Gaudi or Not Gaudi?

London's Architectural Review sent me to Barcelona this summer to take a look at progress on Antoní Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. I interviewed Jordi Bonet, the 87-year-old architect in charge of the work, and judged his arguments in defense of the project against the evidence at hand:

"Bonet and his predecessors may have captured the geometries of Gaudí’s design, but the fervid textures of his overworked surfaces, and his vital fusion of structural logic, formal serendipity and an original sense for materials and craft (early-20th-century craft at that) are completely lost. Take in the mad profusion of sculpture and fussy surfaces of the lower parts of the Nativity Portal, for example, which are liquid, lumpy and dark like a poured sandcastle (and quite scatological as Catalan art tends to be, from Joan Miró to Antoni Tàpies, reveling in the plastic richness of mud). And now turn to the raw concrete porch of the Passion Facade on the opposite side, with its awkwardly angled piers and architraves. There may be a Gaudí drawing that traces these exact forms, but my bet is that the eccentric master of Reus wouldn’t have left the matter there."

Photo 1
Christ parachutes down over the main altar, in an interpretation of surviving reproductions of a tiny sectional drawing by Gaudi.

Photo 2
My hosts brought me up above the vaults of the nave, where the raw brick and concrete of the roof structure may be the closest thing to the spirit of Gaudi in the new work.

Photo 3
Clouds collaborate in the dizzying rise of towers and scaffolds into the heavens. Is Barcelona ready for the 170-meter lantern and cross that are under construction above the crossing of the nave, and that will transform the city's skyline?

Photo 4
Detail of the Passion Portal
All photos: DC


Gaudi's Sacred Monster
Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
The Architectural Review, August 2012

Crisis Casualties: The Mallorca Congress Center

The City of Palma de Mallorca has halted construction on the waterfront Congress Center designed by Francisco Mangado. It made the decision after the request for bids from the private sector to operate the center produced only one submission, from Melía Hotels, which it found inadequate. The building has been under construction for several years and has accumulated a construction debt of 70 million euros. The city plans to finish enclosing the facades and wait for better times.

Reported in the Diario de Mallorca newspaper, July 20, 2012
Link from the Arquitectura Viva webpage

Rendering from arqa.com
Model photo from europapress.es

Endgame In Córdoba

The Berlin weekly Bauwelt asked me to report on the cancellation of Rem Koolhaas' Congress Center in Córdoba, as announced by the city's new conservative mayor last March. The project was originally conceived in a 2001 competition and has long been bogged down in financing problems. This is a major loss for the city, but the project was not without problems as well -- a lose-lose boggle every way you look at it.

"Clearly Spain's local politicians have a lot to learn about how to responsibly manage large building projects. But architects, as accomplices in their wasteful building spree, are being held to account as well, as the profession enters a period of profound self-examination. Is architecture a plaything of the newly-rich (whether governments or individuals), a gaudy bauble, or does it have something serious and important to offer society?"

The site today. Photo: DC

Endspiel in Córdoba
Bauwelt 26.12, July 6, 2012, pages 6 - 7
(No web version available without subscription)


Thankfully though, historic Córdoba is still around:

A Night at the Races

I inaugurate my new Canon SLR camera with this photo of Eduardo Torroja's magnificent grandstands for Madrid's racetrack, the Hipodromo de la Zarzuela outside Madrid, one clear, cool July evening last week. The evening races make the most of Madrid's summer climate -- the city is at an altitude of some 860 meters or half a mile above sea level, and the refreshing nights are when you want to be out-of-doors. People come just for the bars and food, but the races were a good adrenaline-booster for this newcomer.

