Jungle Fever: Nouvel Hotel in Barcelona

Silkscreen glass encloses bath. All photos by DC

The June issue of Architectural Record includes my report from Jean Nouvel's Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel. You can read it in full here.

Seldom have I had to work on a report from a poolside rooftop deck over a shot of tequila (with the charming Mexican architect Patricia Meneses, of whom I wrote about in Record's Design Vanguard in 2010; finally we met). Seldom have I worked up my notes over a candlelight dinner on a 14th floor greenhouse restaurant (with the voluble and entertaining collaborating architect, Josep Ribas, and Nouvel's man on the scene, the charming and well-informed Damien Rinchon - with a midnight phone call from Nouvel himself to inflate me even further). And seldom have I been able to study the custom details and sleek Nouvel-designed furnishings from the comfort of a queen-size bed (for which Record picked up the tab, to insure my critical independence).  I tell you, it's tough out there.

More on Nouvel's high-rise jungle, or what he calls an oasis:

"The literal oasis is a central open-air garden that runs vertically through the hotel's 26 floors, filling every level with palm trees and other vegetation. This vertiginous, north-facing void, animated by zigzagging fire stairs, rises between two solid volumes containing guest rooms. ... As project leader Damien Renchon points out, 'It's really a vertical motel.' "

"On the figurative side, Nouvel carries the oasis concept into a branding theme for the facades. Inside every guest room, he cuts a window out of the structural precast-concrete wall in the shape of the jagged crown of a palm tree. Outside, these openings are visible behind a continuous curtain wall of milk-white glass, silkscreened with palms at different scales, that blurs the reading of floor lines.... The result, both inside and out, is unexpected, campy, and fun."

 Urban Oasis
Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel
By Jean Nouvel
Architectural Record, June 2013, pages 242 - 244.

Palm frond window opening or artillery hit?

With view of Toyo Ito's Porta Fira Hotel

Those windows from outside...

The gardens drop down on the right

From the rooftop bar and pool...

...through 26 floors...

sdsds

Gallery in this "Vertical Motel"

Dizzy...

Effects of light and reflection in the lobby

Breakfast on the 14th floor

It's time to get horizontal....

Donald Judd: The Birth of the Loft

Dining table. © Joshua White / Judd Foundation

One of the formative experiences of my student years or shortly thereafter was a visit to this building when Judd was still around (though mostly in Marfa then), thanks to Ron Bentley and Sal LaRosa and their friend and teacher, the late Lauretta Vinciarelli. (Sal introduced us to everything about downtown New York in those years). There was the cargo lift, and every floor was an open space dedicated to a single use, from the bedroom on top down to the living room and the country-style kitchen, organized around an enormous oak table.

Each floor was so down to nothing that the stereo and speakers were on the floor, with cables snaking about, and the bed too, on a low platform. The ground floor was a dusty private gallery that you could gawk at from the street. Every floor was about that run of windows on one side, leading you from the back, where the stairs and elevator were, into the space.

There was a memorable New Yorker cover with a drawing of the building in those years, which I saved. It caught the spirit of the building then better than the exterior shots I've seen recently:

The New Yorker, October 13, 1980

Read about the restoration of Judd's building here:

 Alice Rawsthorne
"Donald Judd and the Art of Living"
The New York Times, June 2, 2013

James S. Russell
"Donald Judd’s SoHo Loft Opens After $23 Million Makeover"
Bloomberg, June 1, 2013

Cifflord A. Pearson
"Judd Home and Studio"
Architectural Record, May 2013

Alexandra Lange
"Donald Judd's House"
The New Yorker Culture Desk, May 13. 2013

New Yorker cover courtesy http://cover.browser.com  

The Judd Foundation 

Update
See my blog entry of July 28th for my own story on the building published in El País, Minimalismo al máximo.

Obrist Exhibit in Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House

Uncredited photo from openhouse blog

Just for the record, ending June 2nd is Hans Ullrich Obrist's art installation in Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House in São Paulo (1951), with works by 36 artists. He has mounted similar exhibitions in the houses of Nietzsche, John Soane, Federico García Lorca and Luis Barragán.

