Alvaro Siza: In the Garden

© Juan Rodríguez

Amag Publishers and the Caja de Arquitectos Foundation have just released Siza x Siza, which focuses on six projects chosen by the architect, with black-and-white photographs by Juan Rodríguez, original drawings and sketches, and extensive interviews on the projects themselves and other themes.

Siza took a special interest in this project, working very closely with the editors.

I am very proud to be included in this book at Siza's request, with a short text, In the Garden. Other texts are by Kenneth Frampton, Eduardo Souto de Moura and Juhani Pallasmaa.

We will all be present this coming November 20th in the official presentation of the book at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. 

Boa Nova Tea House and Restaurant. Photo © Juan Rodríguez

In the Garden 

In various articles I have written over the years covering different projects by Álvaro Siza, I often focus on their relationship to the landscapes and urbanscapes of northern Portugal, coming back again and again to the image of a neglected garden, lush, unkempt and overgrown. Traveling as I do from the high, dry, flat meseta of central Spain to Porto underlies for me the particular character of the place: its verdant humidity and mild temperatures, and its abrupt topography, which disrupts any would-be orthogonal order on the part of would-be planners, contributing to the general disorderliness of urban and rural settlements. As I wrote in an article on the Serralves Museum in 1999, "The verdant hills overlooking the Douro are covered by a crazy-quilt of development, in which dense new growth jostles for place among old villas, small industries and languishing vegetable plots."

The strength of the relation of this landscape and its patterns of settlement to the work of Siza struck me most forcefully when I visited, in 2002, his restoration of and additions to the 18th century country estate of the Quinta Santo Ovidio, east of Porto:

"The fragmentary Baroque elements of the Quinta [its allée of lime trees, Baroque fountain, simple house and small formal garden] bear the same relation to the grand axes of Rome or Versailles that Siza's quirky modernism has to the canonical works of Le Corbusier or Mies. Siza ... transforms [modern architecture] from a universalizing formal language into a language of particularity and fragmentation: he passes Modernism through the historic, rumpled, genteel hillside gardens of northern Portugal."

An essential quality of this relation between the Portuguese landscape and culture and Siza's work is precisely the concept of gentility. I have always been struck by the bourgeois, slightly antique feel of many of Siza's details. When I interviewed him for the Serralves Museum, for example, he was still designing the seating for the auditorium:

"Each seat is a self-contained armchair, with its curving back sloping down and around to form the arms. 'I will make them out of maple, like this,' Siza tells me.  'With velvet backs and leather trim, here and here.  It is something I saw in the opera house in Naples.  Side by side, like armchairs.  Its very intimate. You feel more at home.  You feel decadent.' "

What makes such details seem so at home in Portugal is their cultivation of gentility, which one still encounters, for example in old restaurants and cafés, with their uniformed waiters and handsome table settings. And what could be more genteel than an unkempt garden? It is a surviving fragment of past wealth, culture and glory, now somewhat faded but respected and maintained through the generations. The gentleness in the word genteel is embodied in Siza's respect for this landscape and its past, its ancient cultural richness lingering in a disheveled, poorer present, a situation one could appreciate even before the country's current economic crisis.

Siza extends the largess of this well-mannered respect not only to the more aristocratic qualities of the landscape but also, simply, to the traces of the past and place. His is not an architecture of the bulldozer and the tabula rasa; instead, his designs seek their place amid what already is. For this reason, the Boanova Restaurant and Teahouse in Leça da Palmeira is sited not on along the flat expanse of a seaside promenade, but instead is embedded in a forbidding outcropping of rocks.

Siza's mastery of natural light and relative indifference to building materials form part of this faded aristocracy of manner. Modernism allows him to dematerialize gentility to its essence as a dignification of everyday life and its pleasures. Visiting again the Serralves Museum, I wrote,

"As you explore the Museum, you are surprised and delighted at every turn by his spare, elegant geometries and off-balance symmetries, and by the way that natural light is reflected and re-reflected from walls and horizontal planes, creating an effect of expansive, luminous spatial containment."

