Excess by the sea – Calatrava’s City

In a fairly spontaneous trip to the coast this weekend, I went to Valencia, hometown of Spain’s immensely famous engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava.  This icon of expressive building structure was what we all wanted to be when we were at uni – Calatrava was the paradigm of what we could achieve with our dual discipline studies: more than an architect with some fundamental engineering principles or an engineer with aesthetic sensibilities; rather a seamless combination of the two superficially conflicting disciplines.

Yet, all I’ve heard about in connection with the firm (it seems unfair to put all the blame on an individual, just as it is ludicrous to lavish all of the glory upon one) during my time in Spain has been spiralling prices, and unbuildable vanity projects.  It may well be a function of the crisis-hit country, but I’m unable to go back to the time before the economic crisis (which seems so very distant now, anyway) to check.

Here’s an example of some of the criticism that’s been levelled at the most recent Valencian show-pony, La Ciutat de les Art i les Ciencies (City of Arts and Sciences):

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/08/architect-santiago-calatrava-valencia

I try to think I went with an open mind (although I had seen this article beforehand), but I tend to agree.  As the tingly feeling of having stepped into a futuristic metropolis subsides, you’re left with a sense of overwhelming excess, and the realisation that the place is virtually empty.

Despite each building being a virtuoso structure in its own right, overall it’s just too much for even a massive building geek like me: the buildings, all of the signature Calatrava style but variations on a theme, like the laboratory cast-offs from the tinkerings of a deranged structural genius, compete with rather than complement one another.  The overall composition is undermined by its own homogeneity – white tiles, glass and concrete provide the only textures and the branching, treelike structural form is so overused it loses all of its style.

I did like the water.  The Ciutat is situated in the dried up bed of the River Turia, so it’s a nice touch to surround everything in water.  The downside, of course, is that is augments the sense of distance and isolation which is already excessive.  It also doesn’t help that most of the buildings appear to be closed most of the time, or that they are clearly suffering, somewhat prematurely, from the ravages of their coastal environment.

All of this said, I really like Valencia.  I’m generally a fan of not-the-capital-city sort of places, especially the ones that aren’t particularly trying to prove anything or be the edgy alternative to the capital.  The place felt comfortable, even despite the 80% humidity and the tendency for paths, roads and bike tracks to just suddenly stop as though the builders got distracted or ran out of money or both.

I hired a bike and explored.  I spent over an hour wandering around the Mercat Central on Saturday morning, and an hour sketching the vaulting in the Lonja (15^th century commercial exchange) on Sunday afternoon.  I meandered the streets, and watched the other tourists.  I did not understand any Valenciano.

Church in the Old Town

Mercat Central

My sketch

What the Lonja vaulting really looks like

The Barrio

I’ve not written a lot for a while, and this is largely because after more than a year I’ve settled into a normal rhythm of daily life.  I need to nudge myself on occasion to remember that I’m essentially a long-stay tourist, and should therefore be getting out there and making the most of it. I’ve been toying with writing about my neighbourhood, and day-to-day Madrid in general, for some time now, so here it is.

   

Unlike most guiris, I live well outside the city centre: although I hear English spoken at every step when I wander around near the office, along Gran Via or through Retiro, the community I live in is totally different.  I don’t think people particularly notice we’re foreigners, a lot of the time, because that’s just not what they expect to see out here.  It not’s glamorous, just a normal flat in a normal comunidad,  but we do have the very good fortune to have a swimming pool available to use  - no room for that in the city centre – and it’s easy to feel normal.

This evening my brother and I went running through the Aluche park, which was teeming with life – old ladies gathered on benches, people cycling the perimeter, and children playing in the dried-up concrete base of a long pond.  Just a few weeks ago this park was the scene of the local fiestas, which I was disappointed not to have time to get to – the equivalent, from the sound of it, of the village fair.  This is all in sharp contrast to the last time I ran that particular route on a damp evening in the spring, when a couple of hardy dog-walkers were all I had for company (see photos).

The comparison of the weather in Spain and back home, and people’s reaction to it, are two of the things that come up most often.  Us Brits take a perverse sort of pride in not even noticing the degree of drizzle that brings out a sea of umbrellas here.  That’s not to say that the park, transposed to the UK, would have been as lively on the soggy evening as it was today – on the contrary, back home we wouldn’t go to the park on a summer’s evening either, as much as anything because of the risk of a downpour any minute or because the benches are all still sodden from this morning’s showers.  Although in exchange you have to suffer the dust catching in your throat, and breathe air that's body temperature before getting anywhere near a body, the upshot is that these well-used parks in Madrid are well taken care of, and pretty nice places to be.

