Ill-Fitting: The Balenciaga Museum

The Balenciaga Museum: a refurbished 19th-century palace

onto which a vast new glass shed has been added. 

The canted, curving sea-facing glass facade of the addition is

punctuated by clunky emergency exits that appear to be an afterthought.

The shed is symmetrical in cross-section, even though it is built into a steep hillside.

 The care taken by AV62 in the design of the exhibition spaces redeems the building.

Fashion,
Architecture, Politics: Image is Everything

The inauguration of a cultural institution is
normally a cause for widespread celebration; even more if it is the opening of
the world’s first museum dedicated entirely to one couturier. But the long
anticipated inauguration in 2011 of the Museum dedicated
to Cristóbal Balenciaga in his birthplace of Getaria, a small fishing town
in Spain's Basque Country, must have been somewhat awkward, to say the least.
The occasion, as reported in national media, was attended by Queen Sofía of Spain, local and national
politicians, and dignitaries and luminaries from the international fashion
world, for whom the celebrated Basque chef Juan Mari Arzak created a special
six-course gastronomical menu inspired by Balenciaga's creations. But there
were nevertheless two very conspicuous absences at the inauguration: the former
mayor of Getaria who spearheaded the project, Mariano Camio, and the architect
who gave it its overall built form, Julián Argilagos. They were probably not
invited because of the criminal charges they were facing in relation to the
project. In 2007, when the building was semi-complete, a scandal broke out
triggered by the apparent theft of some handkerchiefs and other pieces from the
museum’s collection. More revelations soon followed: serious irregularities in
the awarding of contracts, embezzlement of public money, huge cost overruns, and an unlicensed architect (who was also rumored to be the mayor’s lover). The scandal amounted to terrible publicity for
a museum dedicated to a legendary perfectionist: Balenciaga was known to work
in relative seclusion and to abhor publicity of any kind.

The corruption scandal surrounding the Balenciaga Museum
is a textbook example of the close relationship that exists between architectural and
political ambition. A spectacular building is capable of providing both the politician who spearheaded it and
the architect who designed it with the very same thing each craves to advance their respective careers: a good photo opportunity. The politician craves photos that will generate news headlines, while the
architect craves photo reportage in glossy design media. Regardless of the type of media,
the greatest buzz is generated by photogenic architecture. Any politician or architect with the slightest ambition
knows this: image is everything. 

Spain, in the nearly three decades between the definitive end of Franco's dictatorship and the onslaught of a devastating economic crisis in 2008, was a
particularly rife place for architectural-political ambition. As a
relatively young democracy, Spain still feels it has a collective "backwardness complex" it needs to bury once and for all. The construction of new democratic institutions, public spaces and infrastructure became a priority in the first decade, to be followed in the latter two by the construction of world-class cultural institutions. Museums, then very much in architectural vogue, became especially important as a way for Spain to brand itself as vanguard. Or, more precisely
speaking, Spain’s autonomous regions, almost half of which speak languages that
were suppressed during the Franco dictatorship and which afterward set out to
gain greater political power. In Spain, regional identity is a global political issue as much as it a national one, and
ambitious architecture was found to be among the most effective vehicles for
projecting a regional voice into the global arena.   

Building iconic museums developed into a particularly Spanish kind of “space
race” among its provincial cities. The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum by Frank O.
Gehry (situated only an hour’s drive from Getaria) is the most
famous example, eventually becoming an international media
phenomenon. The “Bilbao effect” (a reference to Jean Baudrillard's
"Beaubourg Effect") refers to a form of edifice envy among politicians around the world, for whom building a high-profile architect-designed museum
became their preferred way to give their city or region an image make-over. If Bilbao is capable of completely transforming its urban image from
heavy-industrial “grunge” to post-industrial “chic”, then so can Barcelona or Badajoz. The Bilbao Guggenheim is only one of many museums in Spain by
respected national and international designers. In the Spanish vox populi, the new generation of museums are so much associated with "architecture" that it is often jokingly commented that museums are visited more for their
shells than for what's inside. As we shall see, in the case of the Balenciaga Museum the exact inverse happens to be case:
here, it is the container that does not live up to its
content. 

