From the Archives

© Melchor Sarasketa

My latest backdated story, Portrait of Old Madrid, Summer 1989, long in the writing and intended as part of a book on my adapted city that I later thought better about completing, was an exercise of immersion as a newcomer to Spain, taking the idea of Paolo Portoghesi's genius loci as a literary strategy.  The photographs were taken by Melchor Sarasketa as part of the project, and are used with his permission. 

"If there are cities of stone in Spain such as Salamanca and Santiago, and cities of light such as Cordoba and Sevilla, then old Madrid is a city of earth...."

To keep on reading, click here.

Present Crisis and Glories Past

Articles for readers in both Spanish and English appear this week: The Architectural Review publishes my pundit piece (they asked for something "pithy") on the effect of the crisis on Spanish architecture (The Death of the Icon, it's alarmingly called; love the Brit's apocalyptic journalistic headline craft), and a review of the show on Jean Prouvé in Madrid, which appeared in the cultural supplement of El País this Saturday (Visionario y Pragmático).

On the crisis, I make a quick survey of the debris accumulated so far to conclude, among other things, that "the profession is clearly preparing itself for a period of contained, functionalist remorse, although it remains to be seen if politicians and voters will be capable of capturing the change in sensibility."

On the Prouvé show, organized by Norman Foster for his wife's Madrid gallery, I plot the interesting connections between Prouvé and Foster himself, as captured in "the photo of an older Prouvé heading the jury for the competition of the Pompidou Center in Paris, won by Foster's former associate Richard Rogers together with Renzo Piano. The photo seems intended to mark the changing of the guard between Prouvé, one of the original masters of the Modern Movement, and the High Tech generation to which Foster himself belongs, a generation that with this project took its first steps into the limelight."


Top photo: The Niemeyer Foundation in the northern post-industrial city of Avilés, yet another Guggenheimesque cultural center that will close after just six months of operation, due to local political squabbling. Photo from The Architectural Review.

Second photo: Construction shot of the Aeroclub Roland Garros in Bac, 1936, by Jean Prouvé and the architects Eugène Beaudouin and Marcels Lods, High Tech avant la lettre. Photo courtesy of Ivory Press Art + Books, © Fonds Jean Prouvé.

Moneo Museum in Pamplona

News brief
Another private project perks up the gloomy panorama in Spanish architecture. This time it's a museum designed by Rafael Moneo for the University of Navarra in Pamplona, which is owned and operated by the Opus Dei. Situated between the university campus and the edge of the city, the project will begin construction next month.

Among other collections, the museum will house a major donation of works by María Josefa Huarte, 87, member of the Huarte family, the great patrons of the arts in Spain in the 1950s and 60s, and the archives of José Ortiz-Echagüe, author of posed, painterly photographs on popular Spanish themes in the early 20th century. Huarte's donation, some 50 works, includes paintings by Tapies, Picasso, Rothko, Palazuelo, Jorge Oteiza and Eduardo Chillida.

Ortiz-Echagüe was one of the founders of the Spanish aviation industry in the 1920's, the first director of the state-owned SEAT automobile corporation in the 1950s, and the father of the noted 1950s architect César Ortiz-Echagüe, who built a series of memorable Miesian buildings for SEAT before cutting off his career and retiring at an early age into the Opus Dei.

Source: El País, October 19, 2011 and my own research.

Renzo Piano's First Work in Spain

News Brief
Last month, Renzo Piano presented the design of his first work in Spain, the Botín Art Center in Santander. The project is sponsored by Emilio Botín, President of the Santander Bank, Spain's largest. The glass and ceramic-clad structure will project into the Santander Bay, and is scheduled to open in 2015. It will include 2500 m2 (25000 sf) of galleries and a wing dedicated to multicultural and educational activities. The head of the commission in charge of the center's artistic program is Vicente Todoli, former director of the Tate Modern, the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal and the IVAM in Valencia.

Source: ABC newspaper, Sept. 17, 2011

Update Jan. 12,. 2012
New information about the project can be found on SCALAE this month, reporting on an exhibit on the project in Santander and some of the criticism it has received.

The SCALAE page includes links to various videos about the project and from its critics, the catalog of the show, links to press coverage in Spanish. etc.

