Two from Spain in Design Vanguard

Héctor Fernández Elorza, School of Cellular and Genetic Biology

Of the ten young architecture firms from around the world selected for Architectural Record's annual Design Vanguard issue this December, two are Spanish: Héctor Fernández Elorza and Grupo Aranea, led by the couple Francisco Leiva and Marta García Chico.

My article on Elorza begins:

"Using raw primary materials such as concrete and galvanized steel, simple forms, and an adroit manipulation of scale, the Madrid-based architect Héctor Fernández Elorza gives even small projects a monumental authority. Two horizontal glass slashes across the facade of his Faculty of Cellular and Genetic Biology at the University of Alcalá, for example, transform the rows of diminutive offices and seminar rooms behind them into a mysterious, iconic mask, while deeply projecting concrete planes shade the interior spaces from the western sun. At a larger scale, in the Valdefierro Park outside his native Zaragoza, long concrete retaining walls emerge from the hillside like the ruins of a lost city."

Grupo Aranea, The Braided Valley River Park, Elche

I write about the obsession with spiral movement in the work of the Alicante-based Grupo Aranea:

"Their first building, a library in San Vicente del Raspeig completed in 2004, is a continuous spiraling ramp. And both a seaside spa in Gijón and an Environmental Observatory in Alicante spin around themselves in open-ended loops. Their Lude House sits like a hard white seashell atop an existing building in the town of Cehegín, rippled inside and out by the curving, rising movement of its stair and double-height living area."

"Even a completely orthogonal design, a public high school in the village of Rafal, is organized around circular movement: a pink-carpeted bleacher opposite the entrance, which doubles as a wide stair and meeting point, kicks off a sequence of corridors and outdoor spaces that circle back over the entry and around a playing field to connect classroom pavilions."

 
Héctor Fernández López Architects 
Architectural Record, Design Vanguard, December 2013
Cover

Grupo Aranea
Architectural Record, Design Vanguard, December 2013

Photo top  © Montse Zamorano
Photo bottom © Jesús Granada

"AR House 2013" Award to Grupo Aranea

© Jesús Granada

Still catching up on my July articles, I wrote in The Architectural Review on the Lude House in Cehegín, Murcia by Francisco Leiva and Martín López Robles of Grupo Aranea, based in Alicante. The design shares AR's HOUSE 2013 Award (see the full article here).

"The spiral pull of the design carries visitors up to the roof, which visually connects the house to its natural setting, lifting it out of the mundane local streets to find its place in the wider world, almost like a Greek temple. Up on the roof, Francisco Leiva eagerly points out the sights, from the choppy roofscape of the houses below, invisible from the street, to the profile of the historic town center on its hill in the near distance, and the bowl of mountains and hills surrounding the town, with their orchards of apricots and other fruit trees, or cut by the terraces and tailings of marble quarries.... The overlapping, spiral movement of this little house is like that of a sprouting seed, an organic life force in vital contact with planet Earth."

AR House 2013 Joint Winner
Casa Lude, Spain by Grupo Aranea
The Architectural Review
Vol. CCXXXIII, No. 1397
July 2013, pages 30 - 37

The architects on the roof by DC

View of town with unfinished public water park

View of distant marble quarries from roof of house

An Embryonic New New Urbanism

Babelia, the weekly cultural supplement of the Spanish newspaper El País, has published an article in which I use the interesting urban strategy of the Rafal High School, by the Grupo Aranea, to point out the overlooked crisis in urban planning that has accompanied the crisis in high-stakes architectural follies (link).

While young architects are taking another look at Brutalism, they are also taking another look at Team X planning ideas, briskly discredited in the 1970s for their glaring social failures, and replaced by the Post Modern nostalgia for the 19th century city, a model that in Spain has become an empty technical formula.

Significantly, Spanish examples of garden-city towers and low-rise clusters from the 1960s , free of streets, cars and city blocks, have generally not suffered the degradation and abandonment of their American and English counterparts, as Spain has so far lacked the underlying social conflicts that fed these failures. And in Spain, public authorities have an enormous power in determining the shape and content of urban development. So why not take another look at those wonderful ideas of the 50s and 60s for creating sophisticated spaces of local, public interaction among neighbors, free of cars and not necessary beholden to commerce or speculation?

El urbanismo de vanguardia contraataca
"Avant-garde Urbanism Counter-attacks"
High School in Rafal, Alicante by Grupo Aranea.
El País, Saturday, September 3, 2011, Babelia, Number 1032, page 18.

Photo by architect Francisco Leiva of Grupo Aranea, showing the standoff between the architects' Rafal High School and a crass urban development in the coastal province of Alicante.

The New Brutalism

In the latest issue of Bauwelt I report on the Alicante-based Aranea Group's high school in the town of Rafal, Alicante.The young architects challenge the mediocrity of current urban development in the region with a project that turns its back on its surroundings to develop a rich matrix of indoor/outdoor spaces around its central courtyard, an urban scene in miniature. The project combines Brutalist textures --board-formed concrete makes a comeback here-- and a Team X sense of social space. It was the recipient of the 2010 FAD Award for Architecture.

Can a work of architecture constitute in itself a critical project? Can it change the way its users see their habitat, and awaken them to their supposed errors of vision and method? Can it take a stand in aesthetic and moral judgment of its surroundings, and propose a counter-model for a more environmentally and humanly sensitive method of development?
 

 Wie ein Faustschlag auf den Tisch
Challenging the Status Quo
Bauwelt 3.11, January 2011, page 20-29.
Table of contents

Photo collage: Grupo Aranea
The collage imagines the full development of the streets around the high school in the future -- currently the building is surrounded on two sides by empty streets and abandoned construction projects.

Photo 2 © Duccio Malagamba