Learned from Las Vegas: DHUB Design Museum, Barcelona, by MBM

DHUB: a shed with a duck stapled on top of it?

This building is important. It occupies a prominent site at the intersection of Barcelona’s three most important
thoroughfares. But not only that: a chunk of it has been
allowed to singularly invade public airspace over Gran Via, the longest,
straightest and most important of these avenues. Just to give us an idea,
La Sagrada Familia is among the few other buildings in Barcelona permitted
to occupy public airspace over a major street:
when completed, the Glory façade’s monumental
entrance steps will arch over Carrer de Mallorca. The name of the new
building, “Disseny Hub”, also exudes importance, suggesting that it is a point of network centrality, not unlike an international
airport.

It turns out that this important
building is a design institution, not a transportation interchange, although the jet-setting Wallpaperazzi are sure to make it a stopover on their globe-trotting itineraries.
Among Barcelona’s locals, meanwhile, this building’s pronounced cantilever has
already earned it the sobriquet of “la grapadora”, or the stapler; astutely
reflecting today’s growing complicity between architecture, design and
bureaucracy.

But this monumental stapler is in fact only a small component of a
much larger building; a mere hood ornament on a sprawling, low-slung, semi-buried 'groundscraper'. It is as if one part of the building were intended to be highly visible—an eye-catching icon or sign—and the rest much more hidden and discreet. Moreover, the conspicuous element faces the busy roadway intersection, while the
discreet one opens in the other direction onto a more pedestrian-scaled
public space. It is almost...almost...as if the architects, MBM,
took their cue from the ducks and sheds of Las Vegas, stacking these
elements vertically instead of layering them horizontally, as would make sense
in a much denser urban setting. Who would have thought that an important
building on Barcelona’s grand strip would one day take the form of a duck
stapled onto a shed?

[Originally published in Mark Magazine #45]

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Provocative Architecture?

In "Little Frank and his Carp", a 2001 video of a performance by artist Andrea Fraser, architecture, replete with its institutional frame, becomes a stimulus for masturbation. Is this architecture at its most provocative? No, unless this was part of the architect's design intention; something which only Frank Gehry can tell us for sure. Architecture can't take all the credit here: it takes two to tango.

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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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Architectural Art

Tomas Saraceno's Cloud Cities installation at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin 

Art galleries and museums seem to be showing with greater frequency artworks about architecture, many of them by artists who have studied architecture.



It's all very interesting, but is it architecture or is it art?



After all, art is a discipline that is completely open to every conceivable method, medium, and process. It has, for about a century now, been freed from the traditional academic categories of sculpture, painting and drawing to include conceptual art, installation art, performance art, land art, video art, photo-based art; and what we might call "architectural art" (which is arguably a form of installation art). Art is no longer restricted in terms of media, and is no longer practiced exclusively by painters or sculptors, but by artists who use multiple types of media to explore certain ideas from different angles. Architecture can be one of these ideas, and architectural construction one of those media, but if it's in an art institution, then it's art, not architecture.



There are fundamental differences between art and architecture. The most important one being that art is autonomous, while architecture has only a degree autonomy. In other words, art has an artistic freedom that architecture does not. But here we're obviously talking about architecture as "buildings", not gallery installations. As soon as an architect constructs something in a gallery (or in any institutional context involving a gallery or museum), then architecture becomes art.



When architecture occurs outside the privileged context of an art institution, however "artistic" or "sculptural" it may be, architecture will be architecture and not art.

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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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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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BMW Welter

Luxury automobiles are fetish items par excellence. The advertising, branding and merchandising of this kind of consumer good is designed to appeal to our emotions, not our rationality. Why else would we buy something that devalues by up to a third the moment we drive out of the dealership? High-end cars are not sold to us based on their technological virtues, even though a great deal of research goes into automotive technology. They are sold on values that tap our desires to be seen to live a certain lifestyle and attain a certain social status. The refrain of “tell me what kind of car you drive and I’ll tell you who you are” is not entirely unfounded, and the mere sight of certain brands of high-end automobiles can conjure all sorts of stereotypes about the identity of the owner. Volvo: tweed-clad, tenured university professor. Porsche: young and nouveau riche. Mercedes: conservative executive. BMW: aggressive entrepreneur with little time to lose. Hummer: I’m super-rich so fuck off.