Update June 19, 2012:
The definitive project was unveiled in Santander today by Remzo Piano and Emilio Botin, as reported in El País: 

"...the cantilevered structure is literally suspended in the air to open to the sea, clad in 360,000 ceramic tiles the color of mother-of-pearl."

With public works projects halted throughout the country --Rem Koolhaas' Congress Center in Córdoba, cancelled last March, is the latest casualty -- the private sector steps in to take up some of the slack.

Frampton & Vidler on the 1960s

Kenneth Frampton and Anthony VIdler (currently Dean of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York) have published two fascinating glimpses into the 1960s English background that led to the highpoint of New York architecture and theory in the 1970s and 80s, a story in which they themselves played major roles.

In a Columbia architecture school publication, Frampton recalls his early years as technical editor of Architectural Design (AD) under Monica Pidgeon in London (1962 - 65), offering a view into his formative years before arriving at Princeton in 1966 on the invitation of Peter Eisenman, whom he had met while Peter was doing his PhD. at Cambridge.

It's essential background for understanding Frampton's American phase; I wish I'd known something of all this when I studied under him in the 1970's.

Here we find:

• Frampton taking measured drawings of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre; 
• Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester Engineering Building, source of a memorable cover design in 1964; 
• Atelier 5's Siedling Halen in Switzerland, where he stayed for a period;
• His "ideal model",  Ernesto Rogers’ Casabella Continuita. "Needless to say, I could not come close to this ideal, above all because the publisher’s rather fixed ideas as to economic paper sizes.... This was hardly the only impediment ... since I lacked both the graphic flair and the mature cultivation that emanated from its pages;"
• His interest in "a critical stance ... which went beyond [a] transatlantic Anglo-American cultural agenda" -- Gino Valle, Aris Konstandtinidis, Mangiaroti and Morasutti (Milan), Max Bill, Frei Otto, Jean Prouvé. "In retrospect I feel that my subsequent preoccupation with Critical Regionalism had some of its root origins in this moment, when I first began to look upon the culture of the European 'city state' with a different eye;"
• His aim "to turn the emphasis of the magazine more towards a latter-day humanist line as was represented, say, by Joseph Rykwert’s translation of Giulio Carlo Argan’s seminal essay 'On Typology in Architecture' which we published in December 1963;"
• Constant Neuewenhuy’s Situationist thesis 'New Babylon, An Urbanism of the Future', published in June 1964;
• The "emerging semiotic line" of Peter Eisenman’s Cambridge thesis 'Towards an Understanding of Form in Architecture' excerpted in AD;
• A "special issue ... devoted to the work of Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni with a critical overview of Italian Rationalism... This was, in effect, the first attempt at recovering this lost wing of the Modern Movement since the end of the Second World War;"
• "A soirée at the British Museum with Nigel Henderson where I first met Camilla Gray, the author of The Great Experiment, with whom I shared an enthusiasm for Russian Constructivism. This was the same Camilla in whose company five years later I would witness Berthold Lubetkin in tears before a private showing of Lutz Becker’s 1971 assembly of archival documentary excerpts of the revolution in action. Camilla would later marry the son of Prokoviev and tragically lose her life, giving birth to their child in the Soviet Union;"
• Claude Schnaidt, "a committed left wing Swiss architect and historian whose early documentation of the work of Hannes Meyer remains unsurpassed to this day;"
• "Being invited to tea by Hans Scharoun in Charlottenberg;"
• "Frequent contact with Le Corbusier at 35 rue de Sevres;"
• And Yona Friedman: "Friedman was a member of the Franco-German Group d’Etudes de l’Architecture Mobile, otherwise known as GEAM; an anarchic connection that I thought was somehow at odds with his African fairy tales, his Boolean logic and his skepticism as to the role of modern art, about which he had the provocative habit of saying, 'I think there is one art and that is cooking.' ”

He closes with a reminiscence on his successor, Robin Middleton, who as acquisitions editor for Thames & Hudson commissioned Modern Architecture: A Critical History in 1970. The book "took me a decade to complete and ... would never have been brought to its final form had it not been for the specialist scholars he linked me up with and for his own testy but pertinent editorial voice, interjecting from time to time, 'You don’t need this sentence, you’ve said it already, you don’t need this adjective, it adds nothing.' In the end, I internalized this voice and hereafter my writing owes whatever conciseness and pertinence it has to his perennial presence whenever I pick up a pen."

