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JAUME PRAT ORTELLS | ...from

articles · reflections · echoes

editor: Félix Arranz

architecture + architects

scalae ebook collection #006, spanish draft edition

June 2013

ISBN: when final ebook and print editions are published

bookID: scalae.net-jprat-from-draftENG-20130630-01

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scalae documents, broadcasts, and stimulates debate around, criticism of, and research into architects and other agents involved in the narration, creation, and construction of architectures that provide shelter for people’s lives and aspirations..

www.scalae.net

[collection credits]

Félix Arranz, editor and director

Jaume Prat, associated editor

Montserrat Arnau, community manager

editorial board

guest participants:

Eugeni Bach, Jordi Badía, Antonio Bedmar, Eva Blanco, Josep Cusidó, Olga Felip, Borja Ferrater, Ferran Figuerola, Beth Galí, Jordi Ludevid, Fernando Marzá, Josep Lluís Mateo, Ariadna Perich, Xavier Torras.

industries board:

Cricursa · Lamp · Ciments Molins · Figueras Int. Seating ·  Roca

guest entities:

Banc de Sabadell · Hydro Technal Alumafel · Andreu World · Interface · Cosentino

institutional network

guest entities:

Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (library) · Institut Ramon Llull · Arquitectes per l'Arquitectura · Associació Arquinfad del Foment de les Arts i el Disseny · Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona, UPC · LaSalle URL · ESARQ UIC · Catalunya Ràdio · ACC1Ó · Barcelona Global

[scalae international ebook collection]

The scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection is a European initiative that began in Barcelona. It became a reality through the support and teamwork of a group of experts, institutions, and companies that are committed to the internationalization of industries and their work, product intelligence for the construction industry, and the configuration of an architectonic project based on cultural exchange and debate.

The collection is based on scalae’s earlier publications and initiatives: print publications (scalae 0.0; 2003), podcasts (scalae 1.0; 2005), and the scalae.net rss documentaries (scalae 2.0; 2009), complementary undertakings which are all still available.

Each volume in the collection focuses on a single Catalan, Spanish, European, or international architect, studio, or architectural agent, and the volume is divided into three ebooks. The first book, ...self, begins with a transcription of a conversation –usually available online as a podcast– that covers the principles, processes, and results of the person or studio in question. It also includes a selection of significant graphics or drawings of theirs in order to reflect the connection between words and signs in their way of doing architecture. The second book, ...from, includes the subject’s opinions, experience, or critiques of topics and objects they hold dear. The third book, ...about, reflects others’ opinions, experiences, and critiques of the subject’s creations, techniques, and professional and personal output. The ...self, ...from, and ...about ebooks make up a complete volume. They are published as free, internationally distributed ebooks in English, Spanish, and Catalan in .mobi (Kindle®) and ePub (iBook, iPad, most eReaders like sony®, fnac®, etc.) formats.

In the final stage of this open production process -which includes both the ebooks and the online material- the issues in the collection become available for low-cost, on-demand printing for those wishing to have a paper version and for public reference libraries in Catalonia and the rest of Spain and in international centres for architecture and culture.

The collection is testimony to the efforts of many people –a fractal map of involvement on the part of the editorial board and multiple other agents– whose only motivation is the desire to open up ideas, documentation, and research so as to foster debate. Their work does not rely on sponsorship or conventional advertising but rather on collaboration: companies produce original articles about their work, which constitute an alternative –and direct– form of expression.

[issue credits]

· issue: JAUME PRAT ORTELLS ...from, draft, ENG

#006 scalae architecture + architects ebook collection, June 2013, scalae ed, Barcelona (Catalonia; Spain; Europe)

· editor: Félix Arranz

· social management: Montserrat Arnau

· English translation: Victoria Patience [nativawordcraft.com]

· photographs: Jaume Prat, Montserrat Farrés and Xavier Ortells

· drawings & sketches:  Jaume Prat Ortells

. technical & distribution support: Micky Bou [ysi.net]

. free distribution & subscriptions: archBIB.com

. printed paper version (June 2014)

. ebooks@scalae.net

. disponible la versió en català d'aquest ebook a archBIB.com

. disponible la versión en español de este ebook en archBIB.com

[technical note]

This issue of the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection is a “draft” version of the ...from volume on the architect, editor and writer Jaume Prat Ortells. Its Book ID is: scalae.net-jprat-from-draftENG-20130630-01. The issue became available online on 30 June 2013. In subsequent months, corrections and updates to the earlier content will be incorporated to produce the “ready” and “final” versions of the text. The “final” version will be available in print as a book for libraries and collectors. The ...about and ...from volumes on the same subject may also become available in coming months, and will be subject to the same revision process before the publication of the print version (please see the complete explanation of the collection for more information)

bonus track

by Félix Arranz

1.

I need to apologize to those reading this two-fold introduction, which presents both the author of the publication and the series it forms part of. Let’s get down to business: this book …from Jaume Prat Ortells is the first of the …from books of the scalae architecture + architects international ebooks collection. The relationship between the …self, …from, and …about books is the nuclear chemistry of the collection, and it is always explained in the credits for each book.

All the same, we still owe readers an explanation of the internal logic of a …from book –more apologies, this time for the less than elegant name, though we hope it is efficient. What the reader will find in a …from book is a package of articles, reflections, and echoes which together offer up the author’s points of view on issues that preoccupy him or her personally and professionally. They also include an outside take on the author in that his or her choices, experiences, and stories inevitably reveal his or her personality, completing what he or she says about him or herself in a (possible) …self volume, or what others say about him or her in a (possible) …about volume.

In keeping with the matrix Jaume and I have been developing over the last couple of years or so with the help of authors of articles that have been or will be published on scalae.net, the articles included in the …from and ...about books intend –in a broad, relaxed sense– to provide brief accounts relating to two parallel topics. One of these is always about architecture and architects, while the other is about “everything else”, such that the two coexist not so much as crossed metaphors or as incidental explanations but as perfect parallels of imagination or reality, which sometimes share a point of reference, but sometimes, not even that.

We trust that any reader will be interested in at least half of what is being said, even if the other half of the text needs to wait to be worthy of their curiosity, patience, education, or even blessing. We’re in no hurry.

Our wish is to contribute to distorting architects’ accounts of architecture, or vice versa, such that the collective account can become readable and comprehensible, as it deserves to be, instead of hiding or remaining hidden, as it often does.

But there’s more: reflections and echoes. Reflections are the illustrations that literally reflect what has been explained in the articles in a way that might complement the text and provide a context for it, or the reverse: the article might end up explaining the reflection. Article and reflection, both by the same author, are the same subject matter.

Now to the echoes. These are brief comments, direct reactions, extra information, or quotations, from other people in a …from book or from the author in an …about book. In both cases, the echoes might be from people who can add to the underlying debate with their experience and resources, because of the industry they work in or the product, technology, or service they provide. The echoes begin with the editors inviting the first such person to get involved, and then the process opens up to anyone else who has something to add. The final version of the book will include a selection of the echoes that readers spontaneously contribute.

2.

So here we have nine personal declarations from Jaume Prat Ortells. They are accounts of nine experiences in which the author glides freely –rarely crossing his own path or crashing into himself, never using metaphors– between fragments of architectures and scraps of art and life: circumstances, clarifications, comments, or experiences related to literature, cinema, popular music, or something that remains nameless for the time being. What this book contains are neither reports, criticism, or recommendations, but rather a direct expression of events and feelings that intend to draw mechanisms for recording, comprehending, and interpreting reality into the reader’s memory, as these activities are characteristic of human senses when they intervene in the world but without excluding things from it; they are a cheeky, provocative way of feeling whilst remaining serious and aware, focused on the type of details that are perceived by the corner of your eye, something touching your entire body at the same time, a highly developed sense of smell, a sharp sense of hearing, refined taste.

