Torres Blancas

I'll try and let the pictures do the talking on this one, an exuberant, next generation Iberian hybridising of the kind of organic concrete expressionism developed by Bertrand Golberg in Marina City in Chicago (finished the year this was designed). The whole thing evolves from dizzyingly complex Aldo-Van-Eyck-on-stimulants plans that govern its massive cliff-like form as it rises.
Between every slab, and into every nook and cranny opened up by the plan's super-imposed circles are crammed small, detailed, strange neo-vernacular wooden details -floating shutters on rails and blown glass screens- which in their hand-crafted, delicate and antiquated appearance (Hassan Fathy in the sky) contrast with the immense coarseness of the concrete structure to lend the whole ensemble the appearance of an ancient future, of an imperial muscularity and grandness aged and colonised by a coral reef of successive, smaller generations whose interventions act only to render the overall scale of the building more impressive.
And now the photos...

The entrance is in the lower ground floor and is a veritable mushroom filled grotto of marble and plaster...

I had wanted to do a post on my other favourite (twin) tower in Madrid, the Torres De Colon, but unfortunately only had time to peer at it through the window of a cab after speeding around a round-about a few times in front of Phillip Johnson's Puerta De Europa towers. The Torres Blancas was just across the road from the Puerta de America hotel (the one where each floor is by a different architect) where we spent a restless night in Plasma Studio's spike-fest floor, in which there was a certain degree of difficulty getting any privacy whilst using the spiky loo or spiky shower, although the terrifying novelty of the whole project (it felt like pure excess capital, like you could touch the stuff with your hands and eyes) made any embarrassment kind of worthwhile.

Gehry's Whale And Zaha's Billboard In La Rioja

Gehry's Hotel Marques De Riscal in Elciego, La Rioja, gives plenty to its surroundings, lots of floaty-lite shiny pretty purply wavy surfaces of ooooh so lovely titanium that glint in the sun and reflect sunsets and glitter at night and stuff like that, and which also -by an incredible sleight-of-hand- simultaneously imprison its well-healed guests in a cage of mad steel beams that stab mindlessly in every direction, sticking into the body of the place like pins into a vodoo doll, whilst also managing to -almost- completely hide the remarkable mediocrity, the total early nineties "rent-a-plan" banality of its interiors.

Perhaps this is an ironic double reflex against the pretensions of the guests and the owner? The empty heart of the icon and the wealth it carries... Perhaps its confusing array of wavy corridors that leave you disorientated not because of any crashing forms, but because of a total lack of any distinguishing mark, together with their alienating in-between spaces populated with Gehry furniture that no one will ever sit on, perhaps they are a 21st century take on Kafka's institutional interiors, but here being an analogised space of global abstraction and endless seriality, which on purpose leaves the occupant lost with an overwhelming sense of sickening deja-vu.

Perhaps, but really its that Gehry must have only ever looked at the pretty sexy model from the outside, and thats where all the money went (the budget for this was around 100million euros, a comparable amount to the bilbao guggenheim). The interior is detritus, the result of a struggle to fit all the program in between the wavy-wavies, while still adhering to Spain's building regs.

In case you ever get lost -which I guarantee you will- there is always a handy scribble neaby, blown up to A1 and framed, to remind you that you are in the result of a moment of genius, from the mind of a genius, and that the sinking feeling in your stomach as you pass another huge window overlooking another bunch of steel beams, must actually be a conceived part of it, must have been intended, otherwise it might mean either that you cant comprehend the immensity of his genius, or its all a ridiculous joke that you, sucker, wasted 300 euros on, and either of those options is best pushed to the back of the mind. For now.

Thankfully, underneath the hotel, in a huge hidden sockle, are the wine-making facilities of the Bodega, where some real doing goes on. Some hardcore aging, bottling and packaging of around 6million bottles a year of that great stuff, Rioja wine, which (if you can drink enough of it, and perhaps mix it with some of the fortified stuff) can easily and surely take you, and whoever is drinking with you, to an equally curvy, and far more exhilarating place, wherever you happen to be, than the preposterous one squatting above the workers and their wine, like some colossal dead beached whale covered in carnivorous beatles.

And nearby is the Vina Tondonia by Zaha, a forlorn "building" whose spirit is definitively broken, its amazingness left behind in a thumbnail somewhere on some design blog, archived in January or February 2009. 

