MoMA Steamrolls down 53rd Street

MoMA Expansion © Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Everyone is weighing in on MoMA's plans to raze Willians & Tsien's American Folk Art Museum, on West 53rd Street, for their next expansion. It's a local fight, but I am still a local when it comes to New York.

Some interesting quotes:

"The Museum of Modern Art is a perpetual work in progress. It’s never been finished.”
Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA Director

“I know the architecture community was hoping the conclusion would be different.”Elizabeth Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), who are designing the museum's expansion. Implying that this question is of no wider import, and does not affect the public interest?

“We don’t collect buildings. We take architecture seriously, but it isn’t art. Architecture is tied to function."
Boom! Glenn Lowry, in a verbal blitzkrieg of executive expediency. Run for cover!

“The current lobby, we feel, is quite mean. There’s a banality about it.”
Diller on plans to redo the existing museum lobby, result of last expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi. Finally someone said it.

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, on the current museum:

"MoMA is now as jammed and joyless as the Van Wyck Expressway on a Friday in July. That’s not because it is a victim of its own success; it’s because the museum is a victim of its own philosophy. ... . I remember the temporary home the museum occupied in Queens during its last renovation. It briefly got MoMA out of its Midtown straitjacket and closer to its pioneering roots."

 And on the problems and virtues of the Folk Museum building:

"Wedged onto a narrow plot, the ill-fated folk art building is far from perfect. Inside, it’s mostly stairwells and passages, its galleries tricky to install. But the eccentricity helps to account for what endears it to architects. Those bespoke, domestic-size spaces, like the building’s sober hammered bronze facade, share something with the handicraft of the folk art museum’s collection; the building has a rootedness, a materiality, an outsize claim to significance. It stands proudly on the street, the unfashionable antithesis of generic, open-ended modernism, the opposite of what Diller Scofidio now envisions in its place, with its paradigm of indefinite and perishable culture."

Update January 20  
Later this week Diller was interviewed by architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times, with more interesting statements:

"I think the reason this [Folk Art] building was very difficult to transform into something else was its degree of idiosyncrasy. If we were to eliminate a lot of those idiosyncrasies, we could use it. But at a certain point it takes on another identity."

"Connectivity to the street [is] something we talked abpit on our first interview with MoMA: the art now is half a mile away from the entrance. MoMA could have a better civic presence generally, and the entrance on 53rd Street could be more generous, be a double-height space. There are a number of gestures that make the entrance more inviting. When it becomes more efficient and cleaned up, there could be great options for showing art there." (Edited by DC)

Hawthorne's original criticism of the proposal, published on January 9th in the LA Times, is also worth quoting:

"The idea that a museum would acquire and then demolish an important piece of contemporary architecture is unfathomable to many artists and architects in New York. While I admire the building, I don’t think the Folk Art Museum is the masterpiece some of my colleagues believe it to be; its interior is mannered and overdesigned, its dark and contorted façade presenting a kind of barricade along the streetscape."

"The idea that endlessly enlarging museum buildings will provide a better experience for visitors is almost never borne out by the architectural gigantism that results. On the contrary, the most powerful encounters we have with works of art tend to take place in the smallest and most intimate -- and even the most eccentric or impractical -- works of museum architecture. Efficiency and endless expansion are catnip to museum boards; they are often fatal to museum architecture."

The Folk Art Museum is hard to capture in photos. Here are a few, by my old friend Michael Moran:

Here's a schematic sketch of the new expansion prepared by DS+R and published in Architectural Record. The motor of the expansion is a new residential tower by Jean Nouvel, promoted by Gerald Hines, whose first floors will be given over to new gallery space -- a return to the real estate strategy behind the Cesar Pelli addition in the 1980s.

A couple of images of Nouvel's Tower Verre, as of last year, from Curbed:

  
I still miss the old Hotel Dorset on 54th Street, wiped out in the Taniguchi expansion. And every time I pass the sculpture garden I wonder how much longer the Rockefeller apartments can hold out across 54th Street. What would the garden be without that backdrop? But of course what i really miss is the old museum, which in memories from college trips in the 1970s was as intimate as a private club. Those were the days.

