Perspective is Everything

Same place seen from different viewpoints (Pas de la Casa, Andorra). 

Neon duty-free stores selling discounted liquor and cigarettes to ski bums already high on oxygen and speed, causing interminable traffic queues at border crossings back into Schengen-land.

If tax havens are the scourge of the planet (and their bankers the scum of the earth), 

how did they ever get away with occupying its most beautiful corners? 

Selling useless goods tax-free is arguably just a pathetic way of buying acquiescence. 

But I guess it ultimately depends on your point of view, doesn't it?

Making Bullshit Mountains out of Buildings

"If architecture is landscape, buildings are mountains." 

-Vicente Guallart, chief architect of the city of Barcelona and general director of Urban Habitat, founder of Guallart Architects and of the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. Image courtesy Guallart Architects.

Fashion Victim

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

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

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

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

Garden and Gaffe: A Hotel by Jean Nouvel

“The city is like some large house and the house in turn like some small city”
-Leon Battista Alberti

If there is one type of "house" that comes closest to Alberti’s “small city”, then surely it is the hotel. Like a city, a hotel is comprised of both private “residential” space (in this case temporary residences) and relatively public functions; the private realm making up the representative bulk and consisting of largely repetitive units while the more public lobby, conference spaces, restaurant, and so on are monumental, singular spaces of representation. The ultimate mixed-use building type, a hotel is a place where guests stay for a variety of reasons, be it a travelling sales rep hoping to strike a business deal, illicit lovers having an affair, criminals evading the police, academics at a conference, or spies on an intelligence-gathering mission. Anything can and everything has happened in hotels: Watergate, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-ins for Peace, Dominique Strauss Kahn.

It is no surprise, then, that the hotel has become in recent times one of the most architecturally reinvigorated types of buildings. The drab, beige hotel of the nineteen seventies and eighties, where sameness, familiarity and the offer of a cozy “home away from home” was the ideal, is seemingly a thing of the past. Hotels have instead become places where people seek a memorable experience that is precisely different from the familiarity and routine humdrum of home. As an “experience” space available to a majority of people, the hotel can also be seen as a democratization of the pleasure palaces of the aristocracy of previous centuries.

The Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel by Jean Novel and Ribas & Ribas is, like many palaces, characterized principally by a garden, that most sensuous space of pleasure and temptation since biblical times. This garden, however, climbs up a 26 story high atrium space that is completely open to the exterior on one of the sides of the tower, which forms a “U” shaped floor plan in which the rooms are accessed by garden-facing galleries that are open during three seasons of the year, and that are separated from the garden in winter by means of transparent roll-down barriers.

A single staircase climbs up the atrium along a different trajectory at each level change, connecting galleries as well as bridges, platforms, and a over a hundred planter boxes containing ten different varieties of palm trees and other plant species. It is a delirious, seemingly endless space that would make Giovanni Battista Piranesi proud, and which redefines the late-modern hotel atrium made famous by architect-developer John Portman.

It is the exterior openness of this atrium that sets it apart from any of  John Portman’s, however. In this atrium, there is no wall-to-wall carpeting, no chrome, and no air conditioning. Instead, there is a gentle breeze and the sounds and framed view of a city beyond. The leaves of the palm trees move in the breeze, and the hotel rooms open directly onto an exterior garden and not into a long, dim, anonymous corridor, making it tempting for guests to leave the door open when in their rooms.

Unfortunately, however, the theme of “palm tree” has been taken by its architect just a little too far. The palm tree-shaped windows of most of the rooms are gimmicky and goofy. A gaffe. Those windows are precisely why it’s a good thing the doors of the hotel rooms open directly onto the memorable garden--and city--outside.

Going Slowly: Cadaval and Solà-Morales

X House, near Barcelona. Photo credit: Iwan Baan.

Lounge in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Photo credit: Sandra Pereznieto.

"Young architects" is a culturally loaded term, often conjuring notions of rebellion, utopian idealism, gravity-defying flights of fantasy and trendy theoretical posturing. But while Eduardo Cadaval and Clara de Solà-Morales are definitely young, their unpretentious, beautifully built work is planted firmly in the ground of common sense, which is precisely why it caught my interest. Why shouldn’t "young" architecture also be about building – and building rationally?

Having seen only images of their work on the internet, I’m looking forward to seeing a real Cadaval and Solà-Morales building. Eduardo and Clara gladly agree to show me a house they have just completed on the coast north of Barcelona: Casa X. On our way to the site, I wonder: What’s with the X? Is it a reference to House X by Peter Eisenman? A house for a secret agent? Or is the client’s name Xavier? In any case, I’m willing to let X equal X; the name of the house is of no great matter.

Sure enough, the first thing Eduardo and Clara tell me, as we approach the motorway that takes us out of Barcelona – one of the few benefits of Spain’s disastrous economic crisis is a noticeable reduction in traffic – is not to mind the name of the house. Why? "Because we don’t want you to get the wrong idea. We are not formalists."

Eventually, we drive through a small town and up the side of a steep hill dotted with villas that enjoy privileged views of the Mediterranean. These homes seem to occupy the rugged hillside haphazardly, but the random pattern they make terminates cleanly and abruptly at the top. ‘That contour line represents the highest permissible building elevation,’ says Eduardo, pointing up while manoeuvring around sharp hairpin turns. I notice one house that looks nothing like the others: a flat-topped, concrete-and-glass structure with two angled arms cantilevering out of the slope, seemingly embracing the horizon. No confirmation required – architecture is always identifiable by process of elimination.

