Thursday, October 20, 2011

Moneo Museum in Pamplona


News brief
Another private project perks up the gloomy panorama in Spanish architecture. This time it's a museum designed by Rafael Moneo for the University of Navarra in Pamplona, which is owned and operated by the Opus Dei. Situated between the university campus and the edge of the city, the project will begin construction next month.

Among other collections, the museum will house a major donation of works by María Josefa Huarte, 87, member of the Huarte family, the great patrons of the arts in Spain in the 1950s and 60s, and the archives of José Ortiz-Echagüe, author of posed, painterly photographs on popular Spanish themes in the early 20th century. Huarte's donation, some 50 works, includes paintings by Tapies, Picasso, Rothko, Palazuelo, Jorge Oteiza and Eduardo Chillida.

Ortiz-Echagüe was one of the founders of the Spanish aviation industry in the 1920's, the first director of the state-owned SEAT automobile corporation in the 1950s, and the father of the noted 1950s architect César Ortiz-Echagüe, who built a series of memorable Miesian buildings for SEAT before cutting off his career and retiring at an early age into the Opus Dei.

Source: El País, October 19, 2011 and my own research.

Renzo Piano's First Work in Spain


News Brief
Last month, Renzo Piano presented the design of his first work in Spain, the Botín Art Center in Santander. The project is sponsored by Emilio Botín, President of the Santander Bank, Spain's largest. The glass and ceramic-clad structure will project into the Santander Bay, and is scheduled to open in 2015. It will include 2500 m2 (25000 sf) of galleries and a wing dedicated to multicultural and educational activities. The head of the commission in charge of the center's artistic program is Vicente Todoli, former director of the Tate Modern, the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal and the IVAM in Valencia.

Source: ABC newspaper, Sept. 17, 2011

Update Jan. 12,. 2012
New information about the project can be found on SCALAE this month, reporting on an exhibit on the project in Santander and some of the criticism it has received.

The SCALAE page includes links to various videos about the project and from its critics, the catalog of the show, links to press coverage in Spanish. etc.

Update June 19, 2012:
The definitive project was unveiled in Santander today by Remzo Piano and Emilio Botin, as reported in El País: 
"...the cantilevered structure is literally suspended in the air to open to the sea, clad in 360,000 ceramic tiles the color of mother-of-pearl."
With public works projects halted throughout the country --Rem Koolhaas' Congress Center in Córdoba, cancelled last March, is the latest casualty -- the private sector steps in to take up some of the slack.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Frampton & Vidler on the 1960s

Kenneth Frampton and Anthony VIdler (currently Dean of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York) have published two fascinating glimpses into the 1960s English background that led to the highpoint of New York architecture and theory in the 1970s and 80s, a story in which they themselves played major roles.

In a Columbia architecture school publication, Frampton recalls his early years as technical editor of Architectural Design (AD) under Monica Pidgeon in London (1962 - 65), offering a view into his formative years before arriving at Princeton in 1966 on the invitation of Peter Eisenman, whom he had met while Peter was doing his PhD. at Cambridge.

It's essential background for understanding Frampton's American phase; I wish I'd known something of all this when I studied under him in the 1970's.

Here we find:
  • Frampton taking measured drawings of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre; 
  • Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester Engineering Building, source of a memorable cover design in 1964; 
  • Atelier 5's Siedling Halen in Switzerland, where he stayed for a period;
  • His "ideal model",  Ernesto Rogers’ Casabella Continuita. "Needless to say, I could not come close to this ideal, above all because the publisher’s rather fixed ideas as to economic paper sizes.... This was hardly the only impediment ... since I lacked both the graphic flair and the mature cultivation that emanated from its pages;"
  • His interest in "a critical stance ... which went beyond [a] transatlantic Anglo-American cultural agenda" -- Gino Valle, Aris Konstandtinidis, Mangiaroti and Morasutti (Milan), Max Bill, Frei Otto, Jean Prouvé. "In retrospect I feel that my subsequent preoccupation with Critical Regionalism had some of its root origins in this moment, when I first began to look upon the culture of the European 'city state' with a different eye;"
  • His aim "to turn the emphasis of the magazine more towards a latter-day humanist line as was represented, say, by Joseph Rykwert’s translation of Giulio Carlo Argan’s seminal essay 'On Typology in Architecture' which we published in December 1963;"
  • Constant Neuewenhuy’s Situationist thesis 'New Babylon, An Urbanism of the Future', published in June 1964;
  • The "emerging semiotic line" of Peter Eisenman’s Cambridge thesis 'Towards an Understanding of Form in Architecture' excerpted in AD;
  • A "special issue ... devoted to the work of Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni with a critical overview of Italian Rationalism... This was, in effect, the first attempt at recovering this lost wing of the Modern Movement since the end of the Second World War;"
  • "A soirée at the British Museum with Nigel Henderson where I first met Camilla Gray, the author of The Great Experiment, with whom I shared an enthusiasm for Russian Constructivism. This was the same Camilla in whose company five years later I would witness Berthold Lubetkin in tears before a private showing of Lutz Becker’s 1971 assembly of archival documentary excerpts of the revolution in action. Camilla would later marry the son of Prokoviev and tragically lose her life, giving birth to their child in the Soviet Union;"
  • Claude Schnaidt, "a committed left wing Swiss architect and historian whose early documentation of the work of Hannes Meyer remains unsurpassed to this day;"
  • "Being invited to tea by Hans Scharoun in Charlottenberg;"
  • "Frequent contact with Le Corbusier at 35 rue de Sevres;"
  • And Yona Friedman: "Friedman was a member of the Franco-German Group d’Etudes de l’Architecture Mobile, otherwise known as GEAM; an anarchic connection that I thought was somehow at odds with his African fairy tales, his Boolean logic and his skepticism as to the role of modern art, about which he had the provocative habit of saying, 'I think there is one art and that is cooking.' ”
He closes with a reminiscence on his successor, Robin Middleton, who as acquisitions editor for Thames & Hudson commissioned Modern Architecture: A Critical History in 1970. The book "took me a decade to complete and ... would never have been brought to its final form had it not been for the specialist scholars he linked me up with and for his own testy but pertinent editorial voice, interjecting from time to time, 'You don’t need this sentence, you’ve said it already, you don’t need this adjective, it adds nothing.' In the end, I internalized this voice and hereafter my writing owes whatever conciseness and pertinence it has to his perennial presence whenever I pick up a pen."

