I have been back to Casa de Campo for no less than five runs and two picnics. I also managed to go to Cercedilla (more on that later). I've just not told you about any of it.
What finally made me write, peculiarly, was this:
As I said, I've been away, and before I left I'd seen the elderflowers in Cercedilla in full flower (like I said, more on that later). On my way home through the park today I realised that the grass had dried out in the intense heat and that the lavender had flowered. A sudden overwhelming sense of seasonal change and the passing of time made me feel that the time had come to return to you. So here I am.
Going away and flying long haul for once gave me the chance to get a good look at Richard Rogers' prizewinning (11th RIBA Stirling Prize) Terminal 4 building at Barajas. So naturally, perhaps not wisely, in the three hours of my wait I started wandering around the building taking a couple of photos and making notes. I have had Rogers' book Cities for a Small Country sitting mostly unread on a bookshelf for the best part of a decade, and never visited any of his buildings until late last year, yet now I seem to have inadvertently started collecting them. The book is only mostly unread because I probably skim-read a couple of chapters to find essay quotes at uni. Perhaps the time has come to actuallly read it properly.
The first of the Rogers buildings I went to visit as a result of reading Peter Rice's 'An Engineer Imagines' and happening to be in Paris. Rice devotes a chapter of his book to the Centre Georges Pompidou, and although he had a lively appreciation of the architecture I took from it an engineer's bias: my visit was therefore spent predominantly admiring the ingenuity of the cast steel nodes and lamenting the effect of 40 years on the paint finishes. Piano and Rogers' exterior servicing concept and flexible internal space (which, from half-remembered architecture lectures, I seem to recall is not generally used particularly flexibly for some reason to do with the deep plan - I don't know) didn't really register particularly strongly. The views and the strange 'soundscape' artistic installation in the escalator tubes did. Here is a photo if you can't remember what building I'm on about, along with an image from a totally different building: the tree columns off to one side of the new King's Cross concourse roof in London owe something to Rice's gerberettes, I would say.
Anyway, I digress. Barajas is a very much newer building than the Pompidou, so the 'high-tech' of Rogers' architecture doesn't really have the same resonance or impact as it might once have done, although it's certainly still there in the shiny ductwork, immaculately detailed cabling and several storey high scrolling digital signs that appear to have no function other than to tell you that you're in Barajas and it has shops. The atmosphere comes off sort of like Blade Runner, only really clean.
It does have lots of lovely exposed structure, brightly painted to form part of the gate colour coding system to aid way-finding (incidentally, unless it's pretty deeply subconscious I'm not convinced by the system - despite being pre-warned of the system, having read something about it when the building first opened, it still took me until after I'd got to the gate before I'd noticed the graduated rainbow tones of the steelwork that also matched the colour of the signs I'd been following).
The wavy roof in the main departure hall (i.e. not the bit in the photo) is supported and stabilised by inclined columns that spring off either side of a central concrete elevated walkway and separate to each support two of the undulating roof beams. These roof beams continue out past the barely-there curtain walled facade with its tension cable mullions and skinny transoms, with another line of support and a modest cantilever outside. I very much like the structure; it's a large open space so like the great train stations of engineering's Victorian heyday it should and did invite good, regular, expressed structure, with none of those silly room things that architects like so very much that really just get in the way. Bit light on pubs though, it must be said.
The third Rogers building (or Rogers Stirk Harbour, whatever they're called) that I've collected in under 12 months probably doesn't count. I walked past the under-construction Tower 3 in Lower Manhattan last week. It's not that big yet, and I can't honestly say I noticed it. The nice Irish pub round the corner, on the other hand...
