Public Housing Gets the Prize

The awards of the XI Biennial of Spanish Architecture and Urbanism were announced early this month.

The event is organized by the central government's housing office, architects' professional associations and other sponsors. A jury headed by the architects Félix Arranz and Joaquín Sabaté chose 40 finalists and prize winners in several categories from among 734 entries, over twice the number of previous editions and an all-time record.

Jury members included Lluis Clotet, the urban planner José María Ezquiaga, Manuel Gallego, Belinda Tato of Ecosistema Urbana, and Llàtzer Moix, architecture critic for La Vanguardia newspaper in Barcelona, among others.

Prize for Architecture
Subsidized housing, Mieres (Region of Asturias)
Zigzag Arquitectura (Bernardo Angelini + David Casino)
(Pictured above)

Mentions:
Residential development in Caramoñina, Santiago de Compostela
Víctor López Cotelo

 House in Paderne (Province of Lugo)
Carlos Quintáns Eiras
(Pictured above)


Special Recognition:
Álava Archeological Museum, Vitoria (Province of Álava)
Francisco Mangado

Museum of Water, Lanjarón (Province of Granada)
Juan Domingo Santos
(Pictured above)

Can Framis Museum, Barcelona
Jordi Badía
  

Young Architects' Prize
Rowing Center, Alange (Province of Badajoz)
José María Sánchez García 
(Pictured above)

Mentions:
Mercat de Ferreríes Civic Center, Tortosa (Province of Tarragona)
Josep Camps + Olga Felip

Municipal Environmente Services Headquarters, Zaragoza
Jaime Magén + Francisco Javier Magén

Prize for Subsidized Public Housing
22 Apartments for renters under 35, El Rastro, Madrid
Mónica Alberola, Luis Díaz-Mauriño + Consuelo Martorell
(Pictured above)

Mentions:
Housing block in Salou (Province of Tarragona)
Toni Gironés

Student housing, Bellaterra Campus, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Eduard Bru

Prize for Urbanism
Municipal Plan, Montmeló (Province of Barcelona)
Jornet, Llop + Pastor

Mentions:
Port of Malpica (Province of A Coruña)
Juan Creus + Covadonga Carrasco

The Munch Area, Oslo, Norway
Juan Herreros Architects

Special Recognition:
Waterfront Promenade, Poniente Beach, Benidorm (Province of Alicante)
Carlos Ferrater

Prize for Research
Ex Aequo
Media-TIC Building, Barcelona
Enric Ruíz Geli

Territorial Plan for Housing in Cataluña
Josep María Vilanova +Ricard Pie

Mentions:
"Esto no es un solar" Program, Zaragoza
Patrizia di Monte + Ignacio Grávalos

Font de la Mina Library, Sant Adrià del Besós (Barcelona
Alfonso Soldevila

For pictures of more winners,
see the Arquitectura Viva web page

Geometric Abstraction in Latin America

A landmark show, still on view through May 15: América Fría: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973) at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid.

Art over four decades from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba, and artists such as Joaquín Torres-García, who founded the Asociation of Constructivist Art in Montevideo in 1935; the Madí Group in Buenos Aires, founded in 1946 by Gyula Kosice, Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, Martín Blaszko, Diyi Laan); Lucio Fontana, who settled in Argentina in the same years and published the Manifiesto Blanco on spatialist art; Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Díez and Jesús Rafael Soto in Venezuela; the Brazilian geometric movement, etc. etc.

Also included are interesting cross-currents with artists who spent large periods in South America, including Calder, Josef Albers, Vasarely and  the great Spanish sculptor Jorge Oteiza.

Curated by Osabel Suárez.

Francisco Calvo Serraller reviews the show in El País:
El ardor artístico de la 'América fría'

"For the non-specialist, this exhibition demolishes the common notion that Latin American art stands out only for surrealism, Mexican muralism and the realisms of the inter-war period."

"...the artistic production of this fertile current of geometric art in Latin America was not at all limited to simply following the European vanguard, part of which moved to New York during the Second World War... Rather it made decisive and original contributions that reflect a local sensibility y and an extremely rich cultural tradition."