On the idea of the exhibition, Ángela Molina writes in El País (May 3, 2013):

"If museums are the great condenses of art, the houses where poets, architects and thinkers lived appear today as a refuge or idyllic escapade in their own right, spaces that allow a first-hand vision of the interpersonal transactions between the curator and the artist....  At a time when most museums look at art through the rose-tinted glasses of the market, in houses with a distinguished pedigree one can better understand creation as pure energy based on sensation, a sign of the centrality of architecture in cultural discourse."

Activity Notes

Temenos
The Madrid architecture students of the Temenos Association have published their interview with me on their web page, which can be visited here (in Spanish) Their ringleader is Daniel Dávila, whose brilliant and perplexing activities I have been following for about a year now, and their pursuit is of the TGA, or General Theory of Architecture. (Temenos is the Greek word for a sacred precinct.)

Technology and Design for Everyone
I'll be participating in a congress on domotics and accessibility on Monday, May 27th at the School of Telecommunications of Madrid's Polytechnic University. The event is organized as part of their Masters Program in Domotics and the Digital Home. Iciar de las Casas and I will present an architectural perspective on accessibility as a foil to all the geeky techno stuff others are covering. More information can be found here.

Reprieve for Maspalomas

© Lluis Casals

The Cabildo, the island government of Gran Canaria, has suspended the demolition permit for José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún's historic Maspalomas Oasis Hotel (see blog entry of Jan. 12, 2013).

The hotel closed its doors on April 31 in preparation for the demolition, and the owners planned an inversion of 46 million euros.

The move opens the door to a possible process of negotiation between local authorities and the owners that could lead to the restoration of the hotel, according to local architect and historian José Antonio Sosa, with whom I spoke in a telephone interview.

The Cabildo did not extend historic protection to the hotel building, but rather to the entire area around it, encompassing various other buildings and landscape features such as the virgin grove of palms and lush gardens that give the hotel its name. The Cabildo justified its decision citing the historic value of the site, which was where Christopher Columbus anchored in 1502 to gather provisions on his fourth voyage to the Americas.

The move automatically suspends the existing demolition permit and requires the hotel owners to submit any plans for the building to the Cabildo for approval. For its part, the Cabildo will develop a special master plan for the area, a spokesman told the press (El Diario Montanés, April 30, 2013).

Sosa explains that a decision protecting the building itself would have legally hampered the owners in any effort to update facilities such as kitchens and services during a restoration. Preservation legislation here is designed for protecting traditional historic monuments such as cathedrals and palaces, he says. He explains the protection of the landscape encompassing the hotel as a maneuver to accommodate the negotiation process.

Directing protection to the landscape revindicates Corrales and Molezún's original intentions, as their design breaks the building into a series of linked pavilions that are integrated with their unique surroundings.

Update 01.18.17

The Supreme Court of the Canary Islands  upholds decision protecting Maspalomas against appeals by local town council and hotel owners against lower court decision: 

El TSJC ratifica la sentencia que impide a RIU demoler elhotel Oasis y construir uno nuevo 

Canarias Ahora

12.15.2016

Adam's House in Paradise Revisited

My introduction to the latest issue of Arquitectura Viva focuses on the theme of "Local Material".

From the text:
"The works shown here share a certain degree of primitivism, although covering a wide range of expression. Whether in clay, wood or modern plastics and glass, they bring to mind in different ways the primitive huts of ancient civilizations, or forest Edens, or the simple pleasures of rural life, or the self-aware neo-primitivisms of contemporary art in its different manifestations." 

These are the 8 projects featured:

Li Xiaodong, Village library near Beijing

TYIN Teknestue, Cassia Co-Training Center, Sumatra

Boonserm Premthada, Kantana Film Institute, Thailand

Kengo Kuma, Market + Hotel, Yusuhara, Japan

• 

  Robbrecht en Daem with Marie-José Van Hee, Market Hall, Ghent, Belgium

• 

  Peter Zunthor, Steilneset Memorial, Vardø Island, Norway

• 

  RCR, Banquet Pavilion, Les Cols Restaurant, Olot, Spain

• 

  Solano Benítez, Teletón Rehab Center, Asunción, Paraguay

De vuelta a la casa de Adán
Adam's House in Paradise Revisited
Introduction to issue "Local Material" 
Arquitectura Viva 151, April 2013, pages 7 - 13, cover

Editorial consultant: Iciar de las Casas