Spain expands on its sense of place

When “On-Site: New Architecture in Spain” first appeared on the Museum of Modern Art’s calendar, it seemed unlikely to accomplish much more than anointing the latest national hotbed of architectural experimentation. Did we really need a big, expensive show mounted just to let us know that Spain is the new Holland, just as Holland was the new Japan a couple of years before that?

“On-Site,” which opened Sunday, certainly includes enough evidence of Spain’s architectural and cultural vitality three decades after the fall of the Franco regime to make packing up and moving to Barcelona, Valencia or Seville seem not just an attractive option, but also dreamily inspired. But it has a good deal more to offer than cheerleading or trend-spotting. Organized by Terence Riley, the longtime MoMA curator who is leaving next month to become director of the Miami Art Museum, “On-Site” is at its best a sophisticated essay on the idea of architectural middle ground, particularly between youth and experience and between globalization and regional context.

It uses Spain to make a timely larger argument that the most significant architecture of the coming decade, all over the world, will combine a cosmopolitan, Modernist-inspired sensibility -- and the advanced engineering that has made radical forms increasingly buildable -- with a renewed sense of place. It is precisely that combination that architects are flailingly trying to achieve in China, to pick one example, which has been flooded by foreign firms in the last two decades and where new skyscrapers tend to be crude parodies of traditional styles. It is also what Renzo Piano is struggling to do in his expansion for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art along Wilshire Boulevard.

Although “On-Site” includes designs by the globe-trotting architectural celebrities Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Herzog & De Meuron, Toyo Ito and Zaha Hadid, it features many more Spanish architects, a good number of them emerging talents -- Francisco Leiva Ivorra, anyone? -- who have yet to earn an international reputation. The work of Santiago Calatrava, the Valencia-born superstar who is now facing a rather harsh backlash in architectural circles, is completely and noticeably absent here.

Riley even manages to set up an effective, if mostly too subtle, interplay among Spain’s various regions, which are culturally diverse to the point of combativeness. One thematic example is what the critic Luis Fernandez Galiano, quoted in the show’s catalog but not in the show’s wall text, calls “the line between Madrid pragmatism and Catalan lyricism.” There is also the lingering influence of Moorish design and a Mediterranean legacy on the country’s eastern coastline.

In many countries -- Iraq and Serbia and Montenegro, most notably -- the fall of a totalitarian government has primarily meant an opportunity for old ethnic and religious enmities to catch fire again. Spain has not been immune to those problems since the arrival of democracy in 1977, as the bombing campaign by Basque separatists has made clear. But Spain’s regional rivalries have also provided the kind of cultural competition that pushes nations forward.

Perhaps most important of all, the show, which isn’t called “On-Site” for nothing, suggests that what a wine snob would call “terroir” ought to be palpable in architecture as well. Most of the 53 projects here contain some significant nod to history or regional context. (The 18 already completed are shown in large photomurals by Roland Halbe that are striking but offer only one view of each project, which is frustrating; models, some quite beautiful, and plans represent the 35 that are or soon will be under construction.) Quite a few use ornament that’s derived from some locally meaningful source. But they do so without resorting to irony, kitsch or nostalgia for some idyllic past.

Consider, along those lines, Herzog & De Meuron’s design for a center of flamenco music and dance in Jerez de le Frontera, in the southwest. The building, which will be finished in 2008, encloses an auditorium, museum and dance school within blocky forms covered in a screened facade whose delicate, lacy swirls are inspired by Arab and Gypsy ornament. If there is a single design that embodies the current direction of architectural thinking -- mixing vigorous form-making, advanced -- this is it.

Or consider an addition by the late Enric Miralles and his widow, Benedetta Tagliabue (whose Spanish firm EMBT was a finalist in the recent competition for the Orange County Great Park), to the Santa Caterina market in Barcelona. The project drapes an undulating, multicolored roof -- stitched together like an architectural quilt from more than 300,000 hexagonal tiles -- above an old neoclassical market building, giving an entire neighborhood new vitality without sacrificing a sense of scale or history.

Or an expansion by the Japanese firm Sanaa for the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern. The project, which encloses a 1989 gallery building inside a new rectangular shell of perforated, white-painted metal, suggests that Sanaa might have been the perfect firm to tackle the architectural dilemma at LACMA.

Or, finally, a group of four towers in Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the far north of Spain, by the rising Madrid firm Abalos & Herreros. The widely spaced 16-story towers, with their aloof stance and stripped-down, boxy forms, recall the skyscraper projects of Le Corbusier. But each tower is rotated slightly to take advantage of views and solar orientation. They are lined with solar panels and include other energy-efficient features. The result is a reminder that the green-architecture movement, whose basic priorities have to do with how a new building is positioned on a site to take advantage of sun, shade, wind patterns and views, is also helping to broaden the definition of contextual design.

Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which opened in 1997, is not included in the show, but it casts an unavoidable shadow as the building that brought architectural pilgrims to Spain for the first time in the modern era. Riley does show us plans for Gehry’s hotel for the Marques de Riscal winery in La Rioja, not far from Bilbao. But the curator clearly has another project in mind as the progenitor of the new Spanish sensibility he wants to capture: an extension of the town hall in Murcia, from 1998, by Rafael Moneo, who designed the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles. It is the only project in the show finished in the 1990s; everything else was completed after 2000 or is now being built.

It was the Murcia project, widely published and discussed in the late 1990s, that first suggested that Spain might emerge as the site not only of adventurous, photogenic projects by Gehry, Calatrava and others but also of a new kind of contemporary architecture that combined crisp forms with subtle connections to site and precedent.

The fact that the architectural pendulum is always swinging between those poles -- between buildings that could be anywhere and ones that could only occupy a given place -- is not exactly news. More than a century of architectural history, from the Arts and Crafts movement to the International Style and back to postmodernism, has traced that familiar path.

Riley has decided to stop obsessing, at least for one show, about those wild theoretical swings and focus in on one particular country -- exploring, with some depth, the ground beneath his feet.

That, in the end, is the show’s surprisingly effective plea: Stop the pendulum; we want to get off.