Barcelona and Me: One Night Only in Shanghai

This post is part of my 'Speed-Dating Cities' series...
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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.

Source: here. Foxmachia.

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

Sources: here and here.

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: the above 4 photos from here.

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.

Sources: last 6 photos from here and here.

Urban-Trait-hunter: on the trail of Jorge Rodriguez Gerada

Ever feel like when you're dating someone, you've been here before... and that the only reason you're across the table from them is because you're after a particular trait? I feel like that with my harem of pretty cities sometimes.

"I'm sorry, it's not you, it's me. "

I'm just on this highly myopic hunt for.... the work of a particular architect, a shop (for a while, it was cities with a Muji store).... and tonight, it's the work of Jorge Rodriguez Gerada.

I had the rather good fortune of seeing Gerada's work while I was hunting down Parc de Diagonal Mar in Poblenou (after getting hideously lost in Eixample). I had my head half-buried in a rather tatty map, my hand mournfully clutching a woefully empty bottle of no-water, when suddenly... I ran into this strange, bespectacled woman peering somewhat gloomily out of a rather nondescript piece of urban "blah". And I almost missed it.

I walked on a little bit more before turning back, unable to figure out why I found it so attractive. I half hoped I wasn't turning into a gerontophile... but stranger things have happened.

Took ages to figure out who the artist was.

Love the way he uses scissor lifts, cherry pickers, knuckle booms to execute his work.

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Gerada's work is unsubtle - but that description is probably a bit of an obvious one given the scale at which he works. Yet his images are surprisingly fresh and charming in their "everyday" quality - billboards grabbing for attention, featuring (for one brief visual "sound"bite) an expression tied to the lay of the city, and the city of one person. The choice of material - charcoal - caught my attention more than anything. So often, people who dress a building with their art capitalise on the longevity of the medium, using vivid colours that cling tenaciously onto their hosts. But here, Gerada creates in the raspiness of charcoal, ash-like and ephemeral - a singe over render, mortar and concrete. For a minute, I resist an unfair comparison with Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". There is nothing apocalyptic here. Only a smudge in days on the years and decades of a city.

Gerada's official webpage is here.

Images shamelessly taken from here.

Gerada's email exchange with the folks at Wooster Collective (or one of the guest bloggers there).