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

 

Cool Shades

© María Ramos

My latest article in the bi-annual Russian journal Speech features a pair of entry canopies for metro stations on the periphery of Valencia, Spain that could be described as nifty sunglasses.

"The chief attraction of the stations are their spectacular glazed tubular pavilions... The glazing has a layer of acetate between two panes of 10mm glass, which provides solar protection, lowering thermal loads. The film also refracts light in different colors depending on the angle of incidence, viewpoint, reflections and other factors."

© María Ramos

Unfortunately, the park they form part of, which was to have been created along the right-of-way of the former surface line (it now runs underground) has not materialized, another victim of cuts in public spending due to the crisis. So the stations stand in a no-mans- land.

"These effects are further multiplied by the many panes of shattered glass, the result of vandals throwing rocks at them – the pavilions make for an inviting target amid their abandoned surroundings. These smashed panels are held in place by the lamination and covered with a dense crazy-quilt patterns of cracks, which catch brilliant nets of light. The result is actually quite attractive...." 

Photo: DC

"The stations stand as another vivid symbol (as if another were needed) of the current state of Spanish architecture, once much in demand by politicians who actually understood it little, and now abandoned, another piece of refuse left over from the disaster of overbuilding in Spain. But in this premature decadence they assume a new role that is the fate of any building that survives into a time beyond the era of its conception and usefulness (in this case their usefulness as a political symbols of largess and grandiosity), becoming a fascinating relic,  like a magnificent peacock strutting amid the rubble of a once Eden-like park."

East of Eden
Carolines and Benimàmet metro stations, Valencia, by Luis Ferrer
Speech 13, January 2015, pages 128 - 137, cover

© María Ramos

Photo: DC

The Luminous Edge

Holl, Jefferson and Palladian America
Addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City
Steven Holl Architects

Tectónica 26, 2008, pages 26 - 43, cover
Abbreviated

© David Cohn, Tectónica

In his design for the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, Steven Hall has given a new twist to the old problem of how to enlarge a building that, due to its force and integrity, doesn't easily lend itself to enlargement. The museum's imposing original home, a neo-classical temple sculpted out of Indiana limestone, was built between 1927 and 1933 by local architects Wight & Wight, disciples of McKim, Mead & White. The powerful axes of symmetry of its north and south facades project their dominion over the site, an estate previously occupied by the mansion of the museum's principal benefactor, William Rockhill Nelson (1841-1915), the owner of The Kansas City Star newspaper.

In contrast to other museum additions that attempt to discretely enlarge the original building, such as London's National Gallery by Venturi Scott Brown, or where the original is overwhelmed and engulfed within a completely new reconfiguration of the institution –the case of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, remodeled in the 1970s by Roche & Dinkeloo Architects, or the recently transformed MoMA—Hall has opted to explore the approach taken by I. M. Pei with his additions to Washington's National Gallery and the Louvre in Paris, where he used the strategy of an underground connection to create a new object –or in this case, a new series of objects—that stands independently of the original building and relates to it through a dialogue of contrasts.

© Roland Halbe

But while Pei developed his designs using triangular geometries that were equivalent, in their precision and elegance, to the academic language of their partners in this dance of contrasts, Holl experiments with broken, intuitive forms that place his design at the formal vanguard of contemporary architectural practice. And while the underground sections of Pei's projects are clearly secondary, and are understood as a limited, functional strategy despite their brilliant use of skylights, in Holl's design, the theme of its partial burial is the key to its conceptual and experiential development. For Holl, "The addition is not an object. We have created a new paradigm, fusing landscape and architecture."

Holl broke with the bases of the 1999 competition to arrive at his solution. While other participants sought to enlarge the original building on its northern elevation, in front of the entry façade, as called for in the brief, Holl proposed a more discrete and respectful site, along the eastern edge of the museum grounds, where he scattered five pavilions or irregular glass lenses across the lawn. The lenses descend in a broken line, like transparent, luminous rocks, across the grounds of the sculpture park that extends from the southern façade.

