Criticalismo

Quietly Brilliant: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos

2012-01-26T12:31:00.000+01:00

Centre for Creativity, Córdoba

San Telmo Museum extension, San Sebastián

Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano are truly architects’ architects. They may not be a brand name known in ordinary households the world over, but they build fine buildings for which they have gained respect and admiration from peers. The record speaks for itself: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos has won first place in 25 Spanish and international competitions, and come second or third in another 20. They also received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2010. Not bad for a firm that’s only been around since 1999.

I meet Enrique at Nieto Sobejano’s Madrid office (the firm has a second office in Berlin) one Monday in late August, as the city is slowly returning to normal after the summer holidays. I figure the topic of competitions, and the importance of winning them, is as good as any to kick off with on a Monday morning marked by post-vacation depression syndrome. ‘Competitions are very important to us,’ says Enrique. ‘Up to now, 90 per cent of our built work has come from competitions. I say “up to now” because currently – thanks to the economic situation – Spain has far fewer competitions than it did some years ago. We opened our Berlin office as a result of winning a competition in Germany and have since won some in Austria.’ He goes on to tell me – in fluent English – that he grew up speaking German in addition to Spanish, and that he is also a professor in Berlin. Internationalize or perish: that seems to be the mantra for Spanish architects these days.

Do you believe that competitions lead to the best architecture?

Enrique Sobejano: I know of some offices that don’t enter competitions and that do very good work, mostly for private clients, with whom they enjoy a different kind of relationship. However, competitions can provide architects with certain advantages. In a competition, architects state at the outset what it is that they want to achieve. It gives them a stronger starting position in the relationship with the client. Apart from that – and even more importantly – regular participation in competitions encourages the development of a way of thinking. Competitions are conducive to intellectual development; it’s not just about getting jobs. Every new project that we do for a competition becomes a part of our ongoing research. The drawback to this way of working is that we are not linked very closely with a particular place and a particular community. We have only a few built works in Madrid. Most of our work is elsewhere, but I find that to be liberating. It frees us from local politics.

Does the competition system shape the way your office is organized?

We are not a big firm, so we don’t have one part of the office that does only competitions and another that does everything else. But we are not a small firm either, so we are often working on several competitions at the same time, especially since we opened our office in Berlin. Sometimes it’s complicated having to be in two places at the same time.

Your work seems to share certain affinities with the work of Team X and Dutch structuralism as practised by Aldo van Eyck, for instance. Is the study of architectural precedent part of your process?

Yes, we are very interested in the movements you mention, and in combinatorial ways of thinking. But ultimately we’re interested in a kind of economics of the conceptual. I’m not speaking about money here, but about not always over-designing things. We prefer to base a design conceptually on only a few building elements, and to repeat and combine these in different ways, exploring different possibilities. We are all aware that this is how life works; everything is based on modules, atoms or cells of some kind. Yet when I studied here in Madrid in the ’80s, this kind of approach was completely rejected. There were some Spanish architects from the 1950s and ’60s, such as Corrales and Molezún [designers of the Spanish Pavilion for Expo 58 in Brussels], who were also into the ideas we’re talking about – along with others, of course, including Bakema, Van Eyck and Louis Kahn.

Which Nieto Sobejano works do you consider paradigmatic, and why?

Exactly ten years ago we won the competition to build a museum and offices at the archaeological excavation site of Madinat al-Zahra, near Córdoba. That project represented a turning point for us, because Madinat al-Zahra made us aware of the incredibly rich tradition of Islamic architecture, which is – paradoxically – so contemporary. The thousand year-old geometric patterns of Islamic architecture are highly comparable to contemporary philosophical thought, to information technology and to open ended systems. And yet this museum was built very slowly, taking almost ten years to complete. Not because the builders were slow, but because archaeologists work slowly and methodically. For them we were too fast; their work is never finished. Contemporary architecture is often about speed, and we consider ourselves fortunate to have had the opportunity to build this work slowly, to really be able to think it through thoroughly. Most of our work is in the area of public cultural programmes, especially museums – buildings that receive a lot of attention. Museums have to be exemplary; fortunately, most museum directors understand this. But we are also able to meet tight deadlines: the Expo Zaragoza Congress Centre was completed in very little time, thanks precisely to an economics of the conceptual.

Your office is now completing a second museum in Córdoba, the Centre for Creativity.

Yes, the Centre for Creativity is a space for contemporary art. It is just across the river from the Great Mosque, one of the best architectural spaces in the world – a building full of lessons for architects. The system used for the Great Mosque is based on a module that is repeated, and in its present state it is also about transformation and hybridity. The Centre for Creativity is similarly related to the idea of a repetitive module, in this case one that is based on the geometry of a hexagon that has been separated into three unequal parts. A rearrangement of these fragments then becomes the pattern of both the plan, at the large scale and, at a smaller scale, the openings in the screen wall. Berlin artists realities:united collaborated on the screen wall. The surfaces of the small openings are illuminated by LEDs, and each opening acts as a pixel.

The San Telmo Museum Extension in San Sebastián, on the other hand, features a green wall.

No, not entirely. The San Telmo Museum Extension was conceived as an extension to the mountain that it is built into – Monte Urgull – as much as to the existing historical museum, which we restored. Intended to act as a buffer between the two, the extension has only a partially green façade. Plants grow in some openings, and others emit artificial light from the space between the double skin. The wall is transformative: during the day it looks more like a green façade – a landscape extension – while at night, when illuminated, it looks urban, becoming an extension of the city. Artists Ferrán - Otero worked with us on producing a standard cast-aluminium panel that could be combined in a number of ways.

Has Nieto Sobejano’s approach or process changed since its beginnings? Where do you see the practice headed in the future?

I don’t know. Some years ago we may have been looking more for the object-like qualities of buildings, whereas now we are clearly more interested in open-system geometries without a predetermined form. The museum we’re building in Graz, Austria, for example, pursues a similar line of thought to that of Madinat al-Zahra, as well as to our history museum in Lugo or the art centre in Córdoba: low, horizontal structures in which a series of patio-like openings become the defining elements of the work. I would say that our work has probably not changed all that much over the years, but it has gradually evolved. Regarding the future, as a consequence of the changing situation in the world, our field of activity might also extend outside Europe. In 2009, for example, we were among the five short-listed participants for the National Museum of Fine Art in Québec City, which OMA eventually went on to win. We are also starting to get involved in other countries, a move that is sure to introduce new perspectives to our approach, since we believe that architecture is always the result of a personal dialogue with the place – a balance between memory and invention.

As I leave Nieto Sobejano’s office and walk past the nearby Santiago Bernabéu Stadium – home of the Real Madrid football team – I am encouraged by the realization that architects can still gain international recognition quietly and through intellectual rigour, without making a lot of noise.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #35]

Park, Shop, and Pray. Sacred-Profane Mixed-Use Building in San Sebastian by Rafael Moneo

2011-12-26T20:27:00.001+01:00

Church, supermarket and parking garage in a single structure

Churches are architecture whereas supermarkets and parking garages are not. At least, that's what we've been taught by the likes of Nikolaus Pevsner and others. What, then, do we make of a single building designed by none other than Rafael Moneo, Spain's only Pritzker Prize winner, that contains all three of these functions within its walls? Situated in Riberas de Loiola, a new neighborhood of San Sebastián, the Iesu Church occupies the corner of a park (the Garden of Memory, which honors the 829 victims of the ETA terrorist organization), forming a transition between a rolling verdant landscape and apartment blocks. The inclusion of commercial retail space and parking in the church's basement allowed the church to offset 75% of construction costs.

Although this sacred-profane multi-use building is a single structure, each of the stacked functions is nevertheless entered separately, at different levels and on opposite sides of the building: the church is entered from the highest point of the site while the supermarket and parking garage entrances are entered from the lowest, taking maximum advantage of the site's topography.

The temple provides not a single hint of the supermarket, just as the supermarket makes no reference to the church. In fact, the supermarket even sells condoms.

Collective Intelligence, or Collective Stupidity?

2011-12-05T10:11:00.001+01:00

Detroit? Bangkok? Manila? Manaus? South Africa?

The above image is circulating on the internet accompanied by all sorts of captions of all sorts of cities on all sorts of continents, showing us how images, so easily appropriated and manipulated today, are deployed toward all sorts of ends, all too often sensationalist, demagogical, and misleading.

According to "Del Tirador a la Ciudad", the architecture and design blog of El País, this image is of Detroit, Michigan. Last time I visited Detroit, in 2001, there weren't any palm trees to be found, but who knows, maybe global warming has somewhat altered the flora of the Motor City over the last decade.

I suspect the author, Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, pulled the image from this post at Decrece Madrid, a grassroots environmentalist, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist organization in Madrid calling for the "degrowth" of that metropolis.

In both of the above websites, this image of "Detroit" serves to highlight the built manifestation of extreme socio-economic contrast, which is certainly visible in this image, and which can certainly be seen in parts of Detroit. Except that this isn't Detroit. Poverty in that city actually looks very different, occupying run-down 19th and early 20th century houses originally built for a white middle class that fled to the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s.

A reverse image search (conducted by talented architect and photographer Manca Ahlin) reveals a list of further cities which this image supposedly represents: Manila, Manaus, South Africa and Bangkok.

Is this collective intelligence, or is this collective stupidity? You can take your pic(k).

Calatravaland

2011-11-14T12:12:00.001+01:00

Santiago Calatrava explaining his skyscrapers to mayor of Valencia Rita Barberá and former premier of the Regional Autonomy of Valencia Francisco Camps. Photo courtesy El País.

El País reported recently that the government of the Autonomous Region of Valencia, when it was presided by Francisco Camps (the Popular Party leader who resigned recently over allegations of corruption), paid architect Santiago Calatrava over €15 million to design three skyscrapers for the city of Valencia that, it turns out, are never going to be built. The unusually high "fee" for such a preliminary study, not to mention the lack of an architectural competition, are not the only irregularities, however. The site of the three controversial skyscrapers is adjacent to a monumental opera house, a science museum, an IMAX cinema, a stadium, and a bridge all designed by... (tada!) Santiago Calatrava. Such a concentration in one place of so many large buildings by one architect is rare, and rather questionable in its wisdom.

True, a number of architects are historically associated with cities in which they built their careers: Palladio with Vicenza, Gaudí with Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe with Chicago, to name only some examples. But their works do not appear conspicuously amassed the way Calatrava's work appears to be in Valencia. The problem with Calatrava's architecture is that it long ago became a signature style, which is to say a cliché. When sparsely distributed around the globe in different cities, it is not very perceptible. But when overdone in one place, a cliché easily becomes a theme park.

Calatrava's early work, mainly bridges, are appreciable for containing some rationality. But in his later work, especially larger buildings, rationality gives way entirely to spectacle and showmanship. The true "function" of Calatrava buildings is to impress--the uses for which they are designated are mere pretext. The elongated and elevated proportions of the science museum at the City of Arts and Sciences, for example, make that building appear much larger than it is in reality; not unlike the way an aggressive dog makes its hair stand on end in order to appear bigger and more menacing.

The problem with the "City" of Arts and Sciences is that it is not designed by an architect-urbanist, but by an architect-sculptor of stand-alone objects. An architect-urbanist, when commissioned to design a large-scale urban project, will usually devise a plan in which the finer components--the buildings and public spaces that comprise it--are passed on to several architects to design, thereby ensuring that a single architect does not dominate. In the City of Arts and Sciences, however, Calatrava controls every detail, material, and color palette (white). Alright, to be fair: one of the buildings at the City of Arts and Culture, the aquarium, is by another architect, Felix Candela; but it is off to one end--a transition piece between the port of Valencia and Calatravaland.

It is useful to compare Valencia's City of Arts and Culture to another expensive cultural mega-project in Spain of roughly similar size and also designed in one signature style: the City of Culture of Galicia by Peter Eisenman. Here, six large buildings will, when completed, form an artificial hilltop landscape of sorts. But therein also lies a difference: The City of Culture of Galicia is actually relatively dense and compact. It is not a sprawling arrangement of similar-looking stand-alone objects, but a single structure subdivided by the overlay of a pattern of streets and public spaces.

Calatrava's work can be taken in low doses. It seems ideally suited for tourist consumption: an intense, once-in-a-lifetime "experience" to take photos of and post on facebook. But you couldn't take living there for very long. A good thing it is, then, that these towers are not going ahead. In fact, considering just how corny Calatravaland would begin looking with three skyscrapers added to it, I wonder if this might not have been the plan all along.

The Cantilever Race

2011-11-05T23:32:00.000+01:00

Forum 2004 Building, Herzog & de Meuron

The skyscraper race is over. It's been won hands down by an absurdly high building in Dubai which doesn't look like it will be superseded for quite a while. But not to worry: there is another space race currently in full swing. Unlike the skyscraper race, which was mostly between corporations-developers and their corporate architecture firms, this space race involves organizations and architects of a more academic and artistic inclination. The cantilever race is the fashionable one to participate in now, and if your architectural design doesn't have a pronounced protrusion poking out of one of its sides or isn't suspended in a way that appears to defy gravity, it won't stand a chance. Whose cantilever is the highest, the longest, or the most absurd? CCTV? MVRDV? EMBT? MOUSE?

Despite appearances, though, this cantilever race is not really very different from the skyscraper race. As every structural engineer knows (along with, hopefully, most architects), skyscrapers have to be designed as vertical cantilevers because they must resist, "above all", wind forces. Seen in this light, the current cantilever race is a horizontal skyscraper race of sorts. Horizontal has become the new vertical.

Barcelona, perhaps in its bid to outdo Dubai at something, has been participating in this cantilever race wholeheartedly. A good example of Catalan Cantileverisme is the Catalan Filmothèque, a veritable concrete bunker by Catalan architect Josep Lluis Mateo (professor at the ETH in Zürich and a founder of the BIArch) that is currently being completed just a few blocks from my home in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona. It sports a massive, post-tensioned concrete cantilever reaching over a narrow street, nearly touching the balconies of its residential neighbours. But, what is the cantilever for? What is it doing? Is it sheltering the entrance to the building? No, it only shelters a utility door to an electrical transformer. Is it creating public space? Yes, but not a public space with any qualities, since it is merely widening a dark and dingy street known for vice with a dark and dingy "plaçeta". Unless it is deliberately intended to provide a shady spot for junkies to shoot up or for prostitutes to turn a trick, which I don't think is the case, then just what is the cantilever doing, precisely? Nothing, unless looking impressive (or oppressive, better said) counts as doing something. For all the talk these days about "performance" in architecture...

Filmothèque of Catalonia, Josep Lluis Mateo

But this is not an isolated case. In fact Barcelona abounds with cantilevers of all shapes, sizes and pretexts. The following is a photographic tour of some of the cantilevers of Barcelona:

Gas Natural Headquarters, EMBT

Disseny Hub, MBM

Office building, Dominique Perrault

Hotel ME, Dominique Perrault

Office building, Josep Mías

Fire Station, Manuel Ruisánchez

Office building, Arata Isozaki

Botanical Institute, Carles Ferrater

Hotel in Poble Nou

Social Housing, Arturo Frediani (photo courtesy Urbipedia)

Quaderns 204 cover (1994).

Experimenting in Public: Metropol Parasol, Seville, by Jürgen Mayer H.

2011-09-28T14:11:00.005+02:00

Seville’s public squares come in all shapes and sizes. Some are large and officious, others small and illicit; some are patronized by conservative families in their Sunday best, while others are taken over by rowdy radicals in their Thursday-night gear. The life of Seville’s plazas changes with the time of the day, the day of the week and the fiesta of the month.

Yes, public space is still ‘public’ in Spain, meaning it is a charged, highly contested area of gentle conflict. Progress may have usurped the role of public space in much of the rest of the world – or packaged it into a cheesy, sanitized theme-park ‘experience’ – but here it is still considered vital for purposes of leisure, commerce, ritual, making yourself heard, or simply seeing and being seen. This is especially the case in Seville, where stepping out the door requires spending at least half an hour in front of the bathroom mirror – or else risk being mistaken for a guiri (Spanish slang for ‘tourist’). Squares are even among the favourite subjects of joking complaints by Sevillanos, almost up there with politics and football. The riddler’s question most often comes down to why so many contemporary plazas are duras (hard-paved), which is to say treeless, soulless and inhospitable. Answer: so that guiris can sunbathe there.

This criticism does not apply, however, to Jürgen Mayer H's Metropol Parasol, a multi-level, multi-use redevelopment of the centrally situated Plaza de la Encarnación that locals have already dubbed ‘las setas’ (the mushrooms). Generously shading the square – now elevated over a market, boutiques and an archaeology museum – is an expansive waffled-timber canopy that looks much more like a grove of stone pines (Pinus pinea, interestingly referred to as the ‘parasol pine’) than a cluster of mushrooms, magical or not. But not to worry: Seville’s esteemed citizens have already found other aspects of Metropol Parasol to criticize, such as serious cost overruns and delays. Such grievances are, of course, indisputable. But I do wish to make the following case before the court of public opinion that has emerged over this structure: a work of public architecture is worth significant extra investment when, as here, it experiments and takes risks in pursuit of a more ecological way of building intended to benefit future generations. Admittedly, the construction of schools and day-care centres should not have been put on hold for the sake of a single high-profile building project, but architecture that builds new knowledge is equally important. We need both.

Let’s begin with the facts. Plaza de la Encarnación is a square at the centre of Seville’s extensive historical core originally occupied by a medieval convent and, later, a 19th century market hall demolished in 1973. After that, for almost four decades, the site was surrounded by metal hoarding initially erected for the construction of an underground car park; a project that had to be abandoned when ancient Roman archaeological remains were encountered. The hoarding remained during the subsequent archaeological excavation as well as throughout the lengthy construction of Metropol Parasol.

The programme of Jürgen Mayer H's redesign of the square – the winner of a 2004 competition – comprises an archaeology museum, a market, and a plaza with a vast, habitable parasol-like structure supported by six columns that rest on foundation pilings remaining from the discontinued car park. Construction of Metropol Parasol encountered delays and cost overruns caused by the complexity of building over archaeological remains, as well as by the complexity of the parasol itself. Using exposed laminated timber for the first time on such a large scale and in such a hot climate necessitated the development of a new method for protecting wood from high levels of ultraviolet radiation and heat.

Yes, Metropol Parasol is experimental. But the experimentation was not undertaken purely for the sake of form. This investigation focused on the formal possibilities of a construction system new to a climate zone that occasionally sets global high-temperature records. By curving, folding and nurbing the parasol, the architects tested the permutations and possibilities of the system. It is experimental architecture at its best, if you ask me, because the inventions developed to make this structure endure offer lessons and new possibilities for application. So why not simply use good old steel or concrete instead of wood? Because wood is the building material of the future. Wood is not only renewable; it also sequesters carbon, making it perform even better than a carbon-neutral building material. Finding new, more complex applications for wood is crucial today, especially in conditions of intense heat – a scenario that awaits more and more regions of the planet.

How better to catalyze a research agenda than by way of an ambitious public-space project that produces findings for everyone to see and (bonus!) to enjoy. Architecture is the most public of the arts, and when it involves extensive research and development, as this project does, it builds public, open-source knowledge. Spain is often criticized for investing less than other European countries in research and development. I wonder how the rankings would look if experimental public architecture were part of the equation.

This less-visible, long-term aspect of Metropol Parasol should be taken into consideration if the project is to enjoy a fair trial in the court of public opinion. But even leaving aside its value in terms of embodied knowledge, Metropol Parasol is fantastic as a public space, a fact that cannot be denied. It is a work of art imitating nature, a strategy that makes much more sense in a dense historical urban context than the addition of just another building. Metropol Parasol is an adventure-filled promenade of unexpected delights to walk over, under, around and through. Beneath the canopy, a generous stairway leads from Calle Imagen, the busiest street in the heart of the city, to the elevated plaza. Reminiscent of the Spanish Steps in Rome, these wide stairs invite pedestrians to linger and relax. The rather baroque handrails terminate by turning in broad arcs, closing in on themselves to enclose micro-gardens and openings through which archaeological remains can be seen below. The elevated plaza is a spacious surface designed to host all sorts of events, including the Holy Week procession, Seville’s most important traditional fiesta.

Metropol Parasol is still too new to judge how well it will be appropriated and whether it will become an organic, living part of this vital historical city. For this to happen, the controversy has to die down, the politicians have to move on to other issues, and Sevillanos have to stop looking at the structure as a foreign intrusion and truly make it theirs. It is, after all, a public space both simple and complex enough to offer something for everyone. Unlike most icons, which are semi-public if not outright private, this square is open 24/7 and of interest to one and all, not just to architects and guiris. Hey: experimenting in public is not a crime.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #33]

POSTSCRIPT:
This article was written before the events of May 2011, when public squares in all major cities in Spain became sites of spontaneous protest against high unemployment, corruption, and a distancing of political leadership from citizens. Plaza de Encarnación became Seville's site of spontaneous protest (as can be seen here), specifically Calle Imagen and the "Spanish Steps" leading to the elevated plaza.

Strike a Pose: Assisted Living Facility near Lisbon by Aires Mateus Architects

2011-07-28T02:59:00.008+02:00

Photography: Fernando Guerra

What is it that makes these architectural images so seductive? To be sure, there is nothing here that we haven’t seen before, at least at first glance: a work of exquisitely proportioned, beautifully detailed architecture bordering on sculpture is represented in crisp, technically perfect colour photographs shot under blue skies on a sunny day. We are so inundated by this kind of imagery in design, travel and lifestyle publications that we must surely be immune to it by now. Granted, a few colourful characters included for the sake of human scale give these architectural photographs a certain charm, but something else makes these particular images stand out. Is it the building’s design, the photography, or both?

Make no mistake: photography is crucial when it comes to architecture. Buildings are perceived even more through photographic reproduction than through direct, first-hand experience. A famous example is Mies van der Rohe’s German pavilion, designed for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. It is remarkable just how much celebrity this building garnered considering the relatively few people who were fortunate enough to experience the pavilion ‘live’ during its brief period of existence. If it weren’t for the publication of some black-and-white photographs taken on the occasion of a visit by Spanish royalty to the pavilion, the building would probably have remained in obscurity. Nor, for that matter, would it have been possible to reconstruct the pavilion half a century later – and to re-reproduce it in vibrant colour.

Photographic reproduction is not only essential for making a work of architecture known outside its immediate neighbourhood, not to mention beyond its life span; photography has also become crucial for the success of any building venture from a stakeholder perspective. Architecture has always been a form of communication, and good design is a prerequisite for good advertising copy (just ask Steve Jobs). The incredible photorealism of current rendering software, which is making it more and more difficult to distinguish 3D models from their physical counterparts, means buildings can be – and are – designed to look better than ever, to be photogenic by design. Of course, buildings must be designed to accommodate the human body in its entirety, not just to satisfy the desires of the human retina. But even when we do inhabit architecture bodily, chances are our eyes perceived it first – most likely by way of photographic reproduction.

The residências assistidas (assisted living) facility that Aires Mateus realized in Alcácer do Sal, Portugal, has a thoroughly functional design that gives residents the opportunity to live their final years with dignity. But the complex can also be seen as meticulously detailed architecture that has been designed, wittingly or unwittingly – and this is entirely my contention – to be photogenic. The success of this work lies not in its capacity to perform as it should, or even in its beauty, but in the fact that neither quality has been achieved at the expense of the other. But what, exactly, makes for ‘photogenic’ architecture?

A look at the building is a good place to start. Emerging from a hillside at one edge of the small, historical town of Alcácer do Sal, near Lisbon, the assisted living facility is an elongated, low-rise, bar-shaped building that is folded in places to create semi-enclosed public gardens at grade. The stark white building mass is punctured by large, deep, angular openings, most of which function as private outdoor patios for the individual rooms of this hotel-like home for the elderly. The deep recessing of these patios prevents solar heat gain inside the rooms, while allowing occupants to choose between privacy and community, as well as between sun and shade. The facility is entered at the end of the building nearest the town. From here, a lobby leads to stairs and long meandering corridors that lend access to individual rooms.

Each room faces a private patio visible through a window-wall that is rotated at an oblique angle to the plane of the façade, making the opening much less prominent in elevation. This simple but highly effective detail is crucial: it gives the building its abstract character. Windows – the eyes to the soul of a building, as it were – are among the most figurative parts of a building. By recessing and rotating these windows towards the private patios, the architects have ‘freed’ the façade of a glass-and-mullion configuration and enabled a much purer, solid-void dynamic to take place – a dynamic that makes the building sculptural. Like all abstract sculpture, the building undoubtedly generates different associations for different viewers: where art aficionados might be reminded of the work of Anish Kapoor, gluttons may see Swiss cheese and those with a fascination for death a burial wall with oversize crypts. What it won’t be seen as is a building with windows.