And here's one of the reasons I went out to see them, an exerpt from my upcoming history of Spanish modernism:

"Carlos Arniches and Martín Domínguez opened their work even further to the radical structural experiments of Eduardo Torroja in their 1934 competition-winning design for the Zarzuela Hippodrome outside Madrid. Torroja's innovations in thin-shell concrete during the Republican years claim their place beside the pioneering work of Eugène Freyssinet, Robert Maillart and Pier Luigi Nervi. The Hippodrome design is dominated by his wing-like cantilevered shading vaults over the grandstands, which span nearly 14 meters and taper to a thickness of only five centimeters. The vaults are composed of hyperboloids, surfaces which curve in two directions, and are counterbalanced by an ingenious system that involves suspending the roof vault of the betting hall, situated below the grandstands, from tension bars tied to the rear flanges of the vaults."

 Above, the view from the stands of Madrid's new skyline, with 50-story towers by Henry Cobb, César Pelli, Estudio Rubio Álvarez Sala and Foster & Partners (left to right).

A Lazy Icon on the Riviera

My latest feature is just out in Architectural Record: 
Musée Jean Cocteau
Menton, France
Rudy Ricciotti, Architect
July 2012 issue

"If there is any corner of the world less in need of a contemporary architectural icon, that place is Menton, a lovely seaside hill town situated 2.5 miles from the Italian border on the French Riviera. With its gardens, villas and picturesque historic center, Menton retains the charms that once attracted luminaries such as Aubrey Beardsley, William Butler Yeats or the French poet, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). But when municipal officials began to court the American art collector Severín Wunderman, and offered to build a permanent home for his collection of 990 works by Cocteau, the wheels were set in motion to create just such an icon, a new building that, in the words of Deputy Mayor Jean-Claude Guibal, would give Menton 'the status of a cultural destination in its own right, where bold projects ennoble the spirit of the site and reinforce its authenticity.' "
(Read on)

Here's a general view from the magazine article, © Roland Halbe (used with permission):

Photo, top: DC

Sheep Safely Graze

This spring I traveled to the town of Alcázar do Sal, 85 kilometers south of Lisbon, to report on this Nursing Home by Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus. My cover story appears in the June issue of architektur.aktuell (sorry, no web page).

"A primary school is across the street, and the bright cries of children playing under the ancient trees of its grounds reach the garden, where a handful of sheep graze on the wild lawns under cork and olive trees – connections that keep the residents in touch with the life of the town and their rural origins."

"....a constant in Portuguese architecture over the centuries is clearly seen here: the tension between order and topography, between a rational, regular, repetitive system of settlement –from the urban street grid to individual buildings with their patios, gardens and terraces– and the accidents of topography and historical development that distort and transform this regular order. Amid the lush vegetation, vivid topography and mild climate of Portugal, with its mix of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, this is the formula for a contemporary Garden of Eden."

In the Garden of Eden
Nursing Home, Alcácer do Sal, Portugal
Francisco + Manuel Aires Mateus
architektur.aktuell 387
Issue theme: Solid Structures
June 2012, pages 64 - 75; cover.

 Photo: DC

Summer Exhibitions in Spain

Madrid
The Arts of Piranesi
CaixaForum Madrid
Through September 9

In addition to 300 engravings representing the variety of Piranesi's interests (architecture, archeology, city views, decoration, the Imaginary Prisons series, etc.), the show includes "reproductions of furniture and decorative objects in various materials from his series Antichità Romane, an ... audiovisual presentation that gives a disturbing depth and breadth to his Imaginary Prisons, and contemporary photographs by G. Basilico for his collection of engravings of Views of Rome, comparisons that allow the public to discover the three dimensionality, perspective and detail of Piranesi`s engravings."

According to El País, the digitalizaiton of the Imaginary Prisons by the Madrid-based Factum Arte studio allows "the camera to make a three-dimensional journey through their interiors, creating the sensation of walking through buildings that never existed."

Barcelona 
Le Corbusier & Jean Genet in the Raval;
Gordon Matta-Clark, "Office Baroque" Portfolio;
Roberto Rosellini Filming Beaubourg
MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art)
Through October 21

This miscellany shows off items from the museum's permanent collection.