Jaume Prat Ortells brings us a slice of life and architecture exactly as he perceives them. Jaume draws, writes*, takes photos, talks, and thinks without ever being able to escape the fact that he’s an architect, or even wanting to. And he’s one of those architects who take huge delight in knowing about their discipline and probing into how it is carried out, why, and who and what affect any decision that ends up being architecture, whether it is built or just imagined.

Jaume is Catalan, Catalonia is what locates him, expresses him, and makes him universal and timeless, valid anywhere and at any time.

FA, June 2013

(*) Umberto Eco would undoubtedly concede, without remorse, that this triangulation of accounts and the way that Jaume Prat Ortells brings it all together time and again in his articles is the essence of what we call “literature”, in that the author fulfils its five requirements: he publishes what he wishes to and is satisfied with it; the author offers up ambiguity as a means of expression, without adversely affecting the reader’s health or his or her comprehension; the author admits to referring to himself and exploits this as something that is not only inevitable but also makes him reliable; the author calls on the reader’s personal resources, his or her very intelligence, in order to provoke them into some sort of hypercoding and thus connect with their sense of complicity; and, finally, the author has his own personal and recognizable form of expression, his own aesthetic idiolect. And he allows his readers to enjoy themselves: that’s the bonus track.

[index: articles & echoes]

1 "...erogenous spaces" –a transcendent revelation inside a church–, about Juhani Pallasmaa y Álvaro Siza, with an initial echo by Juan Domingo Santos.

2 "...a freaky serenade" –a gathering in Tarragona–, about Pascal Comelade, Josep María Jujol and Josep Llinás, with an initial echo by Josep Quetglas.

3 "...High Plains Drifter" –the attraction of poisonous colours–, about Clint Eastwood, Five architects, Jean Nouvel, Steven Holl, with an initial echo by Alina Granados.

4 "...Another Brick in the Wall" –psychedelic recurrences and sound architecture–, about Pink Floyd, with an initial echo by Jordi Gas.

5 "...drunken heart" –expanded copper mesh, constructed pixels, and drum kits with no cymbals–, about Jeff Buckley, Lou Reed, Rod Stewart, Michael Roschach, Caruso St. John and Herzog & de Meuron, with an initial echo by Michael Roschach.

6 "...Abattoir Blues" –the benefits of preserving industrial heritage–, about Antoni Rovira i Trías, Pere Falqués, Luis Bellido, José Eugenio Ribera, Beth Galí, Marius Quintana, Antoni Solanas, Arturo Franco, Andrés Jaque, Langarita-Navarro, Iñaki Carnicero, Ignacio Vila and Alejandro Viseda, with an initial echo by Juan Navarro Baldeweg.

7 "...Domestic Mystique" –de profundis Cataloniae–, about Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer, Roger Mas and RCR arquitectes, with an initial echo by Carme Pigem.

8 "...push the light away", –the chalice of back lighting, religions, and the internet–, about Tadao Ando and Nick Cave, with an initial echo by Oriol Bohigas.

9 "...I’m going to come up with a plan", –my generation, a few words on context–, about musicians and architects from Jaume Prat's generation with an initial echo by Olga Felip.

...erogenous spaces

–a transcendent revelation inside a church–

It’s possible that the main legacy of Juhani Pallasmaa’s writings will be an understanding of architecture as an organic extension of the human body, one that can be perceived as another erogenous zone.

From his personal experience, rooted in a country with a culture, population density, climate, and landscape that are diametrically opposed to those of Spain,* Pallasmaa speaks of architecture’s need –its duty– to re-eroticize and re-ritualize space.

Eroticism and ritual can be conceived of as being practically synonymous: sex is all about ritual. A festival of the senses. The beginnings of a sexual relationship are gradual. Sometimes uncertain. Like an architectural project. The end is explosive. A climax which, if things go well, will always end with a full stop.

One of the times when I was able to experience this sensation of continuity with architecture most intensely was during a visit to Alvaro Siza’s church at Marco de Canaveses, near Oporto, Portugal. It is a sacred space built for man rather than for some far-off deity reduced to little more than an excuse for designing a building. It’s more a community centre than a typical church, in that the way space is configured in it represents a return to a secular sense of transcendence. The building appears to have been conceived as a backdrop for any important moment in a person’s life, from birth to death, as though it were a profoundly sensual second skin that makes sight the least important of the senses and thus calls into question any theory that intends to systematize architecture as a system of visual relationships.

The main body –a high-roofed basilica with a flat ceiling– functions as an enormous store of indirect natural light, open on the north-east side to views over the town of Marco de Canaveses via a continuous horizontal window. The window is long and narrow, uninterrupted by any intermediate support, on the eye-level of those seated in the nave.

I visited the church completely alone. I sat in one of the seats at the back of the nave, on the left-hand side. The baptistry opened up behind me, a small prismatic room the same height as the nave itself. It juts out from the main body of the church on the front facade, to the left of the altar, forming a sort of buttress. It is mirrored on the right by the bell-tower, and the two frame an open space that functions as a threshold for the main door, which is seven metres tall.

The bapistry has two windows. One opens onto the threshold of the entrance into the church. The other is a skylight that illuminates a ceramic mural by the architect himself, to the left of the door into the room, in which one standing person baptizes another, the two facing one another in a position of equality, sheltered by the geometry of the walls themselves.

The baptismal font is an enormous block of marble, a single, chalice-shaped piece in the centre of the baptistry, within a sunken circle in the stone flooring some five centimetres deep.

The water in the font is not still: it is a fountain that drains through a hole in the stone and flows out of another hole in the side of the structure, some sixty centimetres from the floor. The water falls onto the circular depression in the floor, making a continuous noise that fills the space entirely.

This sound, and the echoes of it, are perfectly audible from anywhere in the central nave of the church.

You can close your eyes and feel the space. A blind person visiting the building would be able to understand its configuration just as clearly as a sighted person.

Sensuality. Eroticism and rites. Rites above and beyond those of the Catholic Church. Rites as a way of dignifying our daily behaviour. Rites as a vehicle for an eroticism, a sensuality that totally colours the way we behave inside this building where I felt that space is not just something that surrounds you but something that can invade your being like those lovers who leave their mark on you forever.

J.P.O.

(*) Editor’s note: The author wrote this piece from the coast of Barcelona on a sunny day at the end of spring, aware that the beach, only a couple of hundred metres away, was overflowing with bodies entwined in one another.

...

An earlier version of this article, in Spanish, with images, can be seen here: [scalae.net].

...

eXtra track -youtube- Siza sings | Film by Fernando Guerra, 3'13"

echoes of: ...erogenous spaces

I remember one August afternoon I spent in Porto during which Alvaro Siza told me of the unforgettable experience he’d had when he visited Luis Barragán’s chapel for a convent of Capuchin nuns in Mexico City.

He described the moment in which, whilst he was in a space for prayer inside the tiny chapel, he began to hear the far-off sound of children playing football in the street. That strange sensation, the mix of the spirituality of a sacred place with the echo of the faraway noises of the city, made a deep impression on him.

It was the same feeling that Jaume Prat had on his visit to Siza’s church at Marco de Canaveses, where the landscape of the distant mountains that you can make out through a long narrow window and the carved image of the Virgin Mary among the congregation envelop the space in a strange religiousness.

A space between ritual and the mundane.

Putting a window in a place like this is a unique, risky act that bestows on the space an unprecedented sense of everyday life.