Writing about the Galician Museum of Contemporary in 1994, when I was much younger, I summed up all these intuitions about Siza's method in a general attack, with the help of the philosopher Theodor Adorno, on an opposing formalism of perfect geometric abstraction that I found in certain Madrid architects. These words can stand in as well, I think, for a philosophical argument in favor of Siza's design method as the superation of an excessive reliance in the modern tradition on concepts of internal logic, functionality and reason:

"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."

"Siza's fractured geometry reminds me of a passage in Theodor Adorno's ... 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.' "

Sources

Articles by David Cohn:

“Projects: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal,” Architectural Record (New York), November 1999, pages 102 - 109.

“Weekends in the Country,” World Architecture 105, April 2002, pages 26 - 33.

“Siza in Granite,” Bauwelt 19, May 13, 1994, pages 1038 - 1045.

Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, English edition, The MIT Press, 1983, page 55.

English edition:
Juan Rodríguez and Carlos Seoane, editors
Siza by Siza
Amag Editorial, La Coruña, Spain, 2015

Spanish edition:
Siza x Siza
Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2015 

Contents 

Made For
Juan Rodríguez and Carlos Seoane 

The Craft of the Poet
Juan Rodriguez and Carlos Seoane 

Álvaro Siza: A Revised Interview
Interview with Eduardo Souto Moura, by Juan Rodriguez in Pamplona, April 24, 2015 

The Boa Nova Tea House and Restaurant. 1958-63
The Locus 

The Leça Palmeira Swimming Pool Complex. 1959-73
Material 

The Malagueira Housing Complex. 1973-77 
Politics and Architecture 

The Flittering Image of Reality
Kenneth Frampton 

The Riches of Restraint
Juhani Pallasmaa 

In the Garden
David Cohn 

Interview
Conducted by Juan Rodriguez and Carlos Seoane (Porto) 

FAUP. The Porto Architecture School. 1986-93
The Porto School 

The Galicia Museum of Contemporary Art (CGAC). Santiago de Compostela. 1988-93
Specialization 

The Santa Maria Church. Marco de Canaveses. 1990-96
Light and Architecture

Architecture as Fiction: Santa Maria de Bouro

All photos © Juan Rodríguez

The photographer Juan Rodríguez asked me to contribute a few lines about the Pousada de Santa Maria do Bouro for his large book of black-and-white photographs dedicated to the work of Eduardo Souto de Moura. Here is the text in full:  

"Architecture can sometimes become a kind of non-narrative fiction. It has no characters, no observable movement, no plot – or at least none of these things until we as actors come to live a moment of our lives upon its stage. But in the hands of an architect who is alert and exacting –who arrives at a site to listen and observe, and then designs the project by inhaling everything that must go into it and then breathing it all out again– architecture can become more than simply a practical solution to a practical problem. It can register, suggest or encapsulate essential aspects or properties of a culture, place or zeitgeist as effectively and seductively as a good novel."

"Or this at least can be argued in the case of Eduardo Souto de Moura's Pousada de Santa María do Bouro. When Souto first came to the site he found ruins: the crumbling walls, without floors or roof, of an 18^th century Cistercian monastery on the banks of the Cavado River. When he finished the work some ten years later, he left behind the same ruins, but rendered in such a way that they had become not only inhabitable, but eloquent, whispering a thousand stories to any visitor who cared to listen – stories about their stone walls, their spaces and courtyards, the tiny village and the untamed countryside around them, stories that fuse in a timeless continuum the past and present of that particular place on the riverbank."

"Guests are not simply brought back to a recreation, mimetic but ultimately false and simulated, of the monastery's past, though they do sleep in former monk's cells and dine in the refectory and under the monumental chimney of its kitchen. Souto instead has given us the ruin as he found it, converting its lost past into a suggestion, a trace, a whisper that permeates and perfumes its present condition. At the same time, his exacting, minimal intervention creates an austere, elegant, zen-like realm of ease and repose that is imbued with an epicurean sense of how best to live life in this particular place at the present moment, a moment immersed in the accumulated stories of the past, as well as our own, hurtling trajectory into the future, both infused with an awareness of mortality."