The first show aims to document the visits of Le Corbusier and Jean Genet to Barcelona in the 1930s,  "when both applied their critical eye to the city's streets." It includes works by Brassaï, Joaquín Torres-García, Alexander Calder, Leandre Cristòfol, Lucio Fontana, Salvador Dalí and Antoni Tàpies.

Corb came to Barcelona at the urging of José Luis Sert and with the hope of contracting a major new urban plan with the republican regional government of the Generalitat. Genet came to live and write about the low life in the city's Barrio Chino (red light district).

The second show brings together 46 works documenting building interventions by Matta-Clark in the last six years of his life, in the 1970s.

And the third presents Robert Rossellini's film on the opening of the Pompidou in Paris, which ties in with one of Matta-Clark's  last works.

Congress in Pamplona

There's still time to sign up for the Architecture and Society Foundation's next Congress, Lo Común, to be held June 20-22 in Pamplona. Special grants are available to help students attend.

The Congress is directed by Luis Fernández-Galiano. Speakers include Foster, Moneo, Siza and Souto de Moura, as well as Peter Buchanan, Vasa Perović (Slovenia), Manuel Aires Mateus, Roger Diener, Dietmar Eberle, Anna Heringer (Austria), Solano Benítez (Paraguay), Patxi Mangado (Foundation founder) and others.

The proceedings cover the themes "Architecture and Shelter," "Architecture and Efficiency," and "Architecture and Pleasure."

To give  an idea of the calado of the event (Spanish metaphor meaning the draft of a ship), the congress will be kicked off with welcoming remarks  by Carlos Solchaga, former Socialist Minister of Economy and the President of the Foundation, and Ana Pastor, current Minister of Development, as well as the president of Navarra and mayor of Pamplona. Other active and former politicians are sprinkled through the proceedings.

Detailed information can be found here.

It's Summer Again at the Serpentine

Rowan Moore in The Guardian on this summer's Serpentine Pavilion in London by HdM and Weiwei. (Skip-scroll through the intro about how tiresome Thomas Heatherwick is).

Quote:

"What you get now is a sunken bowl lined with series of descending terraces, with fragments of curved and angled lines that echo the bygone works of Sanaa, Gehry, Hadid, Libeskind, Eliasson and others. It's surfaced with dark brown compressed cork which looks like mud from a distance and is firm but slightly yielding underfoot. It also gives off an organic scent. Above is a horizontal disc, propped on a basic structure like the covering of an archaeological dig, holding a film of water."

"The surrounding land slopes, which means that at different places you can see over the top of the disc and appreciate the reflections it makes of trees and sky, or look into the cave-like space it covers, with fragmentary views of the park beyond. The interior ... is an events space, cafe and place for sitting around, except that this time it was felt that the concept would be compromised by installing catering facilities. These are provided by a matter-of-fact trailer parked close by."

Photo from the article
Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Petition Against EuroVegas. And Valdevaqueros!

Sign a petition for government disclosure of negotiations over EuroVegas organized by change.org.
Thanks, José Selgas.

(See my blog entry of April 29, The EuroVegas Threat).

José also sends this link for a petition to save the Valdevaqueros beach in Tarifa (above), threatened with a macro-development, a project that was just approved by the local government.

For details, here's the El Pais story on the vote from May 31, 2012.

Photo of Valdevaqueros Beach from:
Plataforma Ciudadana Por la preservación de Los Lances y Palmones

Design Vanguard Call for Entries

Architectural Record is now accepting entries for its 2012 Design Vanguard competition. Entries are due on August 10, 2012 and the winners will be published in the December 2012 issue.

For more information, and to enter, click here.

London's Olympics on the Horizon

Architectural Record's June issue devotes extensive coverage to the London Olympics, and to London in general. See a list of articles with links here.

The issue includes my brief overview of the lasting effects of the Olympics in Barcelona and Athens.

"For the Greeks, the 2004 Olympics in Athens and the aftermath have become a symbol for everything that has gone wrong in their country..."

