Galicia, Spain
The ‘illusion of plans’: Eisenman’s landmark vision is a conjuring trick
William JR Curtis
www.cidadedacultura.org
Santiago de Compostela is one of those cities that feels as if it has all been carved out of a single material, in this case granite. The streets and squares, the monasteries and churches, whatever their historical period, contribute to an ensemble that is embedded in an ancient landscape. The terraces and stone walls of the countryside invade the town, while the plazas offer framed views over the surrounding hills. Santiago is of course the final destination on the pilgrimage route across France and northern Spain, and the cathedral marks the spot where the apostle Saint James is supposed to be buried. Over the centuries it has imported architectural models from elsewhere and blended them with its own distinctive vernacular and topography. The underlying geology seems to transcend time.
In the 1980s and 1990s
Santiago de Compostela underwent a rapid but intelligently planned modernisation under the leadership of the Socialist mayor of the time, Xerardo Estévez. Inspired by his former architectural mentor Oriol Bohigas, who transformed Barcelona in the pre-Olympic Games period, Estévez sought a balance between the
preservation of historic buildings and spaces, and the creation of a new cultural infrastructure. Several architectural competitions were organised to plan institutional buildings. The high point of this period was the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea (1989-94) by Álvaro Siza, which managed to stitch back the broken urban fabric to one side of the city. This immensely subtle work abstracted the historical context and the tilting terrain in its overall form, threading an architectural promenade through a floating superstructure of top-lit gallery spaces. The fractured convent garden to the rear was transformed into a public park of platforms and ramps providing views over the city. At the end of the 1990s it
was the conservatives of the local government under the presidency of Manuel Fraga (a remnant of Franco’s regime) who projected their vision of the future for Santiago in the form of a loosely defined City of Culture to stand on the top of Monte Gaias, roughly 3km from the hill crowned by the old city and its cathedral. This vast programme originally included a museum, a library, a centre of new technologies and (among other things) a concert hall. The reserved parcel of land extended
over 700,000m2 . Clearly under
the influence of the so-called Bilbao Effect, the supporters of this megalomaniac project organised an international competition and invited several members of the ‘star system’ to participate, including Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel and Peter Eisenman. In addition there were local architects of outstanding quality such as Manuel Gallego Jorreto, whose solution was in fact the best adapted to the site, the use, the symbolic function and the need to construct in several stages. But the client and some members of the jury felt that an ‘iconic’ building by an international star was what was needed, so they insisted on the sensationalist project by Peter Eisenman which, it was claimed by some, responded to the topography of the place. The competition project is preserved in a small cardboard model set into a cardboard landscape with a cardboard version of the old city to one side, and it is true that at this scale and in a unified material, the image of a folded artificial landscape sliced by crossing streets is fairly seductive. Eisenman’s presentation was accompanied by computer drawings which gave the impression that the project had been ‘generated’ by scanning the structure of
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