Less of an icon - terrace life in Madrid

One of the things I've been enjoying on the few occasions I've managed to sit down and write this blog is the way I start remembering things.  Specifically in articulating what I think about buildings and the city I find myself remembering some of that dearly purchased knowledge that came from four years of architectural study.

A big thing, love it or hate it, in architecture is the concept of the 'iconic' building.  That big, shiny white elephant on the corner that people will travel miles to visit and everyone stops to photograph but that has real meaning to no-one at all because they don't live or work there.  It's not a part of (almost) anyone's daily existence. 

Cities fall over themselves to embrace the Guggenheim effect, while architects chase that big competition win.  Architecture students try to conjure hypothetical landmarks on the street corners of provincial towns, unfettered by either cash flow or gravity but well versed in what makes an 'Icon'.  Engineers are complicit, too, when we award prizes to buildings that we see little merit in beyond the fact that they are bigger and more expensive than the next. 

The elegant little bits of design that sit silent but efficient in the corners of buildings (their very invisibility testament, often, to their ingenuity) are attributed no more praise than the shanty communities that develop unplanned yet seem to function on a basis of community engagement and shared ownership, albeit in the informal market.  These need to be explained and promoted by their creators, as well as watched for and appreciated by building users.  The architectural press, to their credit, has a nice line in appreciation of fine detail (the Detail section of the AJ, particularly, springs to mind as an example) while engineering journals can often veer wildly between incredibly broad-brush and uninformative or offputtingly dry and inaccessible.

As an aside, my brother and I both recently read a great book called Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, which deals at length with the effective informal administrative arrangements of shanty town communities and the potential of developing world in general.  Different parts of the book, which explores a wide range of topics all running along the lines of 'How do we save the planet?', seem to have relevance to conversations on a regular basis, so we keep referring back to it.  I still harbour some doubts about some of Brand's comments about building without regulation or design in some of these (extremely seismic) areas of the world.  Professional building designers may in the eyes of many be entirely superfluous but there is a critical safety component to what we do.

What was originally going to be a little pre-amble into a description of a nice, low-key square in Madrid has turned into more of a rant than I intended, for which I apologise, and I assure you I have more than my fair share of white elephant photographs. I like those buildings, a lot of the time I'm making my living from those buildings, and I do see the value to our culture of having more criteria than 'Can I eat it, make money from it or live in it?'.  Construction is one of the few areas left that, even with the widespread loss of traditional craftmanship, has a substantial niche for the bespoke.

The problem is that the building of ambitious construction projects in Spain with dodgy financing and even more questionable business plans has been identified as one of the major contributors to the current woes of the country.  One of my colleagues was telling me today about a huge €1.1bn airport in Ciudad Real that was operational for less than three years before going into receivership.  It's one of many examples that I hear about every day, when all the while I'm never far from the marching, shouting indignados on the street outside.  

On a lighter note, and what I was initially planning to write about, the point being that it's not all about the centre of the city, or the big buildings, but really it's all about shoes...

...some time ago now I found myself in the Plaza Dos de Mayo (2nd May Square: named for the same Madrid uprising in 1808 that gives us that day as a holiday here), which is a little way north of the centre of the city.  It seemed to be the heart of a great deal of family and community life - I don't know if it's the weather or just a cultural difference, but children seem to be far more involved in the city here than back in the UK.  Maybe it's something to do with our reservedness and need to have our own gardens, which we then keep our children in rather than letting them share city squares.

Anyway, it was around the time of the San Isidro (patron saint of Madrid) festival, and as I sat drinking coffee in a cafe in the shade the children were running around in traditional outfits, chulapas, that made them look disconcertingly like very small old people.  A number of them were mustachioed.  It seemed like they were having fun.

I was sitting in the square having come up to that part of town in search of a shoe shop I had found written about on the internet - they sell traditional Spanish alpargatas (you know, those rope wedges that occasionally find themselves in fashion) and have done for generations.  I needed to get some, but like a true tourist had fallen foul of the eccentric opening hours operated here.  Of course one should expect a shop to open at quarter to five 'for the afternoon'.  It's telling of the attitude toward time of a nation when they don't have separate words for afternoon and evening.

I bought some.  I had been distracted by the curious phenomenon of Bubble Tea (more on that another day, I'm sure) by the time the shop eventually opened, but a few minutes late I headed back and I found it full.  The proprietor seemed to have a short fuse, and was already at the end of it as a result of two apparently fairly thick English tourist girls so it wasn't quite the idyllic experience I'd been imagining.  Good shoes though.