Translated by DC

Juan March Foundation
Castelló, 77
Madrid

Monday to Saturday 11.00 – 20.00 h.
Sunday and holidays 10.00 – 14.00 h.
CLOSED April 21-24 for Easter

Pictured above:
Lola Soldevilla
Carte Celeste en Amarillo Nº 1
1953
National Museum of Fine Arts, Cuba
From the Juan March Foundation web page

Watch your Step

My article on a house in the small Portuguese city of Leiria by the architects Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus is the cover story in this month's Record Houses 2011, Architectural Record's annual special issue on the single-family house, which publishes six projects from around the world chosen from 250 candidates. The full text and a portfolio of photos are found here.

... the perfect archetype of a house, straight out of a Monopoly game box or a fairytale; an apparently solid volume wrapped completely in white plaster, pitched roof and all...

House in Leiria, Portugal
Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus, Architects
Architectural Record: Record Houses, April 2011

Photos © Fernando Guerra

Like the bright plumage of a bird

Color in Spanish architecture is the theme of a long article I've written for the latest issue of the Russian biannual journal Speech. It is a theme particularly apt to Spain, for some reason – the most radical experiments anywhere in the use of color in the past six or seven years can be found here. We cover the spectrum, from well-known works by Nouvel, Miralles + Tagliabue and Hadid to virtually unpublished works, such as the medical clinic in St. Martín de la Vega by Pedro Urzáiz and Carlos Pérez-Pla, which uses glass with an inner layer of a prismatic gel that reflects and solarizes the surrounding context in surreal colors (photo top © Miguel de Guzmán) and a secondary school in Las Mesas (Province of Cuenca) by Blanca Rosa and Natalia Gutiérrez of GRG Architects in Madrid (photo below © Roland Halbe).

Color plays at least four different roles in contemporary Spanish architecture. In the first place, we find it used in a traditional way, as an integral sensual quality of finish materials. Secondly, color is used as a system of coding building elements, although this "functional" approach is often mixed with more sensual intentions. Thirdly, we find works that feature a random rainbow splattering of many different colors over finish surfaces, a manifestation of the current recourse to aleatoric or irregular compositional methods, and a response, it seems, to the sensual pleasures of the simple, unmediated experience of color. Finally, we sometimes find color used to create an experience of total immersion, in which colors flood and stain space itself, making space manifest and transforming the normal perceptual conditions of reality.

Like the bright plumage of a bird
Color in Spanish architecture
Speech 06/2010, December 2010 (received March 2011), pages 208 - 226.
Table of Contents

Projects by the following architects (in order of appearance): 
Nouvel, Miralles - Tagliabue, Mansilla + Tuñón, SelgasCano, Mangado, Rogers - Lamela, Haiku Architecture, Amann, Cánovas + Maruri, Pino - Paredes, Aguinaga, Camacho + Macía, RCR Architects, Hadid, GRG Architects, Urzáiz - Pérez-Pla, MI5 Studio, Estudio Entresitio.

Eduardo Souto de Moura

My news story and analysis on Eduardo Souto de Moura, recipient of the 2011 Pritzker Prize, Why Souto de Moura Won the Pritzker, appears today in the news section of the Architectural Record web page.

For background on Souto de Moura, here are three articles I've written on his work over the years:

Beinah Nichtes With a Twist /Almost Nothing with a Twist
Torre Burgo, Porto, Portugal
architekur.aktuell, November 2008, pages 58 - 69.
(Sorry, no web version available at present).

Different Voices
Pousada de Santa María do Bouro

Different versions of this article appeared in:
Architectural Record, November 1998, pages 120 - 123.
Bauwelt 4, January 22, 1999, pages 174 - 179.
World Architecture 73 (London), February 1999, pages 78 - 79.

The Court House Revisited
Court Houses, Matosinhos, Portugal

Published as:
Hofhäuser in Hafenmähe
Bauwelt 33, September 1, 2000, pages 36 - 39.
Holding Court 
World Architecture 86 (London), May 2000, pages 78 - 81.

Photo by Luis Ferreira Alves
Paula Rêgo Museum - Cascais, Portugal 2005-2009 
Courtesy of The Pritzker Architecture Prize

La Trufa

I write on Antón García-Abril's Truffle House, the latest of his experiments in heavy construction, in the March issue of the Viennese journal architektur.aktuell. This small guesthouse on the coast of Galicia is an unreinforced concrete structure, poured in a single day using hay bales and unconsolidated earth as formwork. García-Abril has taught at Cornell and Harvard as well as in Madrid; he is currently teaching at MIT.