I’m not surprised by Jaume’s reaction to this scene, which was born of a man’s excitement with his surroundings in a sublime act of poetic imagination.

by Juan Domingo Santos, architect

(www.juandomingosantos.com)

[Museum of Water in Lanjarón, Granada; Atrium of the Alhambra, Granada – with Álvaro Siza]

...a freaky serenade*

–a gathering in Tarragona–

Pascal Comelade is one of the most interesting contemporary musicians around. Originally from the north of Catalonia, but now settled in Ceret (Languedoc-Rosellón, France), the son of a medievalist cook, and a disciple of John Cage, he has one of the most solid lists of records on the European scene. From his first record, Fluence, released in 1975, to the present, he has been behind nearly forty works including studio recordings, soundtracks, music for ballet and theatre, and collaborations with the poet Enric Casasses, the musicians Albert Pla, Lluís Llach, PJ Harvey, and Robert Wyatt. His work will seem strange to those who aren’t familiar with it: he manages to make music out of anything that makes a noise, from toys and toy instruments to supermarket bags, a vacuum-cleaner hose, drinking straws tuned with scissors, hammers, or old guitars. An inveterate anarchist sympathizer, he even thinks of the famous bomb thrown from the upper circle into the stalls at the Liceo de Barcelona in 1893 as the definitive percussion instrument.** His unorthodox sounds mix together to form a coherent whole that includes both his own work and that of others: from Kurt Weill to Camarón de la Isla, from Ovidi Montllor to The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, or The Modern Lovers and their Egyptian Reggae.

In 2009, he recorded Friki Serenata with a group of musicians he had met not long before at a homage to James Brown. It’s one of his most authentic works. His performance using toy instruments reaches truly refined extremes. An excellent example is his use of plastic guitars bought at a toyshop, filtered with distortion pedals and played –due to the terrible quality of the toys– with a slide, a metal cylinder that slides on top of the strings without touching the instrument’s neck. This is how he plays the improvised solo in the title track. The result is a mix of the grotesque and the refined, playing with the subtle boundary than separates risk from ridicule, so as to reach the greatest possible expressiveness.

Josep Maria Jujol worked in exactly the same way as an independent architect. His first work, the Teatre Metropol de Tarragona (1908), stands on the city’s Rambla Nova, on a courtyard inside the city block. You reach it via a ground-floor commercial gallery of an existing building. It was built with a combination of completely new structures –such as the inverted vaults of the corridors, made of high-tensile metal bands– and components that were recycled from other buildings, such as nearly all the woodwork, which was second hand. Its scale is surprising, in that anyone over five foot nine will feel awkward.***

The finishes were thematic: the way to the stalls was supposed to be a voyage to the bottom of the sea, contemplating the furious waters below. The ribs of the vaults I mentioned were painted straw yellow to contrast with the intense blue of the walls and roof. Some glass was stained blood red. Incrusted in the paving were signs of the zodiac and maritime symbols.

The closure of the theatre and its subsequent reuse as a cinema led to some parts being demolished and parts being hidden behind false ceilings and walls. When the cinema was closed down, it was easy to pull these structures down –they were mostly made of cane matting and plaster– to reveal the original decor, which had practically been forgotten.

The building was restored by the architect Josep Llinàs, who, with great difficulty, was able to restore the theatre by converting it into a contemporary work that has been superimposed on what remained of the original building. Most of the original woodwork could not be restored and so was replaced with designs that struck a balance between the debt to the past and the impossibility of reproducing the originals without parodying them. The adjoining building containing the stage was replaced: the new stage overlooks Calle Armanyà, allowing it to be open to the street and the stalls at the same time. The restoration was a great success both architecturally and socially speaking,**** and the theatre has really become part of the city’s cultural life.

Pascal Comelade has celebrated this by playing the venue more than once, physically superimposing, in time and space, two ways of doing the same thing, but in different disciplines. Or not.

J.P.O.

(*) Friki Serenata, Pascal Comelade album, 2009

(**) Pascal Comelade, Enciclopèdia Logicofobística de la música catalana [Logicophobic encyclopaedia of Catalan music], (Editorial El Trabucaire: 1998). ISBN 9782905828385.

(***) to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Palau de la Música, a special Scalae monograph was published that opened out to show the floor plans of different theatres in the world, including the minuscule design –at least in comparison with the others chosen– of Jujol’s Metropol. A copy of that poster can be downloaded [here].

(****) The same year that Josep Llinàs won the City of Barcelona Prize, 1996, the restoration of the Metropol was awarded the FAD prize by a jury chaired by Norman Cinnamond and made up of Gabriel Allende, Jaume Bach, Olga de la Cruz, Manuel Gausa, Nancy Robbins, Ton Salvadó, and Eduardo Souto de Moura, despite speculation that the sure winner would be Richard Meier’s MACBA.

...

An earlier version of this article, in Spanish, with images, can be seen here: [scalae.net].

...

eXtra track -youtube- Enric Casasses i Pascal Comelade - Sense el ressò del dring, 3'20"

echoes of: ...a freaky serenade

I don't think mixing Comelade and John Cage is a very good idea, unless it’s to contrast them.

Cage has taught us not to attract attention. Any sign suggesting that the audience should look at something or admire it in a specific way makes the spectator submissive. Cage proposes the opposite, a free spectator who pays attention to everything, who is as capable of hearing coughing, the traffic, and squeaking chairs as the piano itself. The listener hears him or herself hearing, with no sense of hierarchy. It is the listener who makes the music.

If you want to see someone on stage who is really original, I'll always recommend Juan Tamariz or Pep Bou, the only true visual artists of these times.

by Josep Quetglas, architect and professor

(profile on scalae.net)

[Massilia: yearbook of Corbusian studies 2002-2007, on UPC commons]

...High Plains Drifter

–the attraction of poisonous colours–

Stories of revenge are an uncomfortable literary genre. There is a clear pattern: a main character seeks to right a wrong by going on a journey that will transform him or her for ever. The revenge will, by definition, be premeditated, tough, awkward. There will be no forgiving or forgetting: destruction will become the whole point of life, and the act of revenge will completely drain whoever carries it out. It will often be disproportionate. There will be collateral damage. The end will be so twisted that catharsis will be out of the question.

In 1973, Clint Eastwood’s second film as a director, High Plains Drifter, was released. It’s a tough tale of revenge in which the Stranger, a gunfighter with no name and no past –it could even be the same character who, twelve years later, is the protagonist of Pale Rider, perhaps Eastwood's greatest achievement as a director– does away with a gang of bandits, but only after he has had them destroy a town he also wants to take revenge on, wiping it off the map, taking pity on no-one. In early versions of the script, Eastwood’s character was said to be the brother of a sheriff killed by the bandits, giving him a motive. Although this connection was later written out, it lingers on in the dubbed versions of the film in several languages, including Spanish. But in the English version, at least, Eastwood turns the genre on its head by denying the Stranger an identity and thus a motive for his actions, making him an ambiguous, supernatural figure, a kind of avenging angel straight off the darkest pages of the Old Testament.

The levels of physical and moral violence in High Plains Drifter spiral ever upwards, culminating in the final bloodbath. To prepare for this ending, the Stranger orders the inhabitants of the town to paint it –as though digging their own graves– totally red: facades, walls, roofs, windows, and doors. Everything blood red. With this single gesture, the town –a set that was built to order for the film on the banks of Mono Lake, in California, a saline lake near Tahoe that Eastwood became so enamoured of that he asked for the entire script to be rewritten to place the action there– was transformed into architecture. The red paint makes it uniform, and converts it into a single project, a work that anticipates subsequent experiences such as the Five Architects, or works by architects like Jean Nouvel (Collège Anne Franck in Antony, 1980, for example) or Steven Holl (House at Martha’s Vineyard, 1988). The architectonic quality that this coat of paint gives to the town is indisputable.

But we shouldn't forget the motive for the intervention: the staging of an act of vengeance, the transformation of the town into something out of Dante, an explicit allegory that includes a sign welcoming visitors to hell.

What transcends this messy group of houses and transforms it into architecture is the desire to do evil. The lure, the way this is revealed, is similar to the way nature uses certain colours as a warning that any living thing bearing them is poisonous.

