Upholstered in Skay, or The Moncloa Complex

On the representation of power: how much can we infer about Spain's political structure in the size and decoration of the Presidential compound at Moncloa?

Office of President Rahoy in Moncloa in 2013. Source ABC

In a column in El País yesterday (Feb. 4, 2017), the historian Guillermo Cortázar analyzes the Palace of Moncloa, an estate on the northern edges of Madrid that has housed the residence and offices of the Spanish Presidency since 1977. He sees the compound reflecting the character of the state that has emerged with the new Spanish democracy following the Franco dictatorship, comparing it to 10 Downing Street. Moncloa has about 2500 employees, he notes, compared to the 70 at home of the Bitish Prime Minister. With its 20 hectares of grounds and 58,000 square meters of built area, he sees it as "demonstrating a prepotency, status and visualization very superior even to those of the Zarazuela", the current official residence of the kings of Spain.

"In contrast, 10 Downing Street is a discrete, temporary residence and office for the Prime Minister. In parliamentary monarchies, it is understood that the Crown is the permanent representation of the nation as a whole, while the president of the government is only the temporary head of one of the three powers of state."

He goes on to assert that this size reflects the concentration of power in Spain in self-serving party structures, in which voters are poorly represented –in Spain one votes for a party in block, not for particular candidates– and in which the separation of powers and other controls are compromised.

But the comparison seems to me rather unfair, as Downing Street is a typically British idiosyncrasy. Though they are not constitutional monarchies, a truer comparison would be with the White House, the German Chancellery or the Elysée Palace, which I would guess are comparable in size and staff, if not much larger. It is also seems unreasonable to infer a structure of political power in size alone.

Gordon Brown receives Barak Obama at 10 Downing Street, 2009. Photo: Pete Souza / Official White House Photostream / Wikikedia Commons

 Cortázar goes on to note the striking differences in decor between Downing Street and Moncloa. He cites the memoirs of Margaret Thatcher as to the furnishing in the London residence, noting the Henry Moore and the paintings of Wellington, George II and other "heroes of Great Britain's history". He quotes her as saying, "in these works the continuity of history can be perceived. It seemed to me of great importance that when foreign visitors came to Downing Street they could contemplate part of Great Britain's cultural legacy." (DC translation from Spanish).

In the Palace of Moncloa, he continues, an aseptic modernity reigns, of giant glass tables, faux white leather furniture ("skay" synthetic leather, very 70s), white walls and abstract art –Miro, Tàpies, Guerrero, Barceló– a legacy of Felipe González's presidency (1982-1996).

His main source for this description is the author Antonio Muñoz Molina, who visited Moncloa during the presidency of the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004 – 2011). In contemporary photos, under the current president, the conservative Mariano Rahoy, the decor tends to a more traditional wood and black leather, although it is equally bland and anonymous.

Conference room, Moncloa, no date given. Source: Intra Arquitec

 "It's a very 20th century, very modern language, as if trying to not signify anything in particular, nothing that could be susceptible to criticism, no narrative, no references to history. With absolutely no aesthetic ties to the past, the presidents of the government in Moncloa have inaugurated a new era, that of the Party State, initiated in 1977."

Pardo Palacce, residence of Franco and his wife, Carmen Polo, Palm Sunday, late in the regime. Source: Juan Cobos, Xavier Casals

Franco's last speech on the balcony of the Palacio del Oriente, no date given. Source: http://www.libertaddigital.com/cultura/historia/2015-11-21/jorge-vilches-y-al-tercer-dia-resucito-juan-carlos-77294/

I'm not sure the decoration of Moncloa says too much about the current structure of power in Spain either, but it does point to the chasm separating the representation of state power in comparison with the dictatorship, which wrapped itself in the "glorious" "imperial" history of Spain as an ideological self-justification.

This is not to say, however, that this supposedly "neutral" style does not end up signifying its own era, as Cortázar suggests – a condition that will become clear as soon as something else comes along.

As he points out, the role of making historical connections falls now to the monarchy and its structures of self-representation, the palaces and art and museums of the National Patrimony, including the Prado Museum, home of the former royal collections. The monarchy too was a victim of Franco, and thus can safely reclaim history and reinterpret the "glorious" "Imperial" past in its own manner, as seen in the controversy over the installations of the upcoming Museum of the Royal Collections (see below).

