David Mackay 1933 - 2014

Photo © Mercè Taberner from La Vanguardia

The British-born architect David Mackay, who died on Novembe 12th at the age of 80, was a partner since 1962 in the Barcelona practice MBM, with Oriol Bohigas and Josep Martorell, who survive him. According to all accounts, he was very much  team player in the firm, contributing an English pragmatism and, especially in his early years, a fresh whiff of modernity for an isolated Francoist Spain.

Beth Galí wrote a warm, personal note on Mackay in the Barcelona edition of El País, "Un català de retruc" (November 12, 2014). The title comes from Mackay's own memoir, and means, I think, something like "A Catalan by Default" or "On the Rebound".  In Spanish.

Peter Buchanan writes on Mackay in the December issue of The Architectural Review, although little of Mackay himself emerges from the accomplishments of Bohigas and MBM in architecture and urban planning.

Llàzter Moix, the architecture critic for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia, writes perhaps the fullest obituary, "La segunda M de MBM", November 13, 2014. In Spanish.

My closest contact with Mackay has been through his book Modern Architecture in Barcelona, 1854-1939, published in English by Rizzoli in 1989.

I also recall a few glimpses in the memoirs of Oriol Bohigas, in two volumes, Desde los años inciertos and Entusiasmos compartidos y batallas sin cuartel  (Spanish edition, Anagrama, Barcelona 1989 and 1996

Irina Shipova, 1968 - 2014

 

Working for magazines from everywhere, I often never actually meet face-to-face the people I work with. I've been collaborating with Speech, the Russian journal that comes out two times a year, since it´s fourth issue, in 2009, thanks to a recommendation by Roland Halbe, but I never actually met Irina, its founding editor, or Jan Skuratowski, who worked beside her on every issue. Now as I am preparing my contribution to the first issue of Speech without her, I found this memorial written by another collaborator, Bernhard Schulz:

April 26, 2014 after a long illness passed away the chief editor of speech: Irina Shipova.

Getting ready for the latest issue of the Architectural journal speech:, released under the direction of Irina Shipova. This is the last issue of speech: to be delivered by Irina Chipova.

Altogether, there have now been 12 issues of speech: (you could call them ‘magazines’, but a better word would be ‘books’). The first was published in the middle of 2008; the new architecture journal quickly acquired a knowledgeable readership. Like all previous issues of speech: the current, 12th, issue is devoted to a single overarching theme.
 
Irina Chipova was born on October 26th 1968 in Moscow, where she went to school before going on to study at the History Faculty at Moscow State University. She submitted her diploma work in 1991. Meanwhile she had spent a year working at a children’s library and then another at the Shchusev Museum of Architecture. This was a time of preparation for the independent path that she was to follow subsequently. But first she worked for three years at the Central House of Architects in Moscow. Then, in 1997, she took an important step – deciding to leave Russia and move to Germany with her husband and son. She learnt German in Rostock before coming to Berlin in 1998, where her second son was born. 

Working as an architecture critic, she started gathering around her the circle of fellow-thinkers who would subsequently prove so invaluable to her. In 2004 Irina started working for nps tchoban voss, where, as head of the PR department, she was instrumental in helping present and explain the firm’s architectural ideas and projects. 

That same year, Irina took part in preparing Moscow-Berlin, an exhibition at the Shchusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow, and in 2007 she wrote ‘Moscow. Art and Design’, a handy guide to contemporary architecture and interior design in Moscow.

Irina’s work for other publications gradually gave way to the idea of creating a new journal dedicated to the state of contemporary architecture. The concept developed by Irina Chipova involved taking a single theme, a single building type, or a single architectural objective and subjecting it to comprehensive examination, beginning with an excursion into history and continuing with numerous examples of buildings from countries all over the world, accompanied by interviews with leading architects and comments from authoritative experts. Underlying the publication was a graphic concept in which text and images were to be of equal importance as sources of information, with equal weight being given to two languages, Russian and English.
 
The above concept was established at the very beginning of the journal’s life and it is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Irina Chipova’s work for speech: that the concept never required reworking. The diversity and balance of the various forms of contribution were a strong point of the new publication, as were the involvement of knowledgeable authors from different countries and the high quality of the photographs selected for inclusion.

While working on the journal, Irina was asked, as an experienced publisher, to produce the catalogue for the exhibition at the Russian Pavilion at the 12th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2010. Irina coordinated this enormous volume of work as a ‘one-woman team’ in Berlin, with help from her colleagues in Moscow. She maintained numerous contacts with her circle of friends back home, and they responded with love and admiration for her kindness, talent, and professionalism.