Many contemporary buildings are decorated with this palette of colours: violent combinations of lurid yellow and black; red; orange and bright green. Noxious colours used to signal danger that have been proudly converted into a sign of identity, reconfigured as something that appeals to the eye, a reversal of the code that is worth reflecting on. Eastwood's film, in contrast, uses the colour code similarly to nature: architecture as a sign of mortal danger. Twisting semiotics by using warning colours like plumage to draw attention to buildings –regardless of their quality– is a nothing less than a (literal) manifesto of antiurbanity of certain examples of spectacular architecture.

Or maybe a way of warning us that they are more dangerous than we think.

J.P.O.

...

An earlier version of this article, in Spanish, with images, can be seen here: [scalae.net]

...

eXtra track -youtube- High Plains Drifter Movie CLIP - The Stranger Rides Away, 3'03"

echoes of: ...High Plains Drifter

Reading Jaume Prat’s highly entertaining article on architecture and the semiotics of colour, my mind was filled not with an image, but with a smell, that of a tannery in Fez, which I visited a couple of times wh en I was younger.

What the scene looked like bore no relation to that overwhelming stench. It seemed to me like a gigantic box of watercolours, mud, pigments, and sun surrounded by reddish buildings made from local materials. Everything had a function to it.

Years later, at the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, I saw that red on the walls again. Now they say it had been yellow before the volcano, but this time its meaning was different, today it would be artistic, although back then it was decorative. Time and nature give meaning to colour. They say that the Indian city of Jodhpur was painted blue because it is the best colour to repel both mosquitoes and the heat. The same is true of Chefchaouen in Morocco or Isfahan in Iran.

If we perceive colour as something natural and functional it doesn’t surprise us, but it does when there is a snobbish component to it that daubs, denaturalizes, or forces what is badly made. The scene Jaume Prat describes in which the inhabitants of the town are forced to paint their houses red as though they were digging their own graves made me think precisely of this idea, of forcing the natural evolution of materials along a different path, thus leading to the death of their authenticity.

by Alina Granados Loureda, painter and literature graduate

(blog comprenderelarte.wordpress.com)

[Article on Tectónicablog on the Exposición 2013 en Museen im Antonierhaus. Memmingen, Baviera, Alemania]

...Another Brick in the Wall*

–psychedelic recurrences and sound architecture–

In 1967, while Pink Floyd was in the middle of a tour, the band’s leader, Syd Barrett, who had written almost all their songs, had a breakdown and remained mentally unstable until his death in 2007. Richard Wright, Nick Mason, and Roger Waters, the other three members of the group, had all studied architecture at university. Led by Waters, the group’s new formation would become its most profitable. It did so by architecturizing its music in such a way that the results are comparable to any more conventional form of architecture.

The first thing the surviving original members did was to sign on the only natural musician the group would have, guitarist David Gilmour. The dialectic and transitions between tracks on the band’s subsequent albums form monolithic stand-alone works built out of the songs’ melodies, rhythms, the stories they tell, and their structure as if they were actual material constructions.

Wright became the link between Gilmour, who wrote the music, and Waters and Mason, the architects –in their own terms**– who built the works and made them coherent. The group that seemed to have lost its head managed to put itself back together, this time with four heads.

Their albums always returned to the same themes. These appeared again and again, much like the work of architects who build their careers around developing a single basic idea: Andrea Palladio’s deep facades; the material construction of Etienne-Louis Boullée’s ideas; the central floor in Antoni Gaudí’s work; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s anisotropic structures; Rem Koolhaas’s notion of the free section; or RCR arquitectes’ framed structures.

Pink Floyd contributed to the consolidation of LPs as a unit of art. The model for each record was always the same, though it became more and more distilled. At first it was based on a central track that was linked to –and fed by– a string of satellite tracks, as was the case on Atom Heart Mother (the beginnings of the post-Barrett stage) or Meddle. The group then recorded continuums of shorter tracks that orbited the acceptable length for radio edits and that form a coherent whole when heard one after the other, in order.

This model reached its high point with The Dark Side of the Moon, their first record to be coherent from start to finish, and would culminate in 1980 with The Wall, which the group did not survive –they split officially in 1983. When the group got back together, without Waters and with Wright as a guest musician, it was only to recreate their greatest hits with some technical improvements but not much else in the way of innovation.

Intensely political, their main works are left-leaning and revolve around the topic of madness, expressing through this their longing for the band’s lost leader, and the relationship between the rational and the irrational, instinct and control –the very root of their art, the very idea underlying it. Pink Floyd thought of the packaging of their music as a fundamental part of each project. Record sleeves were entrusted to well-known artists who ended up creating such powerful designs that they have become iconic even for people who have never heard one a Pink Floyd album. Their live performances took place on stages with clear spatial layouts that were dominated by a central circle, the focal point, while a screen gave a sense of scale in relation to the audience. Thanks to their use of quadraphonic sound –and special effects with dry ice, fireworks, or an aeroplane flying along a cable through the venue– the group was uniquely able to disconnect the source of their sound from the musicians’ geometric positions on the stage.

As a result, the group managed to open up the frontiers of its music to any other cultural form the members were interested in. Due to the way Pink Floyd worked, they can be thought of as an architectural studio that led the discipline, in the 1960s, to build psychedelic spaces out of light and sound, ephemeral places that were nonetheless as powerful as a material structure.

J.P.O.

(*) Another Brick in the Wall’, song from Pink Floyd’s album The Wall, 1979

(**) Povey, Glen; Russell, Ian (1997). Pink Floyd: in the flesh, the complete performance history (1st US paperback ed.). St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-9554624-0-5

...

An earlier version of this article, in Spanish, with images, can be seen here: [leerse en scalae.net]

...

eXtra track -youtube- Pink Floyd - Live at Pompeii - Directors Cut, 1:31'05"

echoes of: ...Another Brick in the Wall

The syncretic process that followed Barrett’s departure from Pink Floyd casts light –and some shadows– on the band’s creative process. Psychedelia, the path they initially followed, would have been a good way out. Although their attempts to compress their music into conventional songs –music, lyrics, a more pop-like format– gave us their masterpiece, it was also the beginning of their decline: simplicity looks good until it brings your virtues and defects to the surface, and it quickly wears out your sources.

Colours and shapes need to be reinvented in each project to keep us from becoming self-satisfied. Hard to escape the ups and downs of creativity.

It was all worth it to find the cornerstone: The Dark Side of the Moon is an indestructible framework, although it's not necessarily my favourite of Pink Floyd's work. Its solidness is a by-product of history.

Music and architecture both feed on technique and creativity. When the balance shifts in one direction or the other, the results are inconsistent. And though we might accept the rather rudimentary nature of Pink Floyd’s technique in deference to their muses, it would be difficult to do the same with an architect, who I think must, necessarily, have a deep and unwavering understanding of his or her art.

by Jordi Gas, musician

(profile at scalae.net)

[Spotify: GAS, 2013; iTunes: GAS, 2013; by Jordi Gas]

...drunken heart*

–expanded copper mesh, constructed pixels, and drum kits with no cymbals–

Jeff Buckley died before his time, in 1997, when he was just 30 and working on what would have been his second studio album, entitled provisionally –and prophetically– My Sweetheart the Drunk.

The following year the rough cuts for the record were released practically unedited: they contained a mix of songs that were more or less worked out, with a sound Buckley was not entirely satisfied with, recorded using semi-professional four-track equipment that would end up being the record’s defining sound, although we’ll never know what the artist’s final decision would have been.

Only a trained ear would perceive the final product as unfinished. The cuts sound careful and precise. The orchestration is rich and the vocals are polished. This technical perfection contrasts with the rough-and-ready recording style of a huge number of landmark albums in the history of rock.

The tapes that masters were recorded on were expensive and easily ruined, and could only hold three takes of each song. To reduce costs, two instruments (usually the rhythm base) were often recorded on a single track. Retakes were kept to a minimum. Background noises were inevitable. Listen carefully and you can pick them up.

