La Grande Motte Revisited

I first saw La Grande Motte in the summer of 1978, more than a decade before I would graduate from architecture school. Back then, the town left an impression on me for its large pyramid-shaped concrete buildings, and for the fact that the beaches had scores of young women who went topless; a bit of an eye-opener for a 14 year-old male just landed from North America. 

In retrospect, I must have been very distracted by the peaches on the beaches, because more recently, upon revisiting La Grande Motte (this time accompanied by a female architect-friend), the place looked completely different to me, even though, at its core, it has changed little during that period. Clearly, what seduced me this time around was the architecture.

I mean, here we have an example of a late 20th-century new town with public spaces that are civic, dignified and human life-affirming and whose buildings are designed to contribute to an overall harmony; to something greater than the mere sum of the parts. La Grande Motte is living proof that it is possible to design a humanly-scaled, walkable, cyclable, and architecturally sophisticated new town without resorting to, say, the pre-industrial nostalgia of so-called New Urbanism. (Perhaps I'm being nostalgic too, but at least it's nostalgia for a period I have lived through.)

A small civic square on one side...

...on the other side, a courtyard garden

Architect Jean Balladur master-planned La Grande Motte in the mid-1960s as a place where the Northern European middle-class, which at that time was beginning to frequent Spanish destinations like Torremolinos or Benidorm en masse, could vacation closer to home, and in an architecturally more sophisticated setting. Emphasis was clearly placed on creating an overall sense of harmony akin to that of traditional vernacular architecture, but with modern materials and expression. 

La Grande Motte does not banish commerce, signage, sun shades, or Hello Kitty beach towels hung to dry over a balcony handrail. This is no Communist vacation camp. Rather, these kinds of elements of "individuality" are subtly veiled behind differently patterned perforated concrete screen-façades, which vary playfully but also consistently from building to building. 

Ah, yes, that age-old conundrum of finding a balance between overall urban identity and individual architectural identity. Interestingly, no building is privileged over any other at La Grande Motte. There are no singular "landmark" buildings by famous architects whose task is to somehow compensate for a sea of surrounding mediocrity. A similar lack of hierarchy occurs in the urban plan: No rows of sea-fronting buildings blocking second-rate buildings in-behind. 

Since 2010, La Grande Motte has been officially recognized as French 20th-century patrimôine. But it deserves to be celebrated outside of France too, because I doubt many other examples of new-town urbanism from the last half-century are this successful still to this day.

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A Whimsical Water Tower in...Barcelona?

I spotted this fantastic water tower the other day while walking around Poble Nou, Barcelona's industrial graveyard. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (authors of a major public sculpture in this city) could not have done a better job than this. I mean, you just gotta love that corrugation detail! Judging by the looks, it seems to be a relic from a defunct cardboard box manufacturer whose logo was the Star of David, no less.



Having grown up in Montreal, I was instantly reminded of that city's famous Guaranteed Pure Milk Company water tower. But then North American cities are places one would expect to find these kinds of quirky pop-constructions (the Orange Julius, a chain of roadside juice stands in the form an orange, is Montreal's answer to a Las Vegas duck). Barcelona, on the other hand, is not the first place that comes to mind when it comes to NON-pedigreed architectural whimsy, so it is very endearing indeed to stumble across something like this in my adopted hometown.

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Jurisprudence. The City of Justice by David Chipperfield Architects and b720 Arquitectura

Courts of justice are steeped in protocol and decorum, not merely because of tradition, but in order to establish and assert the authority of law. This applies to everything from the gown worn by a judge to the facade of the building in which justice takes place, neither of which can appear to be flippant, light or irreverent at any time. On the one hand, justice must of course always be blind and impartial. But at the same time it must always also be seen, in the public eye, to be taking place in a fair and timely manner. Very serious, solemn business indeed.

Barcelona’s new City of Justice appears, at a distant and superficial glance, to be a monotonous, repetitive, and imposing building complex. With its concrete facades and narrow windows, the City of Justice reminded me initially of those 1970s university fortresses that were designed to avoid a repetition of the student unrest of 1968. But up close and inside, this complex turns out to be a very dignified and user-friendly place in which the notion of an architectural balance between opposites (dare I say "harmony"?) takes precedence over the accepted notion that a single overriding architectural idea--often formalist--must be made to prevail über alles come hell or high water.

Occupying the site of a former military barracks on the boundary between Catalonia’s two largest cities, Barcelona and l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the new court of law servicing both of these municipalities is a 230,000 square-meter complex comprised of eight separate medium-rise buildings on a plaza, four of which are joined by a lower four-story concourse that acts as a central atrium and as a passageway between two major adjacent streets: Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, one of Barcelona’s busiest thoroughfares, and Avinguda del Carrillet, which historically connected the center of l’Hospitalet with that of Barcelona. The context surrounding the City of Justice is a mix of the kind of corporate headquarters, modernist housing blocks and arterial roads that one would expect to find on the way to an airport anywhere. Perhaps not the most glamorous part of town, but one that is undergoing an important transformation with the construction of a new subway line, highways that have been re-built below grade, and new office towers by the likes of Toyo Ito and others.

Although the eight buildings of the City of Justice are constructed using the same tectonic system of load-bearing concrete facades with deeply inset tall-and-narrow windows, they are not perfect clones of one another. Variation in height, color and orientation of the buildings creates an urbanism of repetition diferente: variations on a theme that lends a strong overall visual identity for the City while avoiding the nauseating monotony of the kind of supposedly rational urbanism with which monolithic concrete buildings are usually associated. In fact, with its polychromy and seemingly random building placement on a large plaza, a walk through the City of Justice is a bit like stepping into a painting by Giorgio de Chirico.

The concourse infra-structure, which provides entry to the complex at each of its ends as well as amenities such as an auditorium, a bar and a cafeteria, is clad, in contrast to the concrete buildings, with generous amounts of glass behind a finely knit stainless steel mesh. The concourse accommodates a constant flow of people; a humanity that is hidden from view by the steel mesh screen and that is almost completely absent in the plaza outside (à la De Chirico). The life of this justice city is highly interiorized, unlike the Spanish city in general, with the plaza serving more as an abstract setting for the architecture rather than as a place to hang out. Certainly, there is adequate space in the plaza in case the need arises for any demonstrations, a favorite pastime in the young democracy that is Spain. But no matter how inviting the space, who wants to hang out near a courthouse anyway?

The plaza is, then, a space in which a series of monolithic building blocks embrace a more delicate, smaller-scale glass and steel concourse. This creates different effects at different scales. If the concrete facade system provides the necessarily more “serious” image that a court of law must project outwards to the rest of the city at an urban scale, then the concourse compensates with a humane and lively interior space. Indeed, the very success of the concourse as a place is precisely due to the fact that it is not overly large and ambitious; that more is not being made out of that which it simply is.

This is the lesson of the City of Justice: sound architectural judgment. The grandiose gesture that we have come to expect from high-profile architectural projects is absent in this case. The City of Justice is subtle, suggestive, and considered, but it is not frivolous. For Barcelona, with its architectural legacy of Gaudí and Miralles, this may seem like an anathema. But perhaps it is useful to remember here the notion of seny and rauxa, a sort of Catalan equivalent of Yin and Yang. Achieving a correct and judicious balance between seny (prudence, wisdom) and rauxa (ecstasy, rapture) is a hallmark of Catalan culture. In the City of Justice, seny clearly prevails over rauxa, as it must, arguably, for the sake of justice.

[originally published in Art 4D Magazine]

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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]

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