"Barcelona used the investments and positive energy generated by the 1992 Olympic Games as a tool for long-term strategic planning—a model that London studied closely...." 

 In an excellent article in The Guardian, Rowan Moore also weighs in on London's Olympic effort (link), calling into question the whole enterprise of the Games.

The article includes links about some of the Olympic projects, such as Anish Kapoor's and Cecil Balmont's Orbit sculpture,  (photo above, apparently sporting an impressive phallus), on which Moore comments, "it will cost £15 to go up to the top. I suggest that residents of nearby council tower blocks charge £14.95 to visit their flats. The view will be just as good and visitors would gain a richer understanding of London and of humanity".

 Other venues:
Aquatic Center by Zaha Hadid.
Velodrome by Hopkins Architects.
Athletic Stadium, sponsored by Dow Chemical.
Olympic Village (in a separate review by Rowan Moore).
Olympic Park by George Harrgreaves (gets a thumbs-up from Moore for preserving a sense of the pre-existing context amid the waterways of the River Lea).

Dyer on Tarkovsky

"We are in another world that is no more than this world perceived with unprecedented attentiveness."
 Geoff Dyer 

From his book Zona, dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), quoted in The New York Times review on March 2nd. I am not a Tarkovsky fan but this is a useful motto.

Image from Brian Dillon's interesting blog Ruins of the 20th Century

Hobbits in China

EMBT Designs Zhang Da Qian Museum in Neijiang, China
Architectural Record web page, May 15, 2012
Architecture Record, Chinese Edition

Benedetta Tagliabue is still going strong, 12 years after the death of her husband, Enric Miralles. She's a remarkable architectural survivor and a wonderful person, but..... This latest conceit reminds me of those glory days when Frank Stella briefly turned into an architect, serving up a model for an Orangerie-thing in poor-old recently-liberated Dresden, with domes of cantaloupe and trembling flan -- at least that's what they looked like to me as I contemplated them in his studio, at the urging of his loyal pal Phillip Johnson. Now the Chinese are the gumptious lot who will fall for just about anything.

As the article was a news piece and I wasn't yet quite so tired of all this, nothing of the above is reflected in the actual text. The biggest piece of news was that Zhang Da Qian, whom I had never heard of, was the top-selling artist worldwide at auctions last year, outpacing Picasso for the first time in 14 years -- a sign of the strength of the new Chinese buying public.

Here's another zinger from my text:

"Picasso's portrait of Zhang, his face surrounded by dashing blots of ink for hair and beard, inspired the layout for the pavilions' rings of structural fins. Zhang's traditional rendering of a grove of bamboo provided the concept for the pavilion's vertical development. The fins' irregular profiles, designed using folded and cut paper, derive from this drawing and other sources, including a photograph of the artist and his paintings of a woman and a mountain landscape. It also refers to a large boulder from his garden in Taiwan, which he brought from California, and under which he is buried."

I'm still looking for the stones and ladies and photographs and waving groves of bamboo in those fins.

FAD Finalists 2012

Mansilla + Tuñón, Lalín Town Hall. © Roland Halbe

The finalists for the 2012 FAD Prizes have been announced, with winners to appear in the fall. The list of nominees, taken from the SCALAE web page, follows below. The jury was led by Seville architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra. Over 500 projects were presented and 36 were selected.

I know only a few of these works, so the winner will hopefully be a surprise. Two works are by architects who died this winter, Luis Mansilla and Manuel de Solà- Morales.

My blind bet on the winner?

Mansilla and Tuñón's Lalín Town Hall, a stellar project when first announced and unbuilt for years, it hasn't been getting too much attention otherwise. One possible drawback: it may represent -to some- all that is "old" and "out" in post-crisis architecture. But they sure put the circle through some hoops.

Mansilla + Tuñón, Lalín Town Hall. © Roland Halbe

Any takers?