The obvious drawback to recessed private patios is that the building becomes significantly longer and more drawn out than would otherwise be the case. But these voids are not a caprice that serves ‘only’ architectural aesthetics; they are spaces that improve the residents’ quality of life. In this building, beauty is reconciled with utility. Indeed, what makes these façades so attractive is precisely that their defining elements – voids – are useful and delightful spaces. If the building becomes longer as a result, the leisurely strolls within and on top of it become all the more leisurely.

Another notable aspect of the building’s abstract appearance is that it has been achieved with ordinary, vernacular building materials commonly used throughout southern Europe. No high-tech materials visible here. The building may be highly abstract and unusual, but it is rooted at the same time in regional building typology and tradition. The practice of combining traditional materials with a modern expression has been a hallmark of certain ‘critical regionalist’ schools for some time and is in total contrast to the unfortunate international phenomenon of plastic-clad, neoclassical monster-homes in which high-tech materials are combined with a ‘historicist’ expression.

A similar ambiguity can be seen in Fernando Guerra’s photographs of the building in Alcácer do Sal: the presence of local elderly farmers in the foreground of some of the images reminds us of social documentary photography, a critical genre that has its roots in the work of photographers such as Jacob Riis. Buildings featured in social documentary photography, however, are usually decrepit vernacular structures, not cutting-edge architecture. Similarly, the people (if any) we are used to seeing in architectural photography are rarely elderly farmers. The ambiguity of this photographic genre provokes a tension that, like the abstractness of its subject, comes close to what we feel when viewing art.

Architecture has always been a favourite subject for photography, whether the structures are in a state of ruin or are newly completed. But it is the context in which images are reproduced that conditions the way we look at and appreciate them. We no longer believe that photography is a neutral or objective medium that merely documents what it sees; we understand it to be a highly subjective and selective process of framing and omitting – digital manipulation aside. Similarly, we no longer believe that the difference between architecture and building lies, as Nikolaus Pevsner remarked, in the difference between Lincoln Cathedral and a bicycle shed. Building becomes architecture when it is reproduced photographically. Otherwise, a building remains a building, no matter how photogenic it is.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #32]

Context is Still Everything

2011-07-13T20:43:00.001+02:00

The building that looks like an anvil is the soon to be completed Disseny HUB Barcelona, a design museum by the veteran firm MBM (Martorell, Bohigas, MacKay). It is characterized by a very large cantilever suspended over an elevated highway and traffic circle surrounding a park. This gesture serves, presumably, so that the end of the cantilever, which will be equipped with a large multimedia screen, will be visible from the park without being obstructed by the elevated highway. Considering that the architectural firm MBM is known for its rational, urban and contextual approach, that would seem to me like the main justification for such structural gymnastics.

But as it turns out, the very raison d'être behind this architectural move--the elevated highway--is slated to be demolished and submerged beneath what will become a much larger Plaça de les Glòries. It even turns out that this fact was known before construction began on the building, meaning of course that there was an opportunity to re-design the building to suit the "new" context--an opportunity that the architects, in all their wisdom, declined. What are we to make of this: that the very context that formed the basis of the architectural strategy of this building is, then, not so important in the end? I am reminded of something I read somewhere once to the effect of "fuck context."

To be sure, the elevated highway cannot be demolished until the tunnels are completed, so there is at least a window of some years during which the Disseny HUB design will make some sense. Just enough time for the building to be photographed, published, and talked about. And after that...who cares?

Experimental Architecture Without Architects

2011-06-13T20:34:00.005+02:00

A Green School classroom

The Green School auditorium

Bamboo joinery details

Bamboo is an ancient building material that fell largely out of favor in the twentieth century, only to be used as scaffolding in the construction of Asian skyscrapers or else to create atmosphere in polynesian-themed bars and restaurants that serve cocktails decorated with miniature umbrellas. But that may be changing now as our addiction to concrete is proving to be unsustainable. Good old bamboo is making a comeback as a “green” building material: it is natural, very fast-growing, light-weight, strong, flexible, affordable, and requires relatively little maintenance. Its only disadvantages are that it deteriorates when exposed to direct sunshine and certain kinds of insects like to feed on it. The other thing about bamboo is that, in structural applications, it has to be used whole. It can’t be sawn into lumber the way wood can. Bamboo structures are then, by their very nature, rather rustic and imprecise--the opposite of contemporary Swiss architecture.

What is most remarkable about the Green School in Bali is the architectural experimentation that is being undertaken. Altogether, these structures comprise a veritable catalogue of countless ways that bamboo can be used as a building material. Especially impressive are the sizable column-free spans that have been achieved by means of long arches of bundled bamboo, and the beauty of latticed column structures.

Interestingly, the person behind this experiment--John Hardy--is not an architect, but a jeweler.

Blackwash

2011-05-19T17:46:00.005+02:00

You wouldn’t know it from looking at photographs such as these. You wouldn’t even know it if you were standing in front of the building itself. And you would definitely never suspect it knowing the architects are RCR Aranda Pigem Vilalta, the Catalan trio known for its uncompromisingly architectural architecture. No, you would only know it if someone in the know made it known: this is a “green” building; LEED certified and all.

So where, you might well ask, are the photovoltaic panels, the wind turbines, or the nitrogen-inflatable EFTE pillows? Why isn’t the building set in a Teletubbies landscape? And considering this is a private-sector commercial office building: where is the eco-lifestyle advertising billboard that doubles to greenwash the corporate brand? No, this building does not make hay out of the tons of CO₂ that it prevents from being emitted annually into the atmosphere, nor does it show off its rooftop photovoltaic panels, solar hot water heating system, or grey water-flushing toilets (thank goodness).

On the other hand, this building does make ordinary sheet steel (recycled and recyclable, of course) look like slabs of marble à la Barcelona Pavilion; it makes a two-way reflective glass interior light-well recall a Dan Graham installation; and it manages to visually appropriate the neighboring Repsol service station (designed by Norman Foster) in order to transform it into a piece of corporate sculpture in a plaza. Could it finally be that designing a building that saves energy and natural resources no longer needs to look like it’s doing so, and that it might actually even delight us in the process?

[originally published in Mark Magazine #31]

Pop Architecture

2011-03-26T20:40:00.007+01:00

Ordinary, everyday objects--that's what most architectural sobriquets refer to. A gherkin, a paperclip, a typewriter, a stapler, mushrooms, milk cartons, cereal boxes, dildos... These kinds of endearing associations create a pop-cultural world parallel to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's, whose inflated, oversized banal objects are exactly what the "untrained eye" seems to see in many buildings.

"La macchina per scrivere" (the typewriter), Rome.

"La grapadora" (the stapler) by MBM, Barcelona

"De paperklip" (the paper clip) by Carel Weeber, Rotterdam.

"Las setas" (the mushrooms) by Jürgen Mayer H., Seville.

"El tampax" (the tampon), by Toyo Ito, Barcelona

"La pedrera" (the stone quarry) by Antoni Gaudí, Barcelona.

La colmena (the beehive), by Taller de Arquitectura, Barcelona

La gasolinera (the gas station), by Viaplana, Piñon, Miralles, Barcelona

"The gherkin" by Foster, London

La râpe à fromage (cheese grater), Roger d'Astous & Jean Paul Pothier, Montreal

La chute à linge (laundry chute) by Moshe Safdie, Montreal (photo courtesy nwaonline.com)

One of many "milk cartons" by IKOY, Winnipeg

Power to the People: Andrés Jaque activist-architect

2011-02-03T13:49:00.011+01:00

The office of Andrés Jaque Arquitectos

Still on the shy side of 40, Andrés Jaque is a leading member of a new generation of Spanish architects that is emerging onto the international scene, a generation that distinguishes itself more by its way of working – networking, to be more precise – than by any singly identifiable architectural style. Indeed, this generation is seemingly more interested in process than in product, quite unlike the previous generation, whose trademark minimalism of the 1980s and ’90s has become a kind of official dogma in Spain. What these generations have in common, nevertheless, is political activism, albeit approached from different positions. Members of the elder generation of architects took on positions of power in new governmental institutions, both municipal and regional, that had to be ‘built’ during the post-Franco transition to democracy, while those of the new generation more often work for NGOs, collaborate with neighbourhood associations and stage media events as acts of protest. The latter are more anti-Establishment. To their way of thinking, the perfectly detailed building is no longer as important as a design process that invites public participation and interaction by using digital platforms and Web 2.0 networks. In short, these architects are more ‘artist-activists’ than ‘professional experts’. Knowing that Andrés Jacque is one of their most outspoken exponents, I eagerly make my way to Madrid on the first high-speed train out of Barcelona one summer morning.

Hidden away in the heart of Malasaña, a lively barrio in Madrid, Andrés Jaque’s small office is on a street so obscure that people from neighbouring streets haven’t even heard of it. Only the news vendor at the nearby Plaza del 2 de Mayo is able to direct me to Calle de la Galería de Roble. Entering the calle, I spot a sign the size of a business card on a storefront: Andrés Jaque Arquitectos. I knock on the door and am greeted instantly by the man himself – no secretary, no receptionist – and shown inside. The interior is minuscule but high, with a small mezzanine overlooking a double-height space. It’s the kind of shop that was probably once occupied by a neighbourhood shoemaker or locksmith.

The size of his office is the first thing I mention to Andrés. ‘We are actually two offices here,’ he says, ‘an architecture firm and the Oficina de Inovación Política (Office for Political Innovation or OPI).’ Oh, like OMA and AMO, but smaller? ‘Not exactly, because in this case one of the offices is not a business but a not-for-profit think-tank.’ Reminder to self: pick up on this topic again soon.

He introduces me to two colleagues: a young architect from Bogotá, Colombia, and a young sociologist from Lanzarote, Canary Islands. Wait a minute: a sociologist? Hmm. Just what does the ‘Office for Political Innovation’ actually do, I ponder aloud, and what, if anything, does it have to do with Jaque’s architecture practice?

‘Field work’ is his answer. ‘You know: research.’ He goes on: ‘Ever since I was a student, I’ve been more interested in the complexity of the life that occurs in architecture than in the complexity [and contradiction?] of architecture itself. I’ve wondered why it is that buildings are designed so that people are inevitably obliged to adapt to the architecture rather than the other way round. I decided to make it my mission to dismantle the widely held notion of architecture as a fait accompli. I believe architecture must adapt to reality.’ I find myself nodding in agreement: Jacque is very persuasive and enthusiastic. He would probably make a good motivational speaker, I think to myself.

‘Reality is extremely complex, so we need descriptions of it that are equally complex. The Office for Political Innovation is interested in qualitative sociology, in detailed descriptions of current ways of living and of social interaction that can inform the design process of buildings. This is why we engage in field work.’

How did Andrés go from having a student interest in field work to engaging in it professionally? ‘It all came about gradually. We were a bunch of friends and colleagues who one day decided to articulate and make public a political agenda. We would look for the “architectural dimension” of everything that was happening around us, especially news items of public concern: the environment, gender inequality, poverty, et cetera. We soon realized that to address these public concerns seriously and legitimately we needed to join people from other fields who were already directly involved in such issues. I’m tired of hearing architects say that we are like film directors, that we ‘direct’ others. No, we architects are a part of something bigger. In a complex urban reality, we don’t want just one person pulling all the strings. We need a multiplicity of agents. We live in a democracy, not a technocracy!’

Jaque is on a roll now. He is speaking in Spanish, and if there’s one thing Spaniards have it’s the gift of gab. This man is especially gifted: I can hardly get a word in edgeways.

‘In the end, what we are interested in is urbanism as a qualitative endeavour. Too often there is a fascination with the quantitative: numbers that generate “datascapes” and “mappings” as if these were ends in themselves. The question of urbanism is ultimately a qualitative one: what kind of social interaction do we want in cities? Koolhaas’s research into the “culture of congestion” and studies by the Multiplicity group are interesting examples of qualitative studies of the city.’

I point to dozens of pieces of coloured paper filled with notations arranged in rows on the wall, and ask if these are part of a field-work project.

‘Yes. One of our research projects involves a qualitative survey of the way people live. It’s called “Current Ways of Living”. We are interviewing hundreds of people in their homes to find out what sort of arrangement they live in – traditional family, single-parent family, gay couple, flatmates, roommates – and what kinds of problems and preoccupations this raises. One of the things we have learned first-hand is that there is no such thing as a traditional family any more. We strive for an urbanism that can accommodate ways of living that are as diverse as possible, not the unifying, pacifying urbanism we have now. Confrontation is more constructive than a fictitious consensus.’

I am reminded of something I read recently: that one of the primary motives behind the construction of spectacular public buildings by celebrity architects over the last decade has been to build consensus among citizens – that the Bilbao Effect is a pacification strategy. By bringing residential architecture into the urban political debate, Jaque is challenging this enshrined model. He is championing an urbanism of the ordinary and the everyday rather than an urbanism of the extraordinary and the holiday.

‘When you think about it, the domestic interior is much more of a politicized space than the innocent and sacred “home sweet home” it’s made out to be. John Lennon and Yoko Ono knew this when they bedded-in for peace. If we look beyond the traditional family at other kinds of cohabitation, such as apartments shared by Erasmus students, we find that the home is where we encounter “the other” and where all sorts of forms of collectivity are negotiated. Internet has also made the home much more public. Some homes are veritable television studios these days: look at the ongoing fascination with reality shows that occur in domestic spaces.’

Residential architecture is indeed what constitutes the bulk of the built environment; there’s little question that it has not been given the architectural attention it deserves, especially in Spain. But I’m still wondering how Andrés transforms field work into design. How are his theories manifested in his built work? Or are both these offices completely separate spheres of activity?

‘Each office has its own business model, priorities and levels of risk. One is an office that delivers a service to paying clients. This office has to deliver on time and on budget; it can’t afford to take too many risks. It has a responsibility to the public and to the client. The other is a not-for-profit organization. I couldn’t ask sociologists to collaborate on a research project if there was a profit motive. The motive has to be a common research interest and a common political goal – nothing else. We’ve received some research commissions, and sometimes an architectural commission has come out of a research project we’ve initiated. So while there is a transfer of knowledge between the two offices, their organizational and economic structures are different.’

I ask if this research finds its way to the real powers that be: politicians, planners and developers. ‘The OPI disseminates its findings by means of exhibitions and publications in places like the University of Alicante’s architecture school and La Casa Encendida Cultural Centre in Madrid. Through these institutions, I hope the information reaches politicians, planners and developers, because the diversity of living arrangements that exists out there is not reflected at all in the built environment. All we seem to find are three-bedroom homes for traditional families, which almost don’t exist any more. As architects, we have to enter into more of a dialogue with developers, who are a lot more willing to innovate their product if it can deliver an advantage for them. The problem is that the property and housing market is not very transparent. It has been driven entirely by speculation, which explains the repetition of three-bedroom units. Look at how developers' advertisements all seem to look and sound the same when compared with the way people describe their own homes in ads that tend to be much more nuanced and detailed. We do field work in order to go into detail, not to generalize. Details help us understand better just how complex reality is. At the Venice Biennale this year, I participated in a round table discussion with a few architects who have very large practices, and they were complaining that architecture is no longer possible because the only design freedom left to architects is in the façade. To this I responded: reduce the size of your practice, collaborate within a multidisciplinary network and refuse to work for big clients. Of course, the remuneration won’t be the same, but the satisfaction and the respect you’ll receive will be much greater.’

As the train pulls out of Atocha Station for the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Barcelona, block after block of soulless new housing blocks filled with three-bedroom dwellings pass by the window. Their formulaic monotony is perfectly revealed as the train accelerates. I come to a realization: this is not so much an architectural problem as it is a political one, and political problems do indeed require political innovation.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #29]

Interview with Peter Eisenman

2010-11-29T20:24:00.006+01:00

[This is an excerpt of an interview I conducted with Peter Eisenman in Santiago de Compostela in May 2010. The full interview is published in KLAT magazine #4, which can be ordered here.]

Rafael Gómez-Moriana: I can’t help noticing that you give a lot of interviews.

Peter Eisenman: They are all on different subjects. In addition to my work as an architect I write, I lecture, I teach, so I end up giving interviews about everything from football to theory. Perhaps the least interesting topic for me is architecture. Architecture is basically boring as an interview subject.

RGM: Indeed, you’ve been interviewed quite a bit on the subject of politics.

PE: That’s because many of my clients are to the right-of-center politically, so interviewers occasionally try to get me to say right-oriented things.

RGM: Well, I hate to disappoint you, but most of my questions have to do with architecture; specifically the City of Culture of Galicia. Is this the most important project of your career?

PE: Now, the City of Culture is not boring, I am very excited by the buildings. It is certainly one of my most important projects.

RGM: It's currently the largest construction site in Spain, if I’m not mistaken, and probably one of the largest in Europe.

PE: It’s a million and a half square feet under cover, which makes it larger than the Getty Center. So yes, it's a very large project.

RGM: Does building in Spain differ very much from building in the USA or Germany? Some like to say that Spain is different.

PE: All countries have different aspects. Take Europe and America. There is much more concern in Europe for public space than there is in the United States. In the USA, public space is mainly controlled by developers. You could not do a public project of this scale on public land in the United States; it would be taken up by developers. In Germany, the Holocaust Memorial sits on a prime piece of real estate in the center of Berlin. This would be impossible in New York because of real estate speculation. Europeans’ concern for public space manifests itself in the media. Every time I visit Spain, Germany or Italy there are requests for interviews with the press and television. Architecture is good media in Europe because cities are an important part of European culture. Galicia is different, though, because there is a certain longing for a return to the regional language and customs...there’s a certain “not wanting to be in the world”. Manuel Fraga is a very cultured and sophisticated man who, when he was president of Galicia, really wanted to do something good for Galicia. He didn’t want to do what Franco did at el Valle de los Caídos. He wanted to contribute to the culture of this place, or create a culture of this place. When he was Spain’s Minister of Information and Tourism he created the Paradores, and as Galicia’s president he had the idea for the City of Culture architectural competition. When we won, Fraga was insistent the project was going to be built, and built well. He worked very hard to do it. In Germany it was also a struggle to build the Holocaust Memorial, but there was general agreement that it should be built. Nobody questioned that. The disagreements were regarding what it should mean, how it should look, etc. There was more of a political consensus in the German parliament. Spain’s politics are more polarized. The politics in Spain are different, and you feel that when you're doing architecture here. Nobody has ever built a project of mine as well as these buildings are being built in Galicia. Yet we still find ourselves having to educate the people of Galicia about this project.

RGM: But isn't that somewhat ironic, since there’s a strong landscape metaphor in the City of Culture? Landscape is something the regional culture here values very dearly, I would think. I wonder if you could comment about landscape in architecture, because lately we're seeing a lot of architects likening their projects to mountains, rivers, glaciers and crystals rather than to architecture per se.

PE: Nature is never used as a metaphor in my work. Rather, the work is concerned with a very fundamental architectonic project. The philosophical background to the work is the metaphysical dialectic: the relationship between ground and object. That has been a dominant discourse of current thought, specifically poststructuralist French thought, which has argued that there is a problem in the hegemony of vision. It manifests itself in the figure in the frame in painting. In architecture this discourse is largely a visual one. Since 1978 my work has attempted to confound the relationship between ground and figure, so that figure becomes ground and ground becomes figure. That's why it is so difficult to photograph these buildings: they're not objects. They’re not “image buildings”. They are experiential buildings; actual buildings for people, not metaphors. The innate idea in the City of Culture is that it is a hillside that has erupted and heaved up from the Monte Gaiás, that it is a pre-existing object.
...

Top-Down Tower, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, by R+B Arquitectes

2010-10-08T15:30:00.010+02:00

Social housing is among the most regulated--and least glamorous--areas of architecture. While all housing is normally subject to a set of minimum room dimensions, social housing is additionally governed by stringent maximum dimensions which happen to be almost equal to the minimum ones, leaving little margin for architectural maneuver. When, moreover, the building envelope is predetermined by a master plan, then little more than the façade and the entrance lobby are left for design consideration. Yet these two elements make a significant difference, as this 77 unit social housing tower by Barcelona’s R+B Architects shows.

Part of an urban master plan by Viaplana & Piñon for L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the Plaça Europa apartment tower was designed, according to architect Miguel Roldán, “from the top-down”. What he really means here is that from the outset, the program was packed as densely as possible into the given building envelope descending from the top floor down, allowing the ground floor communal entrance lobby to become a larger interior street of sorts. On the exterior, three-story high groupings of deeply recessed windows give the fifteen story tower the appearance of containing only five floors, a nod to the traditional lower buildings nearby.

With its elegant façade and generous lobby-cum-interior street, it’s hard to believe this is social housing. R+B have certainly upped the ante with their top-down tower. The downside, however, is that housing regulators now have a new pretext for reducing the architectural margin even more.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #27]

City as Landscape: City of Culture of Galicia by Eisenman Architects

2010-10-06T20:53:00.011+02:00

Monte Gaiás

Library

Is the pleasure of architecture intellectual or sensual? Of the mind or of the body? This theoretical debate, which is currently raging between the parametric-blobo-diagrammatic-conceptualists and the mythopoetic-tectonic-perceptual- phenomenologists has been going on for some time now, and who knows when, if ever, the two sides will settle their differences. While this debate is essentially academic and therefore largely irrelevant, it nevertheless reflects a more general sign of the times: we seem to be living once again in an irreconcilably divided world of binary oppositions in which the ideological middle ground of moderation is going the way of the modern middle class, which is to say slowly disappearing. Extremism, the new world order, is increasingly served up in copious quantities everywhere, from the global blogosphere to local-yocal tea parties. It’s a polarized world out there, and you don’t want to be caught in the middle of it.

Peter Eisenman is no stranger to polemics. He is among the most outspoken figures in architecture, a field with its fair share of charismatic personalities spewing provocative sound bites for the mass media. Throughout his career, Eisenman’s designs, teachings and writings have transgressed established norms in order to test the theoretical limits of architecture, asking the question: what is architecture really about and whom is it really for? The way he sees it, architecture is more of an autonomous ‘art’, one that must be vehemently defended against the broader (mis)understanding of architecture as a ‘service’ in which the client is always right. For him, formal investigations, especially geometric operations, should take precedence over functional imperatives in the architectural design process. To drive the point home, his House VI, for example, built for Robert and Suzanne Frank in Connecticut in 1975, has a column skewering the dining table so that diners are separated from one another, while a slot in the floor, walls and roof of the bedroom forces the Franks to sleep in separate beds, apparently against their wishes. Essentially, Eisenman’s credo comes down to ‘architecture for the sake of architecture’; clients and users be damned. A fundamentalist position if ever there was one.

It is noteworthy that Eisenman should receive his largest, most ambitious commission in Spain, a country whose history is still the subject of passionate debate, and that the instigator behind the City of Culture should happen to be Senator Manuel Fraga, the recent premier of Galicia. Fraga is known for having coined, in the 1960s, the highly successful advertising campaign slogan ‘Spain is different!’ while serving as Minister of Information and Tourism in the Franco regime. While the pharaonic City of Culture is ostensibly intended to make Galicia a hotspot on the world cultural-tourism circuit, thereby granting it greater presence on the international stage, it’s hard not to also see it as being in the ‘service’ of redeeming the legacy of a veteran politician, not unlike a French grand projet. All architecture is political, and Spain is not that different in this respect.

The Cidade da Cultura de Galicia, as it is referred to in the regional language, overlooks the beautiful city of Santiago de Compostela – the third most important Christian pilgrimage destination after Jerusalem and Rome – from the top of a verdant hill, Monte Gaiás. Situated at the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, Galicia was believed in ancient times to be finisterre, or the world’s end, and its landscape is not the placid Mediterranean postcard image most people have of Spain. It is one of the stormiest and rainiest regions of Europe, an area so rocky and green that it comes closer to resembling Ireland than anyplace else. Galicia’s terrain is rich in granite, and everything from Santiago’s cathedral to traditional farmhouses and granaries is built of massive pieces of stone, which in the cool and humid climate develop a layer of bright orange lichen on the surface.

The design of the Cidade is generated by Eisenman’s trademark technique of superimposing several found grids, in this case principally a map of the historical centre of Santiago and a diagram of a scallop shell – the historical symbol of the Way of Saint James pilgrimage route. The idea behind this diagrammatic crossbreeding process is to conflate the traditional hierarchy of figure-ground urbanism, causing figure to become ground and vice versa. The built outcome, which must surely have involved a lot more sculpting and styling than the rhetoric of the process would have us believe, is a series of parallel, sinuous buildings under a single warping roof plane referencing the hilly topography of Galicia. Incisions in this artificial topography become the City of Culture’s streets and public spaces, making the buildings appear to be the result of a series of ‘artificial excavations’ rather than structures built from the ground up, which is of course how the construction process is proceeding in reality.

