This post is part of my 'Speed-Dating Cities' series...
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Oh Barcelona,
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Oh Barcelona,
you and I go way back - and I'm sorry I haven't called in a while. But our recent hook up in Shanghai was off the charts. We even made a little (or big, depending on which scale you're coming from) love child:
Miguelin, our 6.5 m breathing and blinking Geek Buck-Barcelona love child.
Picture source: here
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Benedetta Tagliabue, of EMBT in Barcelona, created this incredible woven crib for Miguelin - the Spanish Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010.
Central to the pavilion's design is the theme "From the City of Our Parents to the City of Our Children" - this pan-generational vision of stewardship for the city - which takes form as a sensual, worldly and womanly structure that almost caresses the surface of the site. That the design is able to successfully embrace the breadth of ideas explored below, without coming across as architectural white noise, is testament to the unyielding control Tagliabue exercises over the design and execution of the piece.
Visually, the most powerful part of the design is the tiger-skin cladding that celebrates the Chinese zodiac year of the "Tiger". The panels, made in Shandong province, are meticulously assembled on site, reinforcing Tagliabue's deft marriage of the Spanish wicker basketwork tradition with local Chinese skills. The nod to the host is further carried through in the assemblage with the black panels configured to read as "moon" and "sun", a hidden Chinese calligraphy over the surface of the structure.
Chinese calligraphy over the surface of the Spanish Pavilion
The fluid form of the structure was derived from the skirts of a flamenco dancer, executed so that a series of basket-courtyards are produced that embraces movement through the space (though in reality, an Expo in China probably required careful management of traffic through the space and would hardly be as free-flowing as the architecture tries to imply):
Light filtering through the weaves - known as "mimbre" in Spanish, the word conjuring an easy reference to membrane, one that allows in the outside, that wraps more than it encloses.
Source: here
Love the construction process - particularly the image of the traditional Chinese bamboo scaffolding against the structural steel of the pavilion:
Tagliabue with dignitaries at the pavilion.
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