Villa Nurbs: a Sad Spectacle

It is June 2012, and  after a decade of construction Villa Nurbs is still incomplete. In fact, construction has now seemingly come to a halt. If this is indeed the case, then Villa Nurbs appears to be falling into ruin even before ever being completed. A corian panel is missing on the facade, perhaps blown away in a windstorm, while dust and bird droppings accumulate on the EFTE surfaces. There are certainly no signs of human life on the site; neither construction workers nor inhabitants. A futurist dream house that is uninhabitable is now entering into decline just as slowly as it has taken to get this far, despite the use of the latest digital technology in its design and fabrication. All that money and effort spent on something that might actually never get to be enjoyed by its client; all those puff pieces published in various design media on an incomplete building that looks now like it will remain that way forever; all those claims of "sustainability" and "energy efficient materials". A building that can't be used is unsustainable, no matter how energy efficient it may be in theory. What a pathetic spectacle. I sincerely hope I'm wrong. 

A Tour of the Monuments of Sant Adrià del Besòs and Badalona in the Province of Barcelona

Realized in an illustration workshop conducted by Miguel Gallardo and Karin du Croo of Club Talleres.

A Reminder to Urban Planners

Given the choice, most children would rather play in a terrain vague than a playground. They would rather make mud patties out of dirt using makeshift utensils fashioned from pieces of junk, even with "real" toy utensils at hand. Children in most western countries are so overprotected--and western cities so over-designed--that they rarely get a chance anymore to discover things for themselves and improvise, using only their hands and their imagination. Vive le terrain vague! 

Not So Different

"Spain is Different" was a tourism campaign slogan coined in the mid-1960s by dictator Francisco Franco's Ministry of Information and Tourism (!), when it was headed by the late Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a man who would transform into a democrat decades later and continue a long-lasting political career until his death this year at age 90. Fraga's slogan became very effective, not only attracting millions of tourists and therefore much-needed foreign currency to revive Spain's moribund economy decades after its devastating civil war, but also serving to re-brand Spain as "hip"and "fun" at a time when it was isolated and only beginning to gradually open up to the world. Fraga is also known for having relaxed censorship laws during the 1960s, leading to the emergence of the popular expression "con Fraga hasta la braga!" ("with Fraga all the way to the panties!"). Such actions led him to be perceived as a relative reformer from within the dictatorial regime, making him relatively popular at that time. After Franco's death in 1975, however, when students and workers protested massively to demand democracy, Fraga was the Interior Minister who publicly proclaimed "La calle es mía!" ("the street belongs to me!") and ordered police to shoot demonstrators, killing five and wounding many dozen. Needless to say, this heavy-handed action caused him to be largely despised thereafter, ruining the relatively good reputation he had enjoyed until then.

Curiously, a multinational corporation that designs and manufactures computer and entertainment products started out by similarly  branding itself as "hip" and "fun" with a slogan that rings quite similar to "Spain is Different". And now, news of some rather heavy-handed and sordid business practices are similarly beginning to ruin its reputation.

Late in his life, Fraga dedicated his energy to an ambitious cultural and economic development project of which he is the brainchild, the City of Culture of Galicia, perhaps in an effort to restore his legacy. He organized an international competition in 1999 that was won by Peter Eisenman (an article I wrote on it can be read here), but curiously, one of the finalists in this competition, OMA, submitted a design for a building in the shape of a ring (a project which for some reason is not published on OMA's website). Coincidentally, the corporation whose slogan is "Think Different" is expected to soon begin construction of a building designed by Norman Foster that is shaped like...you guessed it: a ring.

Who would ever have thought that the story of a veteran politician from Spain and that of the world's biggest IT corporation could sound so similar, or perhaps better said: not so different?