A more densely-packed memoir of the era is difficult to imagine, with the extraordinary range of interests Frampton brought with him to Columbia.

Peter and the 60s also come up in the first part of Anthony Vidler's overiew in the October Architectural Review of the demand for a "unified field theory" of architecture. In his brisk trot through the postwar period, he pauses long enough to offer this on Eisenman in Cambridge in 1963, already a familiar portrait:

"The most radical departure from the Vitruvian triad, however, was that proposed by a young PhD student at Cambridge, Peter D Eisenman, who in 1963 propounded his faith in ‘the formal basis of modern architecture’ in a short article in AD...."
"In his formal Dantonism, Eisenman ... went on to refuse all outside reference for meaning in architecture, exorcising symbolic, iconographic and perceptual influences or interpretation. Instead he looked at the ‘primary configurations’ of buildings considered as structures of logical discourse − their internal spatial and volumetric considerations deriving the formal ‘linguistics’ of his understanding of architectural systems from Le Corbusier’s ‘Four Compositions’, and making their implications explicit. If for Summerson form was considered only in relation to proportional systems, or for Banham it was no more than a dead (academic) language, Eisenman saw all formal systems as communicative, based on the properties of form itself: this was the only criterion through which architecture could be thought a discipline."
 Stay tuned for the second and third parts:
‘Part II: Postmodernism to Post-Criticism’ (January 2012)
‘Part III: The Global Context: New Critical Paradigms’ (spring 2011)

Both Frampton and Vidler left cold post-postwar England for well-paid faculty posts in the US, together with James Stirling, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, Joseph Rykwert and Alan Colquhoun
-- a major swath of the elite of British architecture (Norman Foster very nearly did the same in those tough years, he once told me in an interview), all to my very good luck as a student, and almost as important to American architecture in the long run as the wartime arrival of the continental elite -- Gropius, Giedion, Mies, Sert, Moholy-Nagy, etc.



Kenneth Frampton 
"Homage a Monica Pidgeon: An AD Memoir"
CC: Global Report
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP)
2011

Anthony Vidler
"Troubles in Theory Part 1: The State of the Art 1945-2000"
The Architectural Review
September 11, 2011
(Free registration required)

Photos: Covers designed by Frampton during his tenure as AD's Technical Editor.
From "Homage a Monica Pidgeon"

Addendum
See my update on Vidler's second installment:
The Postwar Picturesque
Jan. 8, 2012

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Discovering Esther McCoy

One of the interesting things to emerge about this site is that it is read as much in Spain as in the US, Britain or elsewhere.*  To make this a bridge with two-way traffic, now and then I will single out to Spanish readers some of the most interesting things I come across from outside Spain.

The first of these is a brief profile in the Design blog of The New York Times on the Los Angeles architecture critic Esther McCoy  (1904 - 1989): Arkansan-born, Greenwich Village bred (she worked as an assistant to Theodore Dreiser) and draftswoman for RM Schindler after WW II, before she started writing on West Coast architecture. There's a show on her career organized by blog entry author Susan Morgan, at the Schindler House on North Kings Road in LA where she worked, now the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (through January 8th). 



*The View from Madrid all-time audience since May 2009:

Spain ............3094
US .................2433
Italy...............1282
UK .................1275
Germany .........813
Portugal ...........429
France ............. 410

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

SelgasCano + García Sánchez in Mérida


For The Architectural Review's relaunch issue ("not a cosmetic redesign," according to the editors, "but a considered and comprehensive editorial relaunch, intended to offer critical thinking for critical times"), and joining the likes of Anthony Vidler, Joseph Rykwert, Jonathan Glancey (The Guardian), William J. Curtis, Peter Buchanan, Peter Cook, Farshid Moussavi and Peter Blundell Jones, I was invited to write on two diametrically opposed projects in Mérida, Spain: the Mérida Youth Factory by José Selgas + Lucia Cano, and the Perimeter Building at the Temple of Diana by José María Sánchez García.
"The urbanity of the Factory is kinetic, dedicated to movement, activity and intense social interaction, and this is reflected in its fluid forms, where poles of attraction power the circular, circulating movement of its plan. The Perimeter Building, in contrast, aspires to timelessness.  ... The plaza is "abstracted" from the present of the contemporary city, as the architect observes, and is a space not so much for bringing people together as for contemplation, in which we observe the presence of others in the space as part of our solitary aesthetic reverie."
Double Entendre
The Architectural Review (UK), Vol. CCXXX, No. 1376
October 2011, pages 62 - 71.
Link to article (free registration required)

Photos above:
  • Perimeter Building, Temple of Diana; photo © Roland Halbe
  • Mérida Youth Factory; photo © Iwan Baan
Photos below: © Iwan Baan; Office of José María Sánchez García