The sevillians Cruz & Ortiz quote Nabokov with obsessive frequency. I have only seen such fervor for the Russian writer in Ángel Díaz, an architect given to reciting whole paragraphs from his works in the dawns of Seville, and in my uncle Manuel Fern
Some irregular forms define the perimeter of the roof of what at first sight looks like a huge shed. Viewed from afar it is a rather anonymous construction, a bit coarse perhaps in outline and almost offhandedly rendered. Broken and exact perimeters
There is something hypnotic about this house when you see it. You perceive very gratifying contradictions. There’s a courtyard, for example, but that courtyard is really something else… —This was for us a very important project. We like to say that o
Villanueva del Ariscal came after the María Coronel housing project. —Talking about these houses is like talking about prehistory... But there is some mystery... —They have something to do with Oud, right?—Yes, they do look similar, but we were more
Let’s talk about Carabanchel... In general, do you think your housing developments tend to be exercises in hard realism? —Yes, in a way... For this work we’d focus on two questions: attention to domesticity, and treatment of profile. There is a moder
The project for the Cádiz fortress is fantastic. Cádiz is an incredible city, so prettily neoclassic, and which you Sevillian architects have always been fond of. —Diehard Sevillians only like Seville. It is generally Sevillians who are less Sevillia
Where did you take inspiration for the Novo Sancti Petri development in Cádiz? Does it have something to do with Utzon? —Definitely. Novo Sancti Petri is a very windy place, close to the Strait, and we resorted to a typology that would facilitate win
Going back to structures, but in large-scale works like Santa Justa, how did you conceive them? —Santa Justa is a turning point in our career because it involved a huge change of scale. We never wish to give structure too much presence, or let it imp
Is Seville’s culture office from the same period as your intervention in the Candelaria fortress of Cádiz? —It came before the provincial government seat of Seville, and shortly after the fortress. The idea was to join two houses, a large one and a s
Every time we’re on the M-40 highway and driving close to the Madrid stadium we feel a rush of emotion, thanks to its character as a place built out of a mark in the landscape, in this case the urban landscape. —Here’s a building that can be seen fro
Why don’t we talk about the housing development for the miners of Tharsis? —Though this project was carried out with a certain naivety, it did much to help us in subsequent works. Now we realize that it was a germinal piece. Everything about it we ha
And what of the provincial government headquarters of Seville? When we saw this project we mused on the possible influence of Salvisberg, on a certain essentiality we might classify as professionist. —Not directly. It’s difficult to talk about the Se
What do you think of the buildings, the series of boxes, at the Port of Chipiona? —They are like an exercise, a minimalist exercise. At first we didn’t want this project published. It seemed to us too much of an impersonal exercise. The commission wa
With the idea of reviving the huge urban impulse sparked by Expo 92, Seville attempted to use another event of international repercussions – the 2004 Olympics – as an engine to transform the city. In support of the candidacy, the Olympic Ring Society
The Spanish pavilion at Hannover’s Expo 2000 is a very sophisticated project. —Shall we say that Expo pavilions are buildings which allow more freedom of action than architecture usually does, because they are planned to last only six months. Expo ar
In the periphery of Doñana National Park, next to the village of Matalascañas, a 150 hectare plot between the coast and Mazagón highway was chosen to raise two buildings that will serve to connect the park and the urban center: a research institute
Basilea station shows the typical inconveniences of all stop and go train stations that stand parallel to the railway lines. The proposal for its transformation assigns this important piece of infrastructure with a new urban role: that of gate for tr
The plot designated for the extension of the Reina Sofía Museum, at the rear of the Madrid art center, has inspired a medial solution by which its peripheral position with respect to Atocha square is made up for by an architecture which displays the
Four kilometers to the northwest of Granada lays the Almanjáyar area, a place whose character is yet to be defined. Inscribed within the heterogeneous layout foreseen in the regulating plan of the neighborhood – which includes residential and commerc
The rectangular floor plan of the Chapín stadium in Jerez is rounded off by two semicircles that clearly reflect the shape of the athletics track which surrounds the soccer field. Without significantly altering its plan, the extension project foresee
Ceramique Avenue is the central axis of the recent extension along the river that Maastricht is carrying out in an industrial area close to the center of the city which had gradually fallen in disuse. Following the guidelines of the urban plan – that
The proposal for the Museum of Human Evolution and the Burgos Congress Center is located in the plot known as Solar de Caballería and is connected by scattered poplars to the walkways that run alongside Arlanzor River. With an architecture built with