A more densely-packed memoir of the era is difficult to imagine, with the extraordinary range of interests Frampton brought with him to Columbia.

Peter and the 60s also come up in the first part of Anthony Vidler's overiew in the October Architectural Review of the demand for a "unified field theory" of architecture. In his brisk trot through the postwar period, he pauses long enough to offer this on Eisenman in Cambridge in 1963, already a familiar portrait:

"The most radical departure from the Vitruvian triad, however, was that proposed by a young PhD student at Cambridge, Peter D Eisenman, who in 1963 propounded his faith in ‘the formal basis of modern architecture’ in a short article in AD...."

"In his formal Dantonism, Eisenman ... went on to refuse all outside reference for meaning in architecture, exorcising symbolic, iconographic and perceptual influences or interpretation. Instead he looked at the ‘primary configurations’ of buildings considered as structures of logical discourse − their internal spatial and volumetric considerations deriving the formal ‘linguistics’ of his understanding of architectural systems from Le Corbusier’s ‘Four Compositions’, and making their implications explicit. If for Summerson form was considered only in relation to proportional systems, or for Banham it was no more than a dead (academic) language, Eisenman saw all formal systems as communicative, based on the properties of form itself: this was the only criterion through which architecture could be thought a discipline."

 Stay tuned for the second and third parts:
‘Part II: Postmodernism to Post-Criticism’ (January 2012)
‘Part III: The Global Context: New Critical Paradigms’ (spring 2011)

Both Frampton and Vidler left cold post-postwar England for well-paid faculty posts in the US, together with James Stirling, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, Joseph Rykwert and Alan Colquhoun
-- a major swath of the elite of British architecture (Norman Foster very nearly did the same in those tough years, he once told me in an interview), all to my very good luck as a student, and almost as important to American architecture in the long run as the wartime arrival of the continental elite -- Gropius, Giedion, Mies, Sert, Moholy-Nagy, etc.

Kenneth Frampton 
"Homage a Monica Pidgeon: An AD Memoir"
CC: Global Report
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
2011

Anthony Vidler
"Troubles in Theory Part 1: The State of the Art 1945-2000"
The Architectural Review
September 11, 2011
(Free registration required)

Photos: Covers designed by Frampton during his tenure as AD's Technical Editor.
From "Homage a Monica Pidgeon"

Addendum
See my update on Vidler's second installment:
The Postwar Picturesque
Jan. 8, 2012

Discovering Esther McCoy

One of the interesting things to emerge about this site is that it is read as much in Spain as in the US, Britain or elsewhere.*  To make this a bridge with two-way traffic, now and then I will single out to Spanish readers some of the most interesting things I come across from outside Spain.

The first of these is a brief profile in the Design blog of The New York Times on the Los Angeles architecture critic Esther McCoy  (1904 - 1989): Arkansan-born, Greenwich Village bred (she worked as an assistant to Theodore Dreiser) and draftswoman for RM Schindler after WW II, before she started writing on West Coast architecture. There's a show on her career organized by blog entry author Susan Morgan, at the Schindler House on North Kings Road in LA where she worked, now the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (through January 8th). 



*The View from Madrid all-time audience since May 2009:

Spain ............3094
US .................2433
Italy...............1282
UK .................1275
Germany .........813
Portugal ...........429
France ............. 410

SelgasCano + García Sánchez in Mérida

For The Architectural Review's relaunch issue ("not a cosmetic redesign," according to the editors, "but a considered and comprehensive editorial relaunch, intended to offer critical thinking for critical times"), and joining the likes of Anthony Vidler, Joseph Rykwert, Jonathan Glancey (The Guardian), William J. Curtis, Peter Buchanan, Peter Cook, Farshid Moussavi and Peter Blundell Jones, I was invited to write on two diametrically opposed projects in Mérida, Spain: the Mérida Youth Factory by José Selgas + Lucia Cano, and the Perimeter Building at the Temple of Diana by José María Sánchez García.

