Archinect - Emmett Zeifman Travel Blog

Barcelona

2010-08-24T07:46:01-04:00

Antoni Bonet i Castellana is something of an aberration amongst his contemporaries in Spain, one of the few architects who consistently worked back and forth between the Americas and Iberia, though he was primarily based in South America. His architecture has a lightness and an international flavour that is distinct from the major practitioners of the time, the closest points of comparison being perhaps Rafael de la Hoz (more on him to come) and Alejandro de la Sota.

The Meridiana dog track (1962-1963), tucked away in the north-west of Barcelona, was one of the most surprising projects I saw. The lightness of the steel structure, the massing, and the arrangement of program and functional elements are all exemplary, as are the overall effect of the stark black and white finish and the odd little details, such as the slanted columns at the points of bow-shaped pavilion. The track itself has been converted into a park, with the pavilion slated to become a contemporary arts center.

Tarragona

2010-08-22T10:57:36-04:00

If Cabrero's Trade Union Building (http://www.archinect.com/travelblogs/entry.php?id=100059_0_58_0_C) signifies the re-introduction of the modern into the official architecture of Spain, Alejandro de la Sota's Civil Government Building in Tarragona (1957) is its full-fledged acceptance. It is arguably the most significant work of the Franco years, and de la Sota, as much through his teaching as his practice, the period's most influential architect.

In the provinces, and especially in Catalunya, official commisions were carried out by architects from Madrid, with only private commercial and residential architecture open to local architects. That is not to say that what we see here is the product of a Madrid school, for no such consistency existed. But it can, I think, be distinguished from the Catalunyan architecture of the period for its lack of vernacular or regional attributes.

Terragni is the first name that generally comes to mind when discussing the production of modern arc...

Milan

2010-08-03T03:43:14-04:00

On a rainy day in Milan, we stop into the Palazzo Citterio. The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is operating inside of it as a contemporary art gallery. We wind our way into the exhibition spaces in the basement. They are in finely poured but unfinished concrete, with shafts disappearing into the dark, boarded up openings, and finally a large, symmetrical room, entered from a staircase, with circular openings on the far wall. Speaking in very broken Italian with one of the volunteers, it comes out that we are in an unfinished expansion to the Pinoteca Brera across the street, begun in the 1980s by James Stirling. According to a recent issue of Art Forum, recent plans to expand elsewhere by the Brera mean that it will not be finished for that institution. The foundation offers occasional shows in the space (this was a retrospective of Paul McCarthy) as a means of promoting some further development of the project.

Madrid

2010-07-22T15:58:23-04:00

A few preliminary images from Italy on scale and style.

Rossi's cemetery in Modena was at once less than, more, and exactly what I expected it to be. It coincides with his representations in a wonderful way, fragmented, always begging a one-point perspective. My favourite moments are where it trails off into farm fields, or runs up into the generic suburbs and highways of northern Italy. Rossi succeeded in something, a work completely at ease with itself and its location. Whether this comes from the city or not, I'm not sure. The project feels less a city of the dead, and less of the city, than something purely architectural and unassuming. I wonder how many architects imagine being interred (can one be interred out of the ground?) in its many open plots.

The EUR was odd, much less cohesive than I'd always imagined it to be. Its corners are packed with small suburban apartments, and between the monuments there is run of the mill commerce and there are some run of the mill office...

Madrid

2010-07-15T20:39:33-04:00

Finally made it to Miguel Fisac's Iglesia de Santa Ana (1965) today. There will be more Fisac to come, but I wanted to put this up. Of the major figures of post-war Spanish architecture, he is perhaps the most clearly related to the Scandinavians, whose work he'd seen in person. Asplund is mentioned, as well as Jacobsen, but surely Aalto must have been an influence as well. The Asplund relation can be more clearly seen in a couple of buildings I'll post later.

In the late 1950s, Fisac developed a highly specific language of pre-stressed concrete elements, or bones, here combined with both sculptural and generic cast-in-place forms. At Santa Ana, the interior is given great attention, while the exterior (the church sits in the middle of a post-war housing development) appears to be the largely unadulterated result of the interior manipulations.

The sanctuary

The stained glass on the rear walls

The quite delicate pews

Inside the baptistry and confessional

The parish offices

T...

Madrid

2010-07-13T19:13:02-04:00

Between Italy and Spain a two-day pit-stop in Lyon to visit La Tourette, the building I most wanted to see in the world. It is in the midst of restoration, much of it under scaffolding. The restored plaster is incredibly white.

Over the past couple of days in Madrid I somewhat inadvertently saw a number of the most exciting works of the 1960s and early 1970s that make expressive use of concrete. Derivations of Brutalism do not seem to have been the default mode of architecture in Madrid in this period as they were in other cities. However, there are many projects that touch on the full aesthetic range of concrete as developed in the late modernist architectures of the 1960s.

The Center for Artistic Restoration (1961/65), by Fernando Higueras and Antonio Miró, is among the many notable campus buildings that sits in the vast expanse of the Ciudad Universitaria on the western edge of Madrid. It is one of the clearest examples of an interest in Italian architectural positions within...

Spain

2010-07-07T13:00:37-04:00

Sorry to begin halfway through.

I spent the first six weeks of the summer in Italy, in Rome, drawing on a Yale program, and then moving through the north to see work by Moretti, Rossi, Terragni and others. In a sense it was a foundation, in something much more familiar to me as a student at Yale, for what I'm doing now.

Now I am ten days into the second half. Eight weeks in Spain, moving around the country and looking at architecture of the Francoist period. I began in Barcelona, where I will return in a couple of weeks, and am now in Madrid. Afterwards there will be a succession of smaller cities and towns.

I'm working on converting my digital photos to a size suitable to the blog, and then there will be photos and much more frequent posts. I'm also shooting with a film camera and hope to get that stuff online somewhere when I get it developed and scanned in the fall.

There is everything related directly to the project at hand, but there is also a growing backlog of obsevatio...

Thirty-Six Hours

2010-06-28T04:46:24-04:00

Wake up in Lyon at 6:30 for 9:30 flight to Barcelona. Should be landing at 11:15.

Take subway (two trains) to the airport shuttle bus.

Airport shuttle bus to the airport. Wrong terminal printed on the e-mail confirmation. First sign of trouble.

Easyjet terminal is packed. Going to miss the flight?

No. Flight is delayed. Wait. Flight is cancelled.

Refund. Air France is going to be 500 euros. Direct train to Barcelona sells out while in the middle of purchasing it.

And there is a general strike today in France.

Decide to go to Perpignon if possible and figure it out from there. Walk over to the airport rail station to try to discuss situation with SNCF agent.

Station abandoned. Ticket machine doesn't accept chipless credit cards.

Return to the terminal to use the internet again. Purchase ticket on-line.

Take airport shuttle back to the city to the central train station.

Stand in another endless line to try to get paper ticket printed (because machines don't accept the c...