The Fiasco

Sure enough, the Balenciaga Museum started out
with what are presumably the best of intentions. When Mariano Camio, a
charismatic member of the conservative-nationalist Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea /
Partido Nacionalista Vasco political party was elected mayor of Getaria in
1983, he saw building a museum in the place where Cristóbal Balenciaga was born and now
lies buried as a way to leave a lasting mark on the town while honouring a
native son, and, of course, as a way to put the town on the international cultural tourism circuit. Soon after his
election he began to contact families who had been patrons of Balenciaga,
convincing them to make donations to a publicly owned collection he was
spearheading. He created a foundation to administer the collection and to
oversee the design, construction and direction of a future (and
"futuristic") museum, recruiting Hubert de Givenchy as its Honorary
President. In 1999, Camio and de Givenchy convinced the Basque Government to
buy an important collection of Balenciaga’s creations, significantly increasing
the size of the Foundation’s collection to over a thousand pieces ranging from
dresses for different sorts of occasions to hats and handkerchiefs. Government
grants totalling 18 million euros were secured from the Spanish Ministry of
Culture and other public sources, and the idea to build a museum had the
support of Spanish Royalty, Queen Fabiola of Belgium (whose wedding dress
Balenciaga had created), Paco Rabanne, Emanuel Ungaro and Óscar de la Renta,
among others. 

The museum project began with the refurbishment
of the Berroeta Aldamar palace, a summer residence that once belonged to the
Marquesa of Casa Torres, Balenciaga's first client and patron. But it was
evident that the palace would be too small, and that an addition would be
needed to display the growing collection. This is where Miami-based Cuban architect
Julián Argilagos enters the picture. Mayor Camio personally handpicked
Argilagos to design the museum, even though he had no experience with a public
building of such magnitude. Although the museum was to be built with public
funds, no architectural competition was held at the outset--not even an
invitational competition. Camio must have been very impressed by Argilagos’s pompous (and
erroneous) claim that
his museum design, “inspired by Gaudí, American architecture, and Balenciaga
himself” would be “the world’s first suspended building”, and that it would
“revolutionize world architecture”. This kind of rhetoric sounds overly
grandiose even coming from an architect, but it seems to have convinced
Camio. 

So, just how was Mariano Camio able to handpick
someone to design a public building without going through a public selection
process? By creating a private company with himself as the sole signing
authority (Berroeta-Aldamar S.L.) which would be directly contracted by the
Foundation of which he is the deputy president to manage the construction of
the future museum of which he is director and Argilagos curator and exhibition
designer. That’s how. The Foundation’s Honorary President, Hubert de Givenchy,
as well as most of the patrons of the Balenciaga Foundation were living far
away from Getaria, and so were not involved in the Foundation’s day-to-day
business. Camio could control everything (or so he thought). Incredulously,
construction supervision was also contracted to Argilagos, [1] even though it is standard practice,
when a foreign architect designs a building, for supervision and all legal-contractual aspects
to be handled by a local "architect of record". Camio must evidently
have been convinced that the involvement of any "outside" architect or consultant would only compromise Argilagos's vision. 

The original completion date of the building
was originally scheduled for late 2003, but by 2005 construction had only
barely begun. By 2007, the foundation, the steel structure, and parts of the
envelope were in place, but it was slowly becoming evident that Argilagos could
not handle the project by himself. In that year the Spanish Ministry of Culture
halted funding when it was discovered that construction costs, initially
estimated at 6 million euros, had tripled to 18 million. Camio, increasingly
under pressure, fired Argilagos, but not without first paying him an extra
439 000 euros on top of the nearly million he had already been paid in fees.[2] When it was discovered one day that some scarves,
handkerchieves and gloves had gone missing from the collection because they had
been handed out by Camio as gifts to some of his cronies “for their support
during difficult times”, the scandal finally broke in the media. The Foundation’s
Honorary President called for Camio to step down, a parliamentary investigation
was launched, and construction was immediately halted. 

In order to rescue the project, the Balenciaga
Foundation was legally reconstituted in 2008, with Sonsoles Díez de Rivera, a
major donor to the Balenciaga collection, appointed as the new
director. The new foundation immediately launched an architectural competition.
Officially, this competition was  for the museum’s interior and
museological design, but it was also obviously intended to correct a wrong that
had been committed. The competition was won by Victoria Garriga and Toño
Foraster, principals of the firm AV62, a young Barcelona office with a proven record of designing museum exhibitions. But it was a bitter-sweet competition to win: AV62
soon discovered that they had inherited many building deficiencies that had to
be corrected late in the game; problems that would further strain an
already very limited budget.

The Building

As it stands today, the involuntary architectural
collaboration that is the Balenciaga Museum is not exactly the most accurate
manifestation of the couturier’s legacy and values. Balenciaga, who likened his métier to that of architecture, was a perfectionist
who refined and developed his technique and craft gradually, throughout his
entire career. Refusing to follow trends, he was experimental but at the same
time extremely rigorous; the two being inseparable from one another in his
mind. Balenciaga knew not only how to design, but also how to sew, which he
learned as a child while helping his mother, a seamstress. Balenciaga is
comparable in this regard to Mies van der Rohe, who had a similar ethic and who also learned to master a craft (masonry) before becoming a designer. Balenciaga's
"Miesian" rigor is certainly not honored by the awkward building
bearing his name; a building which was ill-conceived from the start, ran amuck, and finally had to be rescued by another architectural firm. If
anything, it might provide us with an example of current-day "complexity and
contradiction in architecture."

