Containers without Content

2013-07-22T12:33:00-04:00

Far from being anchored in the local context, the project (the disastrous City of Culture of Galicia outside Santiago de Compostela, designed by Peter Eisenman) has decapitated Monte de Gaias and replaced it with a phony landscape with curves like those of a fun-fair roller coaster. These cynical intellectual manipulations cannot mask the reality of structures resembling supermarkets twisted about with algorithms and camouflaged with a thin veneer of granite (imported from Brasil!).

In a short sweet and illustrated article writer historian William J.R. Curtis puts several Bilbao effect projects in the trash can. It might as well be called "f..k content."

Building of the Week: City of Culture of Galicia

2011-07-06T17:07:00-04:00

Archinect's Building of the Week series is brought to you by our friends at OpenBuildings.com, the web's most comprehensive directory of buildings.

As I set on writing about the City of Culture of Galicia, I was baffled by the amount of papers, articles and comments on the subject and their diversity. I should have seen this coming, as the project's scale, budget and implications have stretched far beyond the initial expectations and urged a furious debate among architects, journalists, politicians and locals.

Commissioned in 1999, after an invited competition featuring a constellation of starchitects (Libeskind, Koolhaas, Nouvel, Perrault, Steven Holl and Ricardo Bofill, to name a few), the winning project of Peter Eisenman originally featured eight buildings (later reduced to six) composed in a complex, three-dimensional undulating terrain merging harmoniously with the environment.

Eisenman himself admits that "there is no question that the Santiago project is a res...

Archinect - News

Containers without Content

Building of the Week: City of Culture of Galicia