Vázquez Consuegra's CaixaForum Sevilla

Photo courtesy Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra

The theme of my latest article in architektur.aktuell is "the limits of  even the best architecture in the face of an inappropriate site." Excerpts from the text:

"The story of how the CaixaForum ... ended up in a basement is a tortuous one. In 2009, Vázquez Consuegra won a limited competition to install the Forum in the dramatically-vaulted medieval ship-building halls of the Atarazanas Reales. The proposal provoked concerns for the historic integrity of the building, a dispute abetted by political infighting among local administrations. Apparently unhappy with the controversy and the lack of progress, La Caixa pulled out of the deal in 2012, and announced instead a plan to install the center in the Pelli tower. (The Atarazanas is currently being converted into a city-run cultural center, also designed by Vázquez Consuegra, and with a 10 million euro donation from the Caixa Foundation)."

"The Pelli tower had fallen into the hands of La Caixa in the same year, when it took over Cajasol, a local savings bank that had initiated the project in the boom years of the 2000s and had collapsed with the crash."

The existing buildings are clad in glass and terra-cotta-colored metallic elements, and the plaza between them is finished with rather vulgar cement pavers. Vázquez Consuegra responds with his characteristically cool, silvery surfaces. He clads the entry canopy in panels of  Stabilized Aluminum Foam (SAF), spongy and lightweight in appearance. For his addition to the finger, he uses elements of galvanized aluminum, breaking the horizontal lines of the Pelli building with vertical shading fins.

"The canopy's forms are redolent of all the qualities that neither it nor the spaces below it possess: an excavated, carved solid, vaulted and heavy, references that may also remind us of the vaults of the Atarazanas Reales. And yet the canopy is clearly nothing of the sort. It is a ghostly evocation of tectonic muscle, rendered in a space-age material for a junkspace setting: a true architectonic poetics for our time."

In Search of Place
CaixaForum Sevilla by Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra
architektur.aktuell 449, July - August 2017, pages 66 - 77

Restoration Degree Zero

 

All photos © JesúsGranada

In the July 14th issue of Bauwelt I write about a minimalist restoration job in Sevilla, the consolidation of the ruined 16th century Convent of Santa María de los Reyes.

"Rem Koolhaas has contemplated the concept of the restoration project as a semi-ruin in an exhibit at the 2005 Venice Biennial, in relation to his work at the Hermitage Museum. He asks, "Can a certain amount of  inaction, a certain resistance to change, actually be instrumental in maintaining a degree of  the authenticity so frequently erased during the process of  modernization?" ⁽¹⁾ "

"At another extreme, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, chain saw in hand, appropriated abandoned New York buildings in the 1970s as a free field of transgressive action. For him, a ruined building was an inert corpse that he could redeem and transform, like a pioneer in a wasteland, forging a new utopian community of fellow artists in action."

"With their intervention at Santa Maria de los Reyes, Morales and De Giles fall somewhere between these approaches. The building's long abandon has resulted in a degree of deterioration that, one senses, has become a state in its own right, as far from an "authentic" window into the past as it is from a false resurrection. In their intervention in the garden, the architects assume some of the liberty of Matta-Clark – in this sense, their reference to his contemporary Michael Heizer is no coincidence. In the building itself, however, they allow the "bare bones" of the structure to speak for themselves: the traditional sequence of spaces, seen in similar historic structures in Seville, from the narrow confines of the medieval street to the private realm of the

Restaurieren am Nullpunkt

"Restoration Degree Zero"

Consolidation of the Convent of Santa María de los Reyes, Sevilla, by José Morales and Sara de Giles of MGM

Bauwelt 17.2017, July 14, 2017, pages 40 - 45

(Sorry, article not available on the web)

Centripetal Force: CaixaForum Zaragoza, by Carme Pinós

Estudio Carme Pinós

Architectural Record sent me to Zaragoza, Spain in 2015 to review Carme Pinós' CaixaForum, which I found to be her "most accomplished and important work in Spain to date."

From the text:

" 'Everything I do aims to dynamize my work,' Carme Pinós declares, 'because dynamism communicates lightness.' Indeed, everywhere you turn in the CaixaForum, something seems to be in motion – whether it's the pairs of entwined columns in the lobby, angling away from each other like swirling dancers, or the massing of the building itself, where the two L-shaped volumes containing the galleries cantilever out from its upper torso in opposing directions and on different floors."

Lobby                           Photo © Ricardo Santonja

The project is a hard sell in post-crisis Spain, as its exuberant design would seem to epitomize the excesses of the bubble years. In the text I try to address this:

"There is a lot going on in Pinós' design. Lively patterns and forms surge at every turn, from the fabric and acoustical wood paneling in the auditorium, to the curving, movable wood screens of the restaurant, or those dancing columns in the lobby, which disappear into irregular skylit openings in the ceiling, splashed with natural light, as if they were holding up nothing at all. But Pinós handles these formal caprices with authority and sureness. With her first partner, the late Enric Miralles, with whom she collaborated until 1991, she was a pioneer in this kind of formal experimentation. In the aftermath of Spain's economic debacle, such exuberance has come to seem extravagant and wasteful. But Pinós argues that the cost of her design, at 15 million euros, was actually quite reasonable. She notes that modest finishes, such as floors of vinyl, industrial parquet and concrete resin, help compensate for the expensive structural solution, for example."

