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| a simple plan of the forum in context |
About the Project
Barcelona as a city is comprised of layers of urban fabric;
some of the early layers were defined by city walls which shaped the medieval
district. In the late 19th
century Ildefons Cerda devised a plan of city expansion from the original
quarters, which brought accessibility to the city center and a well-defined
street grid, giving the city better accessibility, light, and air. In the suburbs of the Cerda plan and directly
on the coast is the Forum, the entrance to the Forum site is adjacent to the
confluence of Rambla Prim and Avenue Diagonal.
The site of the form was composed primarily of disused and underutilized
industrial plants that did not contribute to the surrounding neighborhoods (???),
so the Forum also became an exercise in ecological recovery and restoration.
Diagonal is, quite literally, a diagonal street that in Georges Haussman fashion slashes through the grid. It improves on the accessibility of the grid, resulting in many awkward block sizes which offer great possibilities for design. In an interview with Augusti Fancelli (El Pais), Jacques Herzog points out that two faces of the building are derived from an extension of the Cerda plan into the forum space from Prim and Diagonal, the third face respecting the highway passing beneath the park.
The Edifici Forum is part of the same 2004 International
Forum of Cultures that, along with the Northeast and Southeast Coastal Parks,
was designed to provide a venue for tens of thousands of people. Constructed to house up to 3,500 people in
the auditorium, with many thousands more in exhibits or traversing underground
to the convention center next door, the Edifici includes a program of an
auditorium, exhibit space, a vast public circulation area, and an underground
tunnel to the convention center next door.
A Critical Look
The Metro map at Besos Mar doesn't refer to the building as
a significant destination, and it is often difficult to find information on the
life of this project past 2004. It is as
though the building became tainted with construction and usability problems and
has become to Barcelona the illegitimate stepchild who keeps coming home to ask
for money. Unless you consider that a renovation project is far more expensive
than a demolition, and you realize that in the memory of the city, perhaps a
defective building might be better than
what was on site before.
It's easy to imagine the Edifici as a massive slab of
blueberry pie with the consistency of a kitchen sponge. The unusual dark texture, adding density
across a wide low expanse of wall, feels overpowering. Not because it is especially large but
perhaps, unlike the neighboring towers, it's entire mass is relatively close to
the ground, much closer to a human scale, and it is easy to sense the size and
weight of the entire building all at once.
The fact that the form is broken and sliced in discrete places actually
seems to reinforce the unity of the whole without boring the eye.
Despite its “bigness” the building works well as a public
shelter. The Forum Park can get quite
hot and passersby, on the way to the beach or the parks, will swerve to walk
under the overhang or cut through the building.
Herzog & de Meuron achieve the ability for such a big building to
require such a small footprint by committing only circulation to ground-level
enclosed areas. Program elements reside
above or below this plane. Unlike much
of the vertical iconic architecture surrounding the Edifici, the Forum politely
continues two of the urban edges in close proximity to the street. Jacques Herzog, in an interview with Jose
Luis Mateo, considers the building a means to “both generate and articulate
this public space”. The prow of the wedge,
facing the primary pedestrian promenade to the building, is made to seem sharper
with slight protrusions at the top an bottom, an homage to the architectural
drawing convention of giving strength to the intersection of two lines by
completely crossing the lines beyond the intersection, and even accentuating
that point with an extra bit of ink.
This forceful prow serves as an effective waypoint that clearly diverts
pedestrian traffic toward the Southeast Coastal Park or toward the Forum
esplanade and Solar Pergola, while also reinforcing the corner and helping to
define the adjacent public spaces.
All three building faces are treated with the same color,
texture, and compositional qualities.
However, one side faces a busy urban intersection, one faces a plaza and
convention center, and the third faces the sea, so it is difficult to make the
argument that context was a consideration.
As the ground rises from one end of the site to the other but the
building maintains a single level, the seaside facade can be understood
haptically; the sponge-like sense of surface is defeated when touching the
dense, rocky, unyielding blue surface.
Rising from the highway below ground are glass and patterned-metal light
wells, too tall to look down into and too dense to see through. The size and arrangement of these wells can
easily be mistaken as a group of mechanical outbuildings, giving the space an
unfortunate “loading dock” feel. The
seaside face thus becomes deactivated space with difficult views and a sense of
utility more akin to a hotel service corridor than public space. The pedestal here shrinks to a height that in
many places is impassable by people, the Forum now sitting and not floating on
a dark shadowy band.
The building floats on a pedestal of absence, offering a
public space with relief from the intense Catalan sun, thanks to large
cantilevers that hover over a sloped ground, and a program that uses the ground
plane solely as a transitional space within the building. The auditorium passes through the ground
plane, but continues above and below as well, so it arguably does not reside on
the ground. Light is brought into the
underbelly through rectilinear shafts punctured vertically through the
building.
In an interview with Philip Ursprung, Herzog and de Meuron
reveal an obsession with the pedestals of Chinese Scholars' rocks as a
form-fitting piece that act as a support, but also define the contours of the
connection between the Scholars' piece and the surface it sits upon. The Edifici, however, is a floating wedge,
with black and reflective surfaces pulled far under the cantilever. The idea of a “floating building,” a pedestal
that doesn't exist, is actually supported by the public space, the wispy trails
of the people who walk through. Except
that, with the exception of occasional concerts and shows, the pedestal is
devoid of activity. To be fair to Herzog
& de Meuron I visited the project while it was under construction, but the
suburban site suffers from a lack of amenities to draw people from the city
center.