The first buildings of the Cidade to be completed at this stage of the project – after a decade in which the cost tripled – are an archive of 14,000 m2 and a library of 26,000 m2. These will be accompanied in the coming years by a museum, a centre for music and performing arts, an international art centre, and a central services building containing conference facilities and administrative offices. All buildings are linked below ground – the ‘real’ ground, that is – by a service tunnel navigable by large transportation vehicles, while a four-lane motorway adjacent to the Cidade is expected to be equipped with off-ramps for direct vehicular access.

The topographic roofscape of the Cidade recalls other canonical works, such as the Yokohama Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects, that also eschew ‘object’ buildings in favour of ‘topographic’ ones. Such a landscape strategy is, of course, politically expedient at a time when brick, mortar and asphalt are replacing nature at an alarming rate, and goes some distance to explain why landscape, nature and all things green have become the latest models for architects to emulate. Interestingly, the landscape metaphor is carried through in the interiors of the Cidade as well, with their smoothly flowing walls and floors and bright, airy spaces. Generous pochés as well as interstitial spaces ‘fill’ the gaps between programmed volumes and building shell, providing some unexpected views and impromptu gathering places. The library is exemplary: even though it is contained in a cavernous hall, intimate reading nooks are created by means of C-shaped bookshelves whose tops conform to an undulating plane similar to that of the Cidade’s roofscape.

The superimposed grids that guided the design process are reflected in the spatial organization as well as on the surfaces, both inside and outside, through variations in the types of stone, glass, metal and other materials selected for the project, resulting in some surprising tectonic showmanship for an architect as conceptual as Eisenman. In this regard, the Cidade marks a significant turn in the architect’s career, a turn towards materiality and fine detailing. What we have here is something that amounts to much more than a full-scale model of a diagram: Cidade is a synthesis of rigour and sensuality.

All extremisms do have one thing in common: they are inevitably about denying something to someone. The Cidade is really not so extreme, precisely because it allows its architecture to be enjoyed in multiple ways.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #27]

Triumph of the Shell: Llotja de Lleida by Mecanoo

2010-08-01T16:17:00.009+02:00

In cinema, there is a common type of architectural scene: a building is shown briefly from outside, with one or more persons approaching its entrance. After they disappear through the doorway, there is a cut to the building’s interior with the same protagonists we just saw now walking towards us. The seeming fluidity of the action suggests that the two scenes – interior and exterior – correspond to one and the same building. In reality, it is possible that they were shot in two very different locations, as interior scenes are often filmed in the more controllable environment of a film studio. Good cinematography, art direction and editing are capable of ‘blending’ two disparate locations into one, and in the same way that a magician always creates a distraction, the audience is usually too wrapped up in the plot to notice a filmmaker’s sleight of hand. In any case, when two very different locations are blended, one of them – the more manipulable interior studio set – is always made to appear as a plausible counterpart to the exterior location. The suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer can, after all, only be taken so far.

What do we make then of a real building in which the interior space has seemingly little to do with its exterior expression? There are certainly countless examples: John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, comes to mind, as does Salvador Dalí’s house (actually three fishers’ houses he combined into one) on the Catalan coast near Cadaqués. Some hotels also offer up ‘surprises’ inside, such as the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, whose rather traditional interior bears no resemblance to the hypermodern and hyper-publicized exterior. Although more common than we might suspect, these kinds of inside-outside discrepancies are nevertheless usually limited to private or semi-private buildings such as residences, clubs, hotels, office buildings or private museums; buildings in which privacy and intimacy come before transparency. What makes the Llotja de Lleida surprising is that in this case, a highly public building has been designed with an exterior and an interior that hardly seem to belong to the same structure.

Lleida is a small town situated on an agricultural plain in the Catalan interior to which Spain’s AVE high-speed train arrived some years ago, bringing with it demand for high-quality arts, culture and business facilities. The historical centre of this city, skirting a hill capped by a cathedral, is an important landmark at the centre of this vast fruit-growing plain. The new theatre and conference centre is situated on the other side of the train tracks from this hill, on a generous riverfront terrace formerly the site of a farmer’s market. The building’s characteristic inverted hourglass profile provides a large portion of the terrace with protection from winter rains (‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’) as well as summer sun, while acting as a new modern landmark in complementarity with the historical one. The main entrance to the building is from a plaza framed on the opposite side by a sloped structure with raked seating to effectively form an amphitheater. Upon entering the building beneath its dramatic overhang, a tall atrium appears inside which contains a generous staircase that similarly provides seating for impromptu performances. The stairs lead to a larger upper level that contains a vast foyer for the 1,000-seat theatre, a multifunction space, a smaller auditorium and conference centre, as well as offices. Finally, the top level is a public roof garden from which various trapezoidal forms emerge containing the theatre fly and other mechanical facilities. Structurally, the Llotja’s atrium and theatre form a concrete core to which the cantilevers containing foyer, conference centre, and other spaces are attached by means of large steel truss brackets. But only the drawn building sections reveal this constructional efficiency, as the structural system that supports the pronounced cantilevers on all sides is largely concealed from view.

The interior spaces of the Llotja are not organized in line with the overall biaxial symmetry of the building’s outer form, but rather more like the dovetailed pieces that make up a Japanese puzzle box. These pieces are shaped and orientated in response to the surrounding context. The generous foyer of the main theatre, for example, from its elevated position over the building entrance, is orientated to overlook the old town across the railway tracks. Similarly, other spaces, such as the conference centre lobby, enjoy views over the river. The angular, trapezoidal forms that so strongly characterize the exterior are almost absent indoors; the interior comprising a much more diverse and less monolithic architecture than the exterior. In fact, there is so little resemblance between the Llotja’s exterior and interior, it would seem that the former is the location of an action thriller while the latter is that of a romantic comedy.

According to the scriptures of modernism, the interior and the exterior of a building must be ‘honest’ with one another; only then does architecture have ‘integrity’. Mecanoo is of course part of the ‘Modernism without Dogma’ generation of Dutch architects (named after the 1991 Dutch entry in the 5th Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Hans Ibelings); a generation that taps modernist heritage for inspiration but not for moral guidance. Indeed, the Llotja’s outer form is evidently inspired by the Aula Magna of Delft University of Technology, by Van den Broek and Bakema. But then its interior is clearly not, which is precisely what absolves the Llotja from some recent and rather absurd accusations of plagiarism. The Llotja’s interior is perhaps as accommodating as it is precisely because it was not subjugated to the relentless rigor of an über-prevailing singular architectural concept. Similarly, the exterior has a strong and coherent character precisely because it is not expressing the programmatic complexity of the interior; a situation akin to what Rem Koolhaas terms the ‘lobotomy’ of the Manhattan skyscraper in his seminal book Delirious New York. It is in fact remarkable how well the interior and exterior of the Llotja each do their job while seemingly oblivious to the other. But the question still begs to be asked: Why, then, this particular exterior, and this particular interior form?

It is probably safe to say that, with the rise of the Bilbao Effect, interior space has taken on a secondary role to the much more media-friendly exterior image of buildings. (Is there even such a thing as an iconic interior?) In the general media architecture tends to be represented through frontal or three-quarter ‘full Monty’ photographs of building exteriors. The more stand-alone the building, the better.

This overall primacy of the exterior image in architectural representation is unfortunate, not only because it turns architecture into a branch of set design, which it is not, but because it precludes considerations of why and for whom architecture exists in the first place. When the interior of a building doesn’t matter, neither do the people who live or work in it; and when the exterior image becomes everything, then architecture might as well exist solely for the aggrandizement of patrons, architects and politicians. And that starts to sound just a little too much like certain 1930s’ propaganda films.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #26]

Media-TIC by Cloud 9: Architecture as Research

2010-06-01T16:28:00.008+02:00

Column-free lobby

Truss space

Two facades with different pillow systems: ETFE fog configuration

and ETFE diaphragm configuration.

The range of building materials and construction techniques available to contemporary architects is unparalleled in history. New materials – in conjunction with digital processes such as computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, parametric design and rapid prototyping – have dramatically expanded the possibilities of design. Were it not for the threat of climate change and the ongoing economic crisis, our future would be a matter of ‘the sky’s the limit’. Suddenly, all the freedom we have hardly learned to handle has a new mission: finding more sustainable ways to produce, consume and discard. The promise of technology remains unchanged, of course – it is still going to save the day and thus save us from ourselves. The mantra hasn’t changed either: architecture that is fresh and intelligent and innovative will eventually prevail over a building industry that is old-fashioned, uninspired, formulaic and wasteful.

In reality, though, innovative architecture and a boring building industry are two sides of the same coin: one being the R&D department of the other. The invention of the curtain wall is a case in point: originally modern and vanguard, curtain walls eventually became a mass-produced, commercially available, off-the-shelf product in a straightforward transfer of technology in the direction of banality. Viewed from this perspective, innovative architecture is to the building industry what Formula One is to mass-produced automobiles, or what haute cuisine is to processed food: an industry-sponsored elite and a glamorous field in which to invent, research and test new technology for the purpose of applying the findings en masse.

Barcelona’s new Media-TIC building, which has led to two inventions being patented by architect Enric Ruiz-Geli of Cloud 9, can be seen as a prototype for field-testing innovations before eventual commercialization. Despite its unorthodox construction and appearance, it is a building involving research partnerships with private manufacturers. It pushes the envelope, in this case both literally and metaphorically, in the service of advancing construction technology – something which supposedly ‘iconic’ or unorthodox buildings have always done to a varying degree, either wittingly or unwittingly.

Although it is in essence an office building, Media-TIC follows few if any of the tenets of commercial office development. Instead of a central service core, it has a central void; instead of a regular steel or concrete structure, it has a gigantic exoskeleton from which the floors are suspended; instead of the marble or granite traditionally used to tart up public areas, it sports DayGlo green paint throughout. The only conventional rule of property development it seems to follow is ‘location, location, location’: Media-TIC is situated in the middle of 22@Barcelona, an ambitious urban-renewal plan to transform a 19th-century industrial zone into a 21st-century knowledge-and-innovation district.

This area, popularly known as Poblenou or ‘new town’, lies to the northeast of Barcelona’s historical core, within the famous gridded urban-expansion plan devised by civil engineer Ildefons Cerdà in 1859. In fact, Media-TIC is situated only a few blocks from the intersection of three of this plan’s most monumental urban axes, Diagonal, Meridiana and Gran Via – a gesture that was intended to stimulate the creation of a new, more modern city centre away from the overly dense and tuberculosis-infested medieval one. As was generally the case with Cerdà’s plan, Poblenou’s built reality turned out to be quite different from what he had envisioned, and instead of a new city centre this area became home to one of Europe’s largest concentrations of textile mills, smokestacks, warehouses and workers’ living quarters. In the latter half of the 20th century, as manufacturing throughout Europe and North America went into decline, the area became increasingly abandoned, until a plan was initiated in 2000 to convert approximately 200 hectares, or 115 city blocks, into the knowledge-and-innovation district 22@, a name that makes reference to the previous zoning code, 22a, which stood for heavy industry. The new mixed-use 22@ designation permits ‘the coexistence of all nonpolluting urban activities’ and promotes greater density and ‘ecological efficiency’. It is only now, one and a half centuries later, that Cerdà’s modern city centre is finally coming to fruition.

Five knowledge clusters make up the 22@ innovation district: information and communication technologies (ICT), media, medical technology, energy and design. As the name implies, the Media-TIC building is intended for the crossover of two of these sectors – ICT and media – and forms part of a larger ‘audiovisual campus’ that spans several city blocks. The bright-green cubic building occupies a chamfered corner site across the street from a factory, Can Framis, which architect Jordi Badia recently converted into an art museum. Other neighbors in the area include national and regional broadcasting companies, institutional bodies, content producers, advertising firms, ICT start-ups and university research facilities.

The architecture of the Media-TIC building, inside and out, seeks to create an environment conducive to both formal and informal encounters among the various knowledge sectors it is intended to host. The structure of the entire building, for example, is designed to keep the ground floor completely free of columns or vertical shafts, converting what is normally a labyrinthine lift lobby in most office buildings into a large open space for conferences, presentations and celebrations. This column-free space was achieved by suspending all floor plates from large trusses that crown the top of the building. The construction process was a spectacle in itself: with only the foundation and two rows of 32-m-high braced column pairs in place, the entire array of trusses – including the two floors contained within them – was raised slowly into place using hydraulic jacks. With the construction site momentarily resembling a triumphal arch, the rest of the floors were hung from the rooftop trusses by means of slender steel tubes.

This structural system results in a fascinating variety of spaces on different levels: the top two floors, situated entirely within the depth of the phosphorescent green trusses, are traversed by thick vertical and diagonal steel members, while the floors below have slender vertical columns adorned with large steel flanges that connect them to the undersides of the trusses. The rest of the floors below have slender columns without adornment until the ground floor is reached, which is column-free. The assembly of such an unorthodox structure for purposes of spatial permeability and open-spiritedness recalls the construction of the Pompidou Centre in Paris by Piano and Rogers, an important forerunner of this building and a milestone for architecture-as-research in general.

The Media-TIC’s outer skin is another unusual feature, employing ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) ‘pillows’ that can be inflated or deflated to moderate heat gain as well as daylight in the building. The pillow pattern varies on each façade in accordance with solar orientation. On the southeast façade, an ‘ETFE diaphragm configuration’ uses a printed pattern on both sides of the pillows to let daylight pass through when inflated and to block it when deflated. Similarly, the southwest-facing pillows use an ‘ETFE fog configuration’ into which nitrogen gas can be injected to minimize solar heat gain. The inflation or deflation of the pillows is controlled in real time by sensors and pumps that manage the movement of gases, directing them where they are needed at the time they are needed.

With its breathing, pulsating body parts, Media-TIC recalls the mechanical systems depicted in Terry Gilliam’s classic science-fiction film Brazil. Indeed, what is perhaps most remarkable about the Media-TIC building is that it is performative in both the ‘art’ and the ‘machine’ sense of the word. Either way, what this building does is far more interesting than what it looks like, especially when seen as a work of research-in-progress. Will its ETFE pillow system work successfully and eventually make its way onto curtain-wall façades of office buildings the world over? Only time will tell.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #25]

Ugh Canada

2010-03-24T13:05:00.010+01:00

An architect is, by definition, a designer of buildings, right? Well, the government of Canada, a nation whose credo is “peace, order and good government”, has, in all its wisdom, entrusted the architectural design of the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai--the theme of which is “Better City, Better Life”--to the Cirque du Soleil. Officially, Cirque du Soleil is the “producer” of the Canada Pavilion and its cultural program, the theme of which is “The Living City: Inclusive, Sustainable, Creative”. No competition was held to select the pavilion’s architect, producer or whatever, but to its credit the Cirque did in turn issue an open invitation to artists and creators to apply to be included in the pavilion’s cultural program, so even though the building isn't architect-designed, there is still hope that at least some of the content to be exhibited inside will be.

Looks like the government body in charge of expo pavilions, Canadian Heritage, couldn’t be bothered to launch an architectural competition for the design of the building, preferring instead a turnkey contract for the whole shebang: design, construction, and content. And who better to hand it over to than the Cirque du Soleil, one of the greatest and most successful shows on earth? What’s the difference anyway between a circus tent and a national pavilion at an expo, both of which are ephemeral structures? It’s the spectacle inside that matters, n’est ce pas?

There are two worldwide tendencies in which Canada is at the very forefront: the ban on smoking and the building of bland cities. The design of the Canada Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai reflects this perfectly.

Jurisprudence. The City of Justice by David Chipperfield Architects and b720 Arquitectura

2010-01-24T16:48:00.010+01:00

Courts of justice are steeped in protocol and decorum, not merely because of tradition, but in order to establish and assert the authority of law. This applies to everything from the gown worn by a judge to the facade of the building in which justice takes place, neither of which can appear to be flippant, light or irreverent at any time. On the one hand, justice must of course always be blind and impartial. But at the same time it must always also be seen, in the public eye, to be taking place in a fair and timely manner. Very serious, solemn business indeed.

Barcelona’s new City of Justice appears, at a distant and superficial glance, to be a monotonous, repetitive, and imposing building complex. With its concrete facades and narrow windows, the City of Justice reminded me initially of those 1970s university fortresses that were designed to avoid a repetition of the student unrest of 1968. But up close and inside, this complex turns out to be a very dignified and user-friendly place in which the notion of an architectural balance between opposites (dare I say "harmony"?) takes precedence over the accepted notion that a single overriding architectural idea--often formalist--must be made to prevail über alles come hell or high water.

Occupying the site of a former military barracks on the boundary between Catalonia’s two largest cities, Barcelona and l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the new court of law servicing both of these municipalities is a 230,000 square-meter complex comprised of eight separate medium-rise buildings on a plaza, four of which are joined by a lower four-story concourse that acts as a central atrium and as a passageway between two major adjacent streets: Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, one of Barcelona’s busiest thoroughfares, and Avinguda del Carrillet, which historically connected the center of l’Hospitalet with that of Barcelona. The context surrounding the City of Justice is a mix of the kind of corporate headquarters, modernist housing blocks and arterial roads that one would expect to find on the way to an airport anywhere. Perhaps not the most glamorous part of town, but one that is undergoing an important transformation with the construction of a new subway line, highways that have been re-built below grade, and new office towers by the likes of Toyo Ito and others.

Although the eight buildings of the City of Justice are constructed using the same tectonic system of load-bearing concrete facades with deeply inset tall-and-narrow windows, they are not perfect clones of one another. Variation in height, color and orientation of the buildings creates an urbanism of repetition diferente: variations on a theme that lends a strong overall visual identity for the City while avoiding the nauseating monotony of the kind of supposedly rational urbanism with which monolithic concrete buildings are usually associated. In fact, with its polychromy and seemingly random building placement on a large plaza, a walk through the City of Justice is a bit like stepping into a painting by Giorgio de Chirico.

The concourse infra-structure, which provides entry to the complex at each of its ends as well as amenities such as an auditorium, a bar and a cafeteria, is clad, in contrast to the concrete buildings, with generous amounts of glass behind a finely knit stainless steel mesh. The concourse accommodates a constant flow of people; a humanity that is hidden from view by the steel mesh screen and that is almost completely absent in the plaza outside (à la De Chirico). The life of this justice city is highly interiorized, unlike the Spanish city in general, with the plaza serving more as an abstract setting for the architecture rather than as a place to hang out. Certainly, there is adequate space in the plaza in case the need arises for any demonstrations, a favorite pastime in the young democracy that is Spain. But no matter how inviting the space, who wants to hang out near a courthouse anyway?

The plaza is, then, a space in which a series of monolithic building blocks embrace a more delicate, smaller-scale glass and steel concourse. This creates different effects at different scales. If the concrete facade system provides the necessarily more “serious” image that a court of law must project outwards to the rest of the city at an urban scale, then the concourse compensates with a humane and lively interior space. Indeed, the very success of the concourse as a place is precisely due to the fact that it is not overly large and ambitious; that more is not being made out of that which it simply is.

This is the lesson of the City of Justice: sound architectural judgment. The grandiose gesture that we have come to expect from high-profile architectural projects is absent in this case. The City of Justice is subtle, suggestive, and considered, but it is not frivolous. For Barcelona, with its architectural legacy of Gaudí and Miralles, this may seem like an anathema. But perhaps it is useful to remember here the notion of seny and rauxa, a sort of Catalan equivalent of Yin and Yang. Achieving a correct and judicious balance between seny (prudence, wisdom) and rauxa (ecstasy, rapture) is a hallmark of Catalan culture. In the City of Justice, seny clearly prevails over rauxa, as it must, arguably, for the sake of justice.

[originally published in Art 4D Magazine]

Holiday greetings

2009-12-25T11:15:00.002+01:00

Vienna, 2009

Optimization Takes Command: Angelo Roventa's Elastic Dwelling

2009-12-03T16:52:00.011+01:00

[originally published in ST/A/R special issue 23 catalogue for the Vienna MAK exhibition "The Game of the Mighty: Heidulf Gerngross archistrates Franz West's Nageltower. With Hofstetter Kurt and Angelo Roventa"]

Architect Angelo Roventa operating his Elastic Dwelling prototype at the MAK, Vienna

Angelo Roventa’s Elastic Dwelling applies a principle—and a mechanism—that is borrowed from a commercially available pre-manufactured industrial product: the high-density mobile storage system that is quite common in large archives, libraries, offices, and warehouses. The principle behind this product is quite simple: the ratio of useable storage space to circulation space increases drastically when storage cabinets can be moved sideways along a track such that only a single access aisle is ever open between any two cabinets at any given time. Space is completely optimized in such a system since circulation space (that all-important difference between net and gross) is reduced to only the location at which it is actually needed.

The Elastic Dwelling transfers this principle to the domestic realm, not in order to increase storage capacity or reduce circulation space, but rather to enable domestic “rooms” to be enlarged and reduced as needed. Instead of storing files or documents that are rarely consulted, the Elastic Dwelling's mobile cabinets contain home furnishings which are used on a daily basis: there are cabinets containing beds, others containing a desk and bookshelf, and others wardrobes. Immobile cabinets at each end contain the “wet” functions of bathroom and kitchen. A generous lateral space from which the elastic rooms are accessed serves as the more public, multi-use living and dining room. All this allows, just as it does in archives and offices, for much fewer square meters to deliver the same level of performance. A saving of square meters entails a saving of construction material, energy, maintenance and, of course, cost. Space is money too.

The idea of space as something to be optimized probably worries some architects. I can think of more than one academic who would very likely disapprove of the Elastic Dwelling's optimization ethos. Their refrain goes something like “optimization only serves capitalism and instrumental rationalism, which architects must resist.” But isn’t the proposal of a real, viable, and yes, financially feasible alternative to business-as-usual more constructive and effective in implementing change than mere resistance? The interesting thing about the Elastic Dwelling is precisely that it withstands some of the typical criticisms levelled at architects by the more conservative building industry. For example, the Elastic Dwelling does not rely on any expensive yet-to-emerge technologies: the high-density mobile storage system has been around for decades. Which raises an obvious question: how is it that no architect has thought of this until now?

The clues have been there all along. What is the most oft-repeated client criticism of architect-designed housing? “There isn’t enough storage space for all my stuff!” (“Hey, this is my way of forcing you to become less materialistic!”) It was a comedian and not an architect who gave us what is arguably the most accurate definition of a house: George Carlin and his famous line “a house is where you keep your stuff while you run around getting more stuff.” In a consumer society, a house becomes a storage depot of sorts, and storage technology is exactly what makes the Elastic Dwelling possible.

But storage technology is applied in the Elastic Dwelling in order to elastically accommodate the activities of everyday life in less space; not to store goods per se. The Elastic Dwelling's ad-hoc use of a pre-manufactured commercial product recalls Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s 1972 book Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation, which celebrates a DIY hippy-culture of making-do-and-getting-by with the goods of an overabundant consumer society. Although some of the mobile cabinets are indeed used for storage, their larger purpose in the Elastic Dwelling is to act as mobile partitions. In fact, if there is one thing the Elastic Dwelling possibly lacks it is, ironically, storage space.

An important limitation of the Elastic Dwelling idea is that it is really only suitable for singles or couples at most; certainly not large families (“Mommy: Hans is shrinking my bedroom again!”). The Elastic Dwelling demands consensus when there are multiple dwellers in its interior, something that is increasingly difficult to achieve in these post-modern times. Flexibility, which has been the dream of countless architectural utopias, is a double-edged sword, since it is also potentially a cause of disagreement and difference. Perhaps the Elastic Dwelling is ideally a bachelor machine. But then again, households have become much smaller and taken on diverse forms in the last three to four decades, with “singles” forming one of the fastest-growing market segments. Small households must still all-too-often settle in relatively larger dwellings if they want all the comforts of a modern home. The Elastic Dwelling makes it possible for smaller households, especially singles, to occupy significantly less space without sacrificing comfort. In the end, the Elastic Dwelling optimizes quantity for the sake of quality.

When I studied architecture in Canada, one of the early design projects that we were assigned involved randomly picking three pre-manufactured construction-industry products out of Sweet’s Construction Catalogue and combining them in such a way that put them to new, never before imagined uses. The project was all about eschewing arts-and-crafts values in favor of bricolage and “adhocism”. I vaguely remember picking automatic garage doors, Pirelli rubber flooring and barbed wire, and transforming those into some sort of architectural sado-masochistic contraption (what else?). After seeing Angelo’s invention, I now really wish I had picked high-density mobile storage systems as one my three products, and that my attitude had not been so cocky back then. Perhaps then I might have thought of the Elastic Dwelling first.