Pousada de Santa Maria do Bouro
Juan Rodríguez, Eduardo Souto Moura at Work, Amag Editorial, La Coruña, October 2014, page 199
Buy the book: Editorial Amag

Baroque Space

The corridor as a Baroque paseo. Photos: DC

The architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra invited me last year to contribute an essay for a book on his Seville Congress Center, which has just been issued by the Madrid-based publishers La Fábrica. The assignment gave me an opportunity to explore some ideas about Baroque space in contemporary Spanish architecture that I have been mulling over for years - ever since one of my early essays on Madrid.

Since this is a book one may not find everywhere, I am permitting myself a more extensive quote from the first pages:

"Turning over in my mind the apparently amorphous, intuitively-shaped, and thoroughly contemporary spaces of the Seville Congress Center, walking through them again and again in my memory, I have come to the conclusion, although only in the form of a hypothesis, that the quality or principle that governs their organization is essentially Baroque. Not that I can be precisely certain what Baroque space might be. But what I mean is this: an architectural space conceived in terms of the processional, from the point of view of both the people moving through it and those in a position to observe them (positions that, in contemporary democratic space, are fluid and interchangeable), an architecture of movement and changing viewpoints, related also to Le Corbusier's "promenade architecturale", but interpreted with a particular austerity and elegance, and a particular conception of urban space, that I find elsewhere in Spain, and that I associate with the Baroque spaces of the Spanish Counter Reformation, and with certain painters of that period such as Velázquez and Zurbarán (an idea that Juan Daniel Fullanondo, for one, might not have found entirely preposterous)."

 

"This theory first occurred to me in one of the secondary spaces of Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra's design, on the first-floor of the ramped entry wing, in the corridor that gives access to a series of meeting rooms. In any other country, this corridor would most likely be utterly inconsequential, a space conceived solely in terms of its functional efficiency, without aesthetic pretensions, an anonymous space of transition designed as if the people who used it were senseless integers, considered only in terms of their quantity in movement, in order to determine the required capacity of the corridor and hence its width."

"In the Congress Palace, this corridor is very high in proportion, and bathed in indirect natural light from above. Instead of being characterized by the noisy incidents of purely functional space, it is notable precisely for its absence of event. The architect has stripped the space to its essential condition as a recorrido or paseo: a stretch of space that extends in a straight line for the purpose of allowing and directing the movement of people along it. That movement is given shape and measure by the regular rhythm of the structural beams that pass over the corridor, and the regular spacing of the doors to the meeting spaces on one side, with their projecting signage, just like an avenue lined with regularly-spaced trees. This rhythm is underlined by the uncluttered planes of the remaining surfaces, and the marked inflection of the space as a single-loaded corridor, with a long blank wall opposite the line of doorways. This wall is like the garden wall of a large estate along which such an avenue might extend (what comes to my mind is the brick rear wall of Madrid's Botanical Garden along the Avenue of Alfonso XII), a surface that receives and diffuses natural light, giving material presence to the very air the space contains, while modeling the beams in subtle shading as they regularly cross the space over our heads, as well as the people moving along the corridor ahead of us, or talking in a group around a doorway."

"This is certainly not an entirely Baroque concept – we can find it in the streets lined with columns of Roman cities in North Africa, in the neoclassical city, and even in the tree-lined country lanes and roads that, in the era before the automobile, could be found anywhere in the world. But the distillation of a common functional corridor to this elementary condition, that of a luminous space that is rhythmically marked for movement through it, does strike me as true to a long Spanish tradition dating to the Baroque. The very absence of event that characterizes its spatial materialization is paradoxically full of presence, as in the luminous but dark backgrounds of certain portraits by Velázquez or Zurbarán, in that peculiarly Spanish mixture of hard realism and other-worldliness."

"If this line of argument were to be supported solely by the example of a minor corridor it would be of little consequence. But as I studied the project I came to recognize many other processional spaces on a much grander scale...."

Intercambiando Miradas / Exchaning Glances 
Introduction
Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra
Palacio de Congresos de Sevilla 
Seville Congress Center 
La Fábrica, Madrid 2014, unpaged
Spanish and English texts

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." 