All thats left now is what looks like an unused car park, but an unused car park with markings that would definitely not help any car park, or do anything, except, rather excitingly after a couple of minutes trying to figure it out, realise that they all eventually line up with the lines on the building's facade. Amazing!

I dont normally care much about details, but when the structure of the building, and the panels of the floor are so proportionately unfit for showing the items that they were intended to display, pushing them to the periphery, stacked any which way and in any awkward corner,

the situation tends to bring the details out to the fore, as a possible saving grace. Perhaps if the space as an object were beautifuly resolved, one could somehow forgive it being so resolutely unfit for what it was actually meant to do as a wine shop. Needless to say nothing was saved, and there was little grace creeping up between the yawning gaps in the floor,

or falling from the shattered glass of the rain-proofing canopy -which according the the staff, allegedly shatters again every time, soon after being replaced, and allows water through;

and there definitely wasnt enough space for any saving graces in the miniscule room for the three staff members squashed in the back, who apparently cant move their elbows freely for want of knocking into each other.

However there might, just possibly, be some of the stuff slipping off from the corpulent facade, and down into some colourful signs that at least there are some children in the area who like spending time around the place.

The guy working there at the time was quite up front with us, saying that the owners had wanted the building to be a billboard, to bring people in, and that despite certain grievances with its high cost, and with the practicalities and condition of it after only four years, they were pleased that it was indeed bringing international visitors to their bodega. I couldnt help shaking the feeling that if a building's main purpose is to be a billboard, it should perhaps be more eloquent, or at least louder, and less, well, shabby. Gehry should have done something here -the interior almost not having a purpose- and zaha, judging by the luxurious LG Hi Macs perfection of her floor at the Hotel Puerta America, should have hopped over to Elciego.

Gargoyles and Exhibitionism in Santiago de Compostela

Santiago de Compostela is the wettest place in Spain, and proud of it too, with the Architecture making a feature of large, numerous and prominent gargoyles and spouts like the ones above and below.

Apparently it is quite a fantastic experience to walk around town during a downpour, as torrents of water cascade down into the streets from these spouts like so many fountains. Of course the three days I spent there were unseasonably hot, with enrelentingly blue skies. Nonetheless I enjoyed imagining what it might be like, and looked up alot at the weighty layers of Churriguresque ornament that make up some of the cornices in the city centre, which together with their canon spouts tended to look like a fanciful fusion of the battleships and the architectural ornament from Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi's similarly inventive, copious and gigantic fresco of the Battle of Lepanto in Palazzo Colonna. Below is the Western facade of the Cathedral of the city, and site of pilgrimage for St James, whose gold and bejewelled bust you can hug after queuing for a few hours.

In front of it is a large square with one of the buildings facing it being a Spanish Renaissance Pilgrim guesthouse and hospital, on whose cornice I was enjoying some gargoyle spotting, since there are several large ones arrayed along its roofline, when I spotted this rather unecclesiastical gentleman below utilising his position to both attempt some auto-gratification as well as to present the hordes of spiritualy uplifted pilgrims who gather daily in the square with a lyrical transformation, via some deft figuration, of God's regular gift from the heaven's into what must be a positively transubstantiatory scatological installation.

It pleased me no end that somehow this Galician stone-mason, 450 years ago, had used the effect of elemental subsumption that happens in the kind of ornamental proliferation that santiago is encrusted with, to insert something as humorous as anything found in Pieter Bruegel's drunken peasant scenes. Similar statues, although usually much smaller, were common in Romanesque churches, ostensibly as unequivocal warnings to the great unwashed of the dangers of carnal sin, as catalogued in the thorough book Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches, but for one to be placed on a building of this late a period, in this much of a prominent position, and of this size (the more louche were generally confined to smaller churches along pilgrimage routes), there must have been either a particularly lewd Cardinal who explicitly requested it during procurement,

or else there was a roving Jean Genet figure amongst the numbers making up the stone-carvers guild, bent on celebrating through the bared body of a human being the ecstatic downward rush of water fast and away from the heavens to the soil, to turn the cathedral opposite upside down and inside out as his figure gazes reverently not upwards and eastwards, but is transfixed inwards, and projects downwards, gazing firmly at his own member whilst the length of his torso arks to release through the most profane of all body parts, away from the facade, the very stuff of life.