On the song Oh, Jim, from Lou Reed’s 1973 album Berlin, drummer Aynsley Dunbar starts a complicated solo and accidentally hits the edge of a kettle drum halfway through. Towards the end, when only Reed’s guitar is playing, the sound of someone lighting a cigarette with a match can clearly be heard. Rod Stewart’s album Every Picture Tells a Story (1971) was recorded on a shoestring. A careful listen to the exceptional Maggie May reveals drummer Micky Waller to be playing on a terrible quality kit with no cymbals, so the crashes had to be over-dubbed in post production, not particularly successfully.

The works that architect Michael Roschach creates with concrete** oscillate between the great technical perfection of his finished pieces and his having had to use more than one work as a prototype for the next, such that his work becomes a series in which each finished piece is the model for the one that follows. His experiments with concrete include tests for flexible shuttering***, concrete that is folded before hardening, textures included in smooth concrete surfaces in way that is reminiscent of the prefab concrete panels that form the facade of Caruso St. John’s Nottingham Contemporary, engraved or moulded letters, and other experiments that have been incorporated into his products. These pieces are reminiscent of others by architects like Herzog & de Meuron almost every time they decide to use wet construction: photographs printed on panels with set retarders, patinas caused by rainfall or the drips from a rusty steel gutter. Models in which technique, time, or the decontextualizing of the object bring a value to the finished work that contrasts with the use of concrete as a repeated, industrialized component of a building.

The logic of the fragment, of the small component finished with great technical perfection and with a complex relationship to the work as a whole, does not distinguish between scales and disciplines and relates work like that of Buckley, Roschach or Herzog & de Meuron through the constant exploration of the expressiveness of a material that has been constrained by the conventional ways it has been used, drastically limiting its potential.

J.P.O.

(*) My Sweetheart the Drunk, posthumous Jeff Buckley album, 1998

(**) Concrete is a moulded construction material usually made of cement, fine granular material (aggregate), and water. When it sets, it hardens to form an artificial rock, and it is pressure-resistant. When steel bars are added to the mix it is known as “reinforced" concrete, which can be used to make horizontal structural and constructive components such as girders, beam, legs, or tie beams, and vertical components such as walls, pillars, and columns.

(***) A frame, usually made out of wooden boards, that forms the mould to be filled with poured concrete, thus shaping the architectonic or structural piece.

...

eXtra track -youtube- Michael Roschach - concrete letters, 1'08"

echoes of: ...drunken heart

Each new project brings with it small failures, and if I start to dominate a certain area really well then I feel able to alter another. Sometimes I lose control. The chaos in my mind is real, and the scarcity of resources is at times a welcome limit. If everything was possible I would lose myself altogether.

According to Richard Sennett, being a good “craftsman” – and a musician can be a craftsman too – is about being able to take risks and knowing how to handle your failures.*

That kind of thinking seems fundamental to me to be able to keep working and innovating.

(*) Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Allen Lane, 2008), ISBN 978-0-7139-98733-3.

by Michael Roschach, architect

(www.michaelroschach.com)

[facebook: Michael Roschach concrete works]

...Abattoir Blues*

–the benefits of preserving industrial heritage–

Twenty years apart, in 1891 and 1911, Barcelona and Madrid opened new abattoirs on the edges of their cities. The Barcelona abattoir occupied 4 hectares and was begun by Antoni Rovira i Trias and finished by Pere Falqués. The Madrid abattoir was twice that size and was planned and built by the architect Luis Bellido and the engineer José Eugenio Ribera who, hindered by the fact that the First World War had increased the price of steel, designed one of the first public structures in Spain made of reinforced concrete.

The common starting point for the two facilities was the decision to make them enclosed, not so much for reasons of hygiene or to control the activity that went on within them as to physically separate it because people find it disturbing. The Madrid abattoir was built on the banks of the Manzanares River, which had recently been canalized, and thus looked out over the enormous empty space of the river itself, which also served to draw in the wind. The Barcelona abattoir was on the edge of the Eixample district, near the large-scale facilities that urban planner Ildefons Cerdà had not wanted inside the city proper: a prison, barracks, one of the city’s three bullrings, and the train station serving Catalonia’s largest factory, España Industrial, which would close its doors at the same time as the abattoir, victims of the city’s decision to move its productive economy to the outskirts.

The Barcelona abattoir was razed to its foundations in 1979. The first competition for rebuilding the site was discarded, and the second competition was won by a team made up of Beth Galí, Màrius Quintana, and Antoni Solanas, who created a park and a neighbourhood library that respected and made use of the only thing that remained of the original abattoir: the levelled ground. A sculpture by Joan Miró towers over the intervention from the north. The park, which was very well received by residents, would be seen by the City Council first as an empty space that added enough to the section of Calle Tarragona to justify a speculative real estate operation that made up for the lack of houses in the park by building high-rises at regular intervals, based on a design by Jordi Garcés and Enric Soria. Subsequently, various facilities were built within the park, but with no sense of order or harmony, thus seriously distorting the original design.

The Madrid abattoir remained partly open, although it experienced some difficulties along the way, until 1996. It survived several attempts to demolish it and the annexing of part of the grounds to be used by the Arganzuela District Council. At the same time, campaigns were set in action to have the site classified as being of historical interest. They were successful: only a year after it was closed for good, the former abattoir complex became a listed building.

In 2007, the architect Arturo Franco inaugurated the first phase of the renovation which involved adding the facilities needed for Intermediae, including a new access through the fence around the site, which had remained intact over the years. The rest of the site will be refurbished in phases. The perimeter will be kept exactly as it is. The Madrid Río park has transformed the Manzanares River into an urban buffer. The structure of the abattoir blocks and the empty semi-public space between them (which houses a mobile pergola designed by Andrés Jaque) is enough to guarantee the cohesion of the whole. The renovation of each block will follow one of two typologies set out in blocks 15 and 16 (at one point the most beautiful pigsties in the country). The first, undertaken by María Langarita and Victor Navarro, leaves the structure intact, including all the scars of having been abandoned, such as empty window- and doorframes, so as to then colonize the space and inhabit it by creating small pavilions-within-the-pavilion that contain workspaces of different sizes. The rest of the space is divided into different corners of activity, laid out in order of size as though the building were a landscaped exterior. The second –the work of Iñaqui Carnicero, Ignacio Vila, and Alejandro Viseda– involves infrastructure that intervenes in the geometry of the block, consolidating it and separating off a quarter using moveable steel panels to create a space for multiple uses.

The two interventions polarize the architects’ attitudes towards either the building’s contents or the building as a container, with equally valuable results that anchor the site in residents’ memories by creating a historical continuum that stretches from the empty lot next to the Manzanares River to any program that may be put forward for the site in the future. Incremental architecture in Madrid, currently a possibility that has been lost in Barcelona.

J.P.O.

(*) Abattoir Blues, a Nick Cave song included in the 2004 double album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus

...

eXtra track -youtube- Red Bull Music Academy Madrid 2011, 5'25"

echoes of: ...Abattoir Blues

The thing is that, more and more, our job as architects is about working with what has already been built. Our work is now to transform structures that already exist.

Construction is constructive and destructive, it involves doing and undoing, modelling and shaping. We’re talking metamorphosis: it’s not about creating a whole out of parts, but about going from one whole to another. Destroying is building too. One of the most interesting forms of destruction is the kind that only affects the semantic associations with the object.

A common task in the future will be announcing ready-made strategies, which consist of altering the imaginary side of something that already exists because you are modifying its uses, functions, or forms of symbolic interpretation, without actually changing what is there.

