B720 Corners the Flea Market

Barcelona flea market by B720. Photo courtesy Iñigo Bujedo Aguirre.

With its beginnings dating back to the 14th century, Barcelona’s flea market La Firade Bellcaire (also known as Els Encants) is one of the oldest and tradition-steeped of the 43 markets in that city. Recently, this institution moved from a collection of ramshackle sheds it occupied over several decades into a flamboyantly expressive piece of purpose-built infrastructure. In fact, La Fira de Bellcaire’s new accommodation is the result of an architectural competition, possibly the first in history to be held for a flea market.

The challenge faced by B720 was to design a facility double the area of the old market, but on a sloping site only half its size. The outcome is a ramp gently spiraling upward around a sunken courtyard. “The best way to address a slope is with a ramp. But we had to convince the city that a ramp would not pose a functional problem, which we did by measuring the gradient of street markets all over Europe” explains Fermín Vázquez, principal of B720.

Every morning, trucks crammed with surplus merchandise and castoffs pull into the central courtyard, where their loads are auctioned off --a ritual that is as old as the market itself. On the street-like ramp, vendors hawk their wares to throngs of shoppers. Highly reflective stainless steel panels cladding the underside of a spacious canopy create a kaleidoscopic mirrored ceiling that, says Vázquez, “reflects the city in the market and the market in the city”.

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #48]

Everything is Art

ARCO art fair, Madrid.

In September 2012, the fiscally and socially retrograde People's Party governing Spain raised the value-added tax on most items to 21%, breaking one of its most-repeated election promises and causing damage to a culture industry already battered by the economic crisis, not to mention impoverishing even further the "working" and middle class. Well this past week, not even one and half years later, the same government announced a reduction in the VAT charged on sales of works of art to 10%. 

This is obviously good news for art galleries, art collectors and white-collar criminals, for whom art collecting is an effective method for laundering cash. It is also encouraging news for the dying entertainment arts sector, which could be next if this policy is expanded to other arts. But is it good news for architecture? Well, building materials are still taxed at 21%, and there is no expectation that the "building art" might enjoy a similar reduction. The artisans who know the arts of plumbing, masonry, carpentry, welding, or "painting", must, in theory, still charge 21% VAT for their services. Other, more essential art-forms such as clothing, shoes, bicycles, or flatscreen television monitors are also still charged 21%, without likelihood of any break in sight.

But there's an easy solution for every Spanish retailer who wishes their goods would similarly be charged less VAT: rebrand their store as an "art gallery" instead. If art can be anything, then anything can be art, right?

Thus, a hardware store could simply become an art gallery specializing in "sculpture and installation art". In such a scenario, fluorescent lighting would be displayed on the floor, with a lot of space around it, and urinals would be displayed upside down. In the back shed where building materials are stocked, lumber would be strewn all about, as if a tornado had struck.

Similarly, a fashion retailer might merely add the word galería to their shopfront, since fashion boutiques look so much like art galleries already. HiFi shops would become sound-art galleries, while stores selling TVs would become galleries specializing in video-art.

Every month or so, new exhibitions would be installed, invitations would be sent out, and cava would be served to smartly dressed, highly discerning but vacuous snobs engaged in chit-chat and vicious gossip while completely ignoring the art as well as most of the rest of the people in the room.

Every single Spaniard would become a gallery-goer. Not just on Thursdays after work, but every weekday as well as Saturday. And if enough of us could actually land a steady job and start buying at these galleries, instead of just looking, then we might even become the country with the most art collections in the world.

Step Right Up. Architectural Monumentality. Three Boxer Shorts for Only 6€.

Flea markets are normally found under bridges, in empty parking lots, or in old industrial sheds. This flea market (which I already reported on in an earlier post, while it was under construction) is in a purpose-designed, competition-winning, big-budget work of capital-A architecture. Step right up. A monumental flea market. Only in Barceloca.

The market, by b720 architects, consists of a ramped structure under a vast, very high folded roof plane supported by tall, slender columns. The underside of the roof structure is clad in highly reflective stainless steel, which in conjunction with the triangulated geometry and angled folds of the roof plane creates kaleidoscopic, dizzying reflections when looking up. The contrast between the architecture and the Made-in-China goods displayed within it is truly surreal. 

While I walk around and become overwhelmed by the goods, the reflections, the hustlers and the endless crowd, an old song by Tom Waits starts ringing in my head: Step right up. Bargains galore. We need your business. We're goin' outta business. Fifty percent off original retail price skip the middle man. How do we do it? How do we do it? Step right up.

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?

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

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.

Plans and section courtesy Arquitecturaviva