Overlooking the town of Getaria and the Bay of
Biscay from a steep hillside, the Balenciaga Museum is essentially a long,
sinuous glass shed added onto a nineteenth-century palace (Robert Venturi would of course have
done the opposite, adding the palace to the shed). Inside its vast, bright space, a series of smaller, opaque buildings containing exhibition
galleries are suspended from trapezoidally shaped steel arches.  The
approach from the town is by way of a series of escalators that take the
visitor from the main road passing through Getaria to a plaza in front of the
palace and, adjoining it, an opaque, black metal end-facade belonging to the
addition. A single, elegant angular pleat in the surface makes a minimal entranceway gesture.
Upon entering one end of the longitudinal hall directly through the main doors beneath the pleat,
the first thing that draws the eye are the long, gently curving canted glass
walls on both sides. One of the glass walls faces north over Getaria’s
rooftops toward town, sea and horizon, but the other faces south, directly
into the sunlight as well as onto a four-story high retaining wall only a few
meters away from the glass. This massive retaining wall, which is thankfully softened by
vegetation, reveals that a steep, anything-but-symmetrical terrain had to be
radically altered in order to accomodate the cross-sectional symmetry of
Argilagos's design. 

“Ideally” intended for a flat site, Argilagos's
design is essentially a utopian idea forced onto a rugged topography that had to
make way. It is a pre-conceived architectural idea brought to a site from
elsewhere. The only adaptation to the site occurs in the plan: the curvature of
the building follows a topographic contour line. The Balenciaga
Museum is thus ill-fitted to its site. With its long, drawn out form and
symmetrically canted glass walls on both sides, it would be much more
suitable as an airport terminal for a small Spanish town such as, say, Ciudad Real or
Castellón. Mundane things like local building codes were evidently not
taken into consideration either, judging by the number of fire escape doorways
that punctuate the very glass wall graced with a sea-facing view. Due to the
cant of the glass wall, and the fact that fire escape doors must, by necessity,
be vertical and made of steel, these doorways become clunky, opaque box dormers
tacked onto a complex, sculpted, smoothly warped glass curtain-wall.
These doors appear to be such a foreign intrusion on the curtain-wall that they
could only have been added as an afterthought, ruining what was presumably intended to be the main design feature of the building.

It is not until we finally reach the innermost
parts of the building that it begins to look and feel like a museum and not an
airport terminal, in large part because at this point that we no longer see the rest of the building. Inside the suspended exhibition spaces, a display
architecture comprised of a single, continuous, deeply undulating wall creates
smooth, seamless niches within which Balenciaga’s work is sensually  displayed, not unlike virgins in the chapels of a church. The
undulating walls in each of the six different exhibition galleries vary in
curvature and colour according to the museum’s six different curatorial
classifications: “Early Years, Day, Cocktail, Evening, Bridal and Essential.”
The hidden lighting sources, the subdued lighting levels, and the unframed
glass set into the smoothly curved niches amount to a simple but effective
exhibition design strategy that displays Balenciaga’s work with dignity and
elegance.

Good News?

It is a miracle that this museum was completed
in the end, in spite of all the problems it suffered. The museum has become a
popular attraction in Gipuzkoa, despite a building that disappoints for
the most part. In the end, the problem is perhaps not so much the building itself as it is the missed opportunity that the
building represents. It is what this
building could have been that disappoints above all (a type of
disappointment only ever suffered by architects and politicians). It could have been so much better; something Balenciaga
might be proud of. Instead, he must surely be rolling over in his grave. 

In the meantime, a criminal
investigation launched when the scandal broke resulted in Mariano
Camio being charged with embezzling public funds, falsification of invoices,
and administrative disloyalty. He denies all charges. Julián Argilagos, along
with another Cuban architect, is charged with practicing without a license, and
is the only one of the three indicted who has yet to appear in court to
testify, citing poor health as well as financial ruin as excuses not to travel.
Argilagos claims on his YouTube
channel that AV62 violated his intellectual property rights by not
seeking his permission to make changes to his design. AV62, on the other hand,
feels that their right to have been provided a fair opportunity
to be awarded this project from the very beginning was violated, and that they
have to now cope with the disappointment and frustration of not having been
able to do their best work (although they certainly did the best they could
under the circumstances). And Mariano Camio? Curiously, nothing is being heard
from the person who is ultimately responsible and who should have known better
than anyone else that when it comes to excessive architectural-political ambition, media
can also backfire. 

---

[1] http://www.elmundo.es/suplementos/cronica/2009/626/1245535216.html

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/museum-accused-of-giving-away-balenciagas-work-789356.html

[a shorter version of this text was originally published in Disegno #1]

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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]

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