I end with a quote from her brief: "We want our building to be a symbol of technical progress and the generosity of culture, that it should reflect only the best our age has to offer." It's hard to argue with that, especially in a project of this importance.

Auditorium                   Photo © Rubén B. Pescós

Classroom/workshop             Photo © Rubén B. Pescós

Since its opening, the Caixa Foundation has backed away from an ambitious plan to install their Seville venue in the medieval shipbuilding halls of the Atarazanas,  which were to have been designed by Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra. The project became mired in local opposition and political squabbling, and the Foundation finally opted out. More modest quarters in the underground garage of Cesar Pelli's controversial Torre Sevilla, also by Vázquez Consuegra, will open next spring, Vázquez Consuegra recently told me. More then in a future blog....

CaixaForum Zaragoza, by Carme Pinós
Architectural Record
December, 2015, pages 82 - 87

Photo © Ricardo Santonja

© Ricardo Santonja

Estudio Carme Pinós

asa

© Ricardo Santonja

Estudio Carme Pinós

Photo DC

© Rubén B. Pescós

Going Guerilla in Triana

Fotos © Jesús Granada

Until recently, Spain's economic crisis scarcely cut into the number of buildings I have been asked to review by different publications. But since this spring the lack of new work in the pipeline over the past few years seems to be having an impact. This modest museum in a former pottery works in the Seville neigborhood of Triana is all about the crisis, not only in terms of work but also in professional confidence, as I elaborate at the end of my article:

"...The tone of the new" facades, and their invisibility to the street, is in keeping with the modest ambitions of the intervention. The Museum is the product of a new era of moderation in public works, in striking contrast to the projects initiated before the crisis. From the nearby streets, the silhouette of César Pelli's 180-meter-tall Torre Sevilla looms, commissioned by Cajasol, a failed public savings bank. Its lower floors will soon be occupied by the CaixaForum, a cultural center run by La Caixa, the bank that rescued Cajasol, after La Caixa abandoned a more ambitious plan to house the center in the medieval ship works of the Atarazanas in the historic center. Elsewhere, the wooden mushrooms of the Metropol Parasol in the Plaza de la Encarnación, by German architect J. Mayer H., seem gloomy and underused on a warm summer day. And the court-ordered demolition of Zaha Hadid's half-finished library for the University of Seville has been completed, after the project was challenged by local residents for occupying a public park. In this climate, as the Triana Ceramics Museum would seem to confirm, architects must go guerilla, pass under the radar of public attention and commit themselves to specific, local goals."

More from my original text (the published version was somewhat garbled by my Austrian editors, as their title shows (see below)):

"For the Triana Ceramics Museum in Seville, local architects Miguel Hernández Valencia and Esther López Martín, of AF6 Architects, frame the haphazard elements of a disused pottery works with a second-floor addition that overlooks them on four sides, giving the complex a sense of unity.... "

"Hernández and López ... preserve the original brick kilns, buildings and sheds that were built, over time and with little planning, in and around an open patio. To this labyrinthine complex they add a second level that forms a ring around the patio, and arrange visitors' itineraries on both levels. The patio occupies part of a large block that is enmeshed in the barrio's urban fabric, and that includes the "Cerca Hermosa", a famous gated alley lined with modest houses...."

"Hernández and López's approach to the project was to accept and build on its chaotic accumulation of elements, adding a contemporary contribution with the distinctive facades of the second level....."

"The ceramic brise-soleil of its facades is inspired in the metal storage shelving stacked with half-finished pottery pieces that the architects found in the factory. Its "shelves" are of galvanized steel, and the clay units are custom-made in four sizes, with round centers and faceted exteriors so as to stack easily with a bit of silicone.... They left the original street facade of the building unchanged, with its small corner entrance decorated with terra cotta and painted tiles, adding only signage to a parapet, together with the motif of the brise-soleil in low-relief."

"The tubular clay units of the brise-soleil ... bring to mind unexpected references, from the polka dots on traditional Sevillian flamenco dresses to the [nearby] Triana Bridge, where cast iron circles of graduated diameters fill the space between roadbed and arch (a structural system introduced by Antoine-Rémy Polonceau on the Pont du Carrousel in Paris in 1834)."

Entry facade

 
Playing at Gorrillas in Triana
Triana Ceramics Museum, Sevilla, by AF6 Arquitectos
architektur.aktuell 426, September 2015, pages 70 - 79