Monument Ahead: CajaGranada Cultural Centre by Alberto Campo Baeza

2009-11-08T15:35:00.012+01:00

The CajaGranada complex and Genil River seen from beneath the Sierra Nevada highway

The Entrance Courtyard / the Elliptical Courtyard

Restaurant on top floor of Screen Building

Granada, the medieval seat of the Nasrid dynasty, whose rulers built the Alhambra, is a monumental city. But this monumentality ends abruptly at the edge of Granada’s historical centre: whereas the old city consists largely of courtyard corral housing and carmen villas with lush gardens, not to mention the famous monuments themselves, the modern 20th-century extension is made up of pretty much the same sort of residential, institutional and commercial buildings that can be seen anywhere.

When it comes to locating monumentality, suburbia is not usually the first place that comes to mind: symbolic importance has always been the stuff of centres more than peripheries. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that suburbia is completely lacking in monumentality. As César Daly wrote in 1864: ‘Suburban architecture reveals the spirit and character of modern civilization just as the temples of Egypt and Greece, the baths and amphitheatres of Rome, and the cathedrals and castles of the Middle Ages help us to comprehend the spirit of previous civilizations.’ Artist Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, as well as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas each make a case for monumentality to be found in the periphery: Smithson in the form of infrastructure and industry, and Venturi et al in pop-vernacular symbolic building appendages that say ‘I am a monument’.

But these are interpretational readings of monumentality, not design projects. It was Oriol Bohigas who, during his planning directorship in Barcelona City Council in the early 1980s, recommended strategies that would ‘monumentalize the periphery’ through a serious approach to the architecture of new schools, hospitals, cultural centres and other public buildings and public spaces in that city’s outlying areas.

Granada seems to have heeded Bohigas’s recommendation, judging by some recently completed buildings in its urban periphery. Architect Alberto Campo Baeza’s CajaGranada Memory of Andalusia Cultural Centre is a monumentally monolithic and powerful building situated in a heterogeneous context at the very edge of the city, adjacent to an orbital motorway; the Río Genil; a crass office building whose claim to fame is that it is topped by Spain’s first revolving restaurant; a science museum; and the headquarters of the CajaGranada financial institution, an enormous concrete-and-alabaster ‘impluvium of light’ designed in 2001 by the same architect and to which the Cultural Centre is a carefully measured addition.

Dedicated to the rich and complex history of Andalusia, the Cultural Centre is a low, flat, elongated groundscraper that supports a tall, thin ‘screen building’ at one of its ends – the one facing the motorway. Carved out of the opaque groundscraper are two voids: a rectangular entrance courtyard adjacent to the screen building and an elliptical courtyard in the centre whose dimensions are borrowed from the round courtyard of the Palace of Charles V, a mannerist insertion amidst the sumptuous Nasrid palaces of the Alhambra.

Approached from a terrace overlooking the motorway and river, the Cultural Centre is entered through a portal in the screen building that leads down a generous stairway into the entrance court, a sunken, sun-bleached, ultra-minimalist space devoid of the shade-providing trees and cooling water fountains customarily found in Andalusian courtyards. The entrance courtyard provides access to both the screen building – which contains a café, a mediatheque, workshops, offices and a top-floor panoramic restaurant – and, on the other side, the groundscraper with its exhibition spaces and auditorium. It is here, where you enter the groundscraper at the intermediary of three levels, that the elliptical courtyard first becomes visible. This whitewashed exterior space, which acts as a central light well for the exhibition spaces, is equipped with a pair of circular ramps inscribed within the gently curving perimeter of the courtyard walls, recalling the Penguin Pool at London’s Regent’s Park Zoo by Berthold Lubetkin and Tekton.

An interior staircase and a lift connect the three levels of the groundscraper. Thus the ramps of the elliptical courtyard are not a vital component of the building’s circulation system, but rather a superfluous touch of baroque levity within an overwhelmingly solid and heavy beton brut architecture. This is in marked contrast to the more austere entrance courtyard, which is obligatory passage for everyone entering the building. Here, there is no relief whatsoever from the austerity of Campo Baeza’s minimalism except for a small collection of standard café tables, chairs and parasols that look rather silly in such a pure space. One of the elliptical courtyard’s ramps would be more than welcome here, not only to supply a bit of visual relief but also to provide a more dignified entrance to wheelchair users, who – to overcome the barrier posed by the wide stair descending from the screen-building portal – must descend a side ramp that circumvents the screen building altogether. The absence of trees and water in this space is equally baffling in light of how blessed Granada is with water from the nearby Sierra Nevada. Would a canopy of trees in this sunken courtyard compromise the monumentality of the architecture? Perhaps, but then again they would make the collection of patio furniture look less silly and more inviting.

If the entrance courtyard is uninviting, indeed alienating, this is not the case with the exhibition spaces, which are very conducive to an appreciation of the interactive multimedia exhibitions as well as to a temporary exhibition of art from the museum collection. The elliptical courtyard does not compromise the exhibition spaces in any way, but rather offers occasional views outside to another art installation of sorts: the shadow play of round ramps against elliptical walls under the bright Andalusian sun, which makes for quite a spectacle in itself, as will the gigantic plasma display on the screen building once it is installed. Another fine moment in the Cultural Centre is the restaurant, which occupies a transparent opening in the 6-m-thin screen building. The mullionless floor-to-ceiling glazing on both sides of the train car-shaped plan makes for a stunning panoramic view of the landscape.

But it is the urbanism of the Cultural Centre that is most convincing. The strong form of the ensemble of CajaGranada buildings seems to temper the heterogeneous suburban context. The shape and orientation of the monumental screen building makes an emphatic gesture to mark the physical edge of the city, not unlike the early theoretical ‘Edge of a City’ project by Steven Holl for a highly monumental ring of tall buildings designed to create visible edges for sprawling southwest American cities (published in Pamphlet Architecture #13, 1991). It is very unlikely, of course, that such physical ‘sprawlstoppers’ would ever work, but that is not the point. The real point is that the urban periphery is all too often treated too lightly, when what it deserves is to be taken more seriously. Monumentalizing the periphery with these kinds of punctual, strategic and strong forms is simply to make such recognition visible and architectural.

[This text was originally published in Mark Magazine #22]

Team Play: Caja Mágica Tennis Centre, Madrid, by Dominique Perrault

2009-09-28T22:09:00.022+02:00

Exterior view of Caja Mágica Tennis Centre. La Villa Savoye on steroids?

In-between the skin and the stadiums: 'Piranesian' space

The operable roof (sculpture)

As any sports fan can confirm, the architecture of elite sporting venues is the forefront of technologically inventive design these days. This should not come as any surprise: it is consistent with current record-shattering technological advances in sport itself, as well as in the dynamic new ways sporting events are captured for television, which provides sport with its 'real' audience. Retractable roofs, flexible seating configurations, interchangeable playing surfaces and architectural gymnastics go hand in hand with developments such as those controversial friction-reducing swimsuits or nerve-racking video feeds transmitted live from the cockpit of a Formula 1 car. In the increasingly faster, higher, longer and stronger world of elite sport, the setting cannot afford to be seen to lag too far behind the spectacle, and if there is one kind of architecture that is ideally suited for viewing by a global audience, it must certainly be that of world-class sporting venues. In this game, 'brought to you by your friendly corporate sponsor', an ordinary box is simply not a win-win strategy.

Granted, the new home of the Madrid Open Tennis Tournament is a 'magic' box and not an ordinary one, but boxes in general have been out of favour for the last while, not only when it comes to sporting venues. They are things that business gurus, many of whom seem to be great admirers of Frank O. Gehry, have been repeatedly telling everyone to 'think outside of' – at least until their empty cash boxes prompted them to change their tune in favour of square government handouts. Boxes are also things that the theoretically infinite formal possibilities of computer-aided design and manufacturing are supposed to have rendered obsolete. But isn’t the geometry of the cube or box one of the most fundamental building blocks of architecture? Perhaps rules no longer exist in this discipline, unless of course Bernard Tschumi’s 'the first rule of architecture is break it' counts as one. These days it would seem that anything goes – as long as it’s not a box. And here is precisely where the comparison between sport and architecture breaks down: sport is tightly regulated by conventions, governing bodies and strict rules, and if rules are going to be broken, then it had better be while the officials – not to mention the instant-replay cameras – are looking the other way.

The Manzanares Park Tennis Centre, as it is officially called, is an impressive sport complex nestled in a bend of the Manzanares River, in the Madrileño district of Usera. The centre was initiated as part of a larger landscape-urbanism project – the ambitious Madrid Rio Plan – to transform the motorway and slum-laden banks of the river into a linear network of recreational parks, as well as to provide this city with an international tennis facility that would match Spain’s achievements in the sport and reinforce its candidature for the 2016 Olympic Games. The 16-hectare site is bordered on one side by a modest suburban neighbourhood and on the other by the river. The more general vicinity includes two major motorways, a high-speed rail corridor, and water and power plants.

Conceived as islands in an artificial lake, the tennis centre is a tranquil ensemble of buildings, gardens and water. La Caja Mágica, or the Magic Box, is the monumental centrepiece of this archipelago. More than magical, the complex conveys a sense of mystery at first sight, for nothing on the outside suggests that it contains three indoor-outdoor stadiums that together seat up to 20,000 spectators. For all we know, it could be a warehouse.

Shielded from the street and adjacent neighbourhood by a long, stretched-out ancillary building that serves urbanistically as a garden wall and topographically as a retaining wall between city and river valley, the Caja Mágica is approached from the city side through a gateway in the wall. At this point, a long footbridge that traverses the central building begins its trajectory, eventually reaching another park, designed by Ricardo Bofill, on the opposite riverbank. The bridge connects with the Caja’s main public 'street level' 8 m above a more private 'lake level'; the former contains services for spectators and the general public, while the latter is dedicated to athletes, support services, VIP reception spaces and technical installations.

In addition to the Caja Mágica’s three indoor-outdoor clay courts, the largest of which seats 12,000 spectators, the tennis centre’s long wall-building houses another 11 indoor courts for training and practice, tennis federation offices, a swimming pool, a clubhouse and a tennis school. An island with 16 outdoor courts forms a Tennis Garden, and another island normally used as a car park doubles as a Media Garden during major events.

In addition to professional and Olympic tennis tournaments, the Caja Mágica is able to host other types of sporting events, as well as political rallies, fashion shows, rock concerts and the like. Its flexibility is due mainly to three retractable roofs, one over each court, which convert the building into both a functionally and visually transforming structure. Each of the rectangular roofs, the largest of which measures 102 x 70 m, is mounted on a hydraulic mechanism that permits vertical tilting in combination with horizontal sliding, providing each stadium with three spatial configurations: hermetically closed, tilted partially open, or completely open to the elements. The permutations and combinations of the system allow for a total of 27 configurations of the roofscape. The roof planes are so large that, when tilted up, they increase the height of the 35-m-high building another 20 m, making it recognizable from distant points throughout the city.

While the Caja Mágica’s roof is certainly its most complex technological breakthrough and a spectacular icon that should satisfy local politicians, corporate sponsors and the cravings of camera lenses, the building’s exterior image also raises some subtler points that are easily overshadowed. For one thing, the building’s parti conforms to several lessons of Le Corbusier. As a platonic solid raised on pilotis and capped by a sculptural roof, the Caja Mágica can be seen as a sort of Villa Savoye on steroids (pardon the unsportsmanlike expression). At the same time, the building is clearly not dogmatically Corbusian, preferring to play around with the master instead. What this shows us is how certain radical, early-modernist forms have become archetypes over time, which is precisely what early modernism rejected. In other words, perhaps the modernist box has been around long enough, and gone through enough ups and downs, to be 'almost all right' now, to borrow a phrase from Le Corbusier’s arch rivals.

In fact, it is precisely the lightness of the Caja Mágica’s exterior veil – its mysterious translucence as opposed to objective clarity – that situates its architecture far from traditional modernist dogma. The metal mesh that shades and conceals the building’s content, providing only a vague glimpse inside when the building’s interior is illuminated at night, is a key element of this design. The stainless-steel mesh was developed especially for this project in record-sized panels measuring 25 x 7.2 m. Its effect is quite remarkable, generating an element of surprise when the building is entered, for it is only once the exterior metal mesh is penetrated that the characteristic 'inverted pyramid' forms of a stadium become apparent. Only now do we know it’s not a warehouse. Even more significantly, the building’s skin, in conjunction with the inverted pyramids, creates a fascinating left-over space in between, which is characterized by dramatic overhangs, angled structural supports, lifts, stairs and bridges: probably one of the closest built approximations to Piranesi’s Carceri to be seen anywhere. Not bad for an entrance lobby.

To this critic, it is the interior spatiality of the building more than its exterior appearance that makes the box magical. While a part of this has to do with the spectacular operable roofs and their ability to modulate daylight and the acoustics of the stadiums, it is actually thanks to the overall site strategy of the Manzanares Park Tennis Centre that this very unusual and surprising Piranesian space results within the Caja Mágica, a strategy that consists of accommodating the complex programme in a few, simple, carefully placed elements – a box, a wall, a bridge and some islands – and, more specifically, of clustering three stadiums within a single box. The more obvious kneejerk strategy would have been to disperse the three stadiums around the site as autonomous expressionist objects set upon a green lawn, not unlike the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia. The strategy that has been deployed at the Manzanares Tennis Centre takes advantage of compatibilities among architecture, landscape and urbanism. This may be radical for architecture, but in sport it’s nothing new: it’s called team play.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #21]

Learning from CajaGranada

2009-08-27T12:04:00.002+02:00

CajaGranada Cultural Centre by Alberto Campo Baeza

Visitant / Local II

2009-08-07T02:21:00.005+02:00

"The beach is the only space of enjoyment that humans have found in nature." - Henri Lefebvre

Morning Delivery

2009-08-07T00:59:00.008+02:00

The maintenance of buildings is somewhat of a taboo subject in architectural discourse, which actually says a great deal about the kind of social class values in which the second-oldest profession is steeped. If the very definition of architecture is 'building made unnecessarily complicated', then any discussion of safety, maintenance, cleaning, deliveries, and other such prosaic aspects is tantamount to career-suicide for any ambitious architect.

But this is not the case for artists and filmmakers, who seem to be more interested than many architects in the poetics of post-occupancy. Both Jeff Wall's photograph titled "Morning Cleaning" as well as Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoîne's documentary film "koolhaas houselife", to cite only two examples, gain their effectiveness precisely from this blind spot in architecture; or from the chasm that apparently exists between architecture's high-minded ideals and its crude reality.

I would like to think that the socle of the Barcelona Pavilion was secretly designed as a truck-loading bay, but we'll probably never know for sure.

Visitant / Local

2009-07-01T13:02:00.005+02:00

click on image to enlarge

The scoreboard says it all.

visitor / local
Lord Richard Rogers / Bellvitge
hotel / housing
5 star / no star
architecture / building
custom / prefab
unique / repetitive
landmark / landscape

The local team has the advantage of popular support.
The visiting team has the advantage of money and super-stars.

Could be a close match in the end.

BMW Welter

2009-06-04T21:42:00.015+02:00

Luxury automobiles are fetish items par excellence. The advertising, branding and merchandising of this kind of consumer good is designed to appeal to our emotions, not our rationality. Why else would we buy something that devalues by up to a third the moment we drive out of the dealership? High-end cars are not sold to us based on their technological virtues, even though a great deal of research goes into automotive technology. They are sold on values that tap our desires to be seen to live a certain lifestyle and attain a certain social status. The refrain of “tell me what kind of car you drive and I’ll tell you who you are” is not entirely unfounded, and the mere sight of certain brands of high-end automobiles can conjure all sorts of stereotypes about the identity of the owner. Volvo: tweed-clad, tenured university professor. Porsche: young and nouveau riche. Mercedes: conservative executive. BMW: aggressive entrepreneur with little time to lose. Hummer: I’m super-rich so fuck off.

Over the last decade, a number of automotive companies—especially German ones such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and BMW—have embarked on media-friendly architectural projects designed, among other things, to build brand equity. There is now a collection of sophisticated automotive architectural works throughout Germany by the likes of UN Studio, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Delugan Meissl, providing a perfect excuse to fly into Frankfurt, rent a roadster, load some Kraftwerk into the sound system and go on a whirlwind Autobahn tour of these sites.

The most outlandish of these new buildings is BMW Welt in Munich, an "experience" and "customer delivery centre" adjacent to the corporation’s factory, museum and landmark Four-Cylinder office tower. Designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, BMW Welt has won several awards, including the Wallpaper 2009 Award for “Best New Public Building” (just how public is this building really?), the World Architecture Festival 2008 Award in the “production” category (was there no “consumption” category?) as well as the RIBA European Award in 2008, the jury of which praised its “spectacular cloud-like roof”.

Now, I suppose three esteemed architectural award juries can’t be wrong, but I have tried and tried and cannot for the likes of me see the virtues of BMW Welt. The building is an automobile and motorcycle showroom the size and feel of an international airport terminal. Its idiosyncratic architecture has no shortage of entertaining quirks, folds, twists, whims and conceits, but I can't help but think that these tricks are trying pathetically to make the building feel less commercial and more artistic. They seem more like hollow gestures. Naming the roof a “cloud”, the floor a “landscape” and the entrance feature a “whirlwind” is cute, but it is still an oversized commercial showroom.

Yes, the building is formally complex and impeccably crafted down to the last detail. It is architectural bravado, but that's just about all. Despite the beautiful cars, beautiful salespeople, and beautiful views onto the neighbouring Olympic Stadium and BMW buildings from the 1960s, BMW Welt feels empty and devoid of soul.

If the architecture is supposed to build up the company’s brand equity the way its highly effective television and print advertising campaigns have consistently done, then this building falls short in comparison. Give me the BMW ads on TV—they are more thought-provoking.

Too bad the stylist didn't know all the connotations of the word "lemon"...

W: what is it good for?

2009-05-14T14:23:00.021+02:00

A building has been going up--or did it come from outer space?--on Barcelona's Sant Sebastià Beach that is popularly refered to as "Hotel Vela" (sail hotel), but whose commercial name is actually Hotel W Barcelona. That's right: W, as in Dubya. Just what has ex-president George Bush II got to do with this hotel? Probably nothing, since he's in the oil-and-war business. But then this building is such an attack on the urban and natural landscape and such a violation of the human right to live peacefully in a qualitative environment, that it does seem ironic that the name of this hotel would seem to honor the most despised US president ever. And wouldn't you know it: this building is also turning out to be the most despised new construction in Barcelona since work began several centuries ago on the Citadel.

And just as the atrocities committed by Bush junior and his band of inept cronies prompted all sorts of protest, resistance and terrorism movements throughout the world, this building has similarly given rise to an anti-hotel neighborhood group that organizes events such as this one

as well as a Facebook group called GAHV: Grup Anti Hotel Vela Barceloneta (Anti Hotel Vela Barceloneta Group) with over 500 members.

The reason the building is despised is obvious enough: it is a huge, pretentious, malproportioned and unsightly behemoth that casts a shadow on Barcelona's most frequented and beloved public space: the beach. It is situated only meters from the coastline, which together with its unprecedented height means it can be seen from just about anywhere in the metropolitan area. In short: it is a big fat pig of a building whose curving profile resembles a beer belly more than it does a sail. Oh, did I mention that the building is ugly?

What everyone is perplexed about is this: why was there no public consultation process or environmental assessment before permission was granted for this project, and why was it exempted from Spanish coastal setback laws?

There is little that can be done at this point about Hotel W, save throw a bomb at it. Let it serve instead, for the many architecture students that visit Barcelona, as a perfect example of how definitely NOT to situate, proportion, or design a building--just as Dubya's presidency serves as an example of how NOT to run a nation. As with any done deal, one has no choice but to make the best of it.

It Came from Outer Space

2009-05-10T20:44:00.008+02:00

Some buildings are built from the ground up, while others are flown to their site and lowered from the air with the help of aliens and flying saucers. This hotel in Barcelona's Raval neighbourhood is an example of the latter. Before it was lowered into place, the ground had to be cleared of obstacles (buildings, inhabitants, etc.)...for safety, of course. This part took the longest, as there was one neighbour who resented having to make way for progress. But once he was gone, it didn't take very long for this building to make its magical appearance on the cleared slate, er site. It happened one night during an important Barça game, when nobody was on the street. There was barely any noise, only a few strange lights, and voilà. As soon as the building was gently lowered to the ground, the spaceship was gone. Some workers tightened a few bolts, connected some cables and pipes, and that was it. Oh, shortly before the hotel opened, there was one last clean-up operation: a police round-up of suspected delinquents in the Raval whose activities had been repeatedly denounced throughout many years by residents. The hotel has been around for over a year now. At night, its red lights pay homage to the prostitution trade that flourishes in the area, in spite of efforts by the authorities to the contrary. Thanks to these generous aliens, and the collaboration of friendly monsters, the Raval is now hipper and safer. Benches placed by the Ajuntament de Barcelona for gazing at this object from (its) outer space.

Two Optimistic Architecture Yearboks: a comparative analysis

2009-04-19T13:12:00.005+02:00

[originally published in Annuel optimiste d'architecture 2008 / Optimistic Architecture Yearbook 2008, Les Éditions de la French Touch] One of the interesting things about architectural yearbooks is that they provide a snapshot, or to use a more appropriate metaphor, a cross-section of the architectural scene of a part of the world in a given period in time. Comprising a selection that has been vetted from a much larger body of work, a yearbook can be likened loosely to a musical compilation of “greatest hits”, or a “best of” literature collection. These kinds of collections usually contain a number of works that, although adhering to a certain artistic style or genre, are nevertheless highly diverse, precisely to display the range of possibilities or the dynamism of that style or genre. A compilation defines a community without establishing hierarchy. The same goes for a yearbook, which is quite different from a juried awards programme in which a pecking order is established. While the latter is about who is better than whom, the former is about a cultural scene and its activity. But, a year is not a lot of time to see what is happening on a cultural scene, especially one that is dedicated to architecture. As Richard Scoffier remarks in the 2007 Optimistic Yearbook, “a single year is rarely meaningful in architecture, given that even the smallest construction usually takes years to reach completion.” Moreover, modern architecture, just like fashion, political ideology, or rock and roll, tends to be broadly categorized according to decades. It is a commonplace to employ prefixes such as “1920s—” or “60s—” when we want to convey the architectural Zeitgeist of a period, even when the period doesn’t conform very exactly within the frame of a decade. If we go further back in history, the prefix suddenly becomes a century. The mere mention of a certain decade or century is capable of conjuring a plethora of imagery in the mind. So what about the year? Why do we celebrate the end of a year, read year-end reviews, and collect yearbooks? A given year does not constitute a “period” in the way a decade or century does. Would it not make more sense to publish decade-books? It takes the passing of a year, that seasonal cycle that ends with a void in the western calendar, for (at least most of) us to be provoked into reflecting. When a year goes by, we are prompted to look back, take stock, and maybe do some spring-cleaning. This is the essential service that a yearbook provides. It is an annual reflection that results in a selection. In order to come to meaningful conclusions, yearbooks have to be looked at in multiples, not individually. In the meantime, we must do with only two Optimistic yearbooks: 2007 and 2008. Probably not enough to analyze the emergence of a new school or “ism”, or to characterize the decade that is coming to a close, but nevertheless enough to get a snapshot of what happened during these two years. Coincidentally, these happen to be the two years which bracket the onset of a global economic crisis, a record high in the price of oil, and the bursting of what turns out to have been an artifically inflated real estate bubble. Fortunately, France seems to be one of the few countries to have avoided entering into recession in 2008. So while two yearbooks may not serve to paint a definitive picture of the architecture of the 00s in France—though they certainly help in this regard—they can still perhaps provide us with some comparative insight. It is noteworthy that while the 2007 yearbook included 67 entries by 50 different architectural firms, this year’s includes only 61 entries, but by 55 architectural firms. Could this be a sign of harder times in which there is less work to go around, or is it merely that 2008 is not as good a vintage as the year before? Of the 67 works in the 2007 edition yearbook, 10 are housing, while in the 2008 edition that number rises to 12, a significant increase considering there are fewer entries in the latter edition. It is encouraging that housing—especially social housing projects—is on the rise in architecturally qualitative terms. If only the same could be said for other countries! Housing, the largest sector of the construction industry and usually the worst-built and most ill-considered building type is, in theory at least, the most primordial and humane form of architecture, and so it is an important indicator of the level of social commitment on the part of commissioners and architects. Another indicator that is of interest here is the adaptive reuse of older buildings, as this speaks volumes about the degree to which architecture is seen as a contributor to the health of existing communities and to ecological sustainability in general. In the 2007 yearbook, around 27% of the projects involved the adaptive reuse of buildings, while in 2008 that figure declines to only 12%. Hopefully this is only a blip in the longer term, as the adaptive reuse of buildings is an architectural specialization that has been steadily growing in Europe. It is well-known that a building that is upgraded or remodeled instead of demolished and converted into landfill does more to reduce carbon emissions than a comparable building that is built anew no matter how “green” or “ecological” it may be. Similarly, we could analyze the number of brownfield projects. In the same way that adaptive reuse recycles buildings, brownfield construction recycles land. In the 2007 yearbook, a full two-thirds of the projects occupy brownfield sites, several of which are urban infill projects, while in 2008 this is the case for only around half the projects. The lower proportion of brownfield projects in 2008 is, again, hopefully only a blip in the longer term picture, as brownfield development is an effective way of combating urban sprawl. Nevertheless, if we compare with yearbooks (or national awards programs) of other countries, especially in faster growing economies such as Asia, France shows a far greater commitment to brownfield development in its most representational projects. The size of a project, as well as its cost, are also significant factors. If a yearbook is a sampling of “best of” architecture, then it might be interesting to compare what the best costs. In the 2007 yearbook, the cost per square meter of the projects ranged from € 367 for a smart and economical residential renovation to € 5588 for a transportable luxury hotel room by an artist team. The average cost per square meter of all the projects selected in 2007 (for which data is available) is € 1830. In 2008, the cost ranges from € 681 for a covered boulodrome to € 10077 for a mixed-use complex. The average cost per square meter in 2008 is just slightly higher at € 1942. Interestingly, the cost per square meter of yearbook-quality architecture turns out to be only slightly higher than that of standard construction in the end. But what is most significant is the wide range of budgets with which the works included in both yearbooks have been built, clearly a reflection of the broad diversity of project-types that have been selected. Of course, it is understood that architecture yearbooks such as this one do not purport to represent an accurate cross-section of the overall building production taking place in the country, and so this analysis makes no pretense whatsoever at providing across-the-board conclusions. It only looks at the crème-de-la-crème of building production. Another shortcoming is that with only two yearbooks having been published to date, the numbers are not statistically very reliable. An analysis such as this one should really be done with more samples from a longer timespan. Therefore, it is important to understand the outcome as being somewhat aleatory and my conclusions as being highly personal speculation. In a way, this is an exercise in pata-physics more than it is one of serious statistical analysis. If this experiment provides any useful insight at all, it might be interesting to repeat it in a few years to see what has changed, hopefully without the mistakes and shortcomings of this one.