Sources
Diller, first Lowry  quote:
Cathleen McGuigan and Laura Raskin
MoMA to Demolish Tod Williams Billie Tsien Folk Art Building After All
Architectural Record, January 8, 2014

Second Lowry quote:
Fred A. Bernstein
MoMA Defends Decision to Raze Folk Art Museum Building at Public Forum
Architectural Record, January 29, 2014

Michael Kimmelman
The Museum With a Bulldozer’s Heart
The New York TImes, January 13, 2014

Christopher Hawthorne
MoMA reaffirms controversial plan to raze Folk Art building

Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2014

Christopher Hawthorne

Elizabeth Diller Defends MoMA Plan to Demolish Folk Art Building
Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2014

Sara Polsy
Moma Mia! New Renderings Revealed for Jean Nouvel's MoMA Tower
Curbed, December 10, 2012


NEWS UPDATES

David W. Dunlap
"Folk Art Building May Be Lost, But Facade Will Live: In Storage Some Place"
The New York Times
February 12, 2014

David Cohn
"The Short Life of Another Little NY Masterpiece"
The View from Madrid
February 10, 2014
Standford White's Madison Square Presbyterian Church lasted just 10 years. 

"MoMA Begins Demolition of Folk Art Museum Building"
Webpage news story
Architectural Record
April 14, 2014

Robin Pogerin
Architects Mourn Former Folk Art Museum Building
Talk with Tod Williams
The New York Times
April 15, 2014

Looking Off the Map

Trevor Paglen
Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m
C-Print
30 x 36 inches
2007

Trevor Paglen doesn't exactly document off-map secret US military and spy facilities. He hangs his photos in galleries and sells them to collectors, and he takes his shots with the historic context and tradition of landscape painting and photography in mind, especially, it seems, those old ideas about the romantic sublime.

I finally caught up with a New Yorker profile of him published last year, which can be found on his website here, where he explains his approach.

I don't quite get it. Is selling this as art a way to finance the work? No, he takes himself seriously as an artist. But I think all that purposely blurry stuff is the least interesting thing about his work.

In the New Yorker article, he complains to the writer at one point during a shoot that the atmosphere is too clear. On the photo above, he writes.

"Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography.... In some ways, however, it is easier to photograph the depths of the solar system... Between Earth and Jupiter (500 million miles away), for example, there are about five miles of thick, breathable atmosphere. In contrast, there are upwards of forty miles of thick atmosphere between an observer and the sites depicted in this series."

Fair enough. But outing secrets is what counts for me, documentation as a political act, showing that these places, although off the map, are in our lives, in our minds, in our culture, in our relations with the rest of humankind.

Besides looking into Area 51 and other secret sites, he actually tracked down a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. Good for him.

The Salt Pit, Northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan
C-print
24 x 36 inches
2006

My counter example would be Camilo José Vergara, who without any pretensions, and initially with many sacrifices, documented the unseen decaying inner cities of North America, from Detroit and Gary, Indiana to Camden and the Bronx. I've been reporting on him for years. His archives were bought a few years ago by the Getty, and he's had several books published, so the recognition is there. And there's no nonsense about art and mystery, though the images are as powerful as any you'll find.

Trevor Paglen website
http://www.paglen.com

Jonah Weiner
Prying Eyes
The New Yorker 
Oct 22, 2012 p 54-61

Trevor Paglen
Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes
Aperture, 2010

Annie Jacobsen
Area 51
An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base
Orion, London, 2011

Camilo José Vergara
The New American Ghetto
Rutgers University Press, 1997

Calatrava Update: Heads Up for Falling Trencadís

Photo: Efe via Heraldo.es

In a winter storm last month, sections of the tile facade came off Sanitago Calatrava's Palace of the Arts in Valencia. The regional government announced it will consider suing the architect and the builders for damages.

Areas of "wrinkling" or buckling tile were first observed early last year, but neither the builder or Calatrava assumed responsibility, according to the government. The building's curving surfaces are covered in a mosaic of broken tile known as trencadís, adapted by Calatrava from the works of Gaudí. The building cost 478 million euros, including a 44 million euro fee for Calatrava, the Spanish newspaper El País reminds readers in its December 27th story on the problem.

A Europress story published in the Heraldo de Aragón yesterday offered the government's first evaluation of damages. A preliminary study finds 60% of the facade affected. Engineers recommend the complete removal of the tiles and their replacement with white paint over the steel under-surface (sounds pretty tacky, doesn't it?). The estimated cost is over 3 million euros, plus the expense of cancelling the opera Manon Lescaut, scheduled to open February 2nd (another 600,000 or more). Officials hope to have the building secured for the next scheduled opera on February 23rd. The work will also affect the filming of the Disney movie Tommorrowland scheduled this winter. 

