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.. to shape the landscape so that it resembled an erosion cleft cutting through the agricultural landscape (1958) and Sverre Fehn’s Norwegian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial (1962). In the south, shadows are sharp; they give the landscape contours. In the north the world is less clear. But the dialogue with nature and the past is the same. The city and the urbane can be seen as nature, and movement is the fulcrum. The Danish architecture theoretician Nils-Ole Lund suggests that it was possible to build on these modernist ideas in Barcelona because the architecturally quiet period under the Franco regime made Modernism seem like a liberating activity rather than a straight-jacket. The Spaniards were free of the idea that Modernism was guilty of tearing the city apart and of the descent of architecture into stereotypical repetition. 1 If the Catalans have owed anything to the Scandinavian modern direction that they call el organismo, they have repaid with interest. Artificial flowers The Igualada cemetery (Enric Miralles & Carme Pinos, 1985) lies in an industrial area with abandoned quarries and gravel pits. From the gateway made of three steel supports one is led past the chapel and the sacristy down into a burial chamber through a passage whose walls consist of stacked columbaria built into the slopes that lean alternately inward and outwards, broken by small passages that lead up into the light to a first floor. The floor of the burial chamber is concrete, surfaced with a smattering of small stones. Something that looks like driftwood in a river is pressed into the concrete. Sloping concrete slabs cover graves grouped in three quadrants. The walls that support the slopes of the gravel pit are of ashlar-stone held in place by rusty reinforcement netting bent over at the top. The wall is built up in layers as if there were sediments in the earth. Rosemary and fir grow between the stones. Mausolea are built into the walls with shutters of rusty cast iron. The architraves and lintels are large concrete beams. The association can be Eqyptian temples or Jørgen Utzon’s Roman houses, depending on one’s background. On the way one is met by apparently self-seeded poplar trees that cling to the earth to resist the current, if we stay with the river metaphor, or like the trees in Chinese cemeteries that must not be removed The same applies to vertical, triangular stones and lamps of rusty steel cut off slant-wise at the top. Everything is irregular or according to an Photos: Malene Hauxner apparently natural order. The materials bear witness to the passing of time. Steel rusts, trees fade, concrete crumbles and plants wither. This is a structure, not a building in a landscape built up around a flow of movement. An illustration that cultivation of the landscape can lead to architecture and landscape architecture, that building art can be enriched by an element of cultivation. Unused, the graves lie open, when occupied they are closed with a concrete slab, forming a background for artificial flowers and photographs of the deceased. A white, open book with a sketch of a cat signed MIS (Puss) bears witness that the creator, Enric Miralles is buried here. Miralles’ first instinct when he looked at the task of creating a cemetery in this wasteland was to shape the landscape so that it resembled an erosion cleft cutting through the agricultural landscape. By using diggers he was able to hollow out the landscape faster than by natural erosion. Tree crowns were to fill the gash and recreate the original level of the landscape. The whole cemetery would apparently disappear under the ground and form a kind of communal grave covered by a green grave-stone, from the basic idea of placing a cut like the trace of a path without disturbing the landscape. Miralles has taken the inspiration for the path that marks a movement from the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn. ‘A path comes into being out of the resolution to proceed from one place to another and this act determines its form….a series of scratches on paper which by drawing assume increasingly concrete forms and are gradually filled with memories, with back-references, with associations.’ 2 The cemetery is highly textural, which Kenneth Frampton emphasises as a part of the architectural direction ‘critical regionalism’. Miralles has learnt about this in the written lectures of the Danish architect Carl Petersen: ‘Textural effects’ and ‘Contrasts’, but also by studying Gunnar Asplunds and Sigurd Lewerentz’ Woodland Cemetery in Enskede. 