The great infrastructures that the Lisbon Expo left behind have served to regenerate an old industrial plot next to the Tajo’s estuary as an area for mixed uses. All of this within the second phase of the urban plan that will conclude in 2010. Next
The unevennes between the plot borders and an extending program which comprised eight soccer fields, athletics tracks, ground hockey fields, as well as an exercise circuit, a stadium and a shopping mall; urged to undertake the project with an archite
The choice location of the parcel, between the María Luisa Park and the Guadalquivir River, was the starting point of the proposal. In this gardened zone, the library inserts itself into the structure of the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition. Isolated a
For this bus station complex on a 33-degree angle, wedge-shaped lot with a 200-meter radius, close to the river Odiel, the basic intention was to arrive at a unitary> image, with a single gesture addressing and resolving the difficult conditions of t
Rafael Moneo
Epifanía del momento
Epiphany of Moment
La vida de las formas
The Life or Forms
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Organismos unicelularesUnicellular Organisms
Francisco Mangado
La emoción lógica
Logic Emotion
1975-1990: Vocación cívica
Civic Mood
Viviendas en la calle María Coronel, 1974-1976, Sevilla
Housing on María Coronel Street, 1974-1976, Seville
Viviendas en hilera, 1977-1980, Villanueva del Ariscal (Sevilla)
Row Housing, 1977-1980, Villanueva del Ariscal (Seville)
Conjunto residencial en Carabanchel, 1986-1989, Madrid
Residential Development in Carabanchel, 1986-1989, Madrid
Baluarte de la Candelaria, 1986-1989, Cádiz
Candelaria Bastion, 1986-1989, Cádiz
Urbanización Novo Sancti Petri, 1987-1991, Chiclana de la Frontera (Cádiz)
Novo Sancti Petri Development, 1987-1991, Chiclana de la Frontera (Cádiz)
Estación de Santa Justa, 1987-1991, Sevilla
Santa Justa Railway Station, 1988-1991, Seville
Consejería de Cultura, 1989-1992, Sevilla
Culture Office, 1989-1992, Seville
Estadio de atletismo, 1989-1994, Madrid
Track and Field Stadium, 1989-1994, Madrid
1990-2000: Juego de límites
Game of Limits
Conjunto de viviendas, 1990-1992, Tharsis (Huelva)
Housing Development, 1990-1992, Tharsis (Huelva)
Estación de autobuses, 1990-1994, Huelva
Bus Station, 1990-1994, Huelva
Sede de la Diputación Provincial, 1991-1995, Sevilla
Provincial Government Headquarters, 1991-1995, Seville
Edificios portuarios, 1994-1995, Chipiona (Cádiz)
Port Buildings, 1994-1995, Chipiona (Cádiz)
Biblioteca pública, 1995, Sevilla
Public Library, 1995, Seville
Estadio olímpico, 1997-2000, Sevilla
Olympic Stadium, 1997-2000, Seville
Pabellón de España en la Expo, 1999-2000, Hannover (Alemania)
Spanish Pavilion at the Expo, 1999-2000, Hannover (Germany)
Centro de visitantes de Doñana, 1999-2000, Almonte (Huelva)
Doñana Visitors’ Center, 1999-2000, Almonte (Huelva)
Cambio de código
Code Switch
Estación ferroviaria, 1997, Basilea (Suiza)
Railway Station, 1997, Basel (Switzerland)
Ampliación del MNCARS, 1999, Madrid
MNCARS Extension, 1999, Madrid
Oficinas en Almanjáyar, 2000, Granada
Office Building Almanjáyar, 2000, Granada
Ampliación del estadio Chapín, 2000, Jerez (Cádiz)
Chapín Stadium Extension, 2000, Jerez (Cádiz)
Manzana residencial en Ceramique, 2000, Maastricht (Holanda)
Housing Block in Ceramique, 2000, Maastricht (Holland)
Museo de la Evolución Humana, 2000, Burgos
Museum of Human Evolution, 2000, Burgos
Bloques residenciales junto al Tajo, 2001, Lisboa (Portugal)
Residential Blocks by the Tagus, 2001, Lisbon (Portugal)
Centro deportivo y comercial, 2001, Thun (Suiza)
Shopping and Sports Center, 2001, Thun (Switzerland)
Rafael Moneo
Whoever has closely followed the work of Antonio Cruz and Antonio Ortiz, admirable for its continuity, may be surprised at the appearance, as something new in their career, of projects like their entry to the competition for the extension of the Reina Sofía, their proposal for the Solar de Caballería in Burgos, or the Spanish pavilion at Hannover. The serene mood of repose that we appreciated in much of their previous work has now been sacrificed, one might say, in the name of reflecting a fluid and malleable universe. Cruz and Ortiz are not the only ones tempted to undertake such an adventure. It has been some time since architects abandoned the orthogonal grid, and the geometry that went with it, to unfurl in space a battery of undulating structures endeavoring to represent and register movement. On the other hand, such aspirations are nothing new. When Alvar Aalto astonished the world with the rolling walls of the Finnish pavilion at the World’s Fair of New York (1939), critics spoke of Guarini’s Carignano Palace and the disturbing geometry of Borromini churches as references. Later Le Corbusier, and with him many Latin American architects, felt drawn to an architecture that took shape to the dictates of movement. But definitely it is only recently that we have come upon the latest Gehry on one hand, and those trying to transform architecture into a restless landscape on the other-all toward a way of building architecture that negates the condition of radical immobility heretofore considered consubstantial to the discipline.