Update March 1, 2014



The Palau stripped bare of is trencadis, even. From El País, April 2, 2014. Photo: Tania Castro. The white spots are test areas for sample paint.

Update Jan. 10
El País informs today that Calatrava and the builders have met with the local government and agreed to find a solution to the problem and pay for the costs, thus adverting a possible court case.

The problem appears due to the different coefficients of expansion under temperature changes between the tile and its steel backup. No problems have appeared where tile is applied over concrete, the engineers' study reports.

Joaquín Ferrandis
El Consell emprenderá acciones legales contra Calatrava y la UTE de Les Arts
El País
December 27, 2014 

Europa Press
Valencia estudia demandar a Calatrava por los daños en el Palacio de las Artes
Heraldo de Aragón
January 8, 2014

Ferran Bono
Retirar el ‘trencadís’ del Palau de les Arts costará tres millones de euros
El País
January 10, 2014

Ferrran Bono
El Consell asegura que Calatrava y la UTE reprarán Les Arts y asumirán el coste
El País
January 10, 2014 

Agencia Efe
El despacho de Calatrava y UTE asumirán la reparación del Palau de les Arts
El País
January 10, 2014

Ferrran Bono
Calatrava's opera house: a rip-off?
El País (English edition)
January 12. 2014
 
Opinion
Anaxtu Zabalbeascoa
'Trencadís and footing the bill
El País (English edition; article at bottom of page)
January 12, 2014

José Ramón Giner
Un 'trencadís' cultural
El País (Valencia edition)
January 12, 2014

Ongoing compilation of news stories in El País:
http://elpais.com/tag/santiago_calatrava/a/

Quote of the Month

"Some people use only the color white, or only 90 degrees. What defines their style is the sum of all their inhibitions. And I think we try to put ourselves in a position where we can be free to choose any weapon of choice in each and every case to match the context, the culture [and] the climate in the best possible way." 

Bjarke Ingels, asked about why his work supposedly doesn't have a recognizable style (although I would disagree). Good one to the solar plexus of uptight American practice.  

Quote from:
"Bjarke Ingels: An "Architect For A Moment Or An Era?"
NPR (National Public Radio), USA
January 03, 2014

I chosse Bjarke Ingels as Architect of the Year in December's Gentleman (Spanish edition).

(More goodbyes: this will be my last collaboration with the magazine, which closes with the January issue.)  

Arquitecto sin fronteras
Bjarke Ingels, Architect of the year
Gentleman, December 2013, page 24

Photo, Dan Bobkoff for NPR

Almendrales on a Winter Sunday

I made an excursion to the Directed Settlement of Almendrales in Madrid today, and took a few pictures. I was able to get into the hypostyle church, with its slender columns and skylights, inspired in the "multi-polar" spaces of a mosque, and inspiration in turn, no doubt, for Rafael Moneo's Atocha Railroad Station. The columns double as rain gutters.

The housing was built by the Franco regime to replace shanty towns that sprang up around Madrid in the 1950s (see my related article on the Directed Settlement of Caño Roto). 

Church (1961-64)
José María García de Paredes

Settlement (1958 - 1964)
Ramón Vázquez Molezún
José Antonio Corrales
Javier Carvajal
José María García de Paredes

Warm, rough, simple brick, regular orientation to the light (evident in these pictures) without a sense of repetition, due to the rippling setbacks of the housing blocks.

Suppression of regular street grid for parking cul-de-sacs and green spaces, now with mature trees.

Low buildings for local shopping along one of the streets, and a kind of market in one area.

The openness and trees, the light and reflected light from the brick, set the district apart from its surroundings.

Many blocks have been renovated and finished in stucco. Otherwise the complex is remarkably preserved. The access to the church has been changed, and the covered porch along one side of the patio, and connecting the church to the parish house, has disappeared. But the patio's Mediterranean pines make up for this loss, I think.

Approach to the church (left)

Upper class houses built to the north of Madrid in the 1960s and 70s, in places like La Florida or Aravaca, often feature similar textures of warm brick. It seems to me to be a different brick from earlier or later periods, a brick that responds to the light with its rough texture, but a pink brick not too highly fired. This mixture of brick, relfected light and trees: elements of the Organicist Eden.