Circles of Light

RJC Tafyr, Courtesy Rafael de La-Hoz

Coinciding with my article in Architectural Record on the new hospital in Móstoles by Rafael de La-Hoz (see blog entry of March 3rd, Therapeutic Space), I was asked to write one of the introductions to a book on the project published by Q! Estudio and sponsored by the builder.

This story is particularly important to me for two reasons. The first, my final thesis project at Columbia University's School of Architecture, way back in 1979, was for a hospital.  Working with a small group of fellow-students, we explored different aspects of the idea of therapeutic space under the direction of Klaus Herdeg, who had recently returned to the school after undergoing a long hospital stay for a brain tumor.  For that project I went back to vivid memories of a childhood stay at Reading Hospital for appendicitis: how vividly certain things remain in the mind, in the confusion of delirious fever as a child.

Secondly, I visited the Móstoles hospital shortly after my wife Amelia died, and in the accumulated years of different hospital stays during her illness, the idea of therapeutic space was a constant theme in my mind.

Since the book will not be easy to find, I publish the full English text here. It follows a line of argument similar to that of my article for Record.

© Duccio Malagamba

Circles of Light

It may not be too much to claim that Rafael de La-Hoz's design for the King Juan Carlos Hospital in Móstoles demonstrates, as I shall try to argue, how the basic tools of architecture can be used to create a therapeutic environment conductive to the well-being of patients, a rather radical argument given the general state of contemporary hospital design. In addition, the project offers an innovative rethinking of how the complex technical apparatus of the hospital program can be organized, replacing the spreading horizontal facilities commonly built in Spain today for a compact volume that superimposes surprising discontinuities, while weaving them together through a warp and woof of horizontal and vertical communications, atria, light wells and other spatial voids.

Hospitals are places where people undergo some of the most important and traumatic experiences that life has to offer, from birth through sicknesses and injuries to death. And they are places where these vital experiences must be mediated through the daunting technical apparatus of the hospital machine itself. One of the goals of hospital design is therefore necessarily therapeutic: to create an environment that is conductive to healing and that promotes a sense of comfort, protection, dignity and well-being. The tools that the architect brings to this problem include the qualities of the materials used, considerations of space and light, geometry and form, proportion and measure, as well as the development of visual relationships in space, the management of social interactions, and more nebulous concepts such as the creation of a particular sense of place and community. Yet many of these questions are low on the list of priorities when hospitals are actually designed, given the great complexity of the technical issues to be resolved and the erroneous perception that attention to architectural values adds additional costs – a perception that the on-budget design of the King Juan Carlos Hospital would seem to refute.

© Duccio Malagamba

The massing of the Móstoles hospital is organized as an abstract sculptural object on a plinth – in this case, two glass drums containing the patient rooms stand on the technical services block. This is the typology of Jrrn Utzon's Sydney Opera or Rafael Moneo's Kursaal Congress Center in San Sebastián, taken in turn from the Greek temple. Conceptually, the plinth is an artificial raised ground plane, which raises the building to engage it in dialogue with the surrounding topography, a gesture particularly important in the anonymous contemporary landscape of this dormitory suburb. The hospital must be instantly recognizable from a passing car on the adjacent A-5 highway, as indeed it is, the thousand eyes of its glass drums glistening in the light. And this diagrammatic image clearly explains the organization of the building to any newcomer, while the white color of the plinth's horizontal banding, and the light-filled reflections of the glass sheaths above, offer subliminal cues about hygiene, care and healing.

Notably, this initial image of the building is abstract. The horizontal banding of the plinth, and the diamond pattern of the molded sheets of glass sheathing the drums, mask the window openings behind them, breaking our usual anthropomorphic associations –the building as a kind of face and so on– and creating a certain air of mystery and attraction. De La-Hoz transforms the materiality of the finishes into patterns of light, shadow and reflection, a strategy that might be traced to Islamic concepts of ornamental pattern. This abstraction also offers the first sign that, like the private spaces of Spain's Islamic cities, the building is organized around a series of inward-looking realms.