Over the last decade, a number of automotive companies—especially German ones such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and BMW—have embarked on media-friendly architectural projects designed, among other things, to build brand equity. There is now a collection of sophisticated automotive architectural works throughout Germany by the likes of UN Studio, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Delugan Meissl, providing a perfect excuse to fly into Frankfurt, rent a roadster, load some Kraftwerk into the sound system and go on a whirlwind Autobahn tour of these sites.



The most outlandish of these new buildings is BMW Welt in Munich, an "experience" and "customer delivery centre" adjacent to the corporation’s factory, museum and landmark Four-Cylinder office tower. Designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, BMW Welt has won several awards, including the Wallpaper 2009 Award for “Best New Public Building” (just how public is this building really?), the World Architecture Festival 2008 Award in the “production” category (was there no “consumption” category?) as well as the RIBA European Award in 2008, the jury of which praised its “spectacular cloud-like roof”.



Now, I suppose three esteemed architectural award juries can’t be wrong, but I have tried and tried and cannot for the likes of me see the virtues of BMW Welt. The building is an automobile and motorcycle showroom the size and feel of an international airport terminal. Its idiosyncratic architecture has no shortage of entertaining quirks, folds, twists, whims and conceits, but I can't help but think that these tricks are trying pathetically to make the building feel less commercial and more artistic. They seem more like hollow gestures. Naming the roof a “cloud”, the floor a “landscape” and the entrance feature a “whirlwind” is cute, but it is still an oversized commercial showroom.



Yes, the building is formally complex and impeccably crafted down to the last detail. It is architectural bravado, but that's just about all. Despite the beautiful cars, beautiful salespeople, and beautiful views onto the neighbouring Olympic Stadium and BMW buildings from the 1960s, BMW Welt feels empty and devoid of soul.



If the architecture is supposed to build up the company’s brand equity the way its highly effective television and print advertising campaigns have consistently done, then this building falls short in comparison. Give me the BMW ads on TV—they are more thought-provoking.











Too bad the stylist didn't know all the connotations of the word "lemon"...

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Disseny Hype

"Disseny Hub" is a new cultural institution in Barcelona dedicated to design; or, to put it more correctly, to promoting this city as a global design centre. Located in a palace on Carrer Montcada that was previously the home of the Textile Museum, directly across from the busy Picasso Museum, DHUB's inaugural exhibition is none other than "Tourism: Spaces of Fiction".



The name of this institution is curious: the word "disseny" is Catalan (meaning "design") while "hub" is an English word that is not normally used in Catalan. Penny Sparke wrote in 1986: "The English word 'design' is currently used widely in countries such as Japan, Italy, France, the Scandinavian countries and the USA, a fact which indicates that its meaning in contemporary society has moved away from its definition in previous centuries when it was interchangeable with the Italian il disegno and the French le dessin. The fact that these countries have abandoned these native terms in favour of 'design' suggests that more than just a mere shift in meaning has taken place and that what has occurred is, in fact, the emergence of an entirely new concept." This concept, according to Sparke, is one in which design is "an extension of marketing and advertising" in addition to being "a silent quality of all mass-produced goods." Sparke wrote this in 1986. Maybe another concept is emerging now, where the international use of the word "design" is abandoned in favour of "disseny"?