Church plan:
Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, J. M. García de Paredes Arquitecto (1924 - 1990), COAM, Madrid, 1992, page 71.

The best site plan I could find so far. Top of plan is north:
Luis Moya González, Barrios de Promoción Oficial. Madrid 1939 - 1976, COAM, Madrid, 1983, page 212.

Location: Metro Almendrales
The settlement runs along the Avenida de Córdoba, the old highway route to the south, on the western side of the Manzanares River just south of the Legazpi Bridge.

Typical floor plan for the blocks:
Fundación COAM, Ramón Vázquez Molezún, Fundación COAM, Madrid, 2006, page 104.
From the Legado Vázquez Molezún

EuroVegas Pie-In-The-Sky, Goodbye!

Good news that you won't find making the PR circuit this month: the EuroVegas gambling complex proposed outside Madrid by Las Vegas Sands' owner Sheldon G. Adelsohn will not be built.

Goodbye to a 17 billion euro investment, 12 hotels with 36,000 rooms, six casinos, golf courses, shopping malls, a convention center, bars and restaurants. And goodbye, supposedly, to some 250,000 new jobs.

The project was cancelled because the Spanish government didn't accept the promoter's latest demands, but these were so far-fetched that they look more like a lame exit strategy on the part of Adelsohn (they included reducing taxes on gambling earnings to 1%).

Analysts suggest that the real reason Adelsohn pulled the plug is the failure of banks to line up financing for the project. Too much pie-in-the-sky.

So what's to celebrate? It's not like Spanish politicians didn't rush in to try to meet Adelsohn's demands for changes in labor laws, smoking restrictions, zoning and other legal niceties.

Didn't they learn anything from the past 15 years of debauched investments in failed theme parks, airports and cities of this and that (Culture, Arts and Sciences, Cine, Justice, etc. etc.)? No, it's the same old formula. But for once the banks didn't go along (the banks that went along with the first 15 years of boondoggling are no longer in the business).

How could they believe that EuroVegas, with its cheap jobs and mafia taint, could be a solution to anything?

Despite it all, though, I'm celebrating.

Goodbye, EuroVegas!
Bon Voyage!!!

Photo: Rendering of EuroVegas
From The Guardian. Feb. 8, 2013

Stories on the cancellation: 
Eurovegas not coming to Madrid after company demands rejected
El País, Dec. 13, 2013
(in English)

José Marcos
EuroVegas planta a Madrid por Asia
El País, Dec, 13, 2013

Enter Velux Awards for Architecture Students

I have received the following announcement from The Architectural Review (UK) and a Velux, manufacturers of skylights and blinds:

INTERNATIONAL VELUX AWARD 2014 FOR STUDENTS OF ARCHITECTURE         The VELUX Group challenges students of architecture from all over the world to explore and investigate daylight in architecture under the overall theme Light of Tomorrow. With a generous prize fund of 30,000 euros, the International VELUX Award is open to creative reflections on the role of daylight in architecture; not just as a design component or external factor, but as a central issue concerned with shaping architecture and promoting sustainability. Entrants can freely explore the role of daylight in the built environment, whether focusing on daylight in urban contexts, in individual buildings, or as a more abstract concept. The Award encourages an open-minded dialogue on the nature of the light of tomorrow based on experimental approaches and imaginative thinking. In particular, it focuses on the importance of sunlight and daylight in the context of sustainable development, taking human needs and the rhythms and balances of nature into account. This year’s international jury comprises Craig Dykers, founding partner of Snøhetta; Roísín Heneghan founding partner of Heneghan Peng Architects; Magda Mostafa, Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo; Catherine Slessor, Editor of The Architectural Review and Per Arnold Andersen of The VELUX Group.... Registration is now open. Students must register before 3 March 2014 and the final deadline for submission of entries is 2 May 2014. See more at: http://iva.velux.com

Thanks, nice try, but it doesn't seem to work

 In his blog Criticalista, Rafael Gomez-Moriana calls attention to a report in the Barcelona edition of El Pais on the failure of Enric Ruiz-Geli's oft-published Media-TIC Building to live up to expectations.

