Does Art have a purpose in Architecture? 2018

We might believe in allowing the planet to have a voice and wish to show it through our architecture, so we would have a philosophical desire to express both the planet’s permanence and the ephemeral, fragile nature of our information age.

Thus we begin to extract an artistic essence from the contemporary view of the tree — in this case symbolic. But glass can also be very strong in tension, in the form of woven glass fibres. Here fragility is less apparent, and we would need to seek another essence of the tree to present in our glass support. We could look at bamboo, enormously flexible with its high tensile performance, and dynamically stable in strong winds. We have all seen bamboo scaffolding. Does this suggest that an assembly of bamboo supports makes an allusion to the tree? Or do we extract the essence of the fibrous arrangement in a bamboo stem? And what about the nodes, the regularly spaced fibrous discs that hold the longitudinal fibres of the stem together. How far do we go with glass (or carbon) fibre in replicating the visual appearance of bamboo? Such thinking and investigation take us to the essence of the art of architecture in our model.

A more literal concept of the ‘art’ informing the design than the preceding investigation of a glass support is our work for the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, completed in 1990.

In 1989 we were commissioned to help transform and modernise a massive Napoleonic prison hospital building to create the new Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art. Our response was in the form of three 35m high glass satellite towers to enable vertical circulation between floors.

I was given a private view of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in the Prado annexe. It was hoped that this icon of 20th century art would be transferred to the new museum, establishing 1937 as the starting point of its modern art collection. It is a paradox that, in addressing modernity and notions of progress and liberty, the terror and barbarism expressed in Picasso’s painting and the prison hospital of war should be the context we were about to transform.

The painting became the primary inspiration for the design of the towers. I saw ‘planes’ of black, white and greys and these, together with the hair/hand holding the lamp of hope and freedom, became guiding principles for the design.

All windows of the 18^th C building had close set vertical bars. The idea of metaphorically pulling them apart to suggest ‘freedom’ and let in light gave rise to the circular stainless steel rod suspension system, and the hand/lamp informed the design of the clamp supports holding the glass sheets.

The design was a hierarchical composition from large to small scale of vertical and horizontal ‘planes’  in steel, stainless steel and glass. The proportions of the glass panes reflected those of the existing windows but rotated through 90 degrees – and this horizontal proportion together with the absence of any structure in the corners of the glass enclosure gave the design an extraordinary lightness, transparency and a new perception of the building.