If "design" contains the word "sign"--as in the "sign-value" that design delivers--then the interesting thing about the word "disseny" is that it contains the word "seny", meaning a combination of common sense and frugality; attributes by which Catalans have traditionally differentiated themselves from Spaniards. But then, judging by DHUB's inaugural exhibition, "seny" is the last thing that this place seems to be about. "Tourism: Spaces of Fiction" is so unquestioning, so lacking in any problematization whatsoever of this industry, that it comes across as one long infomercial. The inclusion of a colossal model of Bawadi, Dubailand's development proposal for what appears to be yet another simulation of Las Vegas (i.e. a simulation of a simulation), is a case in point. Neither its architecture (cloned buildings from elsewhere) nor its urbanism (one long, wide commercial strip) are anything even remotely new. So what is it doing here? The only thing missing next to the model was a sales representative pressuring me to buy a timeshare.



The same goes for much of the rest of the exhibition, which sticks to a fairly kneejerk notion of tourism. There is little mention of the current interest in eco-tourism, for example, or how the heritage industry--not to mention the Gaudí industry--has grown as a direct consequence of tourism. The role of tourism in the transformation of Barcelona is conspicuously absent as a topic in this exhibition, unless the Macià plan, displayed as a panorama, counts in this regard.



The most interesting material in this exhibition is a series of architectural models investigating new forms of tourism and a montage of classic film clips that is quite entertaining. But overall, it focusses rather heavily and uncritically on what we have come to expect from the tourism industry: ever more spectacular and hyperreal large-scale over-development.

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Exquisite Corpse: CaixaForum Madrid by Herzog + de Meuron

A large sculpture next to a mega monochrome painting – at first glance and from a distance, that’s what the serrated box and vertical garden of the new CaixaForum Madrid resemble. A Per Kirkeby next to an oversize Ad Reinhart or Brice Marden in an unknown green period, or perhaps a public piece by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.



The building by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and the vertical garden by French botanist Patrick Blanc amount to a brilliant urban intervention that has transformed the site of a former power plant and petrol station in central Madrid into an important new addition to the city’s ‘art triangle’, an area formed by the Prado, Reina Sofía and Thyssen-Bornemisza Museums. Nonetheless, the resemblance of this intervention to sculpture and painting raises questions about contemporary architecture’s fascination with art. Even the ‘secular’ work of Herzog & de Meuron – indisputably the favorite architects of the art world – is clearly inspired by modern and contemporary art. Barcelona’s Forum 2004 Building, with its highly textured Yves Klein Blue-coloured skin, is a direct homage to the artist who invented that shade of blue.



Yet, as artists such as Sol LeWitt have written, architecture is not art, and it is particularly ironic that so much cutting-edge architecture currently reminds us of the most traditional forms of art – sculpture and painting – precisely at a time when contemporary art seems to be almost anything but sculpture and painting. I’m not referring here exclusively to Herzog &de Meuron, but to all the usual suspects. It has to be asked whether architecture is really advancing when it seeks to become an inhabitable form of sculpture. If art, as is so often said, is a mirror held up to the world, then architecture, the very construction of the world, cannot be the same sort of mirror. As an old-school professor told me in my formative years: ‘An artist can make a square wheel, but an architect’s wheel must always be round.’



CaixaForum Madrid is the newest of a series of ambitious social and cultural outreach projects of the Fundación ‘la Caixa’, a private philanthropic foundation funded by one of Spain’s larger financial institutions. Like the CaixaForums in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca, Madrid’s is a centre for exhibitions of ancient, modern and contemporary art (including works from the Fundación ‘la Caixa’ contemporary art collection), music and poetry festivals, debates, seminars on contemporary issues and educational workshops. And like most of the foundation’s building projects, which include CosmoCaixa science museums in Barcelona and Madrid as well as smaller cultural and social centres in Catalonia and the Balearic Isles, CaixaForum Madrid has a social agenda that includes the preservation of a significant piece of built heritage. CaixaForum Barcelona, by Arata Isozaki, involved the adaptive reuse of the Casaramona textile factory designed in 1909 by Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Similarly, CaixaForum Madrid recuperates the Central Eléctrica del Mediodía, a power plant designed in 1899 by architect Jesús Carrasco-Muñoz.



