theory, for example quotations from Deleuze on Le Pli (The Fold). Some of his followers in turn introduced a pseudo- scientific badinage concerning strings and algorithmic transformations. Behind the smokescreen of pretentious theorising, Eisenman is in fact a formalist who raids sources and manipulates forms for their own sake, leaving aside the problem of content. For all the promotional chatter, the City of Culture in Galicia seems to have been inspired fairly directly by an example in the realm of land art: Grande Cretto in Gibellina, Sicily (1985-9) designed by Alberto Burri as a memorial to the earthquake of 1968. This takes the form of a solidified ‘map’ of the destroyed city made from concrete and rubble, with folding shapes, incised streets, and the striations of a distorted grid laid out across the landscape. Eleven years later Eisenman’s
Left_ Like its cardboard counterpart, the presentation model in timber has a more sympathetic subtlety, unifying context and proposal in a single material Above_The City of Culture during construction reveals the
fabric-folding of the model to be more ski-slope in real life
the old city then distorting it in a fractured geometry. The plan shape of the vast new ‘city’ was also traced to the shape of a shell, the emblem of Saint James and of the pilgrimage route. There was in turn an overlaid grid (a customary Eisenman device). The complex thus combined several geometrical systems and emerged as a sort of palimpsest, supposedly filtering the natural surroundings into the artificial world of the architecture. Eisenman’s project for Galicia summed up several years of research into fragmentation, striation, and interstitial space. Folds, of course, were very much in fashion at the time and Eisenman was forever sexing up his dossiers with a little French
project for the City of Culture is less than half constructed and the original budget of a little over 100 million euros has more than quadrupled; the programme has also continued to change, with talk now of a major centre of contemporary art. There is enough already built to get some idea of how things may look, and one section is even open to the public. The project promoted for its topographical sensitivity in fact required the complete decapitation of Monte Gaias and the removal of millions of cubic metres of soil. The ‘delicate folds’ of the competition model have translated into vast looping curves and surging roof surfaces that suggest the vulgarity of a railway in a funfair rather than abstractions of landscape. They are encrusted with a thin veneer of granite panels (imported from Brazil) of varying colour
The Architectural Review / October 2010 / View 033
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