We stop and get out of the car. The house lies below the level of the road, permitting views of the

distant landscape over a roof terrace shaped like an X in plan. A driveway descends at an angle parallel

to one of the two intersecting bars comprising the X, terminating in a tidy two-car garage. "X is the shape we arrived at after trying out all sorts of configurations to best optimize views, light, circulation and privacy on a rather small and very steep site," explains Clara. "X is simply the shape that worked best."

I am surprised by how small the house appears to be, especially in comparison with others in the area. "We worked hard to make the house as spatially compact and efficient as possible, as well as to convince the municipality that the house didn’t need to sit atop a plinth," which, given the steepness of the site, would have exposed immense foundation walls. Instead, Casa X cantilevers out of the hillside, lightening its volume. "Interesting," I remark, thinking of all the gratuitous and conspicuous cantilevers being designed just about everywhere these days. What I’m looking at here is a cantilever that actually makes sense.

Although the exterior gives a compact impression, the interior of the house does not feel small at all, thanks not only to generous views of the surroundings through the living room’s double-height glass curtain wall, but also to an interior organization that avoids boxed-in spaces and reveals something new around every corner. Indeed, it becomes evident that every detail has been very carefully considered: the fine, uniform texture of exposed concrete; the positioning of vertical curtain-wall mullions on the exterior to assure a smooth, uninterrupted surface on the inner side of the glass; the mitred joints of acutely angled corners in the millwork; and more.

Back at their office, I ask Clara and Eduardo whether, for them, architecture is essentially a building art, or Baukunst, as the German language so succinctly puts it. 

Clara: "Architecture can be many things beyond building, but when a design does get built, there’s a responsibility to build well. It’s an insult when things fall apart or noise passes through apartment walls. Architecture is human, and mistakes can happen, but architects need to do their very best to make sure they don’t happen. Building well is a way of building sustainably. There you have it – the S word!"

Eduardo: "We love the adrenaline rush that comes from built work." They show me other recently completed projects, as well as those not yet finished, including two in Mexico: a lounge and bungalow for a rural resort in Tepoztlán, and urban housing in Mexico City. What I’m wondering, though, is how their building ethic can be maintained when such operations are in progress on both sides of the Atlantic.

Eduardo: "We may work on two different continents, but we are not one of those ‘global’ offices. We run two local offices. We know and understand the Mexican context. We work there as a local office and charge our clients accordingly. We also work here in Barcelona as a local office. We have been invited to do work in Dubai, but we said no thanks – if it’s difficult to do a good building three blocks away, imagine how difficult it would be to do one without knowing local construction techniques, let alone local culture. That doesn’t mean we’re not interested in designing buildings for other countries, but it takes time. We believe in going slowly, step by step. We really like working on residential and other relatively small projects, but that doesn’t mean we plan to do the same thing forever. We are interested in doing medium-scale projects and in making public architecture, especially in Mexico, but little by little. We want to be able to have successful results, and to do that we need to take our time."

The discussion shifts to landscape, which seems to play a central role in the work of Cadaval and Solà-Morales. In addition to distant views of tectonically framed scenery for visual enjoyment – an important feature of Casa X – landscape is often a more visceral, up-close component of the architecture. One example is the Tepoztlán lounge, in which space is created as much by landscape as by artificially built elements, while earth and vegetation seem to be building materials for the first Tepoztlán bungalow.

Clara: "For us, landscape is not just a view but a part of the programme. We don’t see a line between inside and outside, but a space – and it’s that space that interests us."

Eduardo: "An environment is an environment, whether it’s architecturally built or not. We believe in environments. We don’t build things that just invite users to admire the landscape; we want our work to become part of the landscape – to interact with it. Yes, in the case of the Tepoztlán lounge, the terraces, patios and vegetation are just as important as the concrete. Our design of the lounge includes the environment as a whole, not just the building."

But at the same time, I reply, the ‘hard stuff’ in these environments takes on strong forms: X-shaped or triangular plans, rectangular frames...

Clara: "Form is the result of a long process. We try to find a single shape or idea – an idealistic or utopian form – that can solve everything. In Casa X, the shape of the plan shields the house from very closely situated neighbours while providing views of the surroundings."

Such a search for optimization sounds a bit like the discourse on parametric design, but parametric forms are typically very complicated and convoluted, whereas Eduardo and Clara’s are scandalously simple. I ask them whether they are into using the latest digital technology in their search for optimization.

Eduardo: "A worker on a construction site in Mexico would shatter current parametric discourse in three minutes flat. We feel a closer kinship to his concerns than to those of the digital-technology discourse. We concentrate on simpler issues: how to build reasonably economically and where natural light and ventilation are going to come from. We are more into human parametricism."

Clara: "If we were into parametricism, we would find our own way to build these designs. We are more interested in people and in the urban and social aspects of architecture. Right now, parametricism seems to be concerned solely with formalism and not with how people actually live."

After saying "Adéu", I realize I was wrong. Eduardo Cadaval and Clara de Solà Morales are, in fact, polemical – and in true "young architect" style, no less. They are making a point – a very timely point, I might add – which is that architecture cannot lose sight of its most essential and primordial aspect. Ultimately, architecture must serve others and not just itself.

[Originally published in Mark #39]

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

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

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

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]

Cedar Island, Lebanon: Learning from Dubai?

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)