 |
Showing posts with label monument. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monument. Show all posts
Monday, December 30, 2013
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
 |
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.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Realized in an illustration workshop conducted by Miguel Gallardo and Karin du Croo of Club Talleres.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
 |
| Gemasolar concentrated solar power plant, near Fuentes de Andalucía |
 |
| Nuclear power plant in Bavaria |
The very brightly glowing tower of the upper photograph is situated in the agrarian countryside between Seville and Cordova. Visible from afar thanks to both its height and its mysterious brightness, it can easily be mistaken for a misplaced contemporary architectural monument of some sort.
But no, this is not yet another Spanish politician's architectural capricho. This tower is in fact useful and practical. Even s-u-s-t-a-i-n-a-b-l-e: it's a concentrated solar power plant. A large array of mirrors (heliostats) on the ground track the sun to reflect and concentrate its rays onto a 150 meter high tower containing salt that melts under the intense heat. This molten salt remains hot enough to produce steam to drive turbines for well over 12 hours, enabling this type of solar power facility to generate electricity at night.
The Gemasolar plant is one of a handful of CSP experiments in southern Spain. If this technology proves to be commercially viable and competitive, we could be seeing many more of these on other continents.
Given the current energy crisis, though, this tower is nevertheless on its way to becoming a monument of sorts due to the hope it symbolizes. Could we finally have found a safe, reliable and economical alternative to carbon? Considering how this tower actually performs, it is interesting to compare it to the image of a nuclear power station, whose cooling tower is a retired symbol of progress if ever there was one.
The CSP tower is also beautifully illustrative (reflective?) of the expanding range of uses to which non-urban land is put these days. Knowing the lay of the land is quickly becoming as difficult as trying to make sense of a metropolis.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
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]
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Thursday, December 11, 2008
“Gaudí en alerta roja” is the title of an online petition currently the source of much debate in Barcelona. Its proponents, a group of luminaries from the local architectural and cultural establishment, argue that Gaudí’s work should be left "alone" and that he should be allowed to “rest in peace.” In fact, it demands that post-humous additions to projects Gaudí never completed in his lifetime be "undone" so as to revert to the state in which "the author" left them.
There are many problems with this rather romantic manifesto. For one thing, building is not a “pure” or “fine” art, and as Robert Hughes writes in Barcelona, Gaudí fancied himself as more of a builder than an architect: "That he was the son of artisans mattered immensely to Gaudí. He thought of himself as a man of his hands, not a theoretician." (p. 470). The Sagrada Familia was, from day one, a collaborative endeavor between Gaudí and his crew of masons and artisans. He never produced a full set of drawings of the temple (he apparently hated drawing), and is known to have made many design decisions in situ with his co-workers, operating at a level of humility that is unfathomable in the context of today's prima donna architecture. Leaving Gaudí’s work incomplete in the name of a supposed purity of authorship is probably something he himself would never have wished.
Another argument made in the manifesto is that the construction of such an ambitious temple is anachronous with a modern secular nation, and that the exorbitant amount of money it is costing would be better spent on more urgent needs. As far as I know, the construction of the Sagrada Familia is being financed mostly, if not entirely, by the hordes of tourists lining up to buy tickets to visit the site. Just who is to deny tourists and religious fanatics their right to pay tribute to a temple? Aren’t freedom of religion and freedom of mobility the very hallmarks of a modern, secular society?
Of course, it is entirely correct to insist that the Sagrada Familia should not invade public space, that it should have a building permit like any other construction site, and that there is no rational reason for a projected tunnel to have to make a wide detour around its foundations. Yes, the Casa Batlló’s neighbor should never have had four stories added on top of it, and perhaps the Colonia Güell crypt could have been renovated more sensitively (though it doesn’t look that bad either). But to insist that Gaudí’s work be returned to some sort of pure state and be henceforth left untouched?! That smacks of religious fundamentalism to me.
There are many problems with this rather romantic manifesto. For one thing, building is not a “pure” or “fine” art, and as Robert Hughes writes in Barcelona, Gaudí fancied himself as more of a builder than an architect: "That he was the son of artisans mattered immensely to Gaudí. He thought of himself as a man of his hands, not a theoretician." (p. 470). The Sagrada Familia was, from day one, a collaborative endeavor between Gaudí and his crew of masons and artisans. He never produced a full set of drawings of the temple (he apparently hated drawing), and is known to have made many design decisions in situ with his co-workers, operating at a level of humility that is unfathomable in the context of today's prima donna architecture. Leaving Gaudí’s work incomplete in the name of a supposed purity of authorship is probably something he himself would never have wished.
Another argument made in the manifesto is that the construction of such an ambitious temple is anachronous with a modern secular nation, and that the exorbitant amount of money it is costing would be better spent on more urgent needs. As far as I know, the construction of the Sagrada Familia is being financed mostly, if not entirely, by the hordes of tourists lining up to buy tickets to visit the site. Just who is to deny tourists and religious fanatics their right to pay tribute to a temple? Aren’t freedom of religion and freedom of mobility the very hallmarks of a modern, secular society?
Of course, it is entirely correct to insist that the Sagrada Familia should not invade public space, that it should have a building permit like any other construction site, and that there is no rational reason for a projected tunnel to have to make a wide detour around its foundations. Yes, the Casa Batlló’s neighbor should never have had four stories added on top of it, and perhaps the Colonia Güell crypt could have been renovated more sensitively (though it doesn’t look that bad either). But to insist that Gaudí’s work be returned to some sort of pure state and be henceforth left untouched?! That smacks of religious fundamentalism to me.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The installation by SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) at Barcelona's Mies van der Rohe Pavilion is simple, subtle, and surprising. And irreverent.
A single curving wall comprised of sheets of transparent acrylic winds around the pavilion's interior, creating a nearly invisible circular space. At first glance we might think of it as "Richard Serra Extra-Lite", but in fact this work is not about its own material presence, but about subtly, playfully and irreverently distorting our perception of this most canonical of Modernist buildings. If the Mies Pavilion is already a play of reflections, this adds another, radically different, layer of reflection.
The plan of the installation is a very loosely formed spiral (the symbol of pataphysics), reminiscent of the kind of shape that is often gesticulated by means of a pointer over a map by coaches, war strategists or architects. The work has a sort of spontaneity to it, perhaps due to the flimsiness and imperfect joints of the acrylic sheets. It appears not to have been overly labored, perhaps not even designed. With those oh-so kawaii rabbit chairs in there as well, I wonder if the installation might not just be trying to tell us to "lighten up!" If so, then I wish to second that emotion.
The Mies Foundation should also be congratulated for expanding the program of the pavilion beyond being merely a museum of itself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