We don’t do communal, anyway.  As I discovered first-hand in Graz and Mostar, long before coming here, if I hadn’t quite grasped from my architecture studies, the continental European norm is to live in flats. There’s no sense that this might not be a preferable lifestyle, and no hint of the social difficulties that we’d tend to associate with areas of big flat blocks.  The thing that constantly astounds me is that you see people in the park with dogs the size of horses: I haven’t the faintest idea how these beasts can fit into the average flat.  Anyway, stacking everyone’s homes on top of one another then leaves space for big, open, green spaces in between the buildings: similar density of housing but without the city feeling crowded.  It’s generally agreed that this is a pretty sustainable model, and broadly what Le Corbusier was getting at in the mid-20^th century.

The British, on the other hand, are peculiar in insisting on having our own little house with its own little scrap of land that we can put a fence round, however pathetically small it may be.  That way, when the sun does shine we can fire up our own little barbecue and potter around tending our own little plants in our own 4 sqm, without having to look at any strangers whatsoever.  I’m not objecting to it, but quite the opposite: I’m a fully signed-up member of that club and have my own little patch, replete with tomato plants and a fair supply of weeds too.  I do miss it and it’s difficult to adjust.

I’m working on it. 

Bussing about Castilla y Leon part 1: Avila

This is my first post for some time.  I don’t wish to make excuses, but I have been rather busy.  Completing the tender design for my last project, with an issue date the week before Easter, has occupied most of both my time and my thoughts for almost all of 2013 to date.  Having finally delivered it, it felt like I was waking up and returning to normal just as the world outside began to emerge from its winter slumber.  It was time to get out of the city.

If you’re reading this, you probably saw the Facebook commentary. As if it were necessary, let me tell you more.   Since I originally wrote this two months ago, you’ve probably forgotten anyway.

After the deadline, Easter loomed, and my Spanish colleagues prepared to return to their respective pueblos to spend time with their families. I realised that this four-day weekend would be one of my best opportunities to explore the country outside the capital.  The last year has gone by at a frightening pace, with more time spent in airports than at leisure in Spain, and I now found myself suddenly at the halfway point of my assignment. With every available holiday dedicated to the wedding I am left with dwindling opportunities to make the most of my experience here. 

With this in mind, I didn’t let my lack of available travelling companions deter me, and got to work on finding a destination.  What with the aforementioned busyness, however, I didn’t start to plan until the week beforehand.  Despite having been to Spain over Easter and seen some of the Semana Santa celebrations before, I severely underestimated the importance of that week and the associated dearth of accommodation or transport.  The dream of a sun-kissed break to the beach down south was short-lived, so I settled on a quieter area right on Madrid’s doorstep: Castilla y Leon.

On the Thursday morning I stuffed a few things in a rucksack, bought a bus ticket and booked a night in an Avila hotel, and then set off with no clear plan of what the weekend held.  The big camera, guide book and my sketchbook made up most of my luggage.

Avila, or Steak Town, as I shall henceforth be calling it, is a beautiful walled medieval city.  There’s the odd ramshackle bit – the bus station is a touch post-apocalyptic and there are few places where I’ve seen so many ruined shells of buildings within the city – and I wonder if these are signs of suffering from la crisis or the wider migration away from this area.  I understand that many villages are slowly dying as their people abandon them, and certainly as I travelled further from Madrid I saw more and more empty buildings left for the elements to reclaim.

Going into the cathedral was a mixed experience, as although they’ve screened off the cloister with ugly perspex sheeting and replaced real candles with rather less evocative battery powered fakes, the timing of my visit meant that the nave was filled with the processional floats of Semana Santa.  These colourful renderings of Biblical personages are interesting displays of craftmanship, but leave me feeling either totally godless or at best extremely Protestant, as do the processions themselves.  I respect the solemnity but remain disappointingly unmoved.

What I did really appreciate was the speckled red apse built into the city’s fortifications…<look at pictures and describe further>. In a small museum off to one side, amongst the ecclesiastical finery and religious paraphernalia I came across several huge illustrated cantora.  These are essentially monk’s hymn books, with medieval written music, which given my recent reading (In the Name of the Rose – lots of detailed descriptions of monastic life and illustration) and singing in a choir (reading sheet music for the first time in years) were of particular interest.  I spent much longer than I might otherwise have done poring over minutely detailed flowers in the borders of the pages and trying to decipher the musical notation before skimming past the other displayed finery to continue round the city.

 

The other big-hitter of Avila (aside from face-sized, flavourful steaks washed down with very nice red wine) is the city walls, half of the perimeter of which can be accessed.  Where better to sit sketching for an hour in blustery springtime conditions than the most exposed position for miles around?  I duly climbed to the highest point I could find, one of the wall’s turrets slightly above the bustle of the bank holiday tourist crowds, and settled myself down.  It’s a good way to slow my pace when alone, although when finished I felt dazed and tired: as I finally paused all the fatigue of the preceding weeks washed over me.  I headed back to the hotel for a little rest.

Darkness fell, and the streets filled up.  Avila is well known for its Semana Santa processions, and the floats from the cathedral were brought out through the city streets by their hooded attendants, watched by large crowds in a scene repeated, with some variations in style, in cities and towns across Spain throughout the week.

The obvious next step the following morning was the next city to the West: Salamanca.