As you may recall, the structure was to save energy by way of a curtain of inflatable EFTE panels on its southwestern facade -- although the system only partially covered this facade, in a rather lame petal-like arrangement of segmented hexagonals, and left the more exposed, southeastern facade, composed of ten floors of floor-to-ceiling glass, completely unprotected.

The article reveals that the inflatable EFTE system stopped working only days after the building's inauguration, and high energy costs made it the city's most expensive property to maintain. The center is now closed for lack of renters or buyers.

Of equally dubious utility is the elaborate structural system, with floors suspended on cables from an ungainly double-floor steel truss that runs across the top of the structure, supposedly to offer maximum flexibility for the floors. Hello Pompidou, hello Mies, hello McGuffin.

A lot of people fell for this project in its time, but not me. Ruiz-Geli has always struck me as more about posture than substance, right up there with other Catalan superstars of self-promotion such as Josep Lluís Mateo or the Valencia-born Vicente Guallart, who for a brief and scary time was chief urban planner of Barcelona under its conservative nationalist government, and who seems to remain (equally scary, I must confess) head municipal architect.

If authorities permit this kind of extravagance in the name of experiment and research, shouldn't there be some rigor on the part of the practicing architect? And some accountability? Most of these projects don't even work that well as publicity stunts. I mean, everyone out there in New York, Tokyo and Belgrade, do you still remember this one?

Gomez-Moriana concludes:

"...it makes me wonder if the energy efficiency certification it so proudly received upon completion is still valid, or how it could ever even have received such certification in the first place. It also makes me think that architectural "sustainability" that depends entirely on active, highly technological mechanical systems may not make the most sense in the end."

"What is most disappointing, however, is that this experiment was created as an incentive for start-ups in the information and communication technology field. It was done with the vision that, in the long term, it would transform Barcelona into a Mediterranean technology hub."

"Oh well, so much for that idea."

Here's the relevant paragraph from El País:

"Quizá el caso más destacado sea el del edificio mediaTIC, un ejemplo de arquitectura verde que iba a inaugurar una nueva era de edificación sostenible. Construido con una cobertura plástica inflable reguladora de la luz y la temperatura, iba a reducir significativamente las emisiones de CO2 y la factura energética. Sin embargo, pronto se convirtió en el edificio más caro de mantener de todo el parque existente, debido al colapso del sistema inflable días después de su inauguración. Finalmente tuvo que cerrarse por la falta de inversores interesados en comprar un edificio con unos gastos de climatización desorbitados. Pero ahí sigue, cual fantasma del futuro-pasado."

Update January 9, 2014
Rafael Gomez-Moriana writes:
"I have issued an erratum in the comments section of my post after a reader made me aware that the El País article is misleading. Turns out that the building is not altogether "abandoned": the Cloud 9 architecture firm (!) and a Cybernarium occupy the ground and first floors of the building. The rest of the building still appears to be empty, however."

Rafael Gomez-Moriana
Media-Tic, Another Sad Spectacle
Criticalista, December 7, 2013

Gemma Galdon Clavell
Smart City 2023
El País Cataluña, December 7, 2013

Photos: Luis Ros
Courtesy of Enric Ruiz-Geli

Homage to Manuel de las Casas

This Thursday, December 19 at 19:00, the Toledo School of Architecture officially presents the Manuel de las Casas Chair of Architecture. Manuel will talk about one of his early works, the Pedro Mora House in Talavera de la Reina (1964-71).

The event takes place in the lecture hall of Las Arquerias, the architecture exhibition space in Nuevos Ministerios in Madrid.

There will be an exhibit of student work and a performance by the Automatol, a three-meter tall "artificial walker" put together by students of architecture and engineering at the University of Castilla - La Mancha.

See everyone there!

Born to Run

I couldn't resist republishing this blog from Exabruptos, by my colleague-in-arms, John Sandwich:



Readers of Spanish, please don't miss Jacinto Antón's virtual tour of the new museum of Catalan hurt feelings in El País this Sunday, Born to Si, Si.

During the restoration of the Born, a19th century market, archeologists discovered the remains of an entire neighborhood demolished by Bourbon conquerors in the early 18th century, in reprisal for Barcelona's siding with the wrong monarchy in the War of Succession.

The project for a library in the building was cancelled, and now it has been opened as the Born Centro Cultural, "a sort of theme park glorifying that Barcelona razed by Phillip V's Bourbon troops in 1714," in the words of a more uncritical report published in El País on September 10th.