Integrated Highrise

2009-04-16T20:16:00.011+02:00

Barcelona is a city without very many tall buildings. Not only that: the few tall buildings that do exist are spread relatively evenly throughout the metropolis, not unlike the way church steeples once dotted the landscape. While this gives each tall building plenty of elbow room and unobstructed views, it also makes each one seem overly precious and sacred. The problem here is that cities such as Barcelona can only continue to grow in the Z-axis, and if each new high-rise building has to be set apart from surrounding profanity and venerated as a holy artefact of sorts, then high-rise construction will always be the exception to the rule – not a transformation of it.

Hotel ME Barcelona, by Dominique Perrault, is the least object-like and most successful of the handful of spectacular recent high-rise additions to the Barcelona skyline. It is a role model for accommodating and integrating high-rise architecture in medium-rise urbanism. Rather than being situated in a clearing in the dense urban fabric, the 31-storey hotel incorporates a six-storey base containing semi-public spaces that is contiguous with neighbouring buildings. A tower containing the hotel’s private spaces emerges from this base by way of a dramatic upward lifting of one of its vertical sandwich slabs – such that nearly half the tower appears to be defying gravity. The space below the elevated slab forms a monumental entrance to the hotel while a setback formed near the top by this 'lifting operation' is used as an exclusive restaurant terrace. Similarly, a swimming pool and terrace occupy the setback atop the six-storey base. The hotel is thus much more complex at its lower levels than at its top; an inversion of the 'ill-logic' of the skyscraper as a stand-alone object.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #18]

Everyday Camouflage in "The Visitor"

2009-04-01T11:07:00.008+02:00

The story told by Tom McCarthy in his highly commendable film The Visitor, which deals, among other things, with the issue of illegal immigration in post 9/11 USA, unfolds in part in and around a Queens, New York, detention center that is a perfect example of everyday camouflage. In The Visitor, a recently widowed and disillusioned university professor named Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) befriends, through unexpected circumstances, a young Syrian named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), who is arrested one day and sent to a detention center operated by the sinister "United Correctional Corporation". When Tarek's mother Mouna (Hiam Abass) shows up at Walter's door some days later worried about her son, Walter takes her to Queens so she can see where her son is being detained. Walter and Mouna stop across the street from the detention center, and the following dialogue ensues: WALTER: That’s it. MOUNA: This is where the prison is? WALTER: Yes. That’s it. MOUNA: It does not look like a prison. WALTER: I think that’s the point. The dialogue reveals the insidiousness of everyday comouflage perfectly.

Designer Facadism

2009-03-26T19:48:00.007+01:00

A new luxury apartment building for tourists has recently opened on Passeig de Gràcia, across from Antoni Gaudí's Casa Milá, whose website states: "Located in a privileged area of Passeig de Gràcia, in the centre of Barcelona, with a facade designed exclusively by the prestigious architect Toyo Ito and tourist apartments offering luxury suites, Suites Avenue shines with a unique and avant-garde identity that meshes perfectly with Gaudi's [sic] La Pedrera, just opposite." (my italics). Interestingly, the website makes no mention of which architect actually designed the rest of the building behind the facade. Is it an older building with a new facade, or is it a new building where one architect has designed the actual building and another the facade (certainly not be the first occurence of this in Barcelona)? We don't know from the website: only the facade architect is credited. Only the facade is shown. Only the facade really matters, it seems. Oddly enough, some years ago just up the street, a new building was erected behind an historical facade that was retained by means of a complex steel exoskeleton--the practice known as "facadism" that is disdained by both architects as well as by preservationists, though for different reasons, of course. In terms of substance, is there really much of a difference between "historical facadism" and "designer facadism"?

Us and Theme

2009-03-17T22:16:00.010+01:00

If Venice, the Wild West, or Asia can be themes for parks, casinos, or hotels, then why not contemporary architecture? "Theming" has, after all, been a part of architecture for quite some time, as the interesting collection of essays Variations on a Theme Park, edited by Michael Sorkin (New York: The Noon Day Press, 1992), makes evident. Even Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli can be seen as a theme park of sorts, so architecture is on some level intrinsically bound with the very idea of theming.

What is significant about Hotel Puerta de América in Madrid, in which each of its 14 levels is by a different architect or designer, is that it is a theme hotel whose theme is precisely contemporary architecture and design. Of course, merely having interiors on different floors designed by different architects or designers does not necessarily a theme hotel make. What makes Hotel Puerta de América one is the fact that clients choose which designer they would like to sleep with when they make a reservation.

In most hotels, choice is normally limited to amenities, degree of luxury or size. But here, the design--specifically the designer--becomes the object of choice.

There are lots of theme hotels designed by well-known architects and designers. But the themes of these hotels are "Santa Fe" or "Swan Lake": the architecture may be themed, but the theme in such cases is not architecture itself.

Curiously, the Hotel Puerta de América does not bill itself as a theme hotel. The word "theme" is absolutely nowehere to be found in the hotel's promotional literature or on its website. The prices are also quite a bit higher than a "normal" theme hotel. Perhaps this explains why.

Oh, in case anyone is wondering, the rooms with the highest occupancy rate are Zaha Hadid's.

Disseny Hype

2009-02-11T10:56:00.012+01:00

"Disseny Hub" is a new cultural institution in Barcelona dedicated to design; or, to put it more correctly, to promoting this city as a global design centre. Located in a palace on Carrer Montcada that was previously the home of the Textile Museum, directly across from the busy Picasso Museum, DHUB's inaugural exhibition is none other than "Tourism: Spaces of Fiction".

The name of this institution is curious: the word "disseny" is Catalan (meaning "design") while "hub" is an English word that is not normally used in Catalan. Penny Sparke wrote in 1986: "The English word 'design' is currently used widely in countries such as Japan, Italy, France, the Scandinavian countries and the USA, a fact which indicates that its meaning in contemporary society has moved away from its definition in previous centuries when it was interchangeable with the Italian il disegno and the French le dessin. The fact that these countries have abandoned these native terms in favour of 'design' suggests that more than just a mere shift in meaning has taken place and that what has occurred is, in fact, the emergence of an entirely new concept." This concept, according to Sparke, is one in which design is "an extension of marketing and advertising" in addition to being "a silent quality of all mass-produced goods." Sparke wrote this in 1986. Maybe another concept is emerging now, where the international use of the word "design" is abandoned in favour of "disseny"?

If "design" contains the word "sign"--as in the "sign-value" that design delivers--then the interesting thing about the word "disseny" is that it contains the word "seny", meaning a combination of common sense and frugality; attributes by which Catalans have traditionally differentiated themselves from Spaniards. But then, judging by DHUB's inaugural exhibition, "seny" is the last thing that this place seems to be about. "Tourism: Spaces of Fiction" is so unquestioning, so lacking in any problematization whatsoever of this industry, that it comes across as one long infomercial. The inclusion of a colossal model of Bawadi, Dubailand's development proposal for what appears to be yet another simulation of Las Vegas (i.e. a simulation of a simulation), is a case in point. Neither its architecture (cloned buildings from elsewhere) nor its urbanism (one long, wide commercial strip) are anything even remotely new. So what is it doing here? The only thing missing next to the model was a sales representative pressuring me to buy a timeshare.

The same goes for much of the rest of the exhibition, which sticks to a fairly kneejerk notion of tourism. There is little mention of the current interest in eco-tourism, for example, or how the heritage industry--not to mention the Gaudí industry--has grown as a direct consequence of tourism. The role of tourism in the transformation of Barcelona is conspicuously absent as a topic in this exhibition, unless the Macià plan, displayed as a panorama, counts in this regard.

The most interesting material in this exhibition is a series of architectural models investigating new forms of tourism and a montage of classic film clips that is quite entertaining. But overall, it focusses rather heavily and uncritically on what we have come to expect from the tourism industry: ever more spectacular and hyperreal large-scale over-development.

Cedar Island, Lebanon: Learning from Dubai?

2009-01-28T20:24:00.012+01:00

In my earlier posting "Hotel Barcelona" I mention a costal high-rise hotel that resembles the Burj al Arab Hotel in Dubai.

Well, here's a Lebanese Cedar artificial island project inspired by Dubai's Palms. I guess this is one way to make use of the tons and tons of rubble resulting from the disastrous Israeli bombardment of Lebanon two years ago.

Which raises the question: what sort of tree-island might eventually result from the recent--and seemingly ongoing--bombardment of Gaza? An Olive tree? No, somehow I don't think so. Just one more reason (out of thousands that are much more important) the Israeli governent's insanity must cease.

(Thanks to the lovely Darine Choueri for forwarding the image)

Gaudí in Red Alert

2008-12-11T20:58:00.010+01:00

“Gaudí en alerta roja” is the title of an online petition currently the source of much debate in Barcelona. Its proponents, a group of luminaries from the local architectural and cultural establishment, argue that Gaudí’s work should be left "alone" and that he should be allowed to “rest in peace.” In fact, it demands that post-humous additions to projects Gaudí never completed in his lifetime be "undone" so as to revert to the state in which "the author" left them.

There are many problems with this rather romantic manifesto. For one thing, building is not a “pure” or “fine” art, and as Robert Hughes writes in Barcelona, Gaudí fancied himself as more of a builder than an architect: "That he was the son of artisans mattered immensely to Gaudí. He thought of himself as a man of his hands, not a theoretician." (p. 470). The Sagrada Familia was, from day one, a collaborative endeavor between Gaudí and his crew of masons and artisans. He never produced a full set of drawings of the temple (he apparently hated drawing), and is known to have made many design decisions in situ with his co-workers, operating at a level of humility that is unfathomable in the context of today's prima donna architecture. Leaving Gaudí’s work incomplete in the name of a supposed purity of authorship is probably something he himself would never have wished.

Another argument made in the manifesto is that the construction of such an ambitious temple is anachronous with a modern secular nation, and that the exorbitant amount of money it is costing would be better spent on more urgent needs. As far as I know, the construction of the Sagrada Familia is being financed mostly, if not entirely, by the hordes of tourists lining up to buy tickets to visit the site. Just who is to deny tourists and religious fanatics their right to pay tribute to a temple? Aren’t freedom of religion and freedom of mobility the very hallmarks of a modern, secular society?

Of course, it is entirely correct to insist that the Sagrada Familia should not invade public space, that it should have a building permit like any other construction site, and that there is no rational reason for a projected tunnel to have to make a wide detour around its foundations. Yes, the Casa Batlló’s neighbor should never have had four stories added on top of it, and perhaps the Colonia Güell crypt could have been renovated more sensitively (though it doesn’t look that bad either). But to insist that Gaudí’s work be returned to some sort of pure state and be henceforth left untouched?! That smacks of religious fundamentalism to me.

Lighten-Up in the Mies Pavilion

2008-11-26T13:17:00.023+01:00

The installation by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) at Barcelona's Mies van der Rohe Pavilion is simple, subtle, and surprising. And irreverent.

A single curving wall comprised of sheets of transparent acrylic winds around the pavilion's interior, creating a nearly invisible circular space. At first glance we might think of it as "Richard Serra Extra-Lite", but in fact this work is not about its own material presence, but about subtly, playfully and irreverently distorting our perception of this most canonical of Modernist buildings. If the Mies Pavilion is already a play of reflections, this adds another, radically different, layer of reflection.

The plan of the installation is a very loosely formed spiral (the symbol of pataphysics), reminiscent of the kind of shape that is often gesticulated by means of a pointer over a map by coaches, war strategists or architects. The work has a sort of spontaneity to it, perhaps due to the flimsiness and imperfect joints of the acrylic sheets. It appears not to have been overly labored, perhaps not even designed. With those oh-so kawaii rabbit chairs in there as well, I wonder if the installation might not just be trying to tell us to "lighten up!" If so, then I wish to second that emotion.

The Mies Foundation should also be congratulated for expanding the program of the pavilion beyond being merely a museum of itself.

Welcome to the Hotel Barcelona

2008-11-02T18:48:00.008+01:00

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Barcelona is in the tail-end of a hotel construction boom. And Barcelona being “Barceloooooonaaaaaa” means, of course, that these have to be designer hotels. Designery types such as Richard Rogers, Dominique Perrault, Carlos Ferrater, Oriol Bohigas, Juli Capella, Enric Ruiz Geli, Oscar Tusquets, and Ricardo Bofill (to name only some) all have a four- or five-star hotel in the works if not recently completed.

Interestingly, a number of new hotels are high-rise point-towers à la Benidorm, which is not in itself a bad thing since the city has nowhere to grow except in height. But others are being built in some rather questionable areas. One new hotel has recently been built on the side of Montjuïc hill, a public park of historical importance in which the construction of new buildings is strictly prohibited. It is painted dark green in a pathetic attempt to blend in with the hill’s vegetation; yet another example of what I have termed "everyday camouflage" (see Lotus International #126). Another hotel—an embarrassingly awful clone of the Burj al Arab Hotel in Dubai—is going up right at the edge of the sea, another non-buildable zone. One can’t help but wonder if the city isn’t making some very special concessions to hotel developers. Perhaps that is why the Ajuntament (City Hall) launched the advertisement campaign “Visc(a) Barcelona”, some months ago; a wordplay that in Catalan that means both “I live in Barcelona” and “long live Barcelona!” This latest campaign is obviously aimed at making residents proud to be living in a city well on its way to having the most hotel rooms per capita next only to Las Vegas.

Now I’m thinking to myself: this could be heaven or this could be hell.

Fine, but what does this mean for architecture? Well, for one thing it means that the hotel is possibly eclipsing the museum as architecture’s favorite building type. When designing a hotel, an architect can show off their talent much more than with a museum, since one can design a whole way of life from the building itself down to the toilet paper dispenser. When designing a museum, an architect must restrain herself from upstaging the art, but a hotel is an architect’s wet dream: a chance to do a work of "total design"; to control absolutely every aspect of the life lived inside. The fact that people usually only inhabit hotels for a relatively short period of time makes total design tolerable, even attractive. Hey, it might even be fun to try out a totally designed environment for a holiday experience. Architecture, once the stuff of Grand Tours and now that of global media events, has always been better suited to tourism, travel and temporary inhabitation than to dwelling, Being, or everyday life. Perhaps we can say that architecture has finally found its true "home".

Hal Foster, in his incisive book Design and Crime (and other diatribes), argues that, not unlike the turn of the last century, around the time that Adolf Loos published “Ornament and Crime”, we have once again entered an era of total design, one that he terms “Style 2000.” Perhaps Foster was responding to Mark Wigley, who asks in Harvard Design Magazine #5 “Whatever Happened to Total Design?” In any case, the hotel has eclipsed the home as the locus of total design today. Loos's "poor little rich man's home" is today the poor little rich man’s home away from home.

They’re living it up at the Hotel Barcelona. Such a nice surprise. Bring your alibis.

Architecture in Fashion

2008-10-09T12:24:00.002+02:00

Mannequin supporting a representation of the Expo Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion (by Zaha Hadid Architects) in a Zaragoza window display.

Soft Architecture

2008-10-07T14:17:00.002+02:00

"There will be...a reaction against the rigid, rectilinear architecture expressed in such structures as the United Nations Secretariat building. Buildings of the future will be soft and pliable. Constructed from products derived from atomic chemistry, they will change form constantly according to changes in atmospheric pressure and temperatures."

-Salvador Dalí, "Soft Architecture", 1956

World Glamor Festival

2008-09-24T18:59:00.003+02:00

The “World Architecture Festival” is being launched in Barcelona in late October. Is this good news or bad news?

The first thing that should be pointed out is that “WAF08” is being organized in London, not Barcelona. A click on “about us” at worldarchitecturefestival.com reveals the following bit of information: “The Festival is being launched as an annual event by Emap, the media group which runs other festivals including the World Retail Congress and Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival” (my italics). Hmm.

The second thing that needs to be mentioned is that a three-day visitor pass to this festival costs 600 euros. For students, the cost is “only” 150 euros.

It seems that this promises to be an architecture event “Cannes style”. Will there be walks along the red carpet? Will Lord Foster arrive in his helicopter? Will the paparazzi be out in force? Will Entertainment Tonight provide those of us who can’t attend this event (due to conflicting agendas, of course) their detailed analysis? Look, here comes a famous patron from Dubai!

What will Wolf Prix talk about at his keynote address celebrating 40 years of Co-op Himmelb(l)au—how he went from being anti-establishment in 1968 to building for multinational corporations such as BMW today?

Too bad I can’t make it.

Architecture Beyond Talk

2008-09-22T05:56:00.002+02:00

"Out There: Architecture Beyond Building" is the title of this year's Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Aaron Betsky. The implication here is that architects do more than "merely" build buildings. So what else do they do?

Firstly, it has to be said that there has been no shortage of construction activity at this biennale. There are lots of highly labored installations of drawings, models, photographs, furniture, sculpture, and even some full-scale constructions one is actually allowed to enter and (gasp!) touch. I guess that's the "building" part we were expecting anyway. Architects are hard-wired to build, when all is said and done. Fine. But what else is there beyond all the steel, wood, plastic, styrofoam, projections, monitors, paint and lighting that transcends building?

There is one added element in the Arsenale group exhibition (curated by Betsky himself) that is telling. The Arsenale exhibition includes, beside each installation, a panel printed with a "manifesto" together with a portrait-mounted LCD monitor displaying a video of the architect talking about their work. This multi-media form of extended labeling is intended to explain each architect's installation, which might not otherwise be understood. Normally, the texts of extended labels are written by the curator of an exhibition, and limited to a paragraph or two. Here, the architects have been given a voice, as it were, to explain their designs themselves.

Indeed, the architects were each asked to issue their own manifesto, no less. As Betsky states: "The architects communicate with the visitors by means of their Manifestos, declarations of intent presented by the authors themselves to involve the visitors in their visions and in their idea of architecture."

Manifestos became fashionable in the early 20th century, when avant-garde artistic and architectural movements were sprouting in Paris, Rotterdam, Berlin and Moscow. They went out with the rise of Post-modernism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, or at least that's what we thought. The Arsenale exhibition oozes with avant-garde overtones, not only because of the manifesto panels, but also because of the earnest and sincere tone with which many of the architects talk in their videos. "We must..." comes up frequently.

It is interesting to compare this biennale of architecture to its art sibling. Artists are not required to explain their work, but when they do, they very rarely use the urgent, serious and missionary tone of a manifesto. If they did, it would probably be taken with a large dose of irony. It would seem then, at least from looking at this exhibition, that what architects do "beyond building" is talk. Seriously.

Punch and Play: Palmeritas Healthcare Center, Seville, by CHS Arquitectos

2008-08-01T19:14:00.001+02:00

Any voyage from an airport to a city centre proves that urban peripheries the world over relate more to each other than to their very namesakes. Seville, Spain’s third largest city, is a good example of this. The moment you step beyond the beautiful historical urban core, it’s business-as-usual: cloned housing blocks, retail outlets, industrial parks, and endless traffic circles. Why, it could be the periphery of any city, were it not for the blinding sunshine and the thermometer indicating +40 º C. But then it’s the little things, as the famous line in the film Pulp Fiction goes, that mark the differences in today’s “global world”; little things such as the new Palmeritas Healthcare Centre, by Seville’s CHS Arquitectos.

Situated in the Nervión neighbourhood—best known as the home ground of the Sevilla Football Club—near the appropriately named Avenida de la Ciudad Jardín, the Palmeritas Healthcare Centre is an example of how a modest public building can make a difference in a sea of blandness, perhaps even providing a reminder of the city at the periphery of which it is located. Its exterior wall, clad in differently coloured strips of glazed brick, is punctured with hundreds of small openings that recall the screen walls of Moorish architecture, diffusing the harsh Andalusian midday sun while performing as a glowing beacon to the neighbourhood at night. This is the sort of place where politicians and planners would do well to have their peripheral vision checked.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #14]

Water Tower and Bridge Pavilion

2008-07-11T21:56:00.005+02:00

Bridge Pavilion (Zaha Hadid).....................................Water Tower (Enrique de Teresa)

One of the ironies of world expositions is that while they apparently act as a catalyst for large-scale urban improvements to the host city, the expo sites themselves often end up as ghost towns. Expo architecture always seems to have difficulty finding a second life. Expo Zaragoza, an event whose theme is ‘Water and Sustainable Development’, has done away for the most part with the idea of single-use pavilions. But it has not dispensed with tradition entirely: the Water Tower, an 80-m-high observation post, is probably one of the more monumentally unusable constructions to be undertaken since the building of the Eiffel Tower more than a century ago.

Although over 20 storeys high, the glass and steel structure contains hardly any floors. Except for the base of the building, which houses the Water for Life exhibition, most of its interior is taken up by circulation ramps and empty space. About 3 km of ramps, in fact, are intertwined in a DNA-like double helix: one leading up to the observation lounge and bar, the other descending. Following the teardrop-shaped perimeter of the building, the ramps encircle a tall, airy atrium that, complete with a piece of cheesy corporate sculpture – Splash, by Pere Gifré – would make John Portman proud.

The idea behind the ramps is to facilitate the flow of visitors to and from the observation lounge. In reality, however, many who undertake the hike give up halfway and are forced to descend the up-ramp, making for anything but a smooth flow of pedestrian traffic. The bigger question, however, is what the Water Tower could possibly be used for after the Expo closes and visitor flow turns to a trickle. It would be such an unsustainable shame to have to mothball – or worse, demolish – this urban landmark.

Infrastructure – bridges, canals, roadways, tunnels and the like – has belonged to the discipline of civil engineering since the Enlightenment, whereas representational buildings – such as pavilions, temples and palaces – have been strictly within the purview of architecture. Nary the two shall meet. Until now.

As the name suggests, the Bridge Pavilion is both a piece of public infrastructure and a building for exhibitions. In fact, it bundles the two programmes together: the structure is an enclosed pedestrian bridge that serves as a gateway to Expo Zaragoza from which adjacent and parallel exhibition spaces bifurcate. Although the pedestrian concourse is direct and only slightly curved, the exhibition spaces – especially the larger of the two, spanning two levels – are articulated by means of switchback ramps, carefully positioned windows and finer interior finishes, all aimed at slowing down visitors to a measured pace that is conducive to contemplation.