But why this preamble? Isn’t the idea to identify the character of those singular works of Cruz & Ortiz to which we alluded at the start? As in other projects of theirs, what distinguishes these troubled and restless works are differences, more than similarities. The Reina Sofía project makes allusions to movement and its architectural discourse seems to insist, once again, in the promenade, which in this case-as in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim-encourages us to carry out a pleasant descent. The museum as a place where culture provides hedonistic satisfaction seems to be present in this project. But it would be a mistake to judge the Reina Sofía extension from a strictly functional, museum-related perspective. What interests Cruz & Ortiz, apparently, is contrast. The extension is understood as a symbiosis, and the new building as an attachment that imposes no obligations. It is the epiphany of the moment that seems to be important to the Sevillian architects, an epiphany that translates into the lack of prejudices in the treatment of the roof and wall. The formal, almost graphological gesture is constructed in a conventional manner. What matters now is the gesture; in the gesture lies the force of an architecture no longer under obligation to explain the logic that supports it in compositional or constructional terms. Testifying to the moment or instant in which the architects conceived the building counts more than a structuralist discourse of the kind that tends to reconsider the mass and the lines of the old hospital through the construction of a complementary building-the annex that helps keep it on its feet. The emphasis on showing us that the buildings share only some element of vertical communication serves to confirm what these written lines affirm.
The attitude behind the Solar de Caballería project is diverse, although this, too, makes use of contrast. Hence it consciously offers the future visitor a building from which to contemplate the city and its past, and which while respecting scale and surroundings openly manifests its artificiality. Paradoxically, the artificiality manifests itself through mimesis. And by accepting it-at the risk of resembling a theme park when replicating the Atapuerca Cave-Cruz & Ortiz encountered what would be the most attractive episode of this architecture: an exploration of possibilities in the construction of a wall, through the manipulation of its thickness and shape. Transpiring between the two episodes that give life to this proposal is a fruitful dialogue-a balance, if you will, between architecture of the kind that makes its contour and perimeter its banner (the external seems to prevail here), and architecture where the internal spaces (the auditorium) define and dictate what both the volume and the structure are to be. Differences on plan-so important, so consciously established-are equalized with the roof, a sloping plane that will in the final analysis be the key element in defining the form. The interaction between the abstract plane of the roof and the exact perimeter of the floor plan results in a volume that, had it been carried out, would surely have established a definitive distance from the existing urban environs.
In the Hannover pavilion, the effort to dissolve the conventional square of a lot assigned to Spain by the Expo is manifested through a broken, fractured architecture. The difficulty inherent in the proposal comes across in the problematic transition that turns the forest of capricious polygonal pilasters into contrived paraments, where the choice of material-cork-bespeaks the architects’ desire to avoid trite roads. The complex and ambiguous system of voids that gets fenced in by the smoothly fissured cork wall gives rise to a spectacular space worthy of being considered the heart of the pavilion. The huge skylight assumes the role of metaphorical center of a universe around which all elements of architecture move: the fragments that adapt, like icebergs, to the perimeter of the square, as well as the ‘milky way’ formed by the many access-filtering pilasters. Recreating through architecture a new natural framework in which to show the now of Spanish life seems to have been the architects’ objective.
I trust that these brief notes on such singular buildings will help keep the reader from confusing the work of the Sevillian partners with that of so many other architects seduced by the undulating form, lured by a world Anglo-Saxon critics call ‘formless’. This said, we nevertheless have to admit that these buildings do indicate a disturbing change of direction in their career. I daresay that in all these projects there is a shift in the architect-architecture relationship, whereby the object comes to have priority over the subject. Or, in other words, all responsibility over form is now transferred to the work. The annex to the Reina Sofía, the mineral fragment of the Solar de Caballería and the microcosmos at Hannover are, above all, buildings whose physical condition as objects is not only present, but also predominant. The Reina Sofía project, given the symbiotic condition of the new building, has the character of an object and the character of nature at the same time; we would like to hold the model of the Burgos project in our hands in order to feel its weight, just as if it were a mineral; and the Hannover pavilion immediately bring to mind certain architectural objects that are so famous they need not be mentioned. That these projects are about architecture with a life of its own (hence our talking about objects) is, in my opinion, evident. Such an attitude differs much from that of many architects today who, in the name of fluidity, seek to forget that buildings are objects, and go on to reduce architecture to a field in which to proceed-or to a mere landscape, if you will. Recognizing the value of the individuality of buildings becomes, for the Sevillian duo, a challenge that leads them to explore the unknown, and constitutes, as I was saying, a change of course in their career, one that must be assessed for its merits. Especially when one considers that their career up to now has been a lesson on continuity. At a particular moment of maturity they have chosen to abandon their customary road and enter unfamiliar turf. This is a gesture that illustrates the importance Antonio Cruz and Antonio Ortiz give to feeling free, freed of previous and personal commitments in the undertaking of a new project. Proof, in the end, of their respect for architecture.
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