"The urbanity of the Factory is kinetic, dedicated to movement, activity and intense social interaction, and this is reflected in its fluid forms, where poles of attraction power the circular, circulating movement of its plan. The Perimeter Building, in contrast, aspires to timelessness.  ... The plaza is "abstracted" from the present of the contemporary city, as the architect observes, and is a space not so much for bringing people together as for contemplation, in which we observe the presence of others in the space as part of our solitary aesthetic reverie."

Double Entendre

The Architectural Review (UK), Vol. CCXXX, No. 1376

October 2011, pages 62 - 71.

Link to article (free registration required)

Photos above:

• Perimeter Building, Temple of Diana; photo © Roland Halbe
• Mérida Youth Factory; photo © Iwan Baan

Photos below: © Iwan Baan; Office of José María Sánchez García

Exhibitions: Jean Prouvé at Ivory Press

Luis Fernández-Galiano and Norman Foster get together again this fall to bring a show on Jean Prouvé to the Ivory Press Gallery in Madrid. From the web page on the show:

"From the originality of his earlier furniture to the sophistication of his later constructive systems, the oeuvre of the French genius is an example of committed engagement with prefabrication and industrialisation, and also serves as a bottomless source of inspiration.
 
The exhibition follows a chronological layout in ten sections, each one featuring original drawings and photographs accompanied by critical texts. The selection includes a wide range of furniture, architecture models and fragments of buildings, like his celebrated 6x6 house: a spectacular 1:1 scale prototype that is in turn a manifesto of Prouvé’s interest in lightness and prefabrication in architecture".

Exactly a year ago, the same team brought a remarkable show on Bucky Fuller to the gallery, which is run by Foster's wife, Elena Ochoa. The full-scale model of Prouvé's 6x6 house bids to match the interest of Foster's reproduction of the Dymaxion car seen there last year. 

Jean Prouvé 1901-1984: Industrial Beauty

Sept. 01 - Nov. 12, 2011

Ivorypress Art+Books Space I 

Comandante Zorita 48

Madrid

To accompany the show, Fernández-Galiano's magazine AV Monografias has dedicated its latest issue, No. 149, to Prouvé.

Image above © Centre Georges Pompidou

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.

Raymond Hood and the New York Skyscraper

From time to time I publish long out-of-print articles on back-dated pages of this blog. The latest is my 1993 critical-historic look at New York's McGraw-Hill Building by Raymond Hood (1931).

Here are a couple of quotes:

"The skyscraper rising out of the lower buildings of the city, like a stationary turbine in the prevailing winds (on gusty days, the building's steel skeleton groans and suspended light fixtures sway on upper floors) and the ocean liner moving majestically through the great space of the crowded harbor are images of a monstrous, fascinating power which captured the popular imagination."

"From this perspective, the reductive functionalism of the postwar American office building could appear to be an act of contrition for the excesses of the 1920s and the nightmare of the succeeding Depression."

And here's a link.

All the Usual Suspects

Luis Fernández Galiano has organized a series of lectures this fall at the Juan March Foundation by Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog + De Meuron and Sejima + Nishizawa. The title is "Protagonistas de la arquitectura del siglo XXI" or "Protagonists of 21st Century Architecture" and the dates are October 18, 20, 25 and 27th. Entry is free.


More information:
Juan March Foundation

New Life for Utzon's Can Lis

News brief: Jørn Utzon's 1971 Can Lis house in Mallorca will open this fall as a study center dedicated to the architect, reports SCALAE. It is operated by the Utzon Foundation, based in Denmark.

Utzon's second home on the island, Can Feliz (1991-94) remains in the hands of the Utzon family.

For more on the story, the house and how to apply for a residency:
Danish Arts: News and Danish Arts: Funding.

Photo from SCALAE.

Ephemeral architecture: Pope versus Protesters

News brief
Two outdoor stages for the Papal visit to Madrid in mid-August ("World Youth Day") are designed by Madrid architect Ignacio Vicens. Vicens has designed all the outdoor stages for papal visits to Spain since 1982.

Vicens is also the designer of 200 temporary confessionals, inspired in sails, that are being set up in the Retiro Park.

Meanwhile, on August 2nd, police dislodged the few remaining protesters of the "15th of May" movement in Madrid's Puerta del Sol and demolished the tents and temporary structures that have occupied the plaza for months. The ephemeral architecture of the encampment was the subject of a review in El País on June 17; its social organization was one of its most interesting features.