Supported midway on a small island in the Ebro River, the Bridge Pavilion comprises four interlocking ‘pods’, each diamond-shaped in section. Two pods, arranged linearly on either side of the island, make up the pedestrian concourse while two others, one on either side of the pedestrian pods, contain the exhibition spaces. The intersections of these pods result in the liquid spaces that have become Zaha Hadid’s trademark. Interestingly, it is precisely the public infrastructure component of the Bridge Pavilion that ensures its continued relevance after the closure of Expo Zaragoza. In this regard, the building is a unique example of an expo pavilion that is a genuine urban improvement.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #16]

Exquisite Corpse: CaixaForum Madrid by Herzog + de Meuron

2008-06-01T23:30:00.002+02:00

A large sculpture next to a mega monochrome painting – at first glance and from a distance, that’s what the serrated box and vertical garden of the new CaixaForum Madrid resemble. A Per Kirkeby next to an oversize Ad Reinhart or Brice Marden in an unknown green period, or perhaps a public piece by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

The building by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and the vertical garden by French botanist Patrick Blanc amount to a brilliant urban intervention that has transformed the site of a former power plant and petrol station in central Madrid into an important new addition to the city’s ‘art triangle’, an area formed by the Prado, Reina Sofía and Thyssen-Bornemisza Museums. Nonetheless, the resemblance of this intervention to sculpture and painting raises questions about contemporary architecture’s fascination with art. Even the ‘secular’ work of Herzog & de Meuron – indisputably the favorite architects of the art world – is clearly inspired by modern and contemporary art. Barcelona’s Forum 2004 Building, with its highly textured Yves Klein Blue-coloured skin, is a direct homage to the artist who invented that shade of blue.

Yet, as artists such as Sol LeWitt have written, architecture is not art, and it is particularly ironic that so much cutting-edge architecture currently reminds us of the most traditional forms of art – sculpture and painting – precisely at a time when contemporary art seems to be almost anything but sculpture and painting. I’m not referring here exclusively to Herzog &de Meuron, but to all the usual suspects. It has to be asked whether architecture is really advancing when it seeks to become an inhabitable form of sculpture. If art, as is so often said, is a mirror held up to the world, then architecture, the very construction of the world, cannot be the same sort of mirror. As an old-school professor told me in my formative years: ‘An artist can make a square wheel, but an architect’s wheel must always be round.’

CaixaForum Madrid is the newest of a series of ambitious social and cultural outreach projects of the Fundación ‘la Caixa’, a private philanthropic foundation funded by one of Spain’s larger financial institutions. Like the CaixaForums in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca, Madrid’s is a centre for exhibitions of ancient, modern and contemporary art (including works from the Fundación ‘la Caixa’ contemporary art collection), music and poetry festivals, debates, seminars on contemporary issues and educational workshops. And like most of the foundation’s building projects, which include CosmoCaixa science museums in Barcelona and Madrid as well as smaller cultural and social centres in Catalonia and the Balearic Isles, CaixaForum Madrid has a social agenda that includes the preservation of a significant piece of built heritage. CaixaForum Barcelona, by Arata Isozaki, involved the adaptive reuse of the Casaramona textile factory designed in 1909 by Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Similarly, CaixaForum Madrid recuperates the Central Eléctrica del Mediodía, a power plant designed in 1899 by architect Jesús Carrasco-Muñoz.

It is well known that the art world generally prefers older buildings – especially those linked to a region’s industrial heritage – over completely new architecture for exhibiting visual art. The patina of worn and weathered buildings, according to many artists and curators, suits the display of contemporary art better than brand-new sterile spaces, though I suspect their preference may emerge in part from a predisposition for buildings that look like buildings and not like sculptures. The most monumental manifestation of this aesthetic preference is, of course, London’s Tate Modern, another power plant transformed by Herzog & de Meuron, although the prototype for exhibiting art in industrial buildings originates in the use made of New York warehouses by American minimalist and conceptualist artists of the 1960s and ’70s.

In the case of CaixaForum Madrid, however, the appropriation of historical architecture is superficial: only the exterior walls of the Central del Mediodía have been preserved. Inside these walls – as well as above and below them – the construction is contrastingly new. Moreover, the historical building has been completely recontextualized: the heavy plinth that originally supported the power station has been removed and replaced by three points of support, causing the building to appear to levitate over the site. As a result, it is no longer self-evident that this was the original site of the Central del Mediodía. Industrial architecture is so rare and out of place in Madrid, the monumental capital of Spain, that one could easily imagine this building floating to the site all the way from Barcelona, Spain’s industrial capital and, incidentally, the headquarters of ‘la Caixa’. Indeed, with its addition on top, CaixaForum recalls the many 19th-century buildings of Barcelona’s Eixample district that were expanded vertically by as many as four storeys during the latter half of the Franco dictatorship, a period of rampant real-estate speculation.

CaixaForum Madrid appears, then, to be a palimpsest, a collage, an exquisite corpse. But this is just an exterior reading: in addition to the elevated hybrid building, there is also a hidden underground component extending horizontally beneath the plaza. This underground component can be reached only after penetrating the elevated building through its topographical underside, by means of a sculptural winding stair that ascends from the plaza into the lobby. Here, a single picture window frames a view of Madrid’s Botanical Gardens across the busy Paseo del Prado and a segment of an adjacent block of buildings whose end wall supports Patrick Blanc’s vertical garden. To continue from the lobby to the rest of the building, the visitor must enter a stairwell that leads up to two exhibition galleries, a bar-restaurant and administrative offices; and down to an underground auditorium and lecture halls. The stairwell, a tapered vertical shaft, is important for structural reasons: it is the largest of the three vertical supports that elevate the building above the plaza. As the shear- and torsion-resistant structural core of the building, it functions like the vertical core of any high-rise building, except that it’s roomy and admits daylight from above. But the stairwell is no ‘museum atrium’ either: it is completely out of view with respect to the rest of the building, precisely because of the load-bearing and fire-resistant role of its heavy white concrete walls. In this regard, CaixaForum marks a significant departure from current art-museum thinking, in which galleries are typically organized around a central, brightly lit atrium to which visitors periodically return, as part of a strategy to alleviate disorientation and museum fatigue. The opacity of the structural stairwell separates each floor completely from the others; consequently, depending on the level at which one exits the stairwell, the décor could change completely. The lobby, with its bright silver beams, contrasts with the white terrazzo floored galleries, the natural wood and dark red-brown perforated metal of the underground spaces, and the delicately screened daylight passing through perforated Corten steel in the restaurant. Here, CaixaForum marks another significant departure from current museums: the building interior is neither monotonously monochrome nor ‘purist’ in an ‘honest’ display of construction materials. Like an urban palace– the first art gallery – CaixaForum contains a variety of differently finished rooms. Paint and interior wall coverings are no taboo for these Swiss architects.

Although CaixaForum Madrid appears at first glance to resemble supersize art, up close it reveals itself to be surprising, eclectic and complex. It incorporates the façade of a historical building that has been emptied, but unlike the common heritage practice of ‘façadism’ –whereby a historical surface is used to camouflage modernity – the historical façade of this building functions as a character foil to some radical moves. CaixaForum Madrid appropriates many art-world architectural conventions but subtly turns them upside down. Precisely what the best art and architecture have always done.

[originally published in Mark Magazine #14]

Everyday Camouflage in the City

2006-01-13T22:24:00.004+01:00

INTRODUCTION

"Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth drawers house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales the grocer's....If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city's order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel....Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it." –Italo Calvino

Camouflage, in both nature and warfare, is a means for escaping visual detection by an enemy or predator, presupposing a combative relationship between a viewing and a viewed subject. Yet, a civilian, presumably non-adversarial form of camouflage is increasingly present in many Western cities that has little to do with physical conflict and everything to do with (the prevention of) ideological conflict; with appeasing prevailing aesthetic sensibilities and notions of civic rectitude in the interests of creating an image of uniformity and cohesion.

“Everyday camouflage,” as it is identified here, is a strategy for concealing potentially problematic or undesirable building content by means of contrived architectural simulation. Examples include the concealment of new construction—especially urban infrastructure installations—behind traditional building facades; clandestine religious groups operating under the cover of “normal” secular architecture; banality concealed behind spectacular architecture; wealth disguised behind an image of poverty; or buildings whose contentious histories are “cleansed” by the application of new exterior surface materials. More generally, it is possible to identify three main cultural issues which seem to prompt applications of everyday camouflage: modernity, class, and memory.

In cases of everyday camouflage, the notion of “building type” is appropriated and at the same time subverted. The correlation that normally exists between building content and building form is taken advantage of in order to conceal by means of a deceptive simulation. A disjunction is thereby made to exist between what a building contains and what it “looks like” it contains. Any consistency between form and content is made to yield to a consistency among forms. Such an urban formal uniformity appeals to popular fantasies of the city as a harmonious space; a sentiment that is on the rise in an increasingly heterogeneous and pluralist age.

The existence of this everyday form of camouflage puts into question the socio-political construction of the city as the space par excellence of civilized society, revealing instead hidden deceits and the extent to which a mythical urban image must, at times, be made to prevail over reality (2). It shows, moreover, how the city is increasingly constructed and manipulated as a landscape; as “scenery” with which architecture is expected to conform, regardless of content. The very authenticity of what is experienced and seen is put into question by this marginal, relatively unusual phenomenon.

Everyday camouflage also reveals how architectural appearance can be made to perform in a strategic and performative capacity; how architectural aesthetics can comprise a stratagem—a means to an end—as opposed to an object of visual contemplation—an end in itself. The aesthetic of camouflage is, after all, “uninteresting” unless viewed outside of the field in which it operates. Likewise, examples of everyday camouflage in the city tend to make for visually uninteresting architecture: in most cases, these buildings look no different than neighboring buildings. And yet, the odd juxtapositions that these banal-looking buildings embody between interior and exterior result in disjunctions and “complexities and contradictions” that are nevertheless revealing.

In contrast with a stylistic use of camouflage, such as, say, Herzog and de Meuron’s seamless blending of the Dominus Winery into the Napa Valley landscape, the camouflage discussed here is not the result of any architecturally clever and innovative surface treatment. Camouflage here is an operative means of deception; not an aesthetic. This important distinction is analogous to the difference between a military camouflage pattern worn as a fashion style in cities (as has been the vogue), where it is obviously not intended as a means of dissimulation since such a pattern is completely ineffective in an urban context; and a military camouflage pattern worn in the field by soldiers or hunters in action, for whom it is not a “look” but an operative necessity.

Could the Dominus Winery’s exterior surface have been intended as a means of dissimulation? It certainly does not look like a traditional winery, but it also does not resemble any other type of building. In questions of camouflage, there has to be a motive operating within a certain context: if something is camouflage (and not an aesthetic pattern), then what is being concealed and, given the circumstances, why might this concealment be occurring? Just as a hunter is trying to avoid being seen by prey he is stalking or a soldier by an enemy, there may be interests in concealing certain programmatic activities occurring in certain circumstances.

Conversely, the examples of everyday camouflage cited here could very well not have been intended to be acts of concealment, even though the circumstances of the building programs in question could be seen to warrant it. We can really only ever speculate. But architectural theory—and in this case also cultural theory—is precisely that: speculation.

ARCHITECTURE AND CAMOUFLAGE

The surface of a building always conceals from view, to varying degrees, that which it contains and shelters. Historically, architecture’s content has been revealed on the exterior by means of ornament and typological form. While interior styles could vary to reflect private tastes, the outward appearance of a building has traditionally been consistent with its function in some way. Richard Hill puts it quite bluntly: “The connections between the use of a building and aspects of its visible form are powerful and consistent.” (3) The very notion of architectural typology, or the categorization of buildings into ‘types’—not unlike the scientific categorization of plants, rocks or animal species—is premised on such consistency. Camouflage of any sort would not be effective without a set of assumptions on the part of a viewing subject; assumptions that have their basis in “normal” appearances.

Eighteenth-century Architecture Parlante addressed the issue of the outward expression of function theoretically, contending that a building’s façade must represent or symbolize its function on the exterior. In Claude Nicholas Ledoux’s project for a wheelwright’s shop at the royal salt works at Arc-et-Senans, for example, the building’s content is communicated externally by means of a pattern of concentric circles on the façade.

Claude Nicholas Ledoux: Wheelwright’s shop, Royal Salt Works at Arc-et-Senans

Such literal and highly specific display of content remains the exception and not the norm, of course. More typically, a wheelwright’s workshop would have occupied a building that looks like a workshop, with finer ornament or a sign communicating at closer reading a more exact idea of the activity occurring within. Typological form is premised on “types” of activity—public institutions, residences, religious worship, commerce, banking, industry, and so on—and not on “specific” activities. Such general categorization of types, in conjunction with more specific ornamental definition, allows for readings of building content at multiple levels of detail.

The Functionalist movement of the early twentieth century, on the other hand, which sought to do away precisely with ideas of traditional building types and ornament, argued, not unlike the architects of Architecture Parlante, that it is the exact function of a building that should determine its form. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour have noted, with respect to modernism, that “meaning was to be communicated, not through allusion to previously known forms, but through the inherent, physiognomic characteristics of form. The creation of architectural form was to be a logical process, free from the images of past experience, determined solely by program and structure.” (4)

Modernist transparency and form, which would be made possible by new construction techniques such as steel and reinforced concrete, would liberate the façade not only from bearing loads, but also from having to represent a building’s function through ornament and symbolism. Indeed, there was to be no more “façade” in modernism, but an exterior surface that was a seamless result of the interior: “A building is like a soap bubble,” wrote Le Corbusier in 1927. “This building is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. The exterior is the result of the interior.” (5)

This notion of a more precise functional form, in conjunction with transparency, would become a hallmark of architectural modernism. Yet modernism’s abandonment of the notion of the building type in favor of physiognomic form, coupled with literal transparency, renders the city itself much more polymorphous and difficult to navigate; precisely the basis of much of the humor in Jacques Tati’s 1967 film “Playtime.” As Lewis Mumford writes, “In the past half-century, architecture has turned from enclosure to exposure: a virtual replacement of the wall by the window.” (6)

Architecture’s moral obligation to honestly convey content is reinforced, indeed reified, by modernist transparency. The very idea of transparency was revolutionary in its symbolism and utopian in its potential applications: to shed light into hermetic social enclosures and to open political processes to public participation and inquiry; the sort of values that are epitomized in the glass dome that Norman Foster designed more recently for the Reichstag in Berlin. “Transparency opened up machine architecture to inspection –its functions displayed like anatomical models, its walls hiding no secrets; the very epitome of social morality,” writes Anthony Vidler. “Transparency, it was thought, would eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all the irrational.” (7)

Transparency never really succeeded in opening up the city, of course. For one thing, glass is never perfectly transparent due to its alter-ego; reflectivity. For another, it became apparent that for many modernist architects, transparency and function were alibis for engaging in formalist exercises. Nevertheless, the notion that a building should in some way reveal—as opposed to conceal—its content remained unquestioned throughout modernism. “A building should be true, not dishonest. Forms must be what they seem to be. A building should be a true expression of its purpose and of its age. Materials and structural systems should be used with integrity and be honestly expressed. The society of forms should achieve its goals through harmonious cooperation” wrote Edward Robert de Zurko in 1957. (8)

URBANISM AND CAMOUFLAGE

With the advent of architectural postmodernism, however, the tacit understanding that buildings should be transparent—either literally or figuratively—with respect to content gives way to the imperative that building form must conform with urban context. Everyday camouflage can be seen to represent an extreme form of urban contextualism, where it is no longer a question of architectural mediation between context and communicating or revealing content, but an outright prioritization of the former at the expense of the latter.

As with many aspects of postmodernism, the fantasy of the architecturally consistent city was foreshadowed in an earlier period. Toward the end of the neo-classical period, at the height of European colonial expansion worldwide, a cosmic image of the capital city as an architecturally unified entity began to take hold in the imagination of rulers and architects—even if this image was only a façade. Leonardo Benevolo has observed that "many of the most admired complexes of the late eighteenth century in England--the Circus and Royal Crescent in Bath (J. Wood, 1764 and 1769), the famous squares of Bloomsbury (1775-1827) and, later, Regent's Park (J. Nash, 1812)—consisted in the superimposition of a uniform architecture upon a number of separate houses; symmetry and unity of perspective, originally the elements of structural planning, had now become the vehicle for mere external uniformity." (9)

But whereas late eighteenth-century urban consistency is intended as the architectural expression of a consolidation of power by a ruling class, postmodern urban consistency can be seen more as a reactionary response to an emergent cultural pluralism and aesthetic heterogeneity; a side-effect of growing economic globalization and trans-national migration. In a global marketplace, commodities and the infrastructure and organization required to move them entail the proliferation of new, non-vernacular forms and expressions which, precisely in order to appeal to local consumers, are often dressed up.

Another aspect of globalization is that cities themselves have become internationally recognizable “name-brands” associated closely with certain imagery. This imagery, which is partially fabricated, then becomes one which the “real” city must literally build if it is to physically resemble it. The more consistent the real city becomes with this image, it is believed, the more it will in turn attract tourism and investment. The paradox is, of course, that as cities grow and prosper, they must modernize their infrastructure and, in the case of older cities, their building stock. This creates, in turn, a greater need to employ camouflage strategies for the sake of emulating the idealized urban image; a catch-22 situation.

MODERNITY

Modernity is the object of concealment in most cases of everyday camouflage. Nowhere is this more blatantly visible than with the increasingly common heritage practice of “façadism,” whereby a decrepit building is demolished but its façade retained so that new, modern construction can be incorporated in-behind and, more importantly, out of sight. It involves great expense as the façade must be temporarily braced and supported while demolition and subsequent new construction occurs.

This controversial practice, which represents a compromise between outright conservation and outright modernization, raises the question: to whom does a façade belong—to a building, or to the public space that it faces? For many citizens, the face of a building is an immutable aspect of the collective memory of the city; which explains why façadism is rarely met with public opposition. But façadism is also good for tourism. It is especially common in European and American historical city centers; places where the traditional industrial economic base, which has relocated to the urban periphery or to other parts of the world, is being substituted by cultural tourism.

The very willfulness and expense of façadism suggests that the city is increasingly perceived as scenic landscape; as an object to be consumed rather than as a space of productive activity. Façadism constitutes a “camouflaging” of modernity by a society which increasingly demands the conveniences of modernization but at the same time rejects any image of modernity in the historical public realm. (10)

Rail tunnel ventilation facility behind historical hotel façade, Paris

A public transportation mechanical facility situated in Paris illustrates this very well. The La Fayette ventilation facility, situated between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, contains machinery that draws fresh air into rail tunnels below. It is hidden behind the façade of a Haussmann-era hotel that was retained when the rest of the building was demolished. The content—mechanical infrastructure for public transportation—is hidden entirely from public view behind an architectural façade belonging to another, very different type of building. The concealment of mechanical systems behind historical façades is encouraged in many cities’ architectural conservation policies; policies which were drafted in response to public outrage at the construction of buildings such as the Centre Georges Pompidou by Piano and Rogers in the 1970s; a building whose exterior resembles somewhat the content of the La Fayette ventilation facility.

Cultural institution resembling ventilation facility

Another practice, similar to façadism, and also increasingly common, is that of entirely new building construction—including new façades—which appear, even at close-range, to be historical. The argument cited in support of this more insidious form of everyday camouflage is not architectural conservation but rather contextualism.

An ensemble of 1986 office buildings in Richmond-Upon-Thames, United Kingdom, by Quinlan Terry, provides an example of everyday camouflage in which modern construction is completely masked behind an exterior that appears to date, in every detail, from a previous century. The buildings contain flexible, open-plan office space with central air conditioning, underground parking, and modern communications infrastructure. The buildings are sited between the banks of the River Thames and the historical center of the town, forming a series of public spaces that link town and river. The high visibility of the site from across the river would surely have been a factor favoring the use of camouflage in order to create an image sympathetic to the Prince of Wales’s vision of Britain.

Quinlan Terry: office building, Richmond-Upon-Thames

Contextualism—the visual blending-in of a building with its surroundings—is of course the operative strategy behind most forms of camouflage in general. (11) Contextualist architecture, especially when containing a modern program such as technologically advanced open-plan office space, clearly establishes a disjunction between form and content in which modernity can be seen, again, to be the object of concealment.

But modernity is not the only object of concealment in everyday camouflage. On the contrary, in the 1960s and 70s, it was common practice to clad older, traditional buildings situated in the central business districts of large North American cities with abstract louvers, screens or large commercial signs that would make them appear to be more modern. Manhattan’s Times Square provides the best-known example of this phenomenon. Here, new architectural layers conceal tradition within an historical context in which the aspired urban image was that of the modern metropolis. Today’s practice of façadism represents a perfect reversal of this form of everyday camouflage. In fact, the addition of new cladding onto older buildings can actually be compared to a long history of architectural palimpsests and the sort of historical layering existing in ancient cities; façadism, on the other hand, entails a resistance against historical layering; a maintenance of the status quo.

CLASS

Another, less usual form of façadism has to do with designer culture, taste, and class distinction in urban situations where these values predominate. As opposed to the populism of retained façades, “designer skins” speak of an elitist form of façadism.

Barcelona Hilton: building by one architectural firm; facade by another.

The Barcelona Hilton Hotel is large business-class hotel in which two different architectural firms collaborated: a “high-profile” firm designed the façades (Viaplana Piñon), and a “production firm” designed the rest of the building (Mir, Coll, Carmona). This building sets a precedent in which, from the very outset of the project, a “designer skin” conceals what is in reality a formulaic, banal building. The hotel’s important situation at the upper end of the Avinguda Diagonal, an important gateway into the city in its wealthiest district, prompted city planners to require that the client hire a firm from a list of architects “approved” to design building façades in strategic locations. As a city that has worked hard to become a global referent in architecture and urban design, Barcelona seems to be reaching a point in its radical transformation in which the growing expectation for everything to be “designed” must be satisfied superficially for reasons of feasibility.

Brian Murphy: Hopper Residence, Venice, California.

The residence of actor Dennis Hopper in Venice, California, by Brian Murphy provides, on the other hand, an example of a banal exterior strategically concealing an extravagant and unusual interior program: that of a wealthy Hollywood actor who decides to build a house for his extensive contemporary art collection in a tough, working-class part of the city. It thus follows, to the letter, Adolf Loos’s dictum “the house should be silent to the outside; inside it should reveal all its wealth.” The house is windowless on the street façade and clad entirely in corrugated metal, a material that is visible on the many garages and industrial sheds in the area. The white picket fence, retained from the former tenants, is the only domestic interruption to an otherwise inhospitable exterior. Since it in no way resembles neighboring houses, the Hopper Residence is a non-contextualist kind of camouflage, resembling more a type of natural camouflage known as “mimicry” in which a species adopts exterior characteristics of a species that preys on its hunter. Mike Davis considers this house to be part of “an entire species of Los Angeles ‘stealth houses’, dissimulating luxurious qualities with proletarian or gangster façades.” (12)

MEMORY

The built works cited this far employ various camouflage strategies in order to conceal problematic content. Yet camouflage can also be applied retroactively to an older building in order to physically conceal a problematic history with which it is associated. In this sort of application, camouflage attempts to erase a painful collective memory.

Adaptive re-use of military hospital, Brigham City, Utah, before and after

The small town of Brigham City, Utah, is the site of an extensive array of military buildings renovated into housing that give an example of everyday camouflage concealing a problematic collective memory by means of a superficial application of colorful new building materials. What is now “Eagle Village” was originally a World War II military hospital and prisoner of war camp that was subsequently converted into the country’s largest Native Indian residential school. A private developer purchased the abandoned barracks in the early 1990s, after the school closed, with the intention of converting it into a New Urbanist “village” of affordable row houses. In order to present a new “residential” image to the blighted zone, a vertically striped multi-colored pattern was applied to the façades and roofs that corresponds with the new row-house units. Through the use of color and a “dazzle” camouflage tactic of disruptive patterning, the figural unity of this monotonous complex is broken and given a new image with the aim of creating a desirable commodity. Eagle Village raises, moreover, the question of what to do with buildings that were sites of problematic events. In the case of O.J. Simpson’s Los Angeles residence, the solution taken was to demolish a perfectly fine mansion. In the case of Nazi-era buildings in Berlin that were reoccupied when that city was made the capital of a reunited Germany, the solution was to publicly stress the new democratic use that was being made of these structures, psychologically disrupting the association between the form and the memory. (13)

Church of Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam

The conservation of a religious group’s collective memory during a period of religious proscription is another situation in which everyday camouflage has been used. When Amsterdam was made Protestant in the Alteration of 1578, all public displays of Catholic symbols were prohibited—including Catholic churches themselves, many of which were either demolished or renovated into Protestant churches. Collective Catholic worship was allowed as long as it occurred in locations which appeared, on the exterior, to be inconspicuous. One such location, which remains intact today, is the Our Lord in the Attic Roman Catholic Church, on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal in the historical center of Amsterdam. This church was constructed between 1661 and 1663 in the attic over a new house and store for the wealthy hosiery merchant Jan Hartman. In contrast with the austerity of the Dutch Classical style used throughout the house, the church, which has two galleries suspended from the roof, is rich in ornamentation. Under Calvinist rule, the architectural concealment of Catholic churches was written into law, thus possibly constituting one of the first written treatises on the subject.