The monumental scale of the building becomes apparent on entering the soaring atrium of the plinth, the first of these self-contained worlds. Despite its crisp, clean finishes and clarity of organization, the space is rather Piranesian in impact, crossed by bridges and with natural light sifting down from its lofty circular skylights. This is one of Madrid's most memorable public rooms, comparable in function to great halls such as New York's Grand Central Station, a meeting point or crossroads surrounded by entries and activity on all sides and built at a grand urban scale. It is quite a surprise to find this dense urban concourse in the outer Madrid suburbs; it provides precisely what is lacking in its surroundings, where the fluid movement of the automobile dissolves any sense of urban focus.

The bold simplicity of the plinth's interior organization –three parallel bands, practically independent buildings in their own right, separated by the atrium and a light court– is impeccable from an operational point of view, perfectly relating outpatient facilities and emergency services –as well as patient rooms above– to the technical core (operating rooms, x-ray and diagnostic areas, ICUs, etc.). The outpatient wing is the most insular and yet the most public of these bands, with every waiting area overlooking its own interior light well. The separation into three bands recalls the organization of Rogers and Lamela's Terminal 4 at the Barajas Airport, where movement through the open hall is interrupted by long trenches across its full width, which mark points of transition to and from the planes. Here in Móstoles this division is equally procedural, as patients move from the emergency or outpatient areas to the core for diagnosis and treatment.

The natural light that filters down from the circular skylights in the ceiling of the atrium already draws our attention upwards towards the glass drums above, where patient rooms line two semi-enclosed patios. One can feel the weight of these volumes above, just as in Grand Central Station one can sense the shadowy closeness of surrounding towers.

From the regular, orthogonal spaces of the plinth, elevators bring users up into the organic-shaped patios of the drums and their accessible gardens, another surprising inner world. Instead of a windowless hospital corridor, patients and their families find themselves in a transparent, aerial egg or womb, which embraces them in both a protective sense and in the sense of including them in a larger community. The artificial ground plane of the gardens feels almost celestial, like the moment when an airplane breaks through the upper level of cloud cover into a clear sky, though again the natural light is filtered through the tilted shading canopies to create, together with the wood plank floors, planters and seating, a more intimate and habitable space. In spirit these spaces are cloisters, places of repose, tranquility and protection.

The structural discontinuity between these two vividly contrasting realms is made possible by an intermediate service floor, where the vertical loads of the glass drums are transferred horizontally into the plinth, and where mechanical services are positioned to efficiently serve both. The transition is filtered through the regular grid of circles on the roof of the plinth, which are punched through as needed for skylights and vertical circulation tubes.

In his Madrid campus for Telefónica, Rafael de La-Hoz reinterpreted the classic suburban American corporate headquarters of the 1950s and 60s through the Mediterranean type of the patio. While the American corporate campus subliminally took as its model the English country estate, in the hands of De La-Hoz it became an essentially urban space, a Plaza Mayor. In the case of the King Juan Carlos Hospital, De La-Hoz again organizes the building around the idea of the patio, with the innovation of vertically superimposing two radically different configurations. The result reminds me of certain pre-Civil War buildings in Barcelona's Eixample, where the multiplication of light wells and courts, intersecting with the monumental entry and main stair, transforms the dense, multi-story building into a Piranesian amalgam of indoor and outdoor space, porous, humid, shadowy and mysterious, with its ambiguous mixing of communal and private spaces. In the case of the Móstoles Hospital, I think it is worth pointing out, as a form of conclusion, that this rich sense of porous density, urbanity and community is also the result of the insistence on bringing natural light into every corner of the building – even the baths in patient rooms have windows. Such a preoccupation would be unthinkable in the design of any hospital in the United States, even a luxurious private clinic, though it is a lesson they would do well to consider.

© Duccio Malagamba

Circls of Light / Circulos de Luz
Introduction
Enrique Encabo & Inmaculada E. Maluenda, Editors
Hosptial Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles
Rafael de La-Hoz, Architect
Q! Estudio, Publisher, 2013, pages 36 - 41