Monument Ahead: CajaGranada Cultural Centre by Alberto Campo Baeza

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]

Visitant / Local

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.

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

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]

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

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.

Go With the Flow

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]