García-Abril's investigations into the architectural implications of extremely dense materials, into the qualities of gravity, balance, mass and materiality and the choreography of the construction process, are as compelling in their own right as the early theoretical house projects of Peter Eisenman, for example; they are just as frivolous and serious and pathbreaking

Back to Nature
Trufa House, Costa da Morte, Spain by Antón García-Abril.
architektur.aktuell 372, March 2011, pages 52 - 61.

Photo © Roland Halbe

Spatial Viscosity thru Color

Two recent articles in Bauwelt and Speech feature a nursery by Alejandro Muñoz Miranda near Granada where colored glass plays a central role. The issue of the Russian jounral Speech is dedicated to the theme of color in architecture, and Bauwelt to the theme of kindergartens.

From the Speech text:

Contemporary architecture has returned to two of the most radical formal preoccupations of the early Modern Movement: the aspiration to transparency and weightlessness on the one hand, overcoming bounded space, and the Expressionist aspiration, largely unrealized in its time, to an architecture of colored space... Today the qualities of transparency and weightlessness scarcely seem radical to us, but the concept of space expressively altered through color has only recently become a subject of investigation.

Project:        Nursery, El Chapparel, Granada
Architect:    Alejandro Muñoz Miranda, Granada  

Beyond Transparency 
Speech 06/2010 (released March 2011), pages 208-226.

Das Glasscheibenspiel
Bauwelt 5.11, January 28, 2011, pages 12 - 17.

Photos © Javier Callejas

Calatrava: Case Update

In a post on January 4th I discussed the court case on Santiago Calatrava's unrealized project for a waterside opera in Palma de Mallorca, where I wrote:

News is still scarce, but ... Santiago Calatrava's ... 1.2 million euro fee for the design of an opera in Palma de Mallorca in 2007 has raised the suspicions of Judge José Castro... The judge is investigating the regional President at the time, Jaume Matas, for 25 cases of illegal bribes, kick-backs and other schemes for robbing public funds.

Here is an update on the case:
Both Calatrava and Matas have been indicted by the judge, and have testified before him since our last post. The major accusations to emerge so far are two.

First, on the part of ex-President Matas, the commission was given to Calatrava without following legal procedures, which require competitions to be organized for all public projects, among other things, and without any preliminary studies justifying the project. According to the accusation, the design was a public relations stunt concieved by Matas during an election campaign. In fact, the public commission overseeing the electoral process at the time halted the execution and publication of the project as a violation of campaign fair play.

Matas is therefore accused of using public funds "for exclusively personal and partisan interests," according to prosecutors. The judge has imposed a bail of 1.6 million euros on Matas for his potential personal liability in the case; this is in addition to the 3 million euros he has already posted for other charges in related cases (El País, 02.13.11; 03.03.11) .

Secondly, Calatrava`s office has been accused of numerous irregularities in billing the project, most flagrantly the failure to pay the required 16% Value Added Tax (VAT) on the 1.2 million fee, or more than 160,000 euros, according to a report presented by the Spanish tax authority to the court (El Mundo 01.17.11).

Calatrava is also accused of being an accomplice and party to the fraud perpetrated by Matas. He presented only two models, a video and a power point presentation of the design, without any other documents or studies, according to the prosecution. The local press in Mallorca has picked up accusations that Calatrava lifted the design directly from a 1989 competition project for a floating structure in the Lake of Lucerne (see for example here), a charge Calatrava has denied in court.

Stay tuned for further developments...

Jean Nouvel in Gentleman

The March issue of Gentleman, now on the newsstands in Spain, has a major feature on upcoming projects by Jean Nouvel. The Louvre in Abu Dhabi (left) and the National Museum in Qatar are his most interesting designs to date, and probably the best two projects to come out of the Emirates' building boom. Special thanks to Gentleman Editor Alessandro Ryker and Director Fernando Rimblas for the chance to publish drawings of unbuilt work in a general circulation magazine.

No debe sorprendernos la renovada fuerza creativa de Nouvel en éstas obras de su madurez. Recordemos que Frank Gehry tenía 68 años cuando se inauguró el Guggenheim de Bilbao, y Le Corbusier terminó su ciudad nueva de Chandigarh en India a la edad de 69. Algunos arquitectos pueden caer en la tentación de repetir sus anteriores éxitos, incluso siendo bastante jóvenes. Pero otros como Nouvel encuentran, con el respaldo de la experiencia y el éxito, la libertad para descubrir nuevos territorios a explorar.