While there were no visitors to the building, there were a
few people heading to the park or the beach, but certainly not enough to fill
up the spaces around the Edifici. In his
essay “Blue Lagoon,” Rob Gregory questions the longevity of this building in a
“no-man's land” of fractured and remote urbanism. While the site accepts and extends the Cerda
grid and is perhaps not as fragmented as Gregory supposes, he does predict what
I discovered six years later. Intensive
construction around the Forum Park, however, seems to indicate that the city
acknowledges that the Forum is not yet a “good” site.
Formally, the dense prism becomes less monotonous with
slices of windows that imply a disintegration of the pure shape. Light wells, offering an eerie bluish source
of light, skewer the form from within and ward away the dreaded parking garage
syndrome. Herzog & de Meuron offer
contradictory thoughts in an interview with Philip Urspring:
A
rectangular shape without conspicuous design elements is not especially
exciting. There are perceptual reasons
for this. More complicated, diversified
forms are more effective and appealing-- in nature as well.... These buildings
(whether filmed or photographer) are therefore easier to represent and the
images more impressive than those of box-shaped projects.
The Edifici, then, is an attempt to commingle complexity and
simplicity. A simple form, the pie
wedge, is given a uniform texture and color.
It is then surgically carved with deep vertical cuts with the
claro-oscuro of Joan Miro tapestries, and full-height mirrored windows
reflecting the sky, which all dematerialize the shape without distorting the
perception of its form. The overall
effect adds interest to what would otherwise be a dull and imposing facade,
while maintaining a common language throughout.
The result gives the appearance of a singular solid block, without the
need to construct the Edifici as an actual solid mass.
In an interview with Alejandro Zaera, Enric Miralles talks
about complexity in architecture as such: “What interests me about constructed
work is that the more complex it looks, the more schematic it is, finally freed
from the doubts of the process.”
Underneath, the “lie” of solidity is further reinforced with
light wells that bring light indoors and to the public outdoor space below. The mix of white light on the pavement with
deep blue reflected from the sides of the well seem otherworldly, but are
effective in bringing light into what would otherwise be a cavernous black
public space. The reflective nature of
the outdoor ceiling, whose puddles bring to mind Alexander Calder's Mercury
Fountain, might have been intended to give the low wide space a greater
sense of height. The metal panels,
partly smooth and partially hammered, collectively give a sense of a wet
surface (appropriate to the sponge motif).
The feeling of walking underneath a giant wet sponge is somewhat
disconcerting, and the riot of texture defies direct focus and pushes the eye
back down to the horizon. The ceiling
finish continues down across several of the ground-level enclosed spaces, and
it is here that the metal panels can be experienced haptically. In order to allow air to pass through the
panels, the metal is perforated in specific locations using patterns similar to
the textured indentations. This integral
but poorly executed detail reminds me of rusty antique cars in the early stages
of bodywork. When a deformed fender or
door must be repaired, the thinness of the car's metal becomes evident through
the indentations a slide hammer creates when re-forming the metal. I felt obligated to stick my finger in a
couple of the Edifici's vent holes, as they are remarkably easy to get to, and
I think if I had applied a little too much pressure I might have cut my finger
on the grimy sharp-edged steel.
Conclusion
Just because we can, should we? Built in an era of “Anything Goes”
architecture, Herzog & de Meuron have crafted a building that is more
important to them as an intellectual exercise than provide shelter, though it's
difficult to discern at what point a giant sponge equals academic
exploration. We then arrive at a great
big expensive broken toy that the city is desperately attempting to repurpose
and justify. Certain urban gestures are
well done, if sometimes obvious. The
effort expended to find a juxtaposition of simplicity and complexity, however,
did not justify an engagement of poorly understood construction systems that
ultimately led to the failure of finishes, and the mechanical impossibilities
that should have affected the expression of its function, but seem to have been
discovered too late to influence the design.
The current renovation project also speaks to the purpose
for which the place was designed. A
radical and complex design may be the reason the city has had a schizophrenic
relationship with the building. It is
designed as a large indoor exhibit space, then it becomes an education display
of the ecological history of the city, and now substantial additional funds are
being used to convert the building into a natural history museum. It is then difficult not to conclude
that the life of the Edific Forum was not considered during its existence on
the drawing board. Making a case of the
necessity of complexity in architecture is, then, not proven with the Edifici
Forum.
Works
Cited:
"El
Edificio Fòrum Se Convertirá En 2011 En Museo De Ciencias
Naturales." Elmundo. 12
Dec. 2009. Web. 04 Aug. 2010.
""La
Arquitectura Es Percepción De La Vida" · ELPAÍS.com." Interview by
Agusti Fancelli. ELPAÍS. 08
Sept. 2003. Web. 08 Aug. 2010. .
"Un
Museo De Ciencias Naturales Para El Siglo XXI." Ciencia Y Tecnologa. 13 Dec. 2009. Web. 03 Aug. 2010.
Mateo, Jose
Luis. "Ideas of Design." Herzog
& De Meuron. Barcelona: G. Gilli, 1989. 6-12. Print.
Moneo,
Rafael. "Herzog & De Meuron." Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies: in the Work of Eight
Contemporary Architects. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2004. 362-404. Print.
Ursprung,
Philip. "Interviews." Herzog
& De Meuron: Natural History. Montréal: Canadian Centre for
Architecture, 2002. 80+. Print.
Zaera, Alejandro. "A Conversation with Enric
Miralles." El Croquis. Vol.
72:2. Madrid: El Croquis, 1995. 6-23. Print.
Additional Reading:
