Visitant / Local II

"The beach is the only space of enjoyment that humans have found in nature." - Henri Lefebvre

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Welcome to the Hotel Barcelona

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Barcelona is in the tail-end of a hotel construction boom. And Barcelona being “Barceloooooonaaaaaa” means, of course, that these have to be designer hotels. Designery types such as Richard Rogers, Dominique Perrault, Carlos Ferrater, Oriol Bohigas, Juli Capella, Enric Ruiz Geli, Oscar Tusquets, and Ricardo Bofill (to name only some) all have a four- or five-star hotel in the works if not recently completed.



Interestingly, a number of new hotels are high-rise point-towers à la Benidorm, which is not in itself a bad thing since the city has nowhere to grow except in height. But others are being built in some rather questionable areas. One new hotel has recently been built on the side of Montjuïc hill, a public park of historical importance in which the construction of new buildings is strictly prohibited. It is painted dark green in a pathetic attempt to blend in with the hill’s vegetation; yet another example of what I have termed "everyday camouflage" (see Lotus International #126). Another hotel—an embarrassingly awful clone of the Burj al Arab Hotel in Dubai—is going up right at the edge of the sea, another non-buildable zone. One can’t help but wonder if the city isn’t making some very special concessions to hotel developers. Perhaps that is why the Ajuntament (City Hall) launched the advertisement campaign “Visc(a) Barcelona”, some months ago; a wordplay that in Catalan that means both “I live in Barcelona” and “long live Barcelona!” This latest campaign is obviously aimed at making residents proud to be living in a city well on its way to having the most hotel rooms per capita next only to Las Vegas.



Now I’m thinking to myself: this could be heaven or this could be hell.



Fine, but what does this mean for architecture? Well, for one thing it means that the hotel is possibly eclipsing the museum as architecture’s favorite building type. When designing a hotel, an architect can show off their talent much more than with a museum, since one can design a whole way of life from the building itself down to the toilet paper dispenser. When designing a museum, an architect must restrain herself from upstaging the art, but a hotel is an architect’s wet dream: a chance to do a work of "total design"; to control absolutely every aspect of the life lived inside. The fact that people usually only inhabit hotels for a relatively short period of time makes total design tolerable, even attractive. Hey, it might even be fun to try out a totally designed environment for a holiday experience. Architecture, once the stuff of Grand Tours and now that of global media events, has always been better suited to tourism, travel and temporary inhabitation than to dwelling, Being, or everyday life. Perhaps we can say that architecture has finally found its true "home".



Hal Foster, in his incisive book Design and Crime (and other diatribes), argues that, not unlike the turn of the last century, around the time that Adolf Loos published “Ornament and Crime”, we have once again entered an era of total design, one that he terms “Style 2000.” Perhaps Foster was responding to Mark Wigley, who asks in Harvard Design Magazine #5 “Whatever Happened to Total Design?” In any case, the hotel has eclipsed the home as the locus of total design today. Loos's "poor little rich man's home" is today the poor little rich man’s home away from home.



They’re living it up at the Hotel Barcelona. Such a nice surprise. Bring your alibis.

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The pursuit of pleasure by the most efficient available means: the urbanism of Benidorm, Spain

Benidorm is a city in southeastern Spain with an urban morphology that is highly unusual for Europe: it is a city of point towers. From a distance, it resembles an American downtown or a new Asian city, with hundreds of tall, slender buildings wedged between arid, semi-desert hills and sparkling sea. From the A-7 highway, which runs the entire length of the highly built-up Mediterranean coast of Spain from the French border to the southernmost tip of the Iberian peninsula, the apparition of Benidorm manages to produce surprise and confusion even after passing through much larger cities such as Barcelona and Valencia.



Benidorm began to develop its urbanism of point towers in the 1960s, when it was transformed from a small fishing village into a major holiday destination for northern Europeans, and, significantly, when the modernist high-rise apartment ‘slab’ was still de rigueur worldwide among architects, planners and mayors. Seen in this historical context, Benidorm prognosticates the demise of the modernist slab and the current growth of the point tower as the preferred form of high-rise residential construction.



In the North American city—the very birthplace of the skyscraper—towers have generally contained office space; high-rise residential buildings more typically assume the form of slabs. It is only relatively recently that the residential point tower has become a commonplace in cities such as Toronto or Vancouver. But the emergence of point-tower housing has been even slower in Europe, where high-rise construction is culturally abhorred and where towers have historically been privileged, singular urban landmarks such as church steeples, defensive ramparts or noble families’ symbols of wealth and power—an idea to which an entire city of towers is an antithesis. So why, then, did Benidorm develop in the way that it did?



In the context of the twentieth century, the slab and the tower can be seen to form dialectical opposites. The slab, ideally sited in a park, is representative of European academic modernism and CIAM urbanism—Le Corbusier, in short—while the tower is associated with ‘vulgar’ commercial real-estate development–the stuff of Manhattan or Hong Kong. The slab speaks of welfare-state housing and utopian planning; the point tower of private-sector pragmatism.



Interestingly, a lack of architectural pretension and a fascination for America are probably the reason for Benidorm’s aberrant urban form. Spain—especially agrarian, small-town provincial Spain—was culturally isolated from the rest of the world during almost four decades of military dictatorship that lasted from 1939 to 1975. Could it be that Benidorm’s architects were perhaps more inspired by popular postcard images of American cities than by the teachings of the architectural modern movement?