In his text, Jaume Prat speaks to us of constructive-destructive actions and of metamorphosis in general. A large part of our goals will be about increasing the ability of unstable plots of land to negotiate by shaking or warming them up, changing materials, or shifting meanings

by Juan Navarro Baldeweg, architect

(profile at scalae.net)

[In praise of light: (spanish) video feature on Juan Navarro Baldeweg, RTVE]

...Domestic Mystique*

–de profundis Cataloniae–

The waters of the Atlantic and the Pyrenees. Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer, one of the greatest Catalan poets, gave the Renaixença** a voice, heralding the arrival of Catalan Modernism, giving it mystical roots in the abrupt geography of the north of Catalonia (a land of ravines, fog, and –in the words of novelist Eduardo Mendoza– men with slow digestive systems). From here the movement spread as far as the streets of Havana on a round trip sponsored by Antonio López y López, Marquis of Comillas, father-in-law to Eusebi Güell, the very man who commissioned Antoni Gaudí’s main works. One of these, the entrance to Güell’s farm in what is now the area around the Polytechnic University of Barcelona, on the mountain side of Avinguda Diagonal, was based directly on Cinto Verdaguer’s poem L’Atlàntida. Not long after Verdaguer’s death in 1902 (his funeral was one of the most massively attended in the history of Barcelona), reactions against his work drove the emergence of Noucentisme, a movement that ascribed different origins to Catalonia, shifting them from the depths of the Pyrenees to the beaches of the ancient Greek colony at Empúries.

In 2008, the musician Roger Mas released the most complex and difficult album of his entire career, Les Cançons Tel·lúriques. A conceptual work, it is divided into four parts and an introduction that explores the same national ancestors for Catalonia that Verdaguer advanced in his poetry. Mas has ended up living and working in Solsona, the city where he was born, after having gone on a round trip of his own, living in different countries and studying musical forms from all over. Les Cançons Tel·lúriques starts with an introduction featuring a tabal, a traditional bass drum from the north of Catalonia with a rather loose skin, accompanying deep sounds that seem to spring from the ground itself. The main body of the record contains highly unusual adaptations of Verdaguer’s poems: using his voice as though it were another instrument, Mas moves with total freedom between traditional Catalan music, free jazz, and even rap, which he has been using for a while, albeit in his own way (no bases, little emphasis on percussion) in order to set poems –both his own and other people’s– to music. The way the record was produced mixed instruments usually associated with rock (although here the acoustic outnumber the electric) indiscriminately with classical and traditional Catalan instruments, including some that are truly hard to play, such as the tenora, a double-reeded wind instrument with a limited range and a rather shrill sound. The second part of the album adapts songs from “deep Catalonia”: Ball de l’Àliga, traditionally performed at the Patum in Berga [traditional celebrations and parades around Corpus Christi], declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage by Unesco, or the goigs (literally, joys; an unusually joyful prayer) sung to the Mare de Déu de Solsona, the Virgin who is the patron saint of Solsona. The record ends with three of Mas’s own compositions which are impossible to understand if you have never been to Solsona.

RCR architects published, in 2011, a book in Catalan, Spanish, and English (entitled Tranquil Houses in the latter), focusing on the farms within the Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park, which they have been consultant architects for since 1989. The book is a remarkable editorial undertaking and is also an architectural project in itself. It rests on three pillars: Pep Sau’s black-and-white photographs of these farmhouses, freehand sketches, and plans. Through the book, RCR connect their work directly to these constructions, and through them to the earth, landscape, and the culture immediately surrounding them. If one looks at the buildings and follows the analysis put forward by the authors (zooming in from the landscape to a constructive detail in order to explore volumetrics, accesses, and materials), we find ourselves face-to-face with an incredibly deeply seated architectonic heritage that is almost unknown to us, and, at the same time, the keys for understanding their work: their relationship with the landscape, the way they deal with light, their passion for materials.

Through their work, Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer, Roger Mas, and RCR architects all propose very similar things: although firmly rooted in their respective cities, landscapes, and cultures, they all push out shoots to absorb things from the world so as to delve even deeper into their own culture, linking this to world culture in a shared journey from the universal to the particular, and vice-versa.

J.P.O.

(*) Mística Domèstica, Roger Mas album, 2005

(**) La Renaixença was a cultural phenomenon of the middle three decades of the 19th century that emphasized Catalan as a form of expression for civil society within Catalonia.

...

An earlier version of this article, in Spanish, with images, can be seen here: [scalae.net]

...

eXtra track -youtube- Danielle Berwick - My walk to the office (el despacho) of RCR Arquitectes in Olot, 3'10"

echoes of: ...Domestic Mystique

CWhen someone writes a text it should be a story, a tale that transports you to another time and place, into their imagination. This ability is what creates space, that thing that happens between two moments in time.

But if we understand that time no longer exists (and that it's simply a convention to keep us from being late for an appointment we want to keep) then space is infinite.

This ability to tell stories is what Jaume Prat has. Precisely this, ALL this, which without needing to be explicit, we think, says SO MUCH.

by Carme Pigem, RCR architects

(www.rcrarquitectes.es)

[ebook scalae: RCR architects ...self]

...push the light away*

–the chalice of back lighting, religions, and the internet–

In 1989, Tadao Ando finished work on the Church of the Light, in Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture. The building, a small-scale basilical plan, uses only three materials: reinforced concrete, the shuttering used while this was being poured –later repurposed into the seating and flooring– and light itself.

Light reveals the space, but it does not illuminate it. Light forms a giant cross, as big as the church itself, dazzling the worshippers, preventing them from moving freely through the room, directing their gaze, placing different values on different areas of the space, converting it into a metaphor** of the Catholic Church itself: a fossilized, static, top-down religion whose truth comes straight from the mouths of its leaders, with no dialogue or desire to listen.

At the beginning of 2013, Nick Cave released his album Push the Sky Away. The musical bases for all of Cave’s music are worked on by his band, The Bad Seeds, who couch his highly crafted lyrics in exceptionally sensitive performances. His musical genius aside, Cave is a man of letters. He is the author of two novels, And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, and three screenplays, all of which have been made into films: Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (with John Hillcoat, Evan English, Gene Conkie, and Hugo Race), The Proposition, and Lawless, all directed by John Hillcoat, who also adapted Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which Warren Ellis and Cave wrote the soundtrack for. Cave is a dense, cult writer who cites a vast range of texts: from Immanuel Kant’s and his Critique of Pure Reason in the song ‘There Is a Kingdom’, to William Morris in ‘More News from Nowhere’, paraphrasing the novel of (almost) the same name, or rising beyond the Shelley Harris’s novel Jubilee in another very similarly titled song, perhaps the most beautiful on Push the Sky Away.

The cover is the most intimate of all his records: a photograph taken against the light in Cave’s own bedroom, focusing on the half-open shutters covering three wall-to-floor windows. Cave, on the left, opens one wide, throwing light on the naked body of his wife, Susie Bick. The room is flooded with a milky, delicate light. The central set of shutters form a clear cross, similar to that of Tadao Ando’s church.

In the church, the light is the unquestionable protagonist of the space. There is not even the remotest possibility of any alternative. The only option that users (the congregation, rather) have is to take a seat and be humbled by the spectacle, which was conceived to intimidate them, to impose the Word, which flies acritically from the mouth of the pastor –the only participant in the ceremony who is not blinded by the light– to their conscience. There is something unswerving, terrible, inevitable about the space, which seems to be more ecstatic than sensual.

The scene in Cave’s bedroom is only comprehensible to someone outside the space (the owner of the album). To a voyeur walking in on a moment of intimacy. The light, as such, is an obstacle. For the two protagonists, the scene is different. For them the light is soft, toned down, sensual. They are never dazzled by it: for them, the light is a frame, a backdrop, not a protagonist itself but a veil that makes the true protagonists and their actions seem more desirable. The light envelops and accompanies. It imposes nothing.

