I wrote a blog post on a plane again. This is happening a lot (the being on a
plane, more than the writing on planes). Outside the window what I assumed at
the time of writing to be the lower reaches of the Carpathians marched northward
toward the Bulgarian border as I crossed towards the Bosphorus and the eastern
terminus of the Orient Express… going to Istanbul. It’s a mighty range of mountains and a bleak
and forbidding landscape, even the valleys between baked dry with their rivers
nothing more than tracks of dust. I’ve
lost count of my recent plane journeys but I still love a good window
seat. I’m considering the purchase of a
travel atlas for easier landscape identification.
The journey merits inclusion in the blog because it’s not
just another holiday. The vagaries of
construction project workload in the current environment and a global employer has
seen me sent East in search of gainful employment. Turkey is busy and buzzing so we’re joining
in. I know little about what to expect,
but will endeavour to record some of it in as articulate a fashion as I can
muster.
As previously though, with a long flight and a laptop I have
a chance to fill you in on something interesting I’ve recently seen. It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally
in a position to share my thoughts on the Herzog and Meuron talking piece that
is the CaixaForum building, just off the Golden Mile of Art in Madrid.
The building is sponsored by, fittingly, the CaixaForum, the
charitable arm of a large Spanish bank, and was commissioned as a venue for
art, music and general stuff considered good for society’s soul. Entrance is free, and a visit worthwhile just
for a trip up the first staircase which takes you – like a spaceship’s entrance
ramp – up from the centre of the floating building’s undercroft through sci-fi
brushed aluminium into the belly of the beast.
The building began life as a fairly unremarkable masonry
construction, a municipal substation if I remember correctly. The Swiss architects, or probably more likely
some of their employees from the company’s office in Madrid, kept just the
upper levels of this façade to raise up the building mass and open up a
semi-subterranean plaza (which one might call an undercroft, if so inclined)
beneath, complete with water feature and the aforementioned entrance
experience.
Above, the older building is topped with the architects’
favourite material of the last decade: COR-TEN (or pre-rusted metal to mortal
men), which blends tonally with the brickwork as well as adding height and a
nice bit of texture. I like it. It’s uncompromisingly modern without being
shiny, and inventively turns an old bit of structure to a new purpose rather
than tearing it down to start again.
There’s some great detail about the architecture on the CaixaForum
website.
Once inside, vertical circulation is up through one of the
concrete cores that provide support and stability to the structure, and the
smoothly undulating, high spec exposed concrete makes it feel like the inside
of a sculpture.
I was there to take a look, eventually, at the Piranesi
exhibition. I had a vague idea of his
work, and knew it featured buildings and cityscapes but really no knowledge of
who, when or where he’d been. I
certainly didn’t realise how inspiring I’d find the images, how redolent they’d
be of a sense of place or have any sense of the level of their finely etched
detail.
A mostly frustrated architect in the 18th
century, Piranesi apparently took refuge in the imagined places of his
etchings, drawing heavily from studies of Classical constructions for
landscapes of ruins, surreal vistas and fictional cartography. The exhibition
showed a broad range of his work, grouped more or less chronologically, and
standouts for me were one small print of tiny people racing along in between
the outsized tombs of the Via Appia and a modern video adaptation of his
Imaginary Prisons etchings made 3D. The
video is available online, set to a Bach Cello Suite, and although one might
argue the ethics of wilful manipulation of another, long dead, it doesn’t
detract from the originals but draws you back to take a second look at the
images so vividly brought to life. I am
also conceiving a real appreciation for the humble cello, I think.
The sheer enormity of the imagined edifices calls to mind every time I've stood in awe of an ancient (and they are always ancient if they have this impact - I think it's the contrast of scales between the fine details and the building size), monstrously large building and felt so very small.The work was about creativity, but also just about
skill. It’s a quality of
representation that really makes itself apparent in the work.
Just in case you were paying attention in the first
paragraph: yes I was wrong about the mountains, but also sort of right. The internet tells me that the mountains in
that particular part of northern Greece are called the Rhodopes, which go up to
meet the Balkan mountain range that covers much of Bulgaria and a bit of
Serbia. The Balkan mountains in turn do
almost meet the lowest part of the arc of mountain ranges that form the
Carpathians, but they’re cut off by the Danube.
So… I was right about what direction I was looking but not much else. Like I say, must get that atlas. There seem to be mountains in all sorts of
unexpected places, as I intend to discuss at a later date…
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