El mejor Nouvel
Gentleman 83, March 2011, p. 32-38.
Rendering © Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Upcoming Lecture

Tomorrow, Tuesday February 8, I will give a talk as part of the Workshop on Architecture and Communications organized by the VII Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism. The talk will cover the different approaches to architectural criticism and publishing in the United States and Europe, and my own approach to criticism. In Spanish.

Taller 1. Arquitectura y Comunicación
VII Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo
Casa Encendida, Ronda Valencia, 2 28012 Madrid
February 8, 2011, 6:30 PM
More information
Enroll in the Workshop

Winery Tour

On the newstands in Spain: in the February issue of Arquitectura y Diseño, I publish an article on six Spanish wineries. In addition to the well-known Chivite Winery in Navarra by Rafael Moneo and Richard Rogers' Protos Winery in Peñafiel, it includes RCR's underground Bell-lloc Winery in Girona (left), Paredes + Pedrososa's Bodegas Real near Valdepeñas (below) and Madridejos + Sancho's Bodegas Casalobos in Picón, Ciudad Real. It also introduces the new Portia Winery near Aranda del Duero by Foster and Partners, which opened last fall.

Bodegas: Los Nuevos Santuarios
Arquitectura y Diseño
February 2011, pages 72 - 82.

Above, Bodegas Bell-lloc. Photo © Eugeni Pons
Below, Bodegas Real. Photo © Roland Halbe

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

Eisenman in Santiago

As the first completed section of Peter Eisenman's long-awaited City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela is set for its official inauguration on January 11th, journalists are looking around for someone to blame for its cost overruns, delays and uncertain future.

Besides the project's original political backers, headed by ex-regional President Manuel Fraga of the conservative Popular Party, their list now includes the jury of the original competition back in 1999, as seen in a recent article in El País. Jury member Luis Fernández-Galiano, editor of Arquitectura Viva and the former architecture critic of El País, does his best to defend himself, together with Pep Llinás, while Wilfried Wang gets points for having opposed Eisenman's scheme.

Fernández-Galiano blames continued changes in the plans for the project's cost overruns and delays. Originally set for construction in three years at a cost of 100 million euros, the project has suffered various changes in program under three different elected governments, and has more than doubled in size, to 148,000 m2 (1.6 million square feet). The projected total cost at the moment is nearly 400 million, and not even half the buildings are completed. Next Tuesday, the Princes of Asturias will inaugurate a library and a regional archives. Other buildings still underway include a regional museum, a museum of contemporary art and an opera. Work on the opera has scarcely broken ground, and the project has been scaled back, according to Eisenman in an interview in a local paper, the Correo Gallego.

The previous government of Galicia, a coalition of Socialists and the regional BNG Party, organized a foundation to complete the work in partnership with the private sector. But Spain's current economic crisis and cutbacks in government spending make the future completion of the center uncertain. The current government, now back in the hands of the Popular Party, has allocated less than 34 million for the project in its budget for 2011 (according to another account in the newspaper El Mundo, the 2011 budget for the project is only 13.44 million).

According to Eisenman in the Correo Gallego, "8,000 square meters of the Music Theater have been built, and we're going to start the Art Center this year. When it's finished in three years, we'll start the Music Theater again. With luck, the PP [Popular Party] will be in Madrid and so we'll have a better chance finding collaborators." (Translated from Spanish by DC).

What is really under question, as in so many other pharaonic projects of the last decade in Spain, is the attempt to outdo Frank Gehry in Bilbao at whatever cost and without any realistic program in mind.

In the meantime, reports from the site are better than expected. Much of the credit for the design's credibility is given to Andrés Perea, a respected Madrid architect in his own right, who has developed the project and overseen construction based on Eisenman's initial design. Eisenman himself told El País this about Perea's work in an interview on September 11th:

"[I find the project] intense and very well built. It has been managed incredibly by Andrés Perea. If it weren't for him it wouldn't exist. When we began ten years ago, we made decisions that today I can't even remember why we made them. Perea's work as architect of the executive project has thus been exhaustive....