Protesters presume that authorities finally acted to clear the encampment in anticipation of the Papal visit, with 1 million visitors expected. The plaza was cleared without tear gas, beatings or arrests. Over the past two days protesters have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the police to retake the plaza.

More info on Vicens' papal stage (in Spanish):
SCALAE (with images)
ABC newspaper, August 3, 2011 (interview with Vicens)
Top image from SCALAE

Puerta del Sol encampment photos copied from various web sources

• Photo 2: Information Post, built from pallets, designed by an environmental sciences student, demolished on August 2nd.
• Photo 3: Overhead view of plaza at height of protests.

Puerta del Sol Encampment web page: http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net


Note added August 6, 2011:
Protesters retook the Puerta del Sol on Friady. Their main goal seems to be to re-establish an information post there.

Souto, SIza, Aalto and Mies

El País published an interview yesterday with Eduardo Souto de Moura, including some interesting comments on the relation of his work to Siza's. Here are some excerpts:

"When I was studying, the school in Oporto was highly politicized. Those were the years of sociology. And we worked to change the substandard workers' housing, called islands, that were located in the yards of bourgeois houses. We wanted to change things. We worked with neighborhood associations. … Then the Revolution of the Carnations erupted [1973]. And when Nuno Portas became State Secretary of Housing, he said that he'd support anyone with a plan and an organization. We decided to improve that housingm but we needed an architect to sign the project documents. We were all students. And so we went to find the best. And the best was Siza. Afterwards, I stayed and worked with him for five years."

"Working with Álvaro is fantastic. He's an exceptional person. Back them he had become a widower and I was still single, so we ate together often. He defended Alvar Aalto. I liked Mies van der Rohe."

"I thought then that Aalto was an expressionist. But visiting his work in Finland you understand that he was very rationalist. … But I think Mies was more radical."

"It was the period of the Revolution.  The entire country had to be rebuilt, half a million housing units were needed. And we couldn't do that feeling out the place and local customs like Alvar Aalto. We first needed a technical language to overcome the pressure of Post Modernism, a practical and efficient language. We talked about this a lot. And I thought Mies could help us more than Alvar Aalto."

What do you admire in Siza?

"His figure has marked me more than his architecture: the man, his ethics and his knowledge. He gives you the working instruments. But he is extremely demanding. He's smooth and sweet, but he wants to understand everything."

You didn't want to be his disciple…?

"It wasn't possible. I couldn't get into his head. I know perfectly well the language, the technical aspects. I know his grammar. But I could never think like him. I have other ideas. He says I am a neoplasticist, like the Mies I like. I don't have to prove anything to him, and he never wants to impose anything on me. And so we get along together very well. Working together is like playing chess."

[On Siza]: "I insist: the personality is stronger than the architect. It's very important to understand the identity, the ethics that are the consequence of this kind of obsessive architecture. He has always been obstinate. When he was building the Boa Nova Teahouse, he slept on the rocks. He knew them by heart."

Like Siza in Porto Alegre, you have also let loose a little over time.

"Yes, that's what they say. I think this began when I was designing the Oporto metro. There were no recipes there. I had to learn to take the scale of the city like a doctor examining a patient.... Doing the metro, I thought it may well be that things are not quite as Cartesian as we think. And then there's the idea of experimenting. Without  experimentation, the profession is very boring. And since the world isn't black and white, one can try different things."

Anatxu Zabalbeascoa
Eduardo Souto de Moura. "Soy realista. Creo en la reparación"
El Pais Semanal
July 25, 2011
Photo from the article
Excerpts translated from Spanish by DC

FAD Winners 2011

Update on the FAD Prizes, whose finalists were announced in my May 14th blog entry:

The top architecture prize was given ex aequo to Mansilla + Tuñón's Atrio Hotel in medieval Cáceres, and to a pair of houses by Portuguese architect Ricardo Bak Gordon in Lisbon (photo above), as reported in El País on July 15th.

Iñaki Ábalos' renovation of the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona won the prize for interiors, and the Aigües de les Hortes de Vilabertran Park in Figueres, by Michèle Orliacq + Miquel Batlle, won the urbanism and landscaping prize. The head of the jury was Benedetta Tagliabue.

Photo by Fernando Guerra
Courtesy of ArquinFad