In any of his stories (which is one way of understanding his songs), Nick Cave has distilled the purest beauty out of squalor and cruelty, out of tales, songs, and even an entire record about murder, abandoned children, prostitutes unable to return a client’s unconditional love, structured as intense, violent, sexual hymns or declarations of love or hate. Nick Cave treats his own religion as an insane, twisted, tormented, and lustful foundation from which this kind of beauty can be squeezed, albeit through a painful process. An opponent of the light that allows celebration, that glorifies beauty and sex, that simply constructs oppression: in short, the light we associate with most Catholic churches. ***

The opposition between the light that is the source of anxiety, of terrible beauty, and the beauty of the movement and of flexible space that should force us to reflect whenever we create a space that is to be transcendent. Be it for sex or for prayer.

J.P.O.

(*) Push the Sky Away, Nick Cave album, 2013. At the public launch of the album, Cave commented that the internet has influenced “major events, giving mystical tinges to absurd passing trends” and “questions how we recognize and give weight to what is really important”.

(**) The building belongs to the United Church of Christ in Japan, and evokes Zen philosophy, the light of Romanesque churches, and Protestant austerity, and is thus an exemplary synthesis of much of the history of Christianity.

(***) This was not the case for Antoni Gaudí, who side-stepped the issue of sensuality in order to use light as a decidedly sexual component of his work: one only has to think of the vagina-shaped windows –the clitoris of which is curiously hard to find– of the Church at Colònia Güell.

...

An earlier version of this article, in Spanish, with images, can be seen here: [scalae.net]

...

eXtra track -youtube- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Making of Push the Sky Away, 6'41"

echoes of: ...push the light away

Jaume Prat’s article is full of specific suggestions but it also contains opinions on very general topics to do with architectonic form and how it fits into the way space is perceived. It also includes some particular claims that might spark a debate in the margins.

For example, the first paragraph says –in a tone of almost indisputable praise– that Tadao Ando’s church uses only three materials.

It seems that there is an incontrovertible consensus around this appraisal of the limited use of materials, even though the author is cheating slightly by considering light as a material when in fact it is what defines space better than anything else.

This often happens with architecture criticism: there are statements that should only be descriptive but instead they carry with them a judgment that is presented as being unquestionable. Do you mean to say that using a single material is irrefutably positive? We could debate it, couldn’t we, before stating it?

I say this bearing in mind that simplification is not the same thing as expressing yourself badly.

by Oriol Bohigas, MBM arquitectes

(profile at scalae.net)

[ebook scalae: Oriol Bohigas ...self]

...I’m going to come up with a plan*

–my generation, a few words on context–

Popular Catalan music is going through the sweetest time it its existence, for several different reasons. The main one is that musicians have finally found a way to appropriate (and express) musical forms that, though firmly rooted in Catalonia, are valid all over. Contemporary popular music feeds from the roots of blues and rock. From the North American music that British bands made their own in the mid-1960s. That’s where the revolution began. Ever since then, any country with a voice of its own has had to assimilate and internalize this sound so as to be able to totally reinvent it. The generation who are now around forty (five years older, five years younger) have been key to this: the craft that they have recreated is firmly tied to an older generation of artists some of whom are still active, and many of whom have now retired from public life (names like Quimi Portet, Pascal Comelade, Albert Pla, Adrià Punti, or even Jaume Sisa come to mind). This new generation is characterized by mixed musical backgrounds: some are of self-taught musicians, while others trained at conservatories and music schools all over. In this sense, the Teatro Atlàntida de Vic needs to be understood as more than just a theatre building.

Its line-up is varied: from Mishima or Standstill’s old-school rock to Roger Mas’s one-way trips to deep Catalonia. From the avant-garde sounds of Antònia Font (or the solo work of its leader, Joan Miquel Oliver) or Paul Fuster’s hybrid folk. Refree, Astrud, Silvia Pérez-Cruz, Els amics de les arts, or Manel –a group that is set on recording their encyclopaedic search for a sound– are all examples from a list that is thankfully hard to finish without running the risk of leaving some up-and-coming talent sitting behind on the curb. These musicians have been able, each in their way, to take on (negotiate between) international influences, instruments that are not traditionally part of Catalan culture, a changing economic and cultural context, a cultural VAT** that is more like a boycott than a tax, and a change in the habits of consumers –often through private, really low-budget undertakings– in order to express Catalan culture and take it to one of its highest points in the last three hundred years. Without doubt, the highest point since the Renaixença.

The equivalent generation of Catalan architects have followed a similar path. What stands out above all is the vindication –the reestablishment– of a trade, a craft, as a result of the context of change, uncertainty, and inequality. And it’s thrilling, despite the uncertainty it brings. The forms and typologies of the architecture that has been built in recent years have been conceived, founded, and based on revolutions that originate far beyond our borders. The task of these architects is to give these forms roots. Like their contemporaries, the times many of them are living in are good –or bittersweet, rather, given that it costs significantly more to put up a building than to record an album, and today’s economic context demands an infrastructure that all too often is unviable. These architects are themselves pushing the limits of their discipline and, like the musicians of their generation, they are basing their work on small-scale economies and private funding rather than government, which has been decimated, over-exploited, and worn out.

They are just as diverse, too: from Josep Camps and Olga Felip’s creation of systems to express things to H arquitectes’ emphasis on almost artisanal techniques. From Josep Ferrando’s use of metalworking to integrate his buildings (more is more) to Anna and Eugeni Bach’s visual tricks. Paco Cifuentes, Vora Arquitectura, Gerard Puig and David Sebastián, Anna Podio or Pau Vidal, Sergi Pons and Ricard Galiana are all good examples from a list that, once again, is unjustly incomplete. The limits of the discipline are being pushed by Ariadna Perich’s work, in the world of academia, Moisés Puente in that of publications, and Montserrat Galindo in that of management and advice.

We will need the vital optimism of all these colleagues (and those I’ve left out) to take on the main challenge of contemporary architecture: to draw close to people again, making the ability to excite them another element of function – perhaps the most important element.

J.P.O.

(*) Standstill’s song “Adelante, Bonaparte” (2010) includes the line “I’m going to come up with a plan… to escape into the future”.

(**) VAT is value added tax. The Spanish government has set the country’s VAT on cultural products at 21%, thus leaving its local cultural industry totally unprotected as part of what seems to be more a revanchist policy than a coherent decision.

...

eXtra track -youtube- Standstill - Adelante, Bonaparte, 3'16"

echoes of: ...I’m going to come up with a plan

Our generation has a clear common denominator. Whether you’re a musician, a writer, a filmmaker, an actor, a scientist, a mechanic, or a doctor… The identity of each and everyone one of us is defined by an attitude towards our profession and towards life. We’re entrepreneurs, born surfers, challenges are what move and shake us… They unsettle us... we’re not heroes, we’re humans, plain, simple, and prudent. We like hunting down opportunities in mid-flight, so as to transform them into something real and tangible.

Not long ago, Roger Coma’s self-produced web series Les Coses Grans [Big Things] was released, which was microfinanced by focusing how great little things can be.

Coma, who trained as an actor, is also the producer, director, screenwriter, and set designer for the show... his roles dissolve into one another. He shared his workload with a great team, and everyone was prepared to move beyond the boundaries of their original profession.

We’re entrepreneurs in the sense that we know that anything is possible but only through generosity, cooperation, and hard work.

by Olga Felip, Camps i Felip arquitectes

(profile at scalae.net)

[ebook scalae: josepcamps · olgafelip ...self]

[human]

Imágenes y capturas que dan cuenta de las pequeñas cosas que rodean lo cotidiano –abstracto, imaginado o real– de Jaume Prat Ortells: viajes, planos, dibujos y manos, cocinares, fotografías y los rituales diarios de desayunar, leer y trabajar en el bar Catalunya de Sant Cugat del Vallés, Barcelona.