Honestly. I look at the project and I ask myself, "Did I do that?" I even find it difficult to image who conceived this project, because its so wonderful. Normally when I visit a work, I only find problems, and I end up distancing myself." (Translated from the Spanish by DC).

The City of Culture is buried into the top of Mount Gaiàs outside Santiago, a historical pilgrimage city that is now the regional capital of Galicia. Eisenman's design creates an artificial topography on the hilltop, superimposing the fan-shape of a Vieira shell, a traditional symbol of the city for pilgrims, with the plan of the city's historic core and other devices. I have never had much patience for Eisenman's work, as can be seen in the following quote from an article I wrote for the Galician College of Architect's magazine Obradoiro in 2005. But judging from early photos I may have to take another look:

The City of Culture also manifests an acritical acceptance of the reigning rules of territorial development, despite its pretensions to the contrary. It is a work generated entirely by its own internal logic, in which the strategies supposedly employed to bring the work closer to its site --the superposition of the plan of Santiago and the vieira shell on Monte Gaiás and their subsequent deformations-- are in fact nothing more than strategies to generate an apparently reasoned but unfathomable internal complexity. And underneath this layer of busy nonsense, the plans reveal that the different program spaces have been laid out with an apparently capricious indifference and expediency, suggesting little more than amorphous, anonymous quantities of built space.  

The architect thus plays his obtuse formal game, in terms completely abstracted from the reality of materials, site, context and use --these factors are rather translated into the abstract terms of the game and thereby neutralized as potential sources of true formal dialogue-- and leaves the logistics of programing and construction to the specialists who have reduced them to blunt instruments of technical determinism. The architect thus apes the indifference with which other forces impose their will on the built environment. Eisenman's project, however interesting it may turn out to be in formal terms, has no more relation to the site, the city or the surrounding territory than a typical commercial shopping center.

Batallas en las Colinas / Battles in the Hills
Obradoiro 31, COAG, Vigo, March 2005, pages 8 -13.

Photo © Iñigo Bujedo Aguirre. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Spanish Judge Investigates Calatrava

Note: For an update on this entry, see 03.03.11 post.

After a number of ongoing investigations into major political corruption scandals related to the Spanish building boom, a well-known architect has been indicted as a suspected participant in one case.

News is still scarce, but the suspect is Santiago Calatrava, whose 1.2 million euro fee for the design of an opera in Palma de Mallorca in 2007 has raised the suspicions of Judge José Castro, reports the Barcelona newspaper El Periódico (December 31, in Spanish). The judge is investigating the regional President at the time, Jaume Matas, for 25 cases of illegal bribes, kick-backs and other schemes for robbing public funds.

Architects like Calatrava and Peter Eisenman have collected exaggerated fees for their work in Spain, as Llàtzer Moix documents in his recent book Arquitectura Milagrosa. But this does not imply that Calatrava participated in the corruption in Mallorca. He is of course presumed innocent, and the court's investigation remains secret until an official trial, if any, is undertaken.

Photo: The real crime here is aesthetic. Model of Calatrava's proposed opera in Palma de Mallorca, 2007. Source: Diario de Mallorca.

Niemeyer Preview in Avilés

The Niemeyer Cultural Center speeds towards completion in the northern port city of Avilés, in Asturias. To celebrate Niemeyer's 103rd birthday last Wednesday (December 15th), the Center inaugurated its dome, made of concrete sprayed over an inflated membrane of PVC. The dome will house exhibition spaces. Other elements include an auditorium, a multi-use building with a cinema, classrooms and meeting rooms, a lookout tower and a large plaza. The project is the centerpiece of an urban revitalization effort. Niemeyer donated the design to the city in honor of the 25th anniversary of the Prince of Asturias Prizes, which honored him with its Arts Prize in 1989.

For Roberto Alonso, one of the architects overseeing construction, the work stands out for its tranquility and silence, as he told a local newspaper (in Spanish). For others, Niemeyer brings the sensual pleasures of Copacabana to this tired industrial center. In its startling abstraction, I see the shorthand of the aged master, like Merce Cunningham before arthritis forced him to retire completely from the stage, who with a raised arm and a flick of his wrist could sketch a life's worth of experience in movement. Next to him, younger dancers were simply jumping around.

Photo: Vulka.es
Niemeyer Center web page