The construction of modern Benidorm was, for one thing, never a state-sponsored social housing project but rather a private-sector speculative venture. The point-tower became an established building type in Benidorm due to its high commercial viability and the views that this building type permits, even in a normative situation. Views matter especially in a tourism destination, and a city of slender towers permits more glimpses through the city and toward the surrounding landscape than a city of wall-like slabs. The modernist slab may exploit land efficiently, but not landscape—unless of course the slab is a relatively isolated occurrence in the manner of Le Corbusier’s stand-alone unités.



Architecture is, of course, premised from the very outset on exceptionality. Its values are resistant to the massification of ideas. As every architecture student learns, one must always ‘go against the grain’ and never design the very grain itself. As a mark of cultural distinction, architecture privileges the unique, isolated object; figure over ground. In Benidorm, there is no architecture: there is “the tallest building in Spain” which is also “the tallest hotel in Europe” (the Hotel Bali), but there are no buildings that stand out architecturally. Architectural guidebooks to Spain do not list any of its buildings, making Benidorm an exceptional city without exceptional buildings.



This generic quality permeates Benidorm’s urban fabric with perfect consistency. The point towers contain mostly hotel rooms and vacation apartments inhabited by middle-class Britons, Germans, Scandinavians and Spaniards, such that the city effectively comprises a sort of modern Euro-space. In fact, Benidorm can be seen as a representation in built form of one of the core values underpinning modern Europe: the right of every citizen to free time and leisure. Leisure is democratized and made affordable by the efficiency of the point tower type. It is no coincidence that Benidorm’s occupancy rates consistently outperform other holiday destinations in Spain whose tourist sector faces growing competition from cheaper eastern European destinations served by discount airlines.



Benidorm’s beach is the main public space, principal organizing device and raison d’être of the city. Streets are laid out in a quasi-gridiron pattern of small, compact urban blocks, providing walkable access to the beach as well as ground-level services, mainly in the form of small, family-owned shops, bars and restaurants. The point towers punctuate the air space above this densely built up, contiguous service ground-plane. Like most homes in Spain, Benidorm’s vacation apartments are relatively small, with bedrooms just barely large enough for a bed, side table and wardrobe. Spanish life is lived mostly outside the home in cafés, on streets and in plazas, and the Euro-space of Benidorm is no exception. In fact, the ‘Spanish’ and ‘urban’ lifestyle of Benidorm has been found to be one of its most important attractions, notwithstanding the prevalence of Irish pubs and lunch menus featuring steak and kidney pie. The evening paseo is an institution in Benidorm as much as it is in more traditional Spanish towns. Indeed, notwithstanding the point tower building type, the transformation of Benidorm from fishing village to tourist metropolis parallels Spanish tourism development in general, which has consistently taken on the form of relatively compact urban extensions to historical towns or villages. The isolated, protected and all-inclusive resort complex is rare in Spain, which has always promoted its culture and lifestyle as part of the beach-tourism experience with slogans such as “Spain is different”. This blending of tourism with local culture has made tourism construction relatively indistinguishable from normal urbanization. It is in fact often difficult to distinguish hotels from apartment buildings in Spain, were it not for signage.



In the final analysis, and despite its unusual overall appearance, Benidorm is really not so different, then. Its density, the fine-grain of its ground plane, its public spaces and its walkability make it as much of a Mediterranean city as the traditional, more ‘charming’ fishing villages of postcards. Perhaps too much is made of high-rise versus low-rise development; of urban form as a determinant of urban life. If anything, Benidorm is more of a testament to the perseverance of culture in spite of the forms into which it is placed.



[originally published in Onsite Review # 14]

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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]

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Under Water

Glass-bottom pool at 1000 Beach Av. Vancouver

The swimming pool is an icon of modernism, a veritable symbol of the health and wealth that the modern dream once promised. In North America—especially California—the swimming pool is usually found at tourist resorts or better homes and gardens, and serves as a symbol of private wealth and a hedonistic lifestyle. By contrast, in Europe it is associated with the public health and hygiene movement that championed the modernist slogan of “light, air and space” and encouraged the construction of open-air schools and public baths.

Because Canadian values typically fall somewhere between these two extremes, it is worth noting how a particular swimming pool in Vancouver, designed by The Hulbert Group, mediates between private luxury and public amenity. Although it belongs to an exclusive health club that is part of a 1992 luxury residential development on the north shore of False Creek, the pool also manages to function very effectively as public ornamentation—even spectacle—within the dense and diverse urban milieu of Vancouver’s West End. By forming a bridge between two towers that straddle the development’s Beach Avenue driveway entrance, the pool creates a porte-cochère to a small entry court. A transparent underside consisting of two ten centimetre-thick laminated acrylic horizontal windows, each with dimensions of about five-and-one-half by two metres, creates a surreal visual link between swimmers above and pedestrians and motorists below. While swimmers experience something akin to flying, the view from underneath is made somewhat strange due to the complete absence of the sound of splashing water normally heard near a busy pool.

This body of water thus performs a dual function: it is at once a quiet and serene reflecting pool for the entry court—an upside-down one at that—and a bona fide health club swimming pool. Indeed, the pool becomes much more dramatic when the water is agitated, and thereby made kaleidoscopic, by the movement of swimmers. This raises an interesting question: does this constitute a rare example of architecture that is visually consummated by human presence; of architecture that actually looks better while it is in use?



[Originally published in Canadian Architect March 1999]

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