Audience Hall, Zarzuela Palalce, residence of the King of Spain. Photo: the swearing.in of a new government in 2010. Source: http://www.wikiwand.com/es/Palacio_de_la_Zarzuela

Speaking in another context, about the vogue for museums of contemporary art in Spain, the art historian María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco said in El País last October, "For a long time we only wanted to look ahead, and culture is a perfect emblem of that. And especially contemporary art. But now we've left behind Francoism and we see ourselves with greater serenity."

The passion among Spanish politicians for commissioning iconic works of architecture over the past 25 years is a perfect reflection of this condition – shall we call it something like an architectural / representational PTSD (Post-Traumaitc Stress Disorder)?  -- It's a variation on Walter Benjamin's Angel of History: our backs to the past, our revulsion propels us blindly forward into the unknown. I had thought at the time that I was witnessing the construction of a new present, but that seems hopelessly optimistic now.

Note 

The Moncloa Palace was entirely rebuilt and transformed after its destruction in the Civil War. In the early 20th century, the presidential residence was located in a palace on the Paseo de la Castellana near the Plaza de Colón. President Suárez moved it to Moncloa ostensibly for security reasons, due to the political instability of the transition period and the threat of Basque terrorism.

Sources

Guillermo Gortázar
"El complejo de La Moncloa"
El País, February 4, 2017

Javier Rodríguez Marcos, Ferran Bono
"Una conversación en el Museo del Prado"  
El País, Section Bableia, October 29, 2016, p 16-19.

Javier Arnald
"Involución en la museología: El Museo de Colecciones Reales, que tardará en abrirse al menos dos años, hará un discurso sobre el legado de la monarquía"
El País, December 12, 2016

Representing the Crown

On this last source, I wrote in Facebook on January 18 the following:

Museum of the Royal Collections, Madrid. Source: BEAU 2016

El País announces that Mansilla and Tuñón's Museum of the Royal Collections, completed last year, will not open for another two years as its owner, Patrimonio Nacional, put together its program and collections.

The article, by art historian Javier Arnaldo, comes with a very critical analysis of the planned exhibit program, which will be organize around a vindication of the "achievements" of Spain's three monarchic dynasties: the Trastámaras, the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons – in other words, an ideological program in defense of the monarchy as an institution.

"…se propone servirse de las colecciones para establecer un discurso sobre el legado histórico de la monarquía española. Prevé una traza museográfica fija que daría cuenta de los logros de las dinastías de los Trastámara, los Habsburgo y los Borbón, a cuya representación se rendirían las piezas expuestas, en conjuntos cuya composición sería susceptible de cambios para hacer rotar partes de la colección."

"Imaginemos que el Museo del Prado, cuyas principales colecciones, como es bien sabido, pertenecieron, como las de Patrimonio Nacional, en su día a la Corona, buscara inspiración para su plan museológico en la bóveda del Casón, en la Alegoría del Toisón de Oro pintada allí al fresco por Lucas Jordán; la involución y disfuncionalidad de la pinacoteca quedarían garantizadas."

Patrimonio Nacional is a state institution that owns and manages all the former properties of the Spanish Crown, but it's administration is largely controlled by the current King, with input from the government in office and public financing.

It seems to me that the problem is as much about having a monarchy in the first place, and an insecure monarchy at that, and allowing it to remain in charge of these things. Maybe a republic would handle this better. Though an ideological use of the sumptuary trappings of power is hard to evade, one way or the other, from the Imperial Palace in Beijing to the White House in Washington. Arnaldo reminds us of the role these objects played in the "spaces of representation of the Crown", and that role is hard to shake off, whether for the glorification of the present state or the glorification of its conquerors and revolutionary usurpers. Hence the cache of a Louis XIV chair, or am I missing something?

Saving the Furniture

Caminito del Rey, Malaga by Luis Machuca Santa-Cruz

 

This text is the introduction to the catalog of the XIII Biennial of Spanish Architecture and Urbanism, first presented in Granada in June 2016 and currently traveling to New York, France, Germany, Japan and Sweden

When compared to past editions, the panorama offered by the winning entries of this XIII Biennial of Spanish Architecture and Urbanism is indeed post-apocalyptic. The "apocalypse" referred to is, of course, the crisis that has halted construction and devastated the profession, and that has left architecture under question in the eyes of the larger public for the part it has played in the excesses preceding the collapse. And now, amid the rubble, along comes the XIII Biennial: a handful of small-town private houses, a "pre-restored" convent in Seville, a community garden in Santiago, a nature path in Malaga.... Are these and other winning proposals the tender shoots that will restore the profession to life? Do they offer the outlines of a renewed architectural praxis and vision that can grow and mature, informing larger and more ambitious endeavors, and renovating the confidence and standing of the profession in the public eye? Or will the hard-won lessons of the crisis be swept aside when business-as-usual resumes? (If indeed business resumes at all any time soon.) What will post-crisis Spanish society demand of its architects: will it be EuroVegas or community gardens and participatory planning?