CONCLUSION

The above cases of everyday camouflage involve aspects of modernization, class or memory that, in their respective contexts, could be seen to be “at issue” with prevailing public sensibilities. Rather than provoke or stir up controversy, the buildings employ camouflage in order to avoid detection, and thereby confrontation. Such an attitude stands, interestingly, in complete antithesis to the current climate of spectacular and attention-seeking architecture. As Roy Behrens writes: “Art portrays a unified form and—however daringly—always distinguishes figure from ground in order to utter some “thing,” while camouflage always subverts these laws in order to say “no thing.” (14) How do we judge these works in architectural terms—are they necessarily “bad design” because of their fakery, banality, lack of integrity—because they are, in effect, simulacra? Can buildings designed to dissimulate attention even be considered “architecture,” or will they always be “mere” buildings, albeit unusual ones? Must architecture always look like “architecture”? (15)

These questions may be academically trivial since this phenomenon remains a relatively marginal one. But as Michel Foucault has shown us, it is precisely how a society deals with what it considers to be its aberrations and deviations that can offer more insight into what that society considers normal. Similarly, everyday camouflage sheds insight into urban “normality” precisely because it is a “false” and therefore highly contrived normality.

Everyday camouflage “appears” to occur mainly in technologically advanced urban societies that have undergone massive modernization in recent decades. It is no coincidence that its rise coincides with one of a hegemonic mass-media that employs urban imagery to promote lifestyle consumption. The city is revealed by this phenomenon to be a space of illusion and desire; an illusion that must be maintained, at times, by highly theatrical means. The fact that camouflage, which is adversarial by nature, occurs in the purportedly more civilized realm of the city says perhaps the most about the degree to which the city, as a concept, is shrouded in myth.

NOTES:

1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. Trans: William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) pp. 13-14.

2. Rem Koolhaas writes in S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995) that “the historical city is full of falsifications and manipulations that make it impossible to talk about what is authentic and what is not.” (p. xxviii)

3. Richard Hill, Designs and their Consequences (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) p. 111.

4. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972) pp. 7-8.

5. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1927) p. 167.

6. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961) pp.268-269.

7. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992) p. 217.

8. Edward Robert de Zurko, Origins of Functionalist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957) p. 11.

9. Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning (London: Routledge, 1967) pp. 13-14.

10. In the United Kingdom, for example, public pressure is increasingly demanding that mobile phone antennas be concealed inside props resembling trees or church steeples so that landscape views are not “spoiled,” while many covenants of home-owner associations in master-planned communities prohibit satellite dishes unless these are made to resemble rocks, trees or architectural ornaments. See www.utilitycamo.com

11. An important exception is “dazzle” camouflage, which uses a disruptive, highly abstract pattern in order to disorient and confuse and which was proved to be successful in protecting warships.

12. Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990) p. 238.

13. Stenen Spoken, “Ghosts of Stone”, Archis, 1991. Vol. 3, pp. 69-73.

14. Roy R. Behrens, Art and Camouflage: Concealment and Deception in Nature, Art and War (Cedar Falls, Iowa: University of Northern Iowa, 1981), p. 14.

15. Stan Allen writes, in Points and Lines (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999): “I’m more interested in what architecture does than what it looks like.”

Photography and research collaboration: Sheila Nadimi.

Research for this project was made possible thanks to grants from the Graham Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Netherlands Foundation for Art, Design and Architecture.

Thanks to: Roemer van Toorn, Rob Kovitz, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Miguel Roldán, Anjela Wilkes.

[this article originally published in Lotus International # 126. Earlier versions of this research project were presented / published at the Second Savannah Symposium, Authenticity in Architecture (2001) and in On Site Review #9 (2003)]

The pursuit of pleasure by the most efficient available means: the urbanism of Benidorm, Spain

2005-10-01T10:41:00.007+02:00

Benidorm is a city in southeastern Spain with an urban morphology that is highly unusual for Europe: it is a city of point towers. From a distance, it resembles an American downtown or a new Asian city, with hundreds of tall, slender buildings wedged between arid, semi-desert hills and sparkling sea. From the A-7 highway, which runs the entire length of the highly built-up Mediterranean coast of Spain from the French border to the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, the apparition of Benidorm manages to produce surprise and confusion even after passing through much larger cities such as Barcelona and Valencia.

Benidorm began to develop its urbanism of point towers in the 1960s, when it was transformed from a small fishing village into a major holiday destination for northern Europeans, and, significantly, when the modernist high-rise apartment ‘slab’ was still de rigueur worldwide among architects, planners and mayors. Seen in this historical context, Benidorm prognosticates the demise of the modernist slab and the current growth of the point tower as the preferred form of high-rise residential construction.

In the North American city—the very birthplace of the skyscraper—towers have generally contained office space; high-rise residential buildings more typically assume the form of slabs. It is only relatively recently that the residential point tower has become a commonplace in cities such as Toronto or Vancouver. But the emergence of point-tower housing has been even slower in Europe, where high-rise construction is culturally abhorred and where towers have historically been privileged, singular urban landmarks such as church steeples, defensive ramparts or noble families’ symbols of wealth and power—an idea to which an entire city of towers is an antithesis. So why, then, did Benidorm develop in the way that it did?

In the context of the twentieth century, the slab and the tower can be seen to form dialectical opposites. The slab, ideally sited in a park, is representative of European academic modernism and CIAM urbanism—Le Corbusier, in short—while the tower is associated with ‘vulgar’ commercial real-estate development–the stuff of Manhattan or Hong Kong. The slab speaks of welfare-state housing and utopian planning; the point tower of private-sector pragmatism.

Interestingly, a lack of architectural pretension and a fascination for America are probably the reason for Benidorm’s aberrant urban form. Spain—especially agrarian, small-town provincial Spain—was culturally isolated from the rest of the world during almost four decades of military dictatorship that lasted from 1939 to 1975. Could it be that Benidorm’s architects were perhaps more inspired by popular postcard images of American cities than by the teachings of the architectural modern movement?

The construction of modern Benidorm was, for one thing, never a state-sponsored social housing project but rather a private-sector speculative venture. The point-tower became an established building type in Benidorm due to its high commercial viability and the views that this building type permits, even in a normative situation. Views matter especially in a tourism destination, and a city of slender towers permits more glimpses through the city and toward the surrounding landscape than a city of wall-like slabs. The modernist slab may exploit land efficiently, but not landscape—unless of course the slab is a relatively isolated occurrence in the manner of Le Corbusier’s stand-alone unités.

Architecture is, of course, premised from the very outset on exceptionality. Its values are resistant to the massification of ideas. As every architecture student learns, one must always ‘go against the grain’ and never design the very grain itself. As a mark of cultural distinction, architecture privileges the unique, isolated object; figure over ground. In Benidorm, there is no architecture: there is “the tallest building in Spain” which is also “the tallest hotel in Europe” (the Hotel Bali), but there are no buildings that stand out architecturally. Architectural guidebooks to Spain do not list any of its buildings, making Benidorm an exceptional city without exceptional buildings.

This generic quality permeates Benidorm’s urban fabric with perfect consistency. The point towers contain mostly hotel rooms and vacation apartments inhabited by middle-class Britons, Germans, Scandinavians and Spaniards, such that the city effectively comprises a sort of modern Euro-space. In fact, Benidorm can be seen as a representation in built form of one of the core values underpinning modern Europe: the right of every citizen to free time and leisure. Leisure is democratized and made affordable by the efficiency of the point tower type. It is no coincidence that Benidorm’s occupancy rates consistently outperform other holiday destinations in Spain whose tourist sector faces growing competition from cheaper eastern European destinations served by discount airlines.

Benidorm’s beach is the main public space, principal organizing device and raison d’être of the city. Streets are laid out in a quasi-gridiron pattern of small, compact urban blocks, providing walkable access to the beach as well as ground-level services, mainly in the form of small, family-owned shops, bars and restaurants. The point towers punctuate the air space above this densely built up, contiguous service ground-plane. Like most homes in Spain, Benidorm’s vacation apartments are relatively small, with bedrooms just barely large enough for a bed, side table and wardrobe. Spanish life is lived mostly outside the home in cafés, on streets and in plazas, and the Euro-space of Benidorm is no exception. In fact, the ‘Spanish’ and ‘urban’ lifestyle of Benidorm has been found to be one of its most important attractions, notwithstanding the prevalence of Irish pubs and lunch menus featuring steak and kidney pie. The evening paseo is an institution in Benidorm as much as it is in more traditional Spanish towns. Indeed, notwithstanding the point tower building type, the transformation of Benidorm from fishing village to tourist metropolis parallels Spanish tourism development in general, which has consistently taken on the form of relatively compact urban extensions to historical towns or villages. The isolated, protected and all-inclusive resort complex is rare in Spain, which has always promoted its culture and lifestyle as part of the beach-tourism experience with slogans such as “Spain is different”. This blending of tourism with local culture has made tourism construction relatively indistinguishable from normal urbanization. It is in fact often difficult to distinguish hotels from apartment buildings in Spain, were it not for signage.

In the final analysis, and despite its unusual overall appearance, Benidorm is really not so different, then. Its density, the fine-grain of its ground plane, its public spaces and its walkability make it as much of a Mediterranean city as the traditional, more ‘charming’ fishing villages of postcards. Perhaps too much is made of high-rise versus low-rise development; of urban form as a determinant of urban life. If anything, Benidorm is more of a testament to the perseverance of culture in spite of the forms into which it is placed.

[originally published in Onsite Review # 14]

Daniel Libeskind, utopianist

2003-06-01T18:42:00.006+02:00

[publicado originalmente en la sección de cartas de El País Semanal. Originally published in the letters to the editor section of El País Semanal. English translation follows.] Cuando el arquitecto Daniel Libeskind dice “no pienso en el conjunto de la ciudad” porque “mi interés se centra en lograr edificios expresivos”, no me sorprende nada: la arrogancia estilo Bush-Rumsfeld está ya muy de moda en la arquitectura internacional desde hace años. Pero lo que sí me sorprende es cuando un arquitecto se declara ajeno a las utopías del urbanismo cuando sólo se le ha preguntado si “se inspira para crear una ciudad mejor”, algo que tiene poco que ver con la creacion de una ciudad ideal. Las utopías urbanas fueron motivadas por la búsqueda de un nuevo orden social y, por tanto, han sido casi siempre proyectadas como ciudades nuevas ex nihilo, lejos de ciudades historicas. Mejorar la ciudad que existía era precisamente lo contrario de lo que pretendían los utopistas, que estaban en el fondo contra la ciudad. Parece que Libeskind es mas utopista de lo que cree. English translation: When Daniel Libeskind's states "I do not think about the urban ensemble" because "I am interested in realizing buildings that are expressive", I am not in the least surprised: a Bush-Rumsfeld kind of arrogance has been in fashion in international architecture for years. But what does surprise me is his statement against urban utopias, when the question that was put to him in the interview was only if he "is inspired to create a better city", something that has little to do with the creation of an ideal city. Urban utopias were motivated by the search for a new social order and were almost always planned as new towns ex nihilo, far away from historical cities. Bettering existing cities was precisely not what utopians set out to do, as they were profoundly opposed to the existing city. Seems Libeskind may be more of a utopian than he thinks.

Less and More

2003-05-04T20:10:00.007+02:00

[Originally published in HUNCH 6 / 7 109 Provisional Attempts to Address Six Simple and Hard Questions, in which 109 contributors were posed six questions by editors Jennifer Sigler and Roemer van Toorn]

editors: What is an architect in today’s society?

RGM: The word "architect" is being used by so many different professions--from web architects, software architects, and sound architects, to architects of peace accords or architects of acts of terrorism--that everyone, it seems, is an architect of one sort or another today. If anyone can be an architect, then architecture can be anything, which in turn means, of course, that it is ultimately nothing. In this scheme of things, a "building architect" must have something to do with buildings and cities; with a commitment to the real.

How do you define an innovative architect?
Innovation is when someone does something that no one else remembers having seen before; it is directly proportional with collective amnesia: the more we are bombarded with images and slogans, the less we remember and the more we believe that what we are being bombarded with is "innovative". Let's face it, if architecture is the second-oldest profession, then it is probably not the most innovative field today. Does it matter? Buildings and cities change relatively slowly: we could still use better places to eat, sleep and shit every day. Innovation in building architecture therefore has to be measured in larger historical terms than those of recent developments in semiconductor or information technology.

How should one practice architecture?
Buildings and cities evolve through changes of habit, not just through changes of images. The greatest contribution a building architect can make is to come up with small innovations that will actually have a large effect on building production. The invention of the elevator caused much more change worldwide than any landmark museum ever did.

What are the responsibilities of an architect?
The architect is responsible to the public at large--that complex and diverse group that actually lives, works and fucks in buildings. That's why architectural research that critically investigates its appropriation and inhabitation by mass culture is crucial. A lot of interest in architecture seems to disappear at precisely the moment that it is "consummated" by its users.

What or where is architecture’s laboratory?
The city is the laboratory of architecture. The street is the laboratory of architecture. The back yard. The piece of empty land that is more profitable as a parking lot than as a building. The real world is the laboratory of architecture.

How can architecture be taught today?
Herman Hertzberger's dictum "we want to learn without being taught" is as relevant today as it was in 1968, but life is a learning experience only when education imparts students with the critical thinking that is required in order to learn from life’s triumphs and mistakes.

Based on what I see happening in architecture today, I would like to see the following changes:

less: / more:
academicism / research
competition / cooperation
hype / substance
glamour / intelligence
opulence / affordability
heroics / modesty
hero worship / critique
pretension / triviality
seriousness / humor
elite / pop
arrogance / empathy
branding / ad-busting
Wall Street / Canal Street
objects / networks
workaholics / personnel
virtuality / reality
ideology / ideals
visuality / feeling
rationalism / empiricism
signature / vernacular
solos / jamming
bla bla bla / ha ha ha!
output / input
skyscrapers / housing
aloof / down-to-earth
® / @
talk / action
loudness / silence
either-or / and-or
Bush / Lula
Hollywood / Dogma
ARCHITECTURE! / architecture?
less is more / more or less

The Virtue of Reality: “Puntos de luz”, the butterfly effect, and (web) site-specificity

2002-05-11T13:11:00.028+02:00

The butterfly effect, first formulated by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1970s, “refers to the idea that whether or not a butterfly flaps its wing in one part of the world can make a difference in whether or not a storm arises one year later on the other side of the world.” It is therefore impossible, even in theory, to make predictions about the behavior of chaotic systems such as the weather system. Or artist Chema Alvargonzalez’s aleatory installation project titled “Puntos de luz”, whereby anyone with access to the internet can turn on the lights that he has attached to the exterior walls of the recently inaugurated CaixaForum in Barcelona (originally the Casarramona textile factory, by architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, 1910-11).

The two sites of this project—the building and the web—are each vital to the idea and functioning of the installation: without either, the electrical circuit would be incomplete. In other words, this web site is not just a promotional or explanatory accompaniment to the art, but a component that makes the work interactive, dynamic, and therefore unpredictable. Furthermore, this web site makes it possible to cause a real (albeit minor) change in a real place: to turn on a light bulb in Barcelona. Very few web sites are “really” interactive. Most so-called “interactive” web sites enable only virtual interaction.

The installation “Puntos de luz” can be seen, then, to be reversing the usual roles played by so-called “real” and “virtual” realms: the web site is a physical switching mechanism; while the building’s blinking lights are a transmitter of information; a “web-o-meter” that indicates the amount of (inter) activity on the web site, not unlike the way a modem’s LEDs blink to indicate the sending and receiving of bytes.

This reversal between the real and the virtual complicates the notion of site-specificity in art. As is by now well known, site-specificity became a central concern in art with the emergence, in the 1960s and 70s, of new artistic practices such as installation art, land art, minimalism, conceptual art, and performance art. While expanding the field beyond painting and sculpture, these emergent practices also sought to engage the physical context of a work of art. The notion of ‘place’ and the tectonics of a particular building or landscape—or a particular type of building or landscape—became an inseparable component of the art. A marked preference continues to exist in contemporary artistic practice for physically integrating works directly with the ground of landscape or the floors and walls of buildings, obviating the traditional role of the pedestal in sculpture and the picture-frame in painting.

Since the emergence and recent popularization of the internet, the web is becoming another important site and form of artistic practice. In addition to the many “virtual galleries” that can be visited on the internet, many established art institutions run web-based programs in addition to their building-based programs. Unlike museums made of bricks and mortar, virtual museums stay open 24/7 and are much less expensive to build, maintain and program. Despite references to “firewalls” and “portals”, the internet has no physical architectural elements, of course. It is an abstract, atectonic space that is nowhere in particular and yet accessible from anywhere; a tabula rasa that is virtually free of contingency—the perfect non-place. Nothing, it seems, could be further from the notion of site-specificity and the idea of place than the internet.

Yet one could say the same about the idea of the paradigmatic “white cube” gallery space a type of space that has been the subject of much artistic investigation and critique. This kind of gallery space is generic and architecturally abstract, appearing, often, to set itself apart from its urban context. Just as the traditional frame and pedestal were used to separate and “elevate” the work of art from the architectural chaos of the salon-type exhibition space, so the white cube gallery separates the work of art from the urban chaos outside. The white cube is hardly any more conducive to site-specific art than the internet, then.

We might see “Puntos de luz”, perhaps, as a “web site-specific” installation that capitalizes on the enormous outreach of the internet precisely to induce reflection on the very idea of site-specificity in the age of the internet. When you turn that lightbulb on in Barcelona, think about what the flap of a butterfly’s wing has been known to cause on the other side of the ocean.

[Originally published in www.puntosdeluz.net]

From White Cube to Big Box: Three Exurban Themes in the Work of Kim Adams

2002-03-09T19:41:00.006+01:00

Kim Adams, Minnow Lure

[originally published in 2002 Biennale of Sydney: (the world may be) fantastic]

"Non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified...by totaling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks." –Marc Augé

In a recent solo-exhibition at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Kim Adams's large, colourful sculptures were displayed on heavy-duty warehouse shelving that lined several walls of that gallery's vast central space, permitting a rotating display of his works to occupy the floor. This industrial-commercial display strategy was not only entirely consistent with Adams's practice of ad hoc appropriation–his sculptures are assembled from consumer goods–but was also very effective at transforming the cultural geography of the gallery space, temporarily converting an urban art gallery (itself, interestingly, a converted industrial building) into its very antithesis: a "big box" warehouse store of the sort that can be found on the sprawling fringes of cities the world over.

The work of Kim Adams is very much about place. In particular, it is about the non-place of contemporary "exurbia." Kim Adams addresses the aesthetics of the changing, dynamic zone at the edge of the contemporary city; the space of agri-business, "new" tract-houses, shopping malls, warehouse stores, automobile dealerships, industry, trucking depots, new and improved roads, recreational parks; as well as landfill sites and garbage dumps; the space of both dreams and derision. It is this geographic transition zone between the rural and the suburban–and the human values that are invested in it–that forms the critical subject of Adams's work. I would like to discuss three exurban themes that resonate in Adams's work: populism, automobility and utopia.

"Many people like suburbia." –Robert Venturi

Suburbia, the condition that has given rise to the exurb, is the common referent of North America; its popular voice and the base of its populism. Kim Adams understands this populism: he celebrates DIY culture, invites active participation, and employs the stratagem of the decoy as a vehicle for people to access his work.

DIY culture thrives in exurbia. On farms, doing-it-yourself is a necessity, while in suburban neighbourhoods it is a widely practiced hobby. Rural and suburban houses are typically stand-alone structures constructed of "stick-frame", lending themselves particularly well to self-modification, while driveways, farm sheds and garages offer ideal spaces for those who are mechanically inclined to modify vehicles. DIY itself represents an independence from the aesthetic dictates of urbanity. In addition to comprising a form of bricolage itself, Adams's work is also largely inspired by his ongoing research into popular bricolage. He has built up an exhaustive collection of "research slides" documenting "ordinary" street remakes of vehicles, trailers and homes.

Adams has also experimented extensively with installations and vehicles that invite viewers to participate in his work. In early works such as Mini Ride (1984) and Toaster Ride (1985), he constructs roller-coasters outside and inside the gallery respectively, inviting the public to ride them with himself present as Carney. Other sculptures, such as Gift Machine (1988), which hands out gifts to passers-by, are conceived to occupy streets and other public places, and instigate conversations. Interestingly, when the question "is this art?" is inevitably posed, Adams does not reply in the affirmative because, as he puts it, "then the conversation just ends right then and there." Adams presents himself precisely as an "ordinary person" and not as an artist in order to engage, rather than alienate, an exurban sensibility that is often hostile to contemporary art.

Familiarity is present in Adams's work as well, functioning also as a vehicle for popular engagement. His sculptures are assembled from ordinary objects of the sort one finds in "big-box" warehouse stores; anything from car and truck parts and industrial hardware to patio furniture, gardening equipment, sports gear, and children's toys. With their familiar logos, bright colours, and oftentimes seamless assembly, Adams's sculptures resemble, at first glance, a new line of consumer products, thereby acting as "decoys" that lure shoppers into the world of art.

"That's what a house is: it's where you keep your stuff while you run around getting more stuff."–George Carlin

The automobile is to the suburban house what the elevator is to the skyscraper: it is the mechanical invention that is necessary in order to make the building type inhabitable. Yet while both the house and the car represent the most important purchases of a typical suburban family, aesthetically, the automobile is inversely related to the house. The suburban tract house is typically conservative and conformist, while contemporary automobiles are works of cutting-edge design. A car expresses a great deal more about the aesthetic predisposition, taste, and personality of its owner than does a house, which must always display a polite facade. Indeed, for many the house represents a solid financial investment while the car is seen as a disposable toy. The house is expected to accrue in value while the car depreciates rapidly, placing the two in a compensatory relationship.

Works such as Chameleon Unit (1988) and Two Headed Lizard With a Single Shot (1986) appear to hybridize vehicle and home. Both of these works are on wheels–as are indeed most of Adams's works–yet both also make reference to domestic architecture by means of garden sheds, recalling the suburban house's lesser cousin, the mobile home. Interestingly, trailer parks with mobile homes–communities often disparaged as "trailer trash"–are often the first kind of residential architecture we encounter when we approach a city, representing the suburban dream of living between city and countryside par excellence.

The trailer is the leitmotif of Adams's work. Earth Wagons (1989-91), for example, in addition to being a trailer itself, also plays host to a number of reduced-scale models of trailers. Symbolizing automobility par excellence, usually for escaping the city, trailers are the very embodiment of modernist-utopian values such as modularity, standardization, flexibility, freedom of movement and living in proximity to nature.

"The whole of French soil should be turned into a superb English park, adorned with all that the fine arts can add to the beauties of nature." –Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon

Exurbia has been the subject of much utopian thinking. From Ebenezer Howard's Garden City and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City through the recent "New Urbanist" experiments of Seaside and Celebration–all sited well away from pre-existing cities–finding an ideal synthesis between town and country has long preoccupied utopian thinkers.

It is in Adams's miniaturized scenarios that he most directly addresses utopian ex-urbanism. Adams works with reduced-scale similarly to "real" or full-scale: he buys ready-to-assemble kits that are mass-produced and available commercially, then joins the parts in unorthodox ways. What is significant here about the use of the reduced scale-model, however, is that it provokes more than a passive gaze; inviting the viewer to actually dominate over it. It is for this reason that reduced-scale models, from museum dioramas to architects' models and model train sets, have long been objects of popular fascination. A model is no more than a representation of something real or imagined, but, whether it is an art object, a means for visualizing a three-dimensional design or a toy, a model is also an idealization of that which it represents; something more perfect than the "real" thing. In fact, a scale-model is utopian, since it is placeless and free from contingency. Models are other, alternate worlds upon which real impulses, including those of mastery and domination, can be projected.

Adams's miniaturized works, like their full-scale counterparts, also act as decoys, concealing something behind the attractive appearance of a consumer product–in this case that of a model train set–in order to lure the viewer. The expectation of models is that they are perfect, harmonious places, and it is this very expectation that makes the scenarios played out in Adams' models effective. In Earth Wagons (1989), for example, leisurists and tourists–modern nomads–can be seen happily playing in a landscape that has been devastated by the very infrastructure of tourism and consumerism: by an excess of roads carrying excessive traffic, factories spilling chemicals, and garbage dumps full of discarded products. The landscape, though exaggeratedly dense, is nevertheless ex-urban. As with every utopia, we realize that a promising appearance conceals, in fact, a nightmare; that it contains its very opposite.

