Issue 69-70
I-IV 1998
5,500 Pta.
(32.75 euro)

ESPAÑA 1998

Cultura de autor
Signature Culture

Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao / Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Frank Gehry
Auditorio A. Kraus, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria / Auditorium, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Óscar Tusquets, Carles Díaz, Agustín Juárez & Marcos Roger
Centro cultural, Villanueva de la Cañada / Cultural Center, Villanueva de la Cañada (Madrid)
Juan Navarro Baldeweg
Casa de cultura, Don Benito (Badajoz) / House of Culture, Don Benito (Badajoz)
Rafael Moneo

El lugar de la memoria
The Place of Memory

Cementerio, Camarma de Esteruelas (Madrid) / Cemetery, Camarma de Esteruelas (Madrid)
Carlos Puente
Casa de cultura, Garganta de los Montes / House of Culture, Garganta de los Montes (Madrid)
Ginés Garrido, Francisco Domouso & Emilio Rodríguez
Museo Etnográfico, Güímar (Tenerife) / Ethnographic Museum, Güimar (Tenerife)
César Ruiz-Larrea, Enrique Álvarez-Sala & Carlos Rubio
Museo de Menorca, Mahón / Museum of Minorca, Mahón
José Antonio Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres

Estudios superiores
Higher Education

Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud, La Coruña / Health Sciences Faculty, La Coruña
Manuel de las Casas
Facultad de Económicas, Reus (Tarragona) / Economics Faculty, Reus (Tarragona)
Pau Pérez, Antón Pamiés & Antoni Banús
Institutos de investigación, Santiago de Compostela / Research Institutes, Santiago de Compostela
Manuel Gallego
Institutos universitarios, Alicante / University Institutes, Alicante
Miguel del Rey & Íñigo Magro

Formas de aprendizaje
Forms of Learning

Biblioteca de Fuencarral, Madrid / Public Library at Fuencarral, Madrid
Andrés Perea
Biblioteca municipal, Salamanca / Municipal Library, Salamanca
Gabriel Gallegos & Juan Carlos Sanz
Escuela infantil de Mendillorri, Pamplona / Preschool at Mendillorri, Pamplona
Francisco Mangado & Alfonso Alzugaray
Parvulario, Manresa (Barcelona) / Kindergarten, Manresa (Barcelona)
Dolors Ylla-Català & Joan Forgas

Gestión y producción
Management and Production

Oficinas, Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real) / Offices, Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real)
Ignacio Vicens & José Antonio Ramos
Comandancia del puerto, Cartagena (Murcia) / Harbor Headquarters, Cartagena (Murcia)
Alberto Burgos & Martín Lejarraga
Ampliación de la nave Simón, Canovelles / Warehouse Extension, Canovelles (Barcelona)
Lluís Clotet & Ignacio Paricio
Estudios de cine Arruga, Barcelona / Arruga Film Studios, Barcelona
Carlos Ferrater & Joan Guibernau

La casa común
The House in Common

Bloque de viviendas, Santurce (Vizcaya) / Apartment Building, Santurce (Vizcaya)
Luis María Uriarte
Viviendas y aparcamientos, Barcelona / Apartments and Parking Slots, Barcelona
Miguel Roldán & Mercedes Berengué
Conjunto de viviendas, Sevilla / Housing Development, Seville
Fernando Carrascal & José María Fernández de la Puente
Manzana de viviendas, Leganés (Madrid) / Housing Block, Leganés (Madrid)
Eduardo Mangada & Carlos Ferrán

Un año en el mundo
A Year in the World

The eves of Europe come with variable weather. The year of convergence toward a single European currency has been both sunny and rainy for Spain. Sunny in the economic and social fields, with a rise in stock values and optimism; rainy in the political and meteorological realms, with the tension caused by conflicts in the media and the courts competing with the storms provoked by El Niño. So have cloudy and clear days alternated in the cultural field, where alarm at the diffusion of conservative folklorism has been compensated by the festive mood of much awaited inaugurations. The year of architecture can be summed up in four names: Juan de Herrera, the centenary of whose death has served as prologue to a complex debate about Spanishness; Sverre Fehn, whose winning of the Pritzker Prize initiated a chain of Scandinavian celebrations; Aldo Rossi, whose sudden demise closed a chapter of contemporary architecture; and Frank Gehry, who on completing the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao reached the peak of his career while providing a great symbol for the turn-of-the-century culture of spectacle.