From the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Irina found herself increasingly hampered by serious illness. Nevertheless, she continued working on speech:, without in any way compromising on the publication’s established standard of quality. Until her final days, she worked in bed on editing texts and captions for the issue which you have in your hands. She was unable to let a single important detail slip through her fingers. Her supreme professionalism, which never let the journal’s authors get away with vague phrasing, and her understanding of layout, which resulted in a substantive relationship between text and photographs, were unfailing. After a protracted illness, Irina Chipova died at home in Berlin on April 26th, 2014, a few days after submitting the final proofs for the 12th issue of speech:. 

She was only 45 years old.

It was her unflagging enthusiasm for her work and her incredible resolve which enabled Irina to see the completion of this 12th issue of ‘her’ journal.

Albert Viaplana, 1933 - 2014

Plaza at Sants (1983). Source: viaplana.com

 Albert Viaplana, the Barcelona architect who designed, with his partner Helio Piñón, the Plaza dels Països Catalans at the Sants Railroad Station (1981-83), an emblematic work of Barcelona's urban renaissance, has died at the age of 81, reports José María Montaner in El País this Saturday (link). Montaner writes:

"...the work of the Viaplana-Piñón studio, which emerged in the context of the so-called School of Barcelona, with its roots in realism and contextualism, marked at the end of the 1970s a point of rupture in favor of a conceptual, essentialist and abstract search...."

As Montaner points out, one of the duo's most influential projects was an unrealized competition design for the College of Architects of Valencia in 1977:

"Using a stepped and repetitive form, they achieved an unforgettable, timeless, minimal proposal, rendered in lines that could not be more simple, abstract, and anonymous..."

Montaner goes on to note that Viaplana was somewhat eclipsed by the meteoric success of his disciple Enric Miralles, who worked on projects such as Sants, and he expresses the hope that his work will be better appreciated in its own right in the future.

Other projects with Piñón, all in Barcelona:

• Besós Park, Sant Adrià, Barcelona (1984)
• Santa Mónica Art Center, Las Ramblas (1985-1992)
• Hilton Hotel, Avenida Diagonal (1987-1990)
• CCCB, Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, El Raval (1990-1993)

José María Montaner
Albert Viaplana, imprescindible arquitecto vanguardista
El País
May 17, 2014 

Translation, quotes: DC

Manuel de las Casas 1940-2014

The architect Manuel de las Casas (Talavera de la Reina, 1940) died last Saturday, February 8 in Madrid, after a relatively short illness. A charismatic teacher at the Madrid School of Architecture for over four decades, and founder of the School of Architecture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo, he designed works that were pioneering in the fields of social housing, the revitalization of the traditional city, and the integration of contemporary architecture in historic contexts. He received Spain's National Architecture Prize in 1999 for his University Health Sciences Center in La Coruña, and the Gold Medal in the Fine Arts from the Ministry of Culture in 1995.

I first met Manuel in the 1980s, soon after my arrival in Spain, as the author, together with his brother Ignacio, of the social housing developments of Palomeras, Orcasur and Albufera Avenue, projects launched by the central government to mitigate the inhuman conditions of the numerous shantytowns that still surrounded Madrid in those years. With his abundant beard, deep voice and steady gaze, Manuel was for me the personification of a new generation of Spaniards dedicated to the task of building a modern, democratic and socially-equitable country during the exciting years of transition following the end of the Franco regime. The idealism and high aims of the moment are reflected in the sobriety and dignity of these projects: the buildings of Palomeras, with their grand interior halls lined with galleries, like traditional Madrid corralas, creating community; Orcasur, a miniature city of regular blocks; or the square volumes of Albufera, spread out across the hilltop of the Altos de Vallecas, not without a certain monumentality – all today in excellent condition. Later, Manuel's daughter Iciar, also an architect, took me to see the housing block of Cabeza del Moro in Talavera, organized like a traditional Plaza Mayor surrounded by galleries, an early –and truly urban– formulation of the "patio-block" housing type that has come to dominate the dense new planned developments of Madrid.

Another memorable encounter with Manuel was our trip together to Zamora to see his King Alfonso Enriques Institute of Spanish-Portuguese Studies (1997), where he had introduced, among the ruins of a medieval convent, a series of new elements, clad in oxidized steel, of a startling contemporaneity. This work, together with his Agriculture Department Building in Toledo of 1992, still constitute a model of how to integrate new and old without resorting to a superficial mimetism.

On this same trip, I was witness to Manuel's pride and generosity as a teacher, as he took me to see works by up-and-coming young architects that he followed with great interest. He showed me Luis Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón's Museum of Fine Arts in Zamora, their first built work, then still under construction, and the Fair Pavilion by Javier Revillo and María Fraile. We also stopped at the Labor University, a 1950s work in an eclectic historicist style by Luis Moya, for whom his father had worked as technical architect before working for Manuel on his first built work, the Pedro Mora House en Talavera (1964-71).