By way of its exurban nature, then, Kim Adams's work can be seen within the art world as iconoclastic. The art world is highly urbanized: its capital is New York City, the densest, most urban environment in the world. Its biennials, such as this one, happen in major urban centres. Contemporary art is, moreover, highly differentiated from the more traditional, folkloric and craft-based art-forms that are more typically based in rural regions. In this regard, Adams is clearly an urbanite, but one who brings ex-urban culture into the city and secularizes its most sacred spaces. The work of Kim Adams bridges not only high and low, but also centre and periphery.

Rocket Architecture

2001-03-06T10:14:00.007+01:00

Clockwise from top left: Nike, Aerobee, and Universal launchers

The ensemble of structures illustrated here could easily be mistaken for recent work by a number of contemporary architects, were it situated in the vicinity of Los Angeles or Berlin instead of Churchill, Manitoba on the shore of Hudson's Bay. But the Fort Churchill Rocket Range was built in 1957 by scientists and engineers of the International Geophysical Year and the US Military, who were interested in using rockets to study the aurora borealis.

The site plan of the rocket range is as inexplicable and elusive as the plan of Hadrian's Villa, but one would presume that it represents a logical arrangement of spaces for the preparation and launching of unmanned rockets in this cold and hostile environment. Buildings such as the Blockhouse (control centre), the Hazardous Assembly Building and the Aerobee and Nike Launcher Buildings--the roofs and walls of which slide open to release rockets and pressure from thrust--are linked by long enclosed passageways and gravel roads that meander the site. The Operations Building housed staff, offices, laboratories and a radar and weather station, and is the only structure still in use: it is now the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, a hostel frequented mostly by eco-tourists and wildlife biologists.

The remarkable thing about these idiosyncratic structures is that they were designed without any architectural pretension whatsoever. Their forms are a straightforward result of functional and practical concerns, not the product of deconstructionist posturing. Here, form simply follows rocket science, not postmodern theory. Yet seen today, these architecturally "naïve" buildings nevertheless strike a chord--they are, after all, avant la lettre by nearly half a century.

The fascination for architecture-without-architects is nothing new, especially in this country. From the Port of Montreal's grain terminal, which was celebrated by Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture, to the prairie grain elevators to which the late Aldo Rossi is indebted, Canada's industrial-agricultural vernacular has long been considered among its most impressive architecture. Could it be that there is something truthful--dare one say authentic--about such structures?

[Originally published in Canadian Architect February 2001]

Kitbashing, street remakes, and bisexual architecture: a conversation with Kim Adams

2001-02-07T14:52:00.008+01:00

Research slide from the collection of Kim Adams

Rafael Gómez-Moriana: Kim, you gave a talk in 1988 at the Christiane Chassay Gallery in Montreal in which you showed slides of "street remakes": vehicles and buildings re-made by their owners, such as buses with beetlebody roofs, pick-up trucks with home-made campers and other creations of a do-it-yourself culture. What struck me about these often quite humorous images was that, collectively, they constituted a typological study - or a body of research - into a pop-vernacular building tradition. How do you come across all this material: do you just bump into it while motoring across the Arizona desert? And secondly, how does this research inform your practice?

Kim Adams: My research began in high school while I was skipping classes. I found street life more interesting. Later, I began traveling with a caravan as part of late-hippie culture: in those days, converting your bus was what you were supposed to do. Paint it yourself, make the roof higher, start having babies, start traveling. It was a freedom culture of sorts, and I did enjoy the idea of being a gypsy. I was a musician at the time too, playing in acoustic love bands. One day, I came out of an art gallery in Victoria and there was a vehicle that somebody had converted for hunting. From that point on my art practice changed and I just started seeing these things all over the place: a bus with a Fargo van on the top where the kids would stay. A lot of those finds were accidental but I was keeping my eyes open. People have also contributed to the slides - sometimes students will give me some when I do a talk. When I moved to Ontario this culture had disappeared. It's rare, it's really rare to find these things today. There isn't as much experimentation. Things are pretty well done and bought as is. The inventiveness is not there anymore. My father's generation could fix things with a little binder twine, while today we have to trade it in or have somebody else fix it. The old Volkswagen was something that could be rebuilt and made into something else. You made love in it, you listened to Jimi Hendrix in it, you got married in it. The cottage business or street industry is quite rare today. I mean, getting licensing in Toronto is very difficult: when we did the Curbing Machine in 1988, we had to get a permit and a license, and we had to lie about it. We got it under the category of being a dumpster, because it was on the sidewalk as well as on the road. So it was a dumpster. With the Toaster Wagon in San Diego, the officials seemed to run out of the office every time we requested a permit. We only got busted a couple of times, and they couldn't even describe it to head-quarters: "What is this?" "Well, actually, it's two VW buses. " "On the sidewalk? How did it get on the sidewalk?" And I would just say; "It's the back ends of two buses put together to look like a toaster." "Well, next time you come here, don't go on this side of the street, go on that side of the street."

RGM: Why wouldn't you just tell the authorities or whomever that it's art?

KA: Because then the conversation just ends right then and there. When someone would ask, "What is this?" and I would answer, "It's a Curbing Machine - do you want to try it?" they might become interested. But if I said, "It's an artwork," they'd ask "Who's paying for that?" The subject of the conversation becomes the taxpayer. But when a work just sits in an abstract, quiet way people do a second take on it. French-fry truck, that's right. Ice-cream truck, that's right. Satellite dish spinning around with man sitting next to it. That's not quite right. And then it's: "How much, how much?" "Nothing. Just try it." "Well what's supposed to happen?" It would keep the conversation going. When I did all three of my machines on Granville Island in Vancouver, which is near an art school and therefore a trained area, the trained people came up and said, "This is artwork right?" And I would reply, "No it isn't." "I know it's artwork! I saw the poster!" "Yeah right, OK. Go away, will ya?" I'm waiting for tourists. I don't need conversation about whether it's good or bad art.

RGM: You seem to enjoy a rapport with your audience. Earlier installation works, such as Leisure's Restraint at the Ydessa Gallery, consisted of rides that gallery visitors could actually enjoy. You would even be present to assist with the operation of the rides and to answer any questions. Where does this interest in your audience come from? Why do you care so much about your audience?

KA: My first ride piece was at the garbage dump in Victoria. The gallery thing had already been done and I was looking for some other venue. So I got permission and built an interactive possibility for whoever hangs out in dumps. That was my audience and it worked out fine at first, but then somehow it got press and became public. Media people were coming over from Vancouver, as well as bus tours. It got on the art circuit and that just completely changed it. Then I was asked to do a gallery show in Santa Barbara along the same lines. What happened was wild. The entrance ride came into the corridor and crashed through this truck. There was another ride called the Moon Ride - a half inch steel rolled plate that would crash into the main building support and shake it. A third ride involved going through a video room. I wanted an attendant so I became that attendant. At the dump, though, I wasn't an artist, I was just this guy, and people were asking "What are you doing?" I was testing myself. "What do you do with it?" "You get inside it and then it just moves." Then people would come back and bring the kids, and teenagers came on Friday nights. I was living nearby in my van at that time and got to know this other culture, as well as the police, who kept on moving me away. From there, this idea of movement went into galleries for awhile. The gallery itself was a learning experience for me: what do you do with that space? What is it? What is its meaning? The Curbing Machine came out of these questions, the idea of just planting this thing outside the gallery in the street and seeing what happened. And sitting at the same street corner for a month, there are enough lessons in that memory for a lifetime.

RGM: So being an attendant at these rides you created was really a pretext for observing people - for conducting more research?

KA: Sure, but it was also to see how comfortable it is for people to get up on a platform with a spinning disk - I had to provide something to hang on to.

RGM: These sound like architectural concerns. Indeed, it seems that many of your works are inhabitable or proposing some form of inhabitation.

KA: Almost.

RGM: Alright, almost inhabitable. I'm thinking here of the Decoy Homes and Auto-Office-Haus. Of course, as an artist all media are open to you but this isn't the case for architects. Architecture carries a degree of public responsibility, from which art is exempt. Do you ponder this question much? Does the fact that you're an artist make your architecture any different?

KA: Well, I would love to say it's architecture, but it's not. I learned that in 1988 when I built the Chameleon Unit. I flirted with the idea that it's possibly architecture, but just a little. The Decoy Homes come out of Donald Judd's work at that time, the earlier plywood boxes on angles. Riding a train across Ontario I noticed between here and Windsor there are more garden sheds than houses. Viewed abstractly from the corner of an eye, these sheds look just like houses; the same dumb shapes. The idea of a model emerged: why not buy three or four of them, stack them, and make a Surfer Shack. I was just borrowing what the urban realm offers, but in abstract. Looking at it as abstract forms allows you to borrow from it. I was finding stuff at Canadian tire. That was the beginning of my shopping. There was a whole period when I was building things from scratch and trying to re-invent the wheel; in fact I was often trying to make four wheels exactly the same. I didn't see the simple side: it took a lot to find it. And that was Canadian Tire. "Four lawn chairs and three garden sheds, please," and I would just set them up in the studio. But how they work as models is important because garden sheds are not made for people. So that's where the Decoy Homes become models, or maquettes. There is a little bit from the visual world of architecture, though. The Chameleon Unit, the truck piece, was the first piece I made that you could actually live in. I could buy these units that are made for truckers to sleep in and convert them into "apartment" units in the plaza in front of the new American Express building at Battery Park in New York City. It got reviewed in Architecture magazine as an ashtray, this horrible ash tray right in front of this beautiful piece of architecture. So in 1988 I learned that there might be a difference here, and now I never say I make architecture. Gordon Matta Clark's work was not accepted as architecture, even though he studied it. When he shot those windows out of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, that was an architectural show and architects dumped on him. I mean it was the art world that enjoyed the curiosity of the difference between art and architecture and it crossed over that way. When I worked in Germany there seemed to be a conversation with my work that I wasn't experiencing so much here, where I am a freak or a weird guy. In Germany I was taken quite seriously: Auto-Office-Haus was looked at as a serious proposal. They didn't talk a lot of art at all, but said it was bisexual architecture. I had to look more at the living possibility of the structure, effectively propose it as a small living space.

RGM: The history of architecture is full of proposals that have remained unbuilt, and indeed some proposals have been designed to be unbuildable.

KA: This is probably where we sympathize with each other. Unrealized projects are celebrated in Germany now; the unrealized has actually become subversive. The conversation came up a lot: "We'll realize this project." In Canada our problem is that things don't get realized. Here, the unrealized is a reality.

RGM: So all of your works are models, whether full-scale models, or miniature scale models. How did you actually get into miniature scale? Was it through constructing studies for your larger models?

KA: My first memory of sniffing glue at a young age was when I built a model kit of President Kennedy's boat. After that I was constantly building models. Especially cars. Model building was big. Then it disappeared. At the University of Victoria I got back into making model cars because It seemed to make more sense than learning abstract painting or something like that. The first car piece I ever saw was by Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim in the 1978-79 retrospective. He had a VW bus on the ramp, together with the survival sleds. And it just made so much sense right there in that gallery, which is basically a car park. Just think: Winnipeg, Regina, these prairie towns, they all have mini Guggenheims. I think that made quite an impact on me, just seeing a car in that high-art situation. I didn't understand the survival part. I was just thinking, “Ooh, cars look alright in galleries, especially old, rusty ones.”

RGM: Both your full-scale work, if we can call it that, as well as your miniature work, is assembled from off-the-shelf components, things you can buy, whether actual car parts or model-car kits. Where does the "craft" come into it? Is craft even important here?

KA: It's making these model-building kits look like the period. that's what the craft is. Painting it to look aged and square; they have to look how the kit's supposed to be made. But then it's also when you start "bashing" them. All my work is what I would call "kit-bashing." This is a common term in the model industry: you cross breed a Volkswagen with a Cadillac, and you've got a kit bash. They must do it in architecture too, although I don't know if they talk about it in those terms.

RGM: In architecture there's a lot of value placed upon a kind of originality that has to do with having things made from scratch. It's very much an Arts-and-Crafts ideal. In fact, a lot of architects have a disdain for ready-made products from catalogues because these products are associated with commercial building production. Meanwhile, you've even begun incorporating action figures in your work.

KA: The Breughel Bosch Bus is a proposal for an amusement park - Breughel-Bosch Land - at Niagara Falls. The work is a theme park at 1:87 scale, so the bus itself would be about twelve stories high. You take your family through this late industrial-age North American steel plant turned amusement park. The action figures are there to make the piece believable as a proposal for fiction but it's also about the shutting down of the steel industry in many towns.

RGM: Much of your work deals with the average middle-class family's two principal purchases: the house and the automobile. Yet, while the typical new house today is backward-looking, cars are cutting- edge design. There's a real irony to seeing a new "ye-olde" tract house with a sleek late-model car parked in the driveway. If you look at historical photographs of the villas of Le Corbusier, on the other hand, it is the cars that Le Corbusier liked to park in the foreground as symbols of modernity that look antiquated today, not the villas. In the Decoy Homes, for example, the house becomes a vehicle and the vehicle a house. A lot of your work is about mobility as lifestyle but it's a lifestyle that is less current today.

KA: It's from my parents' generation, no doubt. But I don't know what is going to happen with the next generation; maybe they'll have computers in the trailers. When I was invited to do Chameleon Unit and they gave me some money I felt guilty and I didn't want to make something that wasn't functional. If it fails as art, at least then you can still live in it! Or sleep in it. That work really came out of a fear of being homeless.

RGM: Are you still shopping at Canadian Tire as much as before or are you working with different kinds of components now that require other sources?

KA: When I first discovered Canadian Tire as a source for art materials I would get a buzz. Everything on the shelves - from ironing boards to cups and tents and fishing rods - turned into art supplies. Canadian Tire became an exciting place to be. The garden sheds were my first entry because they were always on display outside. Everything was there, including the hardware to put things together. No welding: everything had to be fastened mechanically and treated as a supply. But some of that excitement wore off after ten years. I still check it out - I keep my eye out for new models, such as the Space Saver shed - but I don't buy as much from there. In 1991, I made a new work because they came out with a new model. I've been increasingly investigating other industries. I'm looking for new shapes so that's what's making me move to other places. The computer has generated a curiosity for making shapes. Right now I'm working with GM and Ford, just for the new shapes and bodies - especially the new truck bodies. And working with a company here in Toronto that makes interesting computer shaped cargo boxes for trucks. We're working on a project in Vancouver that'll become a housing workshop that folds out so that a little truck comes out of there that has fake artworks made of wood, rubber and plastic stacked to look like hamburgers and desserts. The whole thing will look like a gift shop. With miniature models it's the same: they're all available materials. They're all industrially made, so pretty well anything I want to put together I can find. Specialized model stores have become a major new supply.

RGM: If you could do a residency in any factory, store or warehouse that you desired, where would you choose to go?

KA: Well it would be automotive, probably where they build the Smart Car in Germany. The place where Airstream trailers are assembled would have been wonderful earlier. In Europe, they're interested in having artists working in industry. I was approached by BMW but I wanted to take the shell off a BMW and make it look like another car and they weren't into that. They Just wanted me to paint one. I said "Can I drill holes? I've got to do something else with it!" And that was the end of that project.

RGM: In your earlier work you fastened things together that were always recognizable, whereas it seems that in your more recent work one can't quite recognize the components as readily.

KA: Yes, the recognizing gets a little bit more special this time. You have to look more carefully. The language has become more specialized. It's still off-the-shelf, but now stuff is kit-bashed in such a way that it becomes its own image. I'm always surprised at the many people playing with the Toaster Wagon who don't know the spokes. And then there are people who recognize it right away: "That's what I thought it was!” With others, I've had to tell them, "No, it didn't come like this; it's two old VW buses." With other models you'll recognize a tractor cab, but a corn feeder from combines? It's allowed me to expand into the full range of kitbashing possibility. It's finding the parts! I could design from scratch, perhaps using computers. But I still have to have that satisfying level. I think if I was asked to build some of these models I have here strictly from scratch I would be very unhappy. Combining things together is satisfying in some way.

[originally published in C International Contemporary Art #70, summer 2001]

Winnipeg: One Great Situation-Normal (1)

2000-01-01T10:33:00.001+01:00

"Incredible...one can actually order ‘a cup of coffee’ here without having to specify in greater detail the particular brewing method, the type of coffee bean, the darkness of the roast, or even the flavour. It’s even served in a ceramic cup!" (2)

Winnipeg is the ‘ordinary Canadian’ of cities. Not many other Canadian cities can lay claim to being situated right in the middle of the Trans Canada Highway; nor are many situated on land as flat and undramatic as the Red River floodplain. How many other Canadian cities are as averagely-sized --let alone bilingual? Or able to consistently produce the most reliable test-market data on the viability of new consumer products before they are launched in the rest of the country, a theory that rests on the underlying principle that if Winnipeggers will buy it, then anyone will? (3) Hard-working and frugal, socially progressive and fiscally conservative, Winnipeg is the urban equivalent of the mythical ‘ordinary Canadian’ who is married, has two-point-three children and a house in the suburbs. (4)

This is not a bad thing, though. Compared with the rest of the western world, in which the run-of-the-mill is increasingly displaced by specialized premium brands, designer labels and authentic reproductions, being squarely in the middle-of-the-road is precisely what makes Winnipeg unique and interesting, if not exotic. It is also, of course, what makes this city quintessentially Canadian. Like a big Value Village thrift store, Winnipeg is the sort of place where the generic and the naturalized that was never even known to have been forgotten can be suddenly and happily rediscovered, and all for a bargain.

But ordinariness is not just the stuff of savvy antique collectors. It is an increasingly current preoccupation in the discourse of contemporary art as well. As the grand narratives that not-so-long-ago purported to tell everyone’s story whither, the idea of art as compensation for the reality that surrounds us becomes displaced by an art that addresses this reality instead. The trivial and the ordinary are therefore becoming increasingly the central subject of art, displacing the emphasis on the unique, the heroic, the individual, and the autobiographical. With its high standards of mediocrity and its location in the middle of the North American continent, (5) Winnipeg is optimally positioned to exploit this growing area of interest, a situation that, if seized, could propel it into the next global art centre, the logical next-step in the westward progression after Paris and New York.

Winnipeg’s artists are already fully aware of this situation, exploring the mundane to its fullest, including its crass and shitty aspects. (6) The city offers artists and other researchers of the ‘aesthetics of the commonplace’ excellent field conditions in which to observe normality. (7) The city’s physical mediocrity is consistent in its quality, and its citizens appear to be very relaxed and unself-conscious about it, even during media occasions such as the Pan Am Games. Indeed, contemporary Winnipeg places greater value on the quality of its daily life than on that of its rare public spectacles: even the architecture of the new food court at St. Vital Mall, for example, is far more impressive than the Investor’s Group Athletics Facility completed recently for the Pan Am Games at the University of Manitoba, a campus whose collection of fine historical and modernist buildings would be complemented far more attentively if it were located elsewhere. Only in contemporary Winnipeg would shopping and other daily activities be accorded greater architectural monumentality than education and sport, the twin pillars that have traditionally stood for the pursuit of excellence. (8)

The disdain for elitism, excellence and international prestige in favour of a somewhat higher quality of daily life for all is of course not unique to Winnipeg, but is by-and-large a Canadian characteristic that, like this country’s extreme weather, happens to be more pronounced in this region. The result is that artists, who in many other cities must struggle to eat, are themselves able to enjoy a better quality of life. It is not uncommon for a Winnipeg artist to actually live in a house and work downtown, a significant step up from having to live in a studio.

Indeed, it is precisely its housing affordability that has helped to spare Winnipeg, to date, from the latest development craze, that of the so-called ‘artist’s live-work studio’. The city has been spared from many other planning and development trends as well, most notably the urban renewal craze of the 1960s as well as its subsequent backlash, the movement to turn historical buildings into ‘ye olde’ heritage. For a city with so much exquisite historical architecture, it is very remarkable how little of it has been commercially redeveloped into artist’s live-work studios or boutiques. What this means, of course, is that Winnipeg’s warehouse buildings are actually used by artists, the very people who would ironically be driven out if such development were to take place. (9)

Winnipeg can be seen, then, as a city that is genuinely ‘artist friendly’. This should, theoretically, fare well for the city in the new post-industrial economy of ideas, images and visual culture. After having occupied the sidelines for so long, Winnipeg’s day could still come thanks, in the end, to its persistence in striving to be ordinary. If the city does become the next global art centre, it will, of course, have to be careful not to spoil the very quality that made it great. But who would ever have thought that mediocrity could possibly become a virtue in the new world order?

NOTES:

1. The word ‘situation’ refers, interestingly, to both a geographical location (site) as well as to a “condition as modified or determined by surroundings or attendant circumstances” (OED). “Sit(E)ings: Trajectories for a Future,” as an exhibition situated in Winnipeg, provides itself a site for this city’s art. I will therefore speculate on the city as a present and future urban situation that the works in the exhibition may or may not have in common. In any case, specific references to works in the exhibition are made in these notes.

2. An initial personal observation upon arriving for the first time in Winnipeg from LatteLand Vancouver in 1997.

3. Jean Klimack’s installation, in which different kinds of chewing gum were mailed out to different people, chewed, returned and finally displayed in a typological matrix is itself the result of a form of ‘market-research’ into the nuances and subtle variations between different brands of the same generic product.

4. Harry Symon’s on-going work on the Constitution and Paul Butler’s collages using advertisement both comment on the social construction of the ‘ordinary Canadian’: the former engages in the slippery arena of mass-opinion, while the latter reminds us that mass-opinion is fluid and extensively shaped by corporate interests through advertising.

5. Lori Rogers’s complex and poetic video-installation piece and Jake Moore’s rooftop installation are both representations of a diminishing nature. Rogers’s work is abstract and employs a technological medium, while Moore’s is more figurative and craft-based.

6. This strategy is most clearly deployed in the collage work of Jacek Kosciuk, which combines detritus such as recycled KFC cartons with his own imagery, as well as the self-portraits by Christine Kirouac, which reference the glossy PhotoShop™-improved photographs of sports and entertainment celebrities in the weekly media.

7. As Marcel Dzama’s work points out, however, normalcy is never what it seems. His quirky, disturbing world could be a comic-book variation of a David Lynch movie. Yet like all comics and science fiction, they give insight into human nature in general.

8. Blair Marten’s détournements of sports accessories and hand tools, as well as Kevin Waugh’s sofa-legs-cum-tongue can be seen as humorous institutional critiques with a tactile, haptic touch. Their disdain for the overly verbose discourse of art institutions is especially present in their own artist’s statements.

9. Joel Garreau, in his book Edge Cities, notes that suburban enclaves with names like “Cedar Grove” are often named after species of animals or plants that have been eradicated by the very construction of those enclaves. The commercial development of ‘artist live/work studios,’ which often forces artists to move to other areas, proves that this theory applies equally to humans.

[Orignally published in Winnipeg Art Gallery: Sit(e)ings: Trajectories for a Future]

Go With the Flow

1999-08-13T12:08:00.005+02:00

The World Waterpark at West Edmonton Mall is a vast steel and glass-vaulted tropical microclimate in the middle of that city’s suburbs; a Biosphere III for the age of leisure and consumption replete with beach, palm trees, wavepool and this waterslide complex. Like most of what one sees in malls and theme parks today, these slides are constructed of pre-manufactured, readily available off-the-shelf plastic components. The formidable complexity that is achieved here results not from any will to form, but simply from the intertwining of these standardized, repetitive components into a dense assemblage. The slides weave in and out of one another around a central service tower that supports a heroic plumbing system together with stairs and bridges, effectively comprising a Gordian knot on the scale of one of Piranesi’s carceri. From the gently curved novice run to the steep and straight double-diamond schuss, a tumble in one of these tubes is analogous to the now clichéd, early computer-animated scenes of helpless, lightning-fast voyages through something resembling a black hole in outer space or the intestinal tract of a monster.

The World Waterpark illustrates not only how, in this era of entertainment, form simply follows fun, but also how, urbanistically, the very idea of the theme park is premised precisely upon a dense environmental experience that is idealized and that is designed to compensate for sprawling, empty surroundings. It is interiorized excitement that matters here, not exterior expression. Accordingly, the architecture of the waterslides subscribes to a paradigm that is markedly different from that of the classical tectonic object. Here, any discussion of beauty dependent upon whether the addition or subtraction of an element might spoil its perfection is pre-empted: in a situation where density is everything, more and more is more. Nor do these slides subscribe to the notion of an ‘architecture of resistance’ that imposes austerity measures designed to induce reflection on one’s position in the world: on the contrary, the motto here is clearly “go with the flow.”

[originally published in The Canadian Architect, August 1999]