It is well known that the art world generally prefers older buildings – especially those linked to a region’s industrial heritage – over completely new architecture for exhibiting visual art. The patina of worn and weathered buildings, according to many artists and curators, suits the display of contemporary art better than brand-new sterile spaces, though I suspect their preference may emerge in part from a predisposition for buildings that look like buildings and not like sculptures. The most monumental manifestation of this aesthetic preference is, of course, London’s Tate Modern, another power plant transformed by Herzog & de Meuron, although the prototype for exhibiting art in industrial buildings originates in the use made of New York warehouses by American minimalist and conceptualist artists of the 1960s and ’70s.



In the case of CaixaForum Madrid, however, the appropriation of historical architecture is superficial: only the exterior walls of the Central del Mediodía have been preserved. Inside these walls – as well as above and below them – the construction is contrastingly new. Moreover, the historical building has been completely recontextualized: the heavy plinth that originally supported the power station has been removed and replaced by three points of support, causing the building to appear to levitate over the site. As a result, it is no longer self-evident that this was the original site of the Central del Mediodía. Industrial architecture is so rare and out of place in Madrid, the monumental capital of Spain, that one could easily imagine this building floating to the site all the way from Barcelona, Spain’s industrial capital and, incidentally, the headquarters of ‘la Caixa’. Indeed, with its addition on top, CaixaForum recalls the many 19th-century buildings of Barcelona’s Eixample district that were expanded vertically by as many as four storeys during the latter half of the Franco dictatorship, a period of rampant real-estate speculation.



CaixaForum Madrid appears, then, to be a palimpsest, a collage, an exquisite corpse. But this is just an exterior reading: in addition to the elevated hybrid building, there is also a hidden underground component extending horizontally beneath the plaza. This underground component can be reached only after penetrating the elevated building through its topographical underside, by means of a sculptural winding stair that ascends from the plaza into the lobby. Here, a single picture window frames a view of Madrid’s Botanical Gardens across the busy Paseo del Prado and a segment of an adjacent block of buildings whose end wall supports Patrick Blanc’s vertical garden. To continue from the lobby to the rest of the building, the visitor must enter a stairwell that leads up to two exhibition galleries, a bar-restaurant and administrative offices; and down to an underground auditorium and lecture halls. The stairwell, a tapered vertical shaft, is important for structural reasons: it is the largest of the three vertical supports that elevate the building above the plaza. As the shear- and torsion-resistant structural core of the building, it functions like the vertical core of any high-rise building, except that it’s roomy and admits daylight from above. But the stairwell is no ‘museum atrium’ either: it is completely out of view with respect to the rest of the building, precisely because of the load-bearing and fire-resistant role of its heavy white concrete walls. In this regard, CaixaForum marks a significant departure from current art-museum thinking, in which galleries are typically organized around a central, brightly lit atrium to which visitors periodically return, as part of a strategy to alleviate disorientation and museum fatigue. The opacity of the structural stairwell separates each floor completely from the others; consequently, depending on the level at which one exits the stairwell, the décor could change completely. The lobby, with its bright silver beams, contrasts with the white terrazzo floored galleries, the natural wood and dark red-brown perforated metal of the underground spaces, and the delicately screened daylight passing through perforated Corten steel in the restaurant. Here, CaixaForum marks another significant departure from current museums: the building interior is neither monotonously monochrome nor ‘purist’ in an ‘honest’ display of construction materials. Like an urban palace– the first art gallery – CaixaForum contains a variety of differently finished rooms. Paint and interior wall coverings are no taboo for these Swiss architects.



Although CaixaForum Madrid appears at first glance to resemble supersize art, up close it reveals itself to be surprising, eclectic and complex. It incorporates the façade of a historical building that has been emptied, but unlike the common heritage practice of ‘façadism’ –whereby a historical surface is used to camouflage modernity – the historical façade of this building functions as a character foil to some radical moves. CaixaForum Madrid appropriates many art-world architectural conventions but subtly turns them upside down. Precisely what the best art and architecture have always done.