Natural light pours through these lenses into the new underground galleries, which Holl has organized following a route of gently descending ramps, interrupted by subtle changes in direction and points of rest with views over the landscape and towards Wight and Wight's sober Ionic portico. The disjuncture between the changes in level inside the addition and the changing ground plane above them has a disorienting effect that Holl has compared to the floating, disconnected vistas of traditional oriental landscape paintings (Asian art is one of the museum's strong points). Outside, pathways run between the pavilions to reach corners populated with sculptures, and run across the buried galleries' roofs of earth and grass.

The general layout of Holl's design has a certain relation to the Palladian tradition in North America. On various 17th century colonial plantations, secondary elements –the kitchen, smoke house, or domestic slave quarters, for example—are placed on either side of the main axis of the house on its garden side, following a strict geometric order, and defining an outdoor domestic sphere. One example is Thomas Jefferson's house in Monticello, where two semi-buried galleries define the artificial plane of the garden, and end in two small pavilions that frame the view from the main house towards the Blue Ridge Mountains, which still marked the frontier of colonial settlement in Jefferson's time. Like Jefferson, Holl has organized the glass lenses like a secondary, semi-buried extension of the central building, except that he keeps them away from its powerful central axis of symmetry, so as to organize the route through them in a dramatically different way.

Monticello. Image culled from http://aytch.mnsu.edu

The success of the project depends entirely on Holl's handling of the glass lenses and how they treat natural light, two problems that Holl and his team have placed at the center of their investigations. Their concept is to use the lenses to materialize natural light, using this light to mold the interior spaces. The lenses' translucent walls "gather, diffuse and refract light," they remark in the architect's brief. In the daytime, they appear dematerialized, "like blocks of ice," and at night they illuminate the grounds of the museum like enormous lanterns.

The lenses mark a new point of evolution in the development of glass walls, leaving behind the preoccupation of High Tech architecture with the dematerialization of the convention glass curtain wall. Behind Holl's project we find a fascination for abstract, luminous surfaces that would seem to be derived from the domination of the computer screen in contemporary life – the photos showing people staring fixedly and at close range at the surfaces of the lenses are revealing in this regard. In contrast to High Tech's cult of transparency, where the goal of liberating and extending the gaze beyond intermediate barriers was sought, we find ourselves here before the hypnotic effect of luminosity, which converts the building itself into the object of a fixed, absent gaze, and where the relation between inside and outside is less promiscuous and more limited. In the interior spaces, the luminous walls take on a secondary role to the play of light and space. Here Holl returns to the long, tortuous circulation patterns of the Kiasma, a project influenced by Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. Here in Kansas, however, these routes unfold with greater tranquility. The alternation between the exterior views and the glass lenses creates a rhythmic spatial choreography that finds its culmination in the Noguchi courtyard.

In his brief, Holl offers a list of the points of dialogue between the original building and his design, between "the stone and the feather", contrasting the density, opacity and hermetic quality of the first with the lightness, transparency and openness to dialogue with its surroundings of the second. To this list we might add the contrast between the formulaic monumentality of the original building and a more personal and intuitive vision, marked by sensorial intensity and spatial compression. Like Jefferson in Monticello, Wight & Wight's Nelson-Atkins is the design of pioneers, imposing a new order on an existing landscape and with this act erasing its past. Holl's building belongs to a later moment in the development of the North American urban landscape. The apparently virgin territory of the past has become a complex weave of gestures and intentions superimposed over the topography, a palimpsest with many historical layers where, in Holl's interpretation, only a small margin remains free in which one may add a personal, poetic commentary. Nevertheless, from this same position, Holl has managed to reorient our reading of the existing landscape, converting the edge into the new center, dislocated and fragmented, of the contemporary gaze.

Translated from the Spanish by DC
Photos © Andy Ryan, courtesy Steven Holl Architects, unless noted
Plans: Steven Holl Architects