Antón explains:
"The Catalan sovereignty movement finally has a modern tool capable of transmitting its version of history and stir emotions in a mass audience...

"The fundamental experience pursued in the Born CC does not truly belong to the field of historic knowledge, but rather to that of emoción identitaria, the identification with a people and a destiny, with its projection into the future ('the Catalan people maintained the memory of their liberty forever after'). And everything with a modern, impeccable aesthetic and design, equal to that of any European museum."

September 11, 2014 will be the third centennial of this conquest, just in time for the referendum on Catalan independence that the government of Arturo Más is attempting to organize, as a diversion from his disastrous economic policy.

You know the old routine, things are going bad, find someone to blame.

Makes me think back on the emotionally manipulative exhibit displays at Washington's Holocaust Museum, opened in the 1990s. There the aim of moral education is theoretically more universal, but as my friend David Cohn wrote at the time, shouldn't we have more faith in reasonable argument, also on moral grounds? Emotional communication is for another sphere -- but exactly which one?

Meanwhile the grim historic facts about the repression of Catalan identity on the part of centralizing forces from Madrid are quite solid. Archeologists recovered 300 cannon balls from the ruins under the Born, for example; 60 are in the exhibition.

A few more pearls:
"El Born CC, que tiene parte de Yad Vashem —el museo de los mártires y el heroísmo del Holocausto, en Jerusalén— y parte de parque temático, con un puntito de Nou Camp (en los dioramas y reconstrucciones históricas las casacas de las tropas que defendieron la ciudad son mayoritariamente azul y grana y las de los atacantes borbónicos, blancas)..."

"...por todas partes en el Born CC el visitante encuentra alusiones a lo feliz, fantástica y próspera (incluso con helados) que era la vida hasta la Guerra de Sucesión —como si los catalanes fueran un pueblo de industriosos hobbits sobre los que se cernía la sombra del Mordor borbónico y su “barbarie absolutista— y mensajes más o menos subliminales tipo '1714-2014 Vivir libre', 'Feliz Tricentenario', 'Reborn'...."

Patricia Meneses in San Luis Potosi

For anyone who happens to be nearby, I reproduce the invitation to the show of Patricia Meneses' work at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Meneses was featured in Architectural Record's Design Vanguard issue in 2010, together with her former partner Iván Juárez. I wrote an introduction for this show in Spanish, which I reproduce below.

arquitecturas corpóreas

studio patricia meneses

opening reception
19.12.2013  19:30h
19.12.2013 - 23.02.2014

contemporary art museum
morelos 235, historical center san luis potosí,    m e x i c o

www.macsanluispotosí.com
www.patriciameneses.com

"Patricia Meneses es arquitecta, pero su obra extiende los limites convencionales de la profesión. Trabaja principalmente sobre el encuentro entre el cuerpo humano y la naturaleza, trazando el territorio de mediación entre ambos que abarca dos temas fundamentales: la protección del cuerpo ante los elementos –con temas como el ropaje, el nido, el capullo, el cobertizo—, y la proyección del cuerpo y sus sentidos hacia el mundo natural –la proyección de la mirada, los caminos y sus puntos de parada, y los lugares de encuentro y asentamiento donde se construyen las relaciones más estables con un territorio, con el mundo animal que la habita y con las demas personas, abarcando la sociedad y sus propios encuentros—."

"En ésta zona intermediaria de mediación, el edificio, en su condición de objeto extraño introducido entre el cuerpo y la naturaleza, desaparece. Se difume en las varias tecnicas de la artesanía, otro territorio de encuentro entre el cuerpo y la naturaleza, que trata de la manipulación de materiales naturales con las manos. Las obras de Patricia Meneses se fabrican con hilos, cuerdas, ramas o materiales textiles, y con tecnicas como las de tejar, tensar, trenzar, hacer nudos, etc. (aunque a veces trabaja con materiales bastante sofisticados como el nylon o el metacrilato, según el encargo). Sus obras entonces parecen devolvernos a una condición primitiva e idilica, desprovista del ropaje tecnico de la civilización –recordamos la casa de Adán en el Paraíso–, cuando aún no hubo división entre lo artificial y lo natural, cuando todo pertenecía a un continuo, sin fisuras: la condición de la arquitectura antes de la arquitectura."