(For the uninitiated, the FAD Awards are given each year by the venerable Barcelona-based organization  now known as El Foment de les Arts i del Disseny, or Arquinfad, or ADI-FAD or what-have-you, and originally known simply as Foment de les Artes Decoratives. Their web page is here. If you can find any hard info there on this year's prizes, and find your way around in general, let me know. For a place dedicated to design, they have the most confusing web page and organizational chart I've ever seen).

 ARCHITECTURE

• House in Cadaqués. Stephen Bates, Liebman Villavecchia Arquitectos.
• Annex to the Picasso Museum, Barcelona. Jordi Garcés.
• La Pallaresa Complex. Robert and Esteve Terradas Muntañola + Eduardo Souto de Moura. 
  
• UPI ('Kid University'), Gandía, Valencia. Angela García de Paredes, Ignacio García Pedrosa. 
• Apartment buildings on the Ria de Bilbao. Carlos Ferrater, Xavier Martí Galí, Lucía Ferrater; Luis Domínguez  (Katsura Arquitectura).
• Lalín Town Hall. Emilio Tuñón, Luis Moreno Mansilla.
• La Bòbila School. Baas Jordi Badia.
• C / Z House. Inés Vieira da Silva, Miguel Vieira (Sami-Arquitectos).
• Renovation of the former CCCB Theater, Barcelona. Elías Torres.
• Tejado Municipal Auditorium. Francisco Mangado. (DC: Isn't this the Teulada Auditorium?)
• Asunción Linares Infant School. Elisa Valero Ramos.
• Agujas de Torresana. Manuel de Solà-Morales.
• Classroom and Departmental Offices, Pablo de Olavide University, Sevilla. Jose Morales Sánchez + Sara de Giles Dubois; Miguel Hernandez Valencia.
• Nave 16, Matadero, Madrid. Iñaqui Carnicero, Alejandro Virseda, Ignacio Villa.
• School for Infants. Pereda Pérez Arquitectos.
• Ágora Socio-Cultural Center, San Pedro de Visma, A Coruña. Luis Rojo + Begoña Fernández-Shaw; Liliana Obala.
• Red Bull Music Academy. Nave de la Música del Matadero, Madrid.  María Langarita Sánchez, Víctor Navarro.
• Logroño Train Station. Iñaki Ábalos + Renata Sentkiewicz.
• Adega da Quinta do Vallada. Francisco Vieira de Campos, (Menos É Mais, Arquitectos).
• Offices & housing, Guardia Civil Station. Carlos J. Meri Cucart.
• Portalegre Hotel and Tourism School. Eduardo Souto Moura, Graça Correa.

INTERIORS

• Renovation of the Casa do Arco for the Casa da Escrita (House of Writing). João Mendes Ribeiro.
• Housing unit type renovation. Iñigo Beguiristain.
• Urban Strategies. Nuño Sampaio.
• Tondeluna. Rubén Picada (Picaduras de Blas Arquitectos).
• Fanqueiros. José Adriaen.

CITY AND LANDSCAPE

• Project to restore the landscape of Tudela-Culip (former Club Med) in the Cabo de Creus Natural Park, Costa Brava. Martí Franch Batllori, Landscape Architect, Agricultural Engineer.
• "Puesta En Valor" of Roman Archeological Remains at Iesso  / Sg Y Ac (Guissona-Lleida). Toni Gironès.
• Renovation of the Paseo de San Juan (Tetuan - Arco de Triunfo). Lola Domènech.
• San Clemente & Rua Trinidade reurbanization. Abal Alonso Arquitectos.
• Madrid Río Park. Burgos & Garrido / Porras La Casta / Rubio & Álvarez-Sala / West 8
• Estrutura Autoportante de Contenção da Estilha. Cristina Guedes, Francisco Vieira de Campos (Menos É Mais Arquitectos). 

Editing note: I found this list full of typographical oddities,  redundancies, errors. And why no location names for the works (the few included are supplied by me)? I have omitted finalists for ephemeral projects. Please inform if you find any errors.

Photos used with permission.