Step Right Up. Architectural Monumentality. Three Boxer Shorts for Only 6€.

Flea markets are normally found under bridges, in empty parking lots, or in old industrial sheds. This flea market (which I already reported on in an earlier post, while it was under construction) is in a purpose-designed, competition-winning, big-budget work of capital-A architecture. Step right up. A monumental flea market. Only in Barceloca.

The market, by b720 architects, consists of a ramped structure under a vast, very high folded roof plane supported by tall, slender columns. The underside of the roof structure is clad in highly reflective stainless steel, which in conjunction with the triangulated geometry and angled folds of the roof plane creates kaleidoscopic, dizzying reflections when looking up. The contrast between the architecture and the Made-in-China goods displayed within it is truly surreal. 

While I walk around and become overwhelmed by the goods, the reflections, the hustlers and the endless crowd, an old song by Tom Waits starts ringing in my head: Step right up. Bargains galore. We need your business. We're goin' outta business. Fifty percent off original retail price skip the middle man. How do we do it? How do we do it? Step right up.

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Fashion Victim

Plastic green wall at a fashion boutique on La Rambla dels Estudis.

You know green walls have become trendy when a major fashion label puts one up that's made of plastic. Kinda defeats the very point of a green wall, doesn't it? Silly me. I thought green walls were invented so that carbon dioxide-depleting vegetation could be cultivated in places otherwise impossible, like dense urban centers (which just so happen to produce far more CO2 than they can regenerate). But it looks like green walls have now become signage instead. Plastic signage, to boot.



It just goes to show the ease with which an effort designed with the best of environmental intentions can end up becoming an environmental problem in the end, thanks to its very fashionableness; which is to say, in our media-age, thanks to its own "success". Will we now see Made-in-China green-walls at shopping malls everywhere? I mean, the plastic ones don't need expensive irrigation systems or maintenance, and they still pull in the suckers. Oops, I meant to say customers.



Next time someone invents something that improves the environment, please don't publicize it, OK?

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Park, Shop, and Pray. Sacred-Profane Mixed-Use Building in San Sebastian by Rafael Moneo

Church, supermarket and parking garage in a single structure

Churches are architecture whereas supermarkets and parking garages are not. At least, that's what we've been taught by the likes of Nikolaus Pevsner and others. What, then, do we make of a single building designed by none other than Rafael Moneo, Spain's only Pritzker Prize winner, that contains all three of these functions within its walls? Situated in Riberas de Loiola, a new neighborhood of San Sebastián, the Iesu Church occupies the corner of a park (the Garden of Memory, which honors the 829 victims of the ETA terrorist organization), forming a transition between a rolling verdant landscape and apartment blocks. The inclusion of commercial retail space and parking in the church's basement allowed the church to offset 75% of construction costs.



Although this sacred-profane multi-use building is a single structure, each of the stacked functions is nevertheless entered separately, at different levels and on opposite sides of the building: the church is entered from the highest point of the site while the supermarket and parking garage entrances are entered from the lowest, taking maximum advantage of the site's topography.



The temple provides not a single hint of the supermarket, just as the supermarket makes no reference to the church. In fact, the supermarket even sells condoms.

Plans and section courtesy Arquitecturaviva

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