BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY
Essays
DAVID COHN
*
* North American Architect and Architecture Critic
The architectural culture of Spain in the last 20 years of boom and bust has been an important incubator for a paradigmatic shift of vision in the profession, a process in which the architecture of Iñaki Alday and Margarita Jover, with their firm aldayjover architecture and landscape, has played a pioneering role.
8
Ten years have passed since 2008, but the profession in Spain has yet to recover a normal level of activity, and many of its most talented members, including Alday and Jover among them, have found their best opportunities abroad. But the end of the period of plentitude has also been a time of reflection, investigation and the development of alternative strategies, During the boom years, interest in archi- especially for a new generation of architecture was mainly focused on the iconic, tects that has come of age just before and inventive formalism exemplified by Frank during the crisis. These new initiatives Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, opened in have explored issues of sustainability, 1997. But this creative euphoria was left environmental ecology, and a focus on in moral ruins by the crash of 2008 and immediate, local problems within a glothe revelations of overspending, mismabal understanding of the issues at stake, nagement and corruption on the part of as opposed to the media-hungry focus of many politicians involved in public buil- the icon builders. Architects have joined ding, exposing a culture of ostentation neighborhood activists in projects such as and excess in which the architecture of community gardens, alternative cultural the Guggenheim era was inexorably imspaces and participative planning efforts. plicated. In the wake of that disillusion, They have developed radical new approthe pursuit of formal novelty could no aches to the adaptive re-use of existing longer in itself sustain architecture in its buildings in response to principles of aspiration to address the public good, to sustainable practice. There have been work towards improving and humanizing exhibitions exploring alternative building everyday life – an aim, I would argue, systems and materials of traditional that has been the fundamental motivati- cultures from around the world. Others on of architectural innovation since the have developed methods incorporating origins of the Modern Movement in the Big Data into the design process, and the 18th century. global issues it can encompass.
Well before the crisis, however, aldayjover began its practice with what could deceptively be termied “landscape” projects, as in their Gállego Riverbank Recovery in the town of Zuera, in Aragón (19962001), but that in fact anticipate many of these concerns, and offer the first complete profile of the emerging paradigm that brings them together in a coherent, renewed vision of architecture and its role in culture and society. Their work is no longer strictly contained within the conceptual boundaries of the individual building or project as the principal object of design and study. Instead, their attention has shifted to a holistic overview of the habitat, of the environment and its mix of urban and natural features, as the true field of action for architecture and its ambitions. As a consequence, on the one hand, their buildings can be understood as almost equivalent to the role of street furniture in the design of an urban plaza. This is evident not only in the various pavilions of the Zaragoza Water Park, for example, which are subsidiary to the broader aims of the park design as a whole, but also in specifically architectural commissions, such as The Mill Cultural Center, in