"Este territorio sin fisuras, sin el objeto extraño de la arquitectura metido entre el sujeto y el mundo que le envuelve, tiene paralelos con el territorio de actuacion de otros artistas contemporáneos, como por ejemplo Gordon Matta-Clark, donde se eliminan el pedestal, la galería de paredes blancas o el marco. Su obra no se destaca como objeto exceptional, ajeno al mundo cotidiano, sino que se emerge y se exhibe como parte de ese mundo, transformándolo en el proceso. Para éstas artistas, y para Patricia Meneses, su obra se convierte en una acción de transformar una parte del mundo cotidiano y la documentación de ésta acción efímera, su registro para fijarla como parte de la memoria colectiva cultural."

"Las fuentes creativas de Patricia Meneses se escapan de los limites convencionales de la arquitectura porque tiene sus origenes en una visión más amplia del mundo que precede su formación disciplinar. Tienen sus origenes en su niñez, cuando empieza a experimentar con la elaboración de su propia ropa, en ese momento de formación vital cuando el juego infantil se realiza como parte de la experiencia completa de la persona en sus primeros encuentros con el mundo a su alrededor, en el process de descubrir a si mismo, a su cuerpo y al mundo físico. Esta conexión con la fisicalidad de la existencia es tan central en su obra que el hecho de convirtirse hace poco en madre por la primera vez, y de llevar el cuerpo de un nuevo ser dentro de su propio cuerpo, parece como una obra más en su trayectoria creativa, como los nidos y capullos de otros proyectos."

"De estas observaciones podamos concluir, en forma de hipótesis, que la obra de Patricia Meneses aspira a fusionar el arte y la vida, recurriendo a ese viejo sueno utópico de muchos artistas revolucionarios del principio del siglo XX (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Le Corbusier...) de otorgar a la vida la misma condición que la obra de arte. Su objetivo se puede definir como la exploración o elaboración de un territorio de espiritualidad no-religiosa que da sentido a la vida, que le otorga su significado y dignidad en un mundo que, sin ella, amenaza a convertirse en nada más que una extensión anodina y sin cualidades, medida y controlada solamente por la técnica pura y desnuda de la razón. La obra de Patricia Meneses trata de cubrir la desnudez de ese mundo con el ropaje de su propia sensibilidad."

Two from Spain in Design Vanguard

Héctor Fernández Elorza, School of Cellular and Genetic Biology

Of the ten young architecture firms from around the world selected for Architectural Record's annual Design Vanguard issue this December, two are Spanish: Héctor Fernández Elorza and Grupo Aranea, led by the couple Francisco Leiva and Marta García Chico.

My article on Elorza begins:

"Using raw primary materials such as concrete and galvanized steel, simple forms, and an adroit manipulation of scale, the Madrid-based architect Héctor Fernández Elorza gives even small projects a monumental authority. Two horizontal glass slashes across the facade of his Faculty of Cellular and Genetic Biology at the University of Alcalá, for example, transform the rows of diminutive offices and seminar rooms behind them into a mysterious, iconic mask, while deeply projecting concrete planes shade the interior spaces from the western sun. At a larger scale, in the Valdefierro Park outside his native Zaragoza, long concrete retaining walls emerge from the hillside like the ruins of a lost city."

Grupo Aranea, The Braided Valley River Park, Elche

I write about the obsession with spiral movement in the work of the Alicante-based Grupo Aranea:

"Their first building, a library in San Vicente del Raspeig completed in 2004, is a continuous spiraling ramp. And both a seaside spa in Gijón and an Environmental Observatory in Alicante spin around themselves in open-ended loops. Their Lude House sits like a hard white seashell atop an existing building in the town of Cehegín, rippled inside and out by the curving, rising movement of its stair and double-height living area."

"Even a completely orthogonal design, a public high school in the village of Rafal, is organized around circular movement: a pink-carpeted bleacher opposite the entrance, which doubles as a wide stair and meeting point, kicks off a sequence of corridors and outdoor spaces that circle back over the entry and around a playing field to connect classroom pavilions."

 
Héctor Fernández López Architects 
Architectural Record, Design Vanguard, December 2013
Cover

Grupo Aranea
Architectural Record, Design Vanguard, December 2013

Photo top  © Montse Zamorano
Photo bottom © Jesús Granada