Fashion Victim

Plastic green wall at a fashion boutique on La Rambla dels Estudis.

You know green walls have become trendy when a major fashion label puts one up that's made of plastic. Kinda defeats the very point of a green wall, doesn't it? Silly me. I thought green walls were invented so that carbon dioxide-depleting vegetation could be cultivated in places otherwise impossible, like dense urban centers (which just so happen to produce far more CO2 than they can regenerate). But it looks like green walls have now become signage instead. Plastic signage, to boot.

It just goes to show the ease with which an effort designed with the best of environmental intentions can end up becoming an environmental problem in the end, thanks to its very fashionableness; which is to say, in our media-age, thanks to its own "success". Will we now see Made-in-China green-walls at shopping malls everywhere? I mean, the plastic ones don't need expensive irrigation systems or maintenance, and they still pull in the suckers. Oops, I meant to say customers.

Next time someone invents something that improves the environment, please don't publicize it, OK?

Construction as Spectacle: Mercat dels Encants

The construction of the new Mercat dels Encants / Fira de Bellcaire (Barcelona's flea market), by b720 Arquitectos, is not only spectacular but also quite unusual, as it is being built completely without scaffolding. Large sections of the building are first fabricated on the ground before being elevated and fastened into place, a process similar to the way the nearby MediaTIC building by Cloud 9 was erected. However, there is a marked difference here: the columns along which the market's roof segments slide up are incredibly slender, looking as though they might collapse at any moment under the loads they support. In the end, it is of course the very roof structure that will finally provide lateral stability to the building. But until that moment, this site remains an unnerving sight.

Was it Frank Gehry who famously said once that buildings are generally more interesting under construction than finished? It will be interesting to see if that holds true in the case of this building.

Get Smart

Façade detail of the "Smartcity Barcelona" pavilion

A façade design in which photovoltaic panels end up casting shadows upon other photovoltaic panels does not seem to me to be the "smartest" design idea. "Form follows energy" is the catchy slogan of the "Smartcity Barcelona" pavilion's project statement (a research collaboration between Endesa and the IaaC), which attempts to explain an idea that actually makes perfect sense and that is indeed intelligent: why not use photovoltaic panels in conjunction with windows--as window awnings--so that solar heat gain into a building is minimized in summer and maximized in winter?

But because the windows of this façade are placed close together and staggered at different heights in a much more aesthetically dynamic checker pattern, some awnings end up casting shadows upon other ones at certain times of the day and year. If the windows and their awnings were simply lined up rather than checkered then this would not be a problem. But that would not look as sexy, would it?

All this becomes even more idiotic when we read in the statement that parametric design methods were applied here, presumably to optimize the placement of windows and the angles of their electricity-generating awnings. Looks like architectural form overshadowed, as it were, energy considerations. Are we before a new kind of façadism?

P.S. I'm getting really tired of the word "smart".