Though covering recently-finished work, the 22 winning projects span the period of crisis in their origins, with those initiated before it began standing out in size and budget: the Madrid Rio Park and the Museum of the Royal Collections, both in Madrid, the Gran Canaria Arena in Las Palmas and, most ironically for the profession, the Granada School of Architecture, whose construction documents were finished in June 2008, just before architecture became a heroic career choice. Of the rest, eleven cost less than one million euros to build, and three less than 100,000. The contrast between the scope and budget of Madrid Rio, involving 3,000 hectares and 250 million euros in brute construction costs, and the reconstruction of a ruined house in the village of Cilleros, in Cárceres, for 66,000 euros, could not be more eloquent.

 

Casa Luz, Cilleros (Cárceres), by Arquitrectura-G

Despite these obvious differences in scale and timing, the 22 projects have many points in common, falling as a whole into two rather opposing categories, depending on whether they were developed for sites offering rich urban or natural conditions, or on the tabula rosa of new urban developments and parcels.

In the first category, designs are conceived almost exclusively in contextual terms. New interventions are laid over a palimpsest of pre-existing conditions, mixing existing constructions and ruins, vegetation, topographic accident and urban ramifications. These designs seek different degrees of balance between geometric irregularity and  complexity on the one hand, derived from their deeply-layered sites and the topography of their natural settings, and the demands of clarity and order. They are conceived in historic time, presenting new construction as contemporary rather than mimetic, as a new and not necessarily  conclusive addition in an ongoing build-up of archeological layers.

 

Gardens of the Santa María de los Reyes Convent in Seville by MGM Morales de Giles Arquitectos

Examples include the Caramoniña community gardens in Santiago de Compostela, inserted over a highly-irregular plot and negotiating a 20-meter slope, or the restored cliff-hanging walkway of the Caminito del Rey in Malaga, built over the preserved ruins of the original and following its zigzagging course through a gorge. The rehabilitated gardens of the Santa María de los Reyes convent in Seville offer a curious inversion of the tension between natural accident and imposed order, with the architects inserting zigzagging lines of raised borders to order circulation and activities in the open but irregular spaces, citing as their inspiration Michael Heizer's landart "Rift" of 1968.

New elevator access to historic cventer of Gironella (Barcelona) by Carles Enrich Giménez

Photo © Adrià Goulanuevo

The elevator that connects the raised and fortified historic center of Gironella (Barcelona) with newer districts below is a discrete yet transformative intervention in an existing environment, detailed and sited so as to both complement and contrast with existing retaining walls and towers. The discrete addition to a restored masía located in a natural park in Sant Joan les Fonts (Girona) employs a similar strategy in a more immediate scale of reference.

Other projects organize complexes of accrued pre-existing buildings, with judiciously-scaled contemporary additions, as in the Property Registry in Vigo and the Granada School of Architecture, which occupies a former Military Hospital with elements dating back 500 years. 

Architecture School, Granada by Víctor López Cotelo

In the interior spaces of the Santa María convent in Seville, previously mentioned, the strategy with respect to the existing buildings is quite different. Responding to budget restraints and following Rem Koolhaas' 2005 proposal for the Hermitage, the architects simply consolidated the semi-ruined rooms, leaving them in a rough, "pre-rehabilitated" state so as to promote "reflection" on "the relation of time and material fragility" – very post-apocalyptic indeed.

Santa María de los Reyes Convent. Interior

A pair of new buildings in consolidated historic areas are responsive to context in a more diffuse manner,  follows local cues in terms of window openings or finishes, as in the Chao House in Corcubión (A Coruña) and a subsidized housing project in the center of Pamplona.