Spain's Winter
January's fourth centennial of the death of Juan de Herrera, architect of El Escorial, was a cold celebration. Nevertheless it aroused an appetite for a new revision of Spanish history that inevitably touches on his patron, Philip II, preparations for whose own centenary in 1998 have already begun to bear fruits that will tie up with another patriotic and cultural commemoration, the hundredth year since the disaster of 1898. Probably Spain's most important architect prior to Gaudí, Herrera was an intellectual whose stature grows with time, parallel to that of his king, in turn a Renaissance Maecenas and administrator whose figure is only now being severed from the somber overtones that were attached to it by the propaganda of religious wars and his association with the imperialist dreams and Herrerian classicism of postwar Francoism. Such revised views of the history of Spain are gaining ground, though not without political and educational debates between advocates of nationalist affirmation in some regions, and the efforts to establish a new European identity. An identity, by the way, which the designers of the euro bills have found in the continent's successive architectures, and which in March the jury of the European Mies van der Rohe Award encountered in the geometric monumentality of Dominique Perrault's Grande Bibliothèque: the Parisian Escorial of Mitterrand, a republican monarch who like De Gaulle defended a Europe of fatherlands.

Scandinavia's Spring
The awarding in April of the Pritzker Prize to the Norwegian Sverre Fehn began a streak of Scandinavian festivities that was prologued in 1996 by Copenhagen's turn as European culture capital and is to culminate in 1998 with Stockholm's and the centenary of the Finnish master Alvar Aalto. The architect of the Glacier Museum and of the Nordic Pavilion in Venice was feted for a lyrical and tenacious career based on his devotion to construction and respect for landscape: two Nordic virtues not too evident in some of the recent emblematic buildings of Scandinavia, such as the Museum of Modern Art of the young Soren Robert Lund in Copenhagen or the Museum of Contemporary Art of the American Steven Holl in Helsinki, but overwhelmingly patent in the Museum of Modern Art and Architecture by Rafael Moneo in Stockholm, perhaps because the architect recalled his training with the Dane Jørn Utzon. In any case the coming Aaltian commemoration, with its numerous exhibitions and tributes, will reseal the connection with the best of that fertile Scandinavian tradition.

Summer's Ashes
August took the life of the American Paul Rudolph and summer ended in September with the death of the Italian Aldo Rossi, one of the great ideological and formal renovators of contemporary architecture. With his metaphysical poetry and his parallel cult of geometry and memory, the Milanese changed the course of architecture and urbanism of the final third of the century; but his elegiac defense of the traditional city and historical types has been rejected by the latest generations of architects, led by personalities like the Dutch Rem Koolhaas, who preach a return to modern experimentalism and are fascinated by the colossal scale of urban developments in the emerging economies of the Pacific. The Documenta of Kassel, which gauges the arts every five years, precisely chose the Rotterdam architect as a point of reference through an exhibition on the chaotic urbanization of southern China. Nevertheless, the handover of Hong Kong in July and the stockmarket and monetary quakes that have shaken Asia during the second half of the year put a brake on the vigor of a continent which has also welcomed a work of Rossi and the final phase of Rudolph's career.

Autumn's Spectacles
The big star of the fall season was the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, the October opening of which was a major triumph for both its author, the Californian Frank Gehry, and the Basque Country, which has made the sculptural titanium building a symbol of its drive toward modernization and economic recovery. The inauguration of this emblem of the culture of spectacle was preceded by the more polemical premières of Barcelona's National Theater of Catalonia, a work of Ricardo Bofill, and the long awaited renovation of Madrid's Royal Theater. And the series of débuts wrapped up with the auditorium of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, a lyrical seaside fortress which counts as the finest mature work of the Catalan Óscar Tusquets. Autumn also saw the completion of colossal works like Richard Meier's Getty Center in Los Angeles; and the denouement of disputed competitions like the one for Barajas Airport, whose winning by the British Richard Rogers (in association with Madrid's Antonio Lamela) culminates a magical year for the architect of Tony Blair's New Labour, or for the extension of New York's Museum of Modern Art, where the Japanese Yoshio Taniguchi prevailed over New York-based Bernard Tschumi and the Swiss partners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. But the season closed with the sad news of the death of Félix Candela, a Spanish architect and engineer who left the best of his work in Mexican exile, a chapter of history which today's Europe-facing Spain trusts is a thing of the past.