Last December, the Toledo School of Architecture inaugurated the Manuel de las Casas Chair in Architecture, a ceremony in which Manuel, in his last public appearance, presented this first project to the audience, returning to his roots as a student in the organicist architecture of the early 1960s – and offering us a master class in the human values of architecture, in contrast to the frivolities we find in so much supposedly ambitious architecture today.


David Cohn
Manuel de las Casas, una arquitectura con rostro humano
El País, February 10, 2014, page 41.
 Translated by DC

See also:
Antón Capitel
Manuel de las Casas, arquitecto de referencia
El País, February 8, 2014

Bibliography

Articles on Manuel de las Casas by DC 

King Alfonso Henriques Institute in Zamora

Architectural Record, July 2000, pages 106 - 113 

El anexo como abordaje 
Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud, A Coruña 
Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica 14, Feburary 2000, pages 20 - 28 

Building as Landscape 
Lérez Cultural Center, Pontevedra, Spain 
World Architecture 73, February 1999, pages 80 - 83 

Acero Rojo, Pizarra Verde, Vidrio Luminoso 
"Red Steel, Green Slate, Luminous Glass" 

Congress hall an Auditorium, Pontevedra 
Pazo de Congresos e Exposicións de Pontevedra 

Exhibition catalog 

Xunta de Galicia, September 20, 1997 

Block en Form einer gespreizten Hand 
Public Housing, Alcobendas 
Bauwelt 17/18, May 9, 1997, pages 926 - 931 

Public Housing, Alcobendas, Spain 
World Architecture, October 1996, pages 134 - 135 

Entwerfen für die Peripherie: Der Realismus des Manuel de las Casas 
Designing for the Periphery: The Realism of Manuel de las Casas 
Bauwelt 28/29, July 29, 1994, pages 1596 - 1599 

Büros in der Akropolis 
Consejeria of Agriculture, Toledo, Spain 
db - deutsche bauzeitung, October 1993, pages 25 - 29 

The Poetics of Place: Three Projects by Manuel de las Casas 
Geometría 14, December 1992, pages 101 - 112

Javier Carvajal, 1926 - 2013

Business School, Barcelona, 1961. Wikicommons & U. of Navarra

I am behind on news stories that haven't made the jump between Spanish and English readers. The most important was the death last June 14th in Madrid of architect Javier Carvajal at the age of 87.

Carvajal was a key figure in the revival of modern architecture in Spain in the 1950s and 60s. He was an important model for the more abstract formalist work of many Spanish architects today - especially among those who share his conservative politics and religious values. His identification with the Franco regime in the tumultuous 1970s, in positions of power such as director of the Barcelona School of Architecture and the Madrid College of Architects, cost him dearly in later years.

Emblematic works include:

•  Residential tower, Plaza de Cristo Rey, Madrid, 1954-58, with Rafael García de Castro (seen in the classic comic movie Los Tramposos of 1959, with Tony LeBlanc).
• Business School, University of Barcelona, 1955-61, with García de Castro.
• Pantheon to the Spanish Dead, Rome, 1957, with his brilliant contemporary, José María García de Paredes, a prelude to his stark, expressionist, abstract style of the 1960s.
• Church of Our Lady of the Angels, Vitoria, 1958-60, also with García de Paredes.
• Directed Settlement of Almendrales, Madrid, 1958-64, with García de Paredes, José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún. Pioneering public housing.
• Spanish Pavilion, New York World's Fair, 1964.
• A series of houses in northern Madrid in the 1960s, exemplified by his own house in Somosaguas,1964-65, where his expressionist style came into over-ripe maturity. It was the setting for Carlos Saura's claustraphobic 1969 movie La Madriguera.
• Valencia Tower, Madrid, 1968-72, which provoked protests for intruding on views of the Retiro Park and the Puerta de Alcalá.  

Garcia-Valdecasas House, Somosaguas, 1965. Photo ©Jorge Losada

The story in the press:

• Ana Marcos, "Muere el arquitecto español Javier Carvajal a los 87 años", El País, June 14, 2013
• Luis Alemany, "Muere Javier Carvajal, arquitecto clave en la segunda mitad del XX", El Mundo, June 14, 2013
• Alberto Campo Baeza, "Ha muerto Javier Carvajal", Reprint of article "Belleza Precisa", Arquitectura Viva 147, 2012

Other interesting web pages:

• Photos of late work by Jorge Losada 
• Tallermuse blog: photos by Javier Villa, coll-barreu-arquitectos, Ekain Jiménez Valencia, Garikoitz Estornés and others, with texts and list of works on blog. All the photos below come from this source.

This and below, Carvajal House, Somosaguas 1965

 

Sobrino House, Aravaca 1966