 

Left: Casa Chao, Corcubión (A Coruña), by Creus & Carrasco Architects

Right: Social housing, Pamplona, by Pereda Pérez Architects

In this same category of contingent design, two private house projects use the ruinous state of previous constructions on their sites to open the domestic sphere more fully to the outdoors: the house in Cilleros, already mentioned, with its large patio, and the 1014 House in Granollers, where the architects pull the interior spaces back from the existing street facades on either end of the narrow site to create courtyard gardens. In the "Scaffold House" (Casa Andamio) on a beach in Begur (Girona), the architects organize and edit an accumulation of additions, and add a new layer to the whole in the form of woven façade screens that support climbing vegetation, transforming the relation of the house to the nearby beach and introducing a system of passive climate control.

In the opposing camp of work conceived in the absence of a highly-determining context, winning designs are generally more direct, severe, and minimalist, tending towards that apparently rational and yet poetic ideal of "the cube that works", as Alejandro de la Sota called it in his monograph, citing Le Corbusier.

 

Arena, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, by Eduardo Pérez Gómez & Miguel Ángel Sánchez García

The monolithic concrete shell of the Gran Canaria Arena is the clearest example of this approach, with its entry portal spanning 90 meters, its grandly-scaled ambulatory inside, under the slope of the grandstands, and the minimalist deformation of its roof to place the building in relation to the most general and distant attributes of its setting: the mountains to the west, the city to the east, and the horizon line of the ocean. 

Equally severe in its use of opaque forms –in this case, a galvanized steel cladding– is a factory for electrical equipment in Don Benito (Extremadura), though here the architect organizes the naves and offices around a central service patio to create a self-referential urban setting. Sections of the naves alternate in height and width, and are orchestrated, together with openings and movement, to create a carefully-controlled spatial ensemble.

 

Electrical equipment factory, Don Benito, by José María Sánchez García

A project for 163 subsidized housing units in the Ensanche of Vallecasin Madrid takes the same approach of varied massing around a central court. The architects use a system of regular floor-to-ceiling louvers to reduce the formal play of window openings and emphasize instead the volumetric massing. In the conversion of the multi-story Auzo Factory, located in the Bilbao district of Matiko, into a center for start-ups, the architects transform the facade to similar effect, using continuous glazing covered with louvers, although here the composition works as a plane rather than in volumetric terms.

In smaller-scale projects, architects often combine forceful massing with more specific contextual references. The massing and large-span entry opening of the Fronton in Orkoien (Navarra) can be compared to those of the Gran Canaria Arena, but its use of wood (together with exposed concrete) and its sloping roofs echo surrounding houses and evoke a local rural vernacular. In the case of the "House of the Winds" in La Linea de la Concepción (Cádiz), the architects shape the volume to protect terraces from prevailing winds, creating a sheltering, shell-like, rather tensile form, with opening gathered and protected under it. 

Left: Sailing School, Sotogrande (Cádiz), by Héctor Fernández Elorza & Carlos García Fernández

Right: Frontón, Orkoien (Navarra), by OFS Architects

As seen in the factory in Don Benito, some projects develop a small-scale urban setting of their own in the absence of a strong local context. The two small enclosures of the Sailing School in Sotogrande (Cádiz), for example, are as simple and unadorned as a "chiringuito" or beach shack, but the architects have added an open court between them and a shading loggia facing the beach, which functions as a faux-monumental facade and circulation gallery.

The Biennial winners include one work realized abroad, the Gösta Pavilion of the Serlachius Museum in Mänttä, Finland, in which the monolithic, inflected linear building houses an interior "recorrido" or "promenade architecturale" that is deformed by deep angled cuts on either side of the volume, creating the kind of irregular, angled, trajectory seen in the Camino del Rey or in the zigzagging raised borders of the Santa María gardens. This strategy of the "recorrido" developed with seemingly arbitrary twists and incidents points us towards the vast Madrid Rio project as well, where the linear but otherwise undetermined site along the course of the river invites a similar weave of circulation paths (though more fluid in form and developed over slopes and hills), mixed with vegetation and spaces for recreational and other activities. While the miniature urban settings of Don Benito or Sotogrande are open-ended and fragmentary, here the architects respond to the programmatic demands of a museum and a park with routes that, while non-orthogonal, are more highly-determined. 

Gösta Pavilion, Serlachius Museum, Mänttä, Finland, by Mara Partida, Héctor Mendoza & Boris Bezan

I have left the Royal Collections for the end of this review because it is a work that spans both categories of classification I propose. On the one hand, it is built on a highly sensitive site, which implicates the "cornice" or bluff crowned by Madrid's Royal Palace and Cathedral. The building is sited below this cornice, as if forming part of its retaining walls, and the staggered massing mirrors that of the palace and its wing. But on the other hand, the monumentally-scaled, elongated volumes of the galleries, with their dense facade screens, are as blunt and austere in their own right as the factory volumes in Don Benito. While the architects eloquently describe the project as "a new text written over the already written, a reflection on history and memory," they also compare it to a large civil engineering work, "giving the construction a pragmatic realism that avoids unnecessary formal exaggerations."

