, represents the dimension of subjective cultural and experiential values that the architect brings to the table, to begin the process in which the design solution is wrestled from the multiple and sometimes conflicting parameters of the design problem."

Una sostenibilidad alternativa
An Alternative Sustainability
 Introduction to issue
AV Monografías 169, 2012, pages 6 - 13.

Tour Porte de la Chapelle

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Less is Enough

Reading List
I cannot resist reproducing in full Luis Fernández-Galiano's review of three books by the young Italian theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli, published in Arquitectura Viva 158.  

31/01/2014
Pier Vittorio Aureli ‘Less is Enough’

Luis Fernández-Galiano
The architect and professor Pier Vittorio Aureli has just published an electronic book, Less is Enough, with Strelka Press, the editorial branch of the research institute promoted by Rem Koolhaas in Moscow, and the launching of this lucid and timely tract on austerity and asceticism gives a good excuse to look at his two previous works, The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011). Co-founder of the collective DOGMA, Aureli has taught extensively outside Italy – at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Architectural Association in London, and Yale University –, which explains why texts strongly rooted in the political and architectural debates of his country appear first in English. The two being reviewed here are meticulously edited by Joan Ockman (The Project...) and Cynthia Davidson (The Possibility...), who have managed to present the author’s ideas in limpid, pedagogical English prose.

The Project of Autonomy is a convincing description of the ideological debates in Italian architecture of the 1960s, a stimulating intellectual panorama that Aureli analyzes under the prism of the Rome-born philosopher Mario Tronti, whose political thinking he relates both to the architectural proposals of the Tendenza gathered around the Milanese Aldo Rossi, and to the utopian designs of Archizoom and Superstudio in Florence. The current senator Tronti was half a century ago the driving force and theorist of ‘operaism’, a radical Communist movement that would also involve the young Toni Negri, and which in time would bring about Autonomia Operaia. Aureli links the autonomy of the political, as defended by Tronti – who strove to reconcile the ideas of Karl Marx with those of the jurist of Nazism Carl Schmitt – with the autonomy of the architectural, as advocated by Rossi through the categories of type and place; and also connects the view of the philosopher of ‘society as factory’ with the No-Stop City of Andrea Branzi and his Archizoom companions, who proposed a zero degree of architecture that owed much to the urban ideas of Ludwig Hilberseimer, rediscovered at the time by a colleague of Rossi, Giorgio Grassi. This political and poetic landscape of Messianic effervescence – set against liberal democracy and the old guard represented by Bruno Zevi, Giulio Carlo Argan, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers – culminated and ironically also came to an end with two exhibitions, the one curated by Emilio Ambasz at the MoMA in 1972, and the Triennale di Milano directed by Rossi in 1973, a melancholy epilogue that Aureli duly records, while showing his dismay at the de-politicization of postmodern society.

Similar sentiments and anxieties inspired The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, an effort to define the political and the formal in architecture through the opposition between the city with limits and urbanization without them, polemicizing with the urban theories of Cerdá, Hilberseimer, Archizoom, and Koolhaas, and finding in the late work of Mies the best expression of an ‘absolute architecture’: an archipelago of well-defined forms rising on clear-cut plinths in the amorphous, unlimited sea of urbanization. Aureli finds the origins of this strategy in the work of four architects – Palladio, Piranesi, Boullée, and Ungers – who confronted the city project from the angle of architectural form, and combs through their work from a viewpoint closer to theory than to history. Defending the Greek polis against the Roman urbs, and thus nomos against lex, Aureli, like Tronti, resorts to Carl Schmitt to explain limits from the optic of political differentiation between friend and enemy, and to support well-delimited places and forms in the city over the systems and indefinite flows of urbanization, which has imposed its economic logic everywhere.

In his latest work, Aureli questions the current clamor for austerity, pointing out the ambiguity of its ascetic component, which can be both a tool of oppression and a form of resistance. Going through the history of monastery life, from the hermits and the abbeys governed by the Rule of Saint Benedict to the altissima paupertas of the Franciscan reform, and stretching the story to include the bohemian poverty of Baudelaire, the precarious life of Walter Benjamin, or the simple room proposed by Hannes Meyer as an alternative to the Existenzminimum, Aureli censures the monastic minimalism of Pawson, the pastoral humility of Zumthor, and even the asceticism of Steve Jobs for its pseudo-religious spiritual aura, and encourages us to replace the Miesian ‘less is more’ with ‘less is enough’, making the shedding of material things the basis of a life freed of the anxiety of production and possession. With his determination to bring into the current debate the political dimension of more ideologized times, Pier Vittorio Aureli has acquired a voice of his own, a voice that deserves to be heard.

Arquitectura Viva 158


From the introduction to Less Is Enough
"Asceticism ... allows subjects to focus on their life as the core of their own practice, by structuring it according to a self-chosen form made of specific habits and rules. This process often involves architecture and design as a device for self-enactment. Because asceticism allows subjects to focus on the self as the core of their activity, the architecture that has developed within this practice is an architecture focused not on representation but on life itself – on bios, as the most generic substratum of human existence." 

 Pier Vittorio Aureli

Go to Strelka Press, publishers of Less is Enough

Photo:
Becoming Political
Markus Miessen in conversation with Pier Vittorio Aureli
Build, 06/2008

Quote from the interview above:

"How can knowledge be transferred and produced in a meaningful way today?"
"By learning to not be hyperactive. This is a criticism that I address first to myself, every day. To not produce too much, to not design too much, to not travel too much, to not promote too much, to not network too much, to not be everywhere all the time. In short: to learn again to be sedentary and laconic. To learn that refusal, omission and inaction are also positive ways to do something." 

Adam's House in Paradise Revisited

My introduction to the latest issue of Arquitectura Viva focuses on the theme of "Local Material".

From the text:
"The works shown here share a certain degree of primitivism, although covering a wide range of expression. Whether in clay, wood or modern plastics and glass, they bring to mind in different ways the primitive huts of ancient civilizations, or forest Edens, or the simple pleasures of rural life, or the self-aware neo-primitivisms of contemporary art in its different manifestations." 

These are the 8 projects featured:

Li Xiaodong, Village library near Beijing

TYIN Teknestue, Cassia Co-Training Center, Sumatra

Boonserm Premthada, Kantana Film Institute, Thailand

Kengo Kuma, Market + Hotel, Yusuhara, Japan

• 

  Robbrecht en Daem with Marie-José Van Hee, Market Hall, Ghent, Belgium

• 

  Peter Zunthor, Steilneset Memorial, Vardø Island, Norway

• 

  RCR, Banquet Pavilion, Les Cols Restaurant, Olot, Spain

• 

  Solano Benítez, Teletón Rehab Center, Asunción, Paraguay

De vuelta a la casa de Adán
Adam's House in Paradise Revisited
Introduction to issue "Local Material" 
Arquitectura Viva 151, April 2013, pages 7 - 13, cover

Editorial consultant: Iciar de las Casas