Quietly Brilliant: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos

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]

Power to the People: Andrés Jaque activist-architect

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]

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

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]

Exquisite Corpse: CaixaForum Madrid by Herzog + de Meuron

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]