Museum of the Royal Collections, Madrid, by Luis Moreno Mansilla y Emilio Tuñón

The Royal Collections offers a good summary of the contradictory impulses found among the winning entries: the battle between a striving for subtlety and complexity in the response to issues of context on the one hand, and the demand for formal contention and directness on the other. In a project such as the Gran Canaria Arena, the architects must elaborate their design without the cover of a good contextual back-story. They have little to start with: an empty site, a program and a budget. Everything else is up to them. In this scenario, winning projects return to the rationalist, as opposed to organicist, tradition in Spanish architecture, a notable change from just a few years ago. In the neo-organicist projects of the years before the crisis, like other formal experimentation of the period, architects explored the potential of geometrically complex, self-generated formal systems. Now, like De La Sota, they camouflage aesthetic ambition in stories of function and structural logic. But much has changed since De la Sota's time, and we can also see the impact of minimalism in these works, with  their striving for a uniform exterior skin, their sense for material, craft and texture, and their assertive, sculptural solidity.

Function and structural logic also guide many of the interventions in more contextually-conditioned projects, from the Royal Collections to the Architecture School in Granada, the elevator in Gironella and the masía in Sant Joan les Fonts. In these cases, the architects take a position of discretion and respect for the surroundings without renouncing the formal integrity of their interventions. But architects can also find in the weave of pre-existing conditions on a site the "back story" that justifies a greater freedom of formal composition, as in the Santa María convent or the Civil Registry in Vigo. And other projects, like the museum in Finland and Madrid Rio, go further, assuming an artificial naturalism – more angular and Constructivist in the first case, and more picturesque in the second, recalling Frederick Law Olmstead and Capability Brown.

To conclude, I'd like to set aside the projects begun before the crisis and consider only the smaller-scale works initiated in these years of hardship. What does the new, "post-apocalyptic panorama" of current architectural practice actually look like? It would seem to be a time for fine-tuning the country's built patrimony, fixing up neglected corners of towns and cities, recycling and re-purposing what's already there rather than pulling things down and starting over. In this situation, questions of sustainability and passive climate control fit right in, as do projects involving wider public participation. Has the crisis initiated a long-term period of scarcity, like that of the pre-industrial economy preceding the 1960's, a return to the eternal Spain of abundance for the few and want for the many? Has Spain become a country of declining expectations, like Portugal perhaps, where relics of a glorious past are the second-hand clothes that new generations learn to adapt for the present with as much dignity and resourcefulness as they can? Though this does seem unlikely in the long run. Amid these reflections, I remember my grandmother, a survivor of two world wars and the German inflation who, despite her mink coats and trans-Atlantic holidays, saved pieces of used string and empty mayonnaise jars. Maybe that wasn't such a silly idea after all.

The rest of the winning projects mentioned in the text:

Casa Andamio, Begur (Girona), by Ramon Bosch & Elisabet Capdeferro Pla

Community gardens in Caramoniña, Santiago de Compostela, by Elizabeth Abalo & Gonzalo Alonso

House of the Winds, La Linea de la Concepción (Cádiz), by José Luis Muñoz

Masía "Can Calau", Sant Joan les Fonts (Girona), by Montserrat Nogués i Teixidor

163 units of subsidize housing, Vallecas (Madrid), by Rafael, Pablo & Alfonso Olalquiaga

Property Registry, Vigo, by Jesús Irisarri & Guadalupe Piñera

Madrid Río, by Burgos & Garrido; Porras - La Casta; Rubio & Álvarez-Sala & West 8 (Holland)

 

Casa 1014, Granollers (Barcelona), by H Arquitectes

Auzo Factory, Bilbao, by Asier Santas Torres & Luis Suárez Mansilla

Saving the Furniture

Introductory essay

Begoña Díaz-Urgorri, Camen Moreno & Juan Domingo Santos, Co-Directors

Alternativas

Catalog, XIII Bienal Española de Arquitecutra y Urbanismo 2016

Fundación Arquia, Barcelona, 2016, pages 26 - 31