3 Sporadic impact In the first years of the war many young architects went to the Mediterranean countries anonymously to study building and the cultivated landscape. Some travelled as far as Morocco, Mexico and China, others to Italy, Greece and Andalusia. Then the stream quietened for a time. In 1968 the students demanded power to the imagination. First American, apolitical hippies, then Neo-Marxists and Anarchists in France, Holland and Germany had a deep-rooted belief in the spontaneous, free life and wanted to return to nature, i.e. re-establish and recover the natural life in all its purity and authenticity. Postwar Modernism did not enter their imagination – on the contrary. They followed a language that like that of the poster-artist Aubrey Beardsley was informed by the psychedelic, Jugend and Art Nouveau styles. El Modernismo , the Catalonian national romanticism as it appeared in Antoni Gaudì’s exotic Parc Güell could be used. The bizarre, turgid forms, the intricate wrought-ironwork, the City park in Vejle (Preben Skaarup, 1991). Harbour Park on Islands Brygge in Copenhagen (Annelise Bramsnæs, 1994). carved natural stone, the coloured glass, the mosaics, the patterned tiles and exposed wood had a material expression that entered the language of the protests. 4 An early example of the new orientation in this direction in Denmark is Ayala Green Belt Park in Manila in the Philippines by architect Hans Peder Pedersen and landscape architect Peter Holst from the practice Box 25. A bridge over a lake divides the park into a formal and informal part with a waterfall of natural rock. From the period when there had been a garden centre on the site there were some large groups of trees and a curved avenue. The architects emphasised the tension between the two languages. Many years were to pass before this concept broke through and when it did it was in Barcelona. 5 The eyes and mind of Europe were open when Barcelona’s new City Council with mayor Pasqual Maragall in the lead and ETSAB’s head, architect Oriol Bohigas as leader of the newly established practice, Servei de Projectes Urbans, started a strong planning initiative which had far-reaching effects. The planning can be seen as the result of a board game, that signals a haphazard natural order. As the architect Rafael Moneo expressed it in connection with the exhibition ‘Architecture for Barcelona’ in 1978, ‘place your bets, place your bets’. 6 At the end of the 1980’s and the beginning of the 1990’s the concept was given visual expression from Lyon to Copenhagen, when park planning was seen as a result of sporadic impact instead of being characterised by Modernism’s green bands and wedges, and in detail in the form of sloping slabs and tilted surfaces, glass roofs and perforated steel, and edges and spheres of white-painted concrete. The city park in Vejle (Preben Skaarup, 1991) and the Harbour Park on Islands Brygge in Copenhagen (Annelise Bramsnæs, 1994) are some of the successful examples. Barcelona has powerful landscape characteristics: mountain chains and rivers towards north, west and east; sea, coast, harbours and beaches towards the south. Villages and Roman ruins are spun into the regular street network in Ildefonso Cerdà’s Ensanche quarter from 1859 and the whole is intersected by boulevards and avenues. In Gracia, one of the villages Ensanche had swallowed up, Gabriel Mora and Jaume Bach had the task of refurbishing the squares Rius y Taulet, Diamant, Virreina, Trilla, Raspall, Nord unificaciò, Rovira and Sol. The cars were removed or moved to underground car parks. The squares were furnished with groves and rows of trees. They were given new surfacing, lighting and benches. Plaça del Sol (1980) particularly attracted the attention of a Danish public. The new horizontal floor adjusted to the original sloping terrain with three steps; the rectangular granite paving stones in different sizes and nuances of grey, divided by bands with rougher surfaces; the light mountings on high masts; magnolia and plane trees planted in rows, and the characteristic long, two-sided benches with perforated backs were admired. The closure of harbours, meat markets, factories, workshops, railway sidings and gravel pits made space available so that parks and squares could be created with a special character. The aim was to give the urban landscape its dignity back and the strategy was to identify and articulate some special places. Often there were harbour areas whose function had changed and contaminated land left by industry after it Parc de Joan Mirò (Arriola, Quintana et al., 1981). 20 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 21 Photo: Frank Meyer Plaça del Sol (Gabriel Mora and Jaume Bach, 1980). Photo: Harry Harsema