[reference: Jaume Prat Ortells on himself]

I was born in Barcelona in 1975. Since graduating from the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) in 2002, I have collaborated at different studios, notably those of Pep Garcia Cors and Emma Villanueva, Josep Lluís Mateo, Lluís Comerón, and Enric Massip-Bosch, where I worked mainly on public and private facilities and reflected on the buildings that made up the city. Our work on school buildings and our reflections on society and its foundations stand out in my memory. Above all, so does the development of Tàrrega Prison, a scaled-down city that forced the entire team to reflect very seriously on society and its limits. Since 2002, I’ve shared a studio with Montserrat Farrés and Merwan Chaverra, under the name of mmj arquitectos. I’ve built some houses and developed competition proposals for all over Europe and South America. In parallel with this work, I started writing regularly in 2006* in order to express a series of preoccupations of the sort that typically emerge in a conventional architectural studio. In my writing, I have tried to connect and expand the discipline to other areas. In 2010 I joined Scalae as editor-in-chief, a role I continue to perform, combining it with everything else in my life.

(*) Blog "Arquitectura, entre otras soluciones" ESP; "Arquitectura, entre d'altres solucions" CAT; "Architecture, among other solutions" ENG.

[acknowledgements and network]

Jaume Prat Ortells wishes to thank…...

…everyone who has the patience to finish the book: you deserve them. Especially anyone who reads it and isn't an architect.

…the Scalae crowd: Above all to Félix and Montse. And to Victoria, for her patience and comments. To the rest of the team. To those that have moved on. This is more a family than a publishing house.

…everyone who has taught me something and helped me to grow: there are more of you than I can list. More than I can say.

…my teachers.

…all the people I spent long hours with in different studios preparing things for deadlines, having a laugh, or getting annoyed with one another. At the risk of leaving someone out, these people include Esteve, Mariana, Marc, Mar, Gemma, Yolanda, Gloria, and Mireia.

…everyone I've taken part in competitions with.

…José María Sánchez García, Iñaqui Carnicero, Paco Casas, Javier López, Josep Ferrando, Juan Domingo Santos, Borja Ferrater, Ariadna Perich, and Roger Such, for having opened the doors of the university to me. And because it was worth it.

…Miquel, Anne-Sophie, and Marta.

…Josep F.

…Merwan.

…Michel.

...and to Montse. You all know why.

The editors would like to thank the individuals and companies that were invited to sit on the editorial and industries boards of the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection for their support, hard work, and suggestions. We are also grateful to the public bodies and institutions that were asked to participate through our institutional network. Their inspiration and generosity enabled us to launch the collection, polish the ideas that underlie it, perfect the processes used to create it, and hone the goals we share. Their help has made it possible for this issue to reach the hands of those who are interested in architecture and the agents that take part in the creation of it.

We’d like to thank Jaume Prat Ortells for his efforts to make this ebook a complete document.

Thank you to Xavier Ortells Nicolau, Montserrat Farrés, and Jaume Prat Ortells for the photographs that complete the visual and documentary material for this book.

We’re grateful to Apple and Amazon for including scalae ebooks as downloads in their respective stores.

[get involved]

Sharing this content through social networks is very simple: most ebook devices and apps allow you to highlight a paragraph or phrase and share it via your Facebook or Twitter account (once you have set up this feature on your device).

We welcome new echoes, articles, opinions, or comments on these articles from Jaume Prat Ortells, his personal work, or his professional work as architect. Proposals* should be sent to ebooks@scalae.net -if accepted by the editorial board, texts will be published on the scalae.net site and may be included in the appropriate ...about or ...from volume of the scalae ebook collection.

(*)Texts must not exceed 150 words (echoes) or 4000 characters including spaces (articles) in the language of the writer’s choice. The author(s) should establish a critical connection between their own professional background or personal interests and the world of architecture or that of agents that have been published or written about in a scalae ebook. For further information, see the articles in the documents section on www.scalae.net

[subscriptions]

Why subscribe? You will automatically receive, free of charge, all the new issues and updates in the collection in the appropriate format for the device or app of your choice (iPod, iPhone, Android, Kindle®, ePub reader, iPad, tablets, notebook, or desktop). We have found the following apps and devices to be the most versatile: the Amazon Kindle®, the Kindle® apps for Windows, Apple OS X, Android, and Apple iOS, and the iBooks app for Apple iOS.

Subscriptions website: www.archbib.com

Barcelona, June 2013

[collection catalogue]

published ebooks...

· scalae ebook "...self Oriol Bohigas" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...self Josep Camps & Olga Felip" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...self Josep Ferrando" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...self Anna & Eugeni Bach" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...self RCR architects" [iTunes] [archBIB]

· scalae ebook "...from Jaume Prat Ortells"

ebooks "in press"...

· scalae ebook "...self Josep Lluis Mateo"

· scalae ebook "...self Juan Herreros"

· scalae ebook "...self Tom Emerson"

· scalae ebook "...self Juhani Pallasmaa"

· scalae ebook "...self Juan Domingo Santos"

· scalae ebook "...about Oriol Bohigas"

· scalae ebook "...about Rafael Moneo"

· scalae ebook "...about Carlos Ferrater"

[copyright]

The first ...from volume of the scalae architecture + architects international ebook collection, which completes the fractal –or geodesic– map that is made up of the combination of the ...self, ...from, and ...about volumes. Jaume Prat Ortells offers nine accounts of nine experiences in which he glides freely –rarely intercepting or crashing into himself, never using metaphors– between fragments of architecture and scraps of art and life: circumstances, clarifications, comments, or experiences related to literature, cinema, popular music, or something else that shall remain nameless for the time being.

Los ejemplares digitales de la colección scalae de ebooks de arquitectura + arquitectos son gratuitos, por lo que no está permitida su venta. Si la persona lectora desea compensar las satisfacciones de la lectura de un modo material sugerimos su contribución a los programas de colaboración de Arquitectes Sense Fronteres.

(cc) 2013 de sus autores. Este documento se ha publicado bajo licencia Creative Commons: Reconeixement - NoComercial - CompartirIGual (by-nc-sa). No se permite el uso comercial de la obra original ni de las posibles obras derivadas, cuya distribución ha de ser resuelta bajo una licencia igual a la que regula la obra original.

Table of Contents

SCALAE | JAUME PRAT ORTELLS | ...from

[collection credits]

[scalae international ebook collection]

[issue credits]

bonus track

Human: bar Catalunya, collage by Jaume Prat

[index: articles & echoes]

reflection: erogenous spaces, about Pallasmaa, Siza...

...erogenous spaces

echoes of: ...erogenous spaces

reflection: a freaky serenade, about Comelade, Jujol, Llinás...

...a freaky serenade

echoes of: ...a freaky serenade

reflection: High Plains Drifter, about Eastwood, Five Architects, Nouvel, Holl...

...High Plains Drifter

echoes of: ...High Plains Drifter

reflection: another brick on the wall, about Pink Floyd...

...Another Brick in the Wall

echoes of: ...Another Brick in the Wall

reflection: drunken heart, about Michael Roschach

...drunken heart

echoes of: ...drunken heart

reflection: abattoir blues, about Galí, Quintana, Solanas, Franco, Langarita-Navarro, Carnicero...

...Abattoir Blues

echoes of: ...Abattoir Blues

reflection: Domestic Mystical, about Mas, RCR arquitectes...

...Domestic Mystique

echoes of: ...Domestic Mystique

reflection: push the light away, sobre Cave, Ando...

...push the light away

echoes of: ...push the light away

reflection: i'm going to invent a plan, about Jaume Prat's generation...

...I’m going to come up with a plan

echoes of: ...I’m going to come up with a plan

[human]

Human: profile, by Xavier Ortells Nicolau

Human: plan, by Montserrat Farrés

Human: cooking stuff, by Jaume Prat

Human: library, by Jaume Prat, cropped by Félix Arranz

Human: hands, by Jaume Prat

[reference: Jaume Prat Ortells on himself]

[acknowledgements and network]

Human: Catalunya Bar drawing, by Jaume Prat

[collection catalogue]

[copyright]