[originally published in Mark Magazine #14]

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The Virtue of Reality: “Puntos de luz”, the butterfly effect, and (web) site-specificity

The butterfly effect, first formulated by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1970s, “refers to the idea that whether or not a butterfly flaps its wing in one part of the world can make a difference in whether or not a storm arises one year later on the other side of the world.” It is therefore impossible, even in theory, to make predictions about the behavior of chaotic systems such as the weather system. Or artist Chema Alvargonzalez’s aleatory installation project titled “Puntos de luz”, whereby anyone with access to the internet can turn on the lights that he has attached to the exterior walls of the recently inaugurated CaixaForum in Barcelona (originally the Casarramona textile factory, by architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, 1910-11).

The two sites of this project—the building and the web—are each vital to the idea and functioning of the installation: without either, the electrical circuit would be incomplete. In other words, this web site is not just a promotional or explanatory accompaniment to the art, but a component that makes the work interactive, dynamic, and therefore unpredictable. Furthermore, this web site makes it possible to cause a real (albeit minor) change in a real place: to turn on a light bulb in Barcelona. Very few web sites are “really” interactive. Most so-called “interactive” web sites enable only virtual interaction. 

The installation “Puntos de luz” can be seen, then, to be reversing the usual roles played by so-called “real” and “virtual” realms: the web site is a physical switching mechanism; while the building’s blinking lights are a transmitter of information; a “web-o-meter” that indicates the amount of (inter) activity on the web site, not unlike the way a modem’s LEDs blink to indicate the sending and receiving of bytes.

This reversal between the real and the virtual complicates the notion of site-specificity in art. As is by now well known, site-specificity became a central concern in art with the emergence, in the 1960s and 70s, of new artistic practices such as installation art, land art, minimalism, conceptual art, and performance art. While expanding the field beyond painting and sculpture, these emergent practices also sought to engage the physical context of a work of art. The notion of ‘place’ and the tectonics of a particular building or landscape—or a particular type of building or landscape—became an inseparable component of the art. A marked preference continues to exist in contemporary artistic practice for physically integrating works directly with the ground of landscape or the floors and walls of buildings, obviating the traditional role of the pedestal in sculpture and the picture-frame in painting.

Since the emergence and recent popularization of the internet, the web is becoming another important site and form of artistic practice. In addition to the many “virtual galleries” that can be visited on the internet, many established art institutions run web-based programs in addition to their building-based programs. Unlike museums made of bricks and mortar, virtual museums stay open 24/7 and are much less expensive to build, maintain and program. Despite references to “firewalls” and “portals”, the internet has no physical architectural elements, of course. It is an abstract, atectonic space that is nowhere in particular and yet accessible from anywhere; a tabula rasa that is virtually free of contingency—the perfect non-place. Nothing, it seems, could be further from the notion of site-specificity and the idea of place than the internet.

Yet one could say the same about the idea of the paradigmatic “white cube” gallery space a type of space that has been the subject of much artistic investigation and critique. This kind of gallery space is generic and architecturally abstract, appearing, often, to set itself apart from its urban context. Just as the traditional frame and pedestal were used to separate and “elevate” the work of art from the architectural chaos of the salon-type exhibition space, so the white cube gallery separates the work of art from the urban chaos outside. The white cube is hardly any more conducive to site-specific art than the internet, then.

We might see “Puntos de luz”, perhaps, as a “web site-specific” installation that capitalizes on the enormous outreach of the internet precisely to induce reflection on the very idea of site-specificity in the age of the internet. When you turn that lightbulb on in Barcelona, think about what the flap of a butterfly’s wing has been known to cause on the other side of the ocean.

[Originally published in www.puntosdeluz.net]

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