The aim was to give the urban landscape its dignity back and the strategy was to identify and articulate some special places Parc del Clot (Freixes & Miranda, 1982). moved to the suburbs in the 1960’s. According to the board game method the many regeneration projects need not necessarily hang together, but could be contrasted. Council politicians, officers, architects and landscape-architects flocked to Parc de Joan Mirò on a site which had been a slaughterhouse (Arriola, Quintana et al., 1981) to Parc del Clot, where there had been a station, sidings and rail tracks (Freixes & Miranda, 1982) and to Parc de la Creueta del Coll in an old quarry on the wooded Tibidabo mountain (Bohigas et al., 1987). Art and nature In these parks a special language could be studied that spoke of contrasts between the straight and the curved, the worked and unworked, the clear and the opaque, the informative and the inspirational, the urban and the rural, on the difference between culture and nature. New components that both activated and provided for rest, decorated and told stories had arrived. Lakes with rowing boats, grassy slopes with jogging tracks, swimming and paddling pools with fountains and waterfalls, old-fashioned slatted park benches and modern long benches; foot-bridges, amphitheatrical steps, pergolas and glass half-roofs, white concrete spheres and light towers, sculptures and bollards, column-shaped cypresses;plane, fir and palm groves planted systematically and hedges and tress in rows in decreasing lengths. The Photo: Harry Harsema geometry was angled and curved, the directions diagonal and right-angled. The compositions were asymmetrical and layered, the tone often humorous. In Villa Cecilia’s garden (Torres Tur & Lapeña, 1981), role-play between the artificial and the natural was introduced. The correspondence between art and nature manifested itself in hedges with bold sweeping contours, stylised, broken terrain curves, benches with wheels like skateboards and lamps that resembled flower petals blowing in the wind. Elias Torres Tur, one of the architects, had studied with Charles Moore, who in his turn had worked on landscape architect Lawrence Halprins Lovejoy’s fountain in Portland, Oregon, created precisely in this dramatic language that plays with art and nature. Whilst squares in the inner city followed a contextual language, Plaça dels Països Catalans, the station square at Barcelona Sants, was different (Helio Piñón and Albert Viaplana 1982 with Enric Miralles as co-worker). In the plan its outline is drawn as a triangle with a horizontal base line and convex and concave sides. The floor of pink rectangular granite slabs forms a convex curve, highest in the centre. The components are a quadratic, gently sloping perforated steel roof supported by 16 tall thin poles each resting on a small ‘pillow’. The square is furnished with an s-shaped metal roof with thin, round, shorter poles, seven benches that resemble steps with a riser and two bases, a short and a long, so one can lie down and sit up; a metal espalier, a 25 meter long black-polished s-shaped basalt granite bench, slanting metal bollards with lights, steel spheres, pots with twining plants, paper baskets, a slanting box with spotlights and round metal tubes with water spouts. All steel elements are painted steel grey. The syntax is s-shaped curves, straight and slanting lines. At the end of the 1980’s it was thought that the source had dried up after an over-consumption that was close to abuse – but a new, pure Modernism and a gardening and production aesthetic broke through in the 1990’s as in Parc de la Trinitat (Battle & Roig, 1989) at the motorway junction between Trinitat Vella and Sant Andreu, where the motorway, railway and electric pylons from France are merged with the aid of olive groves and fruit plantations, screens of cypresses and poplar that continue out into the landscape independent of the geometry of the roads. The change from the mixed style, that contained grid and meandering lines to ‘barcodes’ and sweeping curves have entered the field and a re-discovery of a modern language that values human production. Folded surfaces In an article in the journal ‘Science’ (1967), the Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot asked ‘How long is the British Coast?’, wellknowing that the coast has no well-defined length. The more small bays and inlets one includes, the longer it gets. He expressed this condition mathematically by introducing the concept of fractal dimensions, involving organisation into systems consisting of small patterns that repeat themselves, for example a bend in a bend in a bend. Mandelsbrot’s idea was that objects such as coasts did not conform to ordinary geometry. They are neither lines, which are one-dimensional, or surfaces which are two-dimensional. They can be in-between. The coast is almost a flat, whole surface and therefore has a dimension closer to two. A line that meanders whether Villa Cecilia’s garden (Torres Tur & Lapeña, 1981). Plaça dels Països Catalans (Helio Piñón and Albert Viaplana 1982 with Enric Miralles as co-worker). 22 ’SCAPE 1 / 2006 1 / 2006 ’SCAPE 23 Photo: Harry Harsema Photos: Malene Hauxner
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Page 4 and 5: ’scape 1/ 2006 16 Avant-garde Mod
Page 6 and 7: news The launch of the European yea
Page 8 and 9: news Peter Walker: ‘The Twin Towe
Page 10 and 11: Hot spots Barcelona, Beijing, Shang
Page 14 and 15: Jardin Botànic (Bet Figueras, Carl
Page 16 and 17: Area for three Roman ovens, Vilassa
Page 18 and 19: Park Piedra Tosca. Lagoon of Harnes
Page 20 and 21: Labourers at work on the outdoor ar
Page 22: and large numbers of very big trees

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