Sleeping beauty

15 June 2007

Interviewed in 1971, James Gowan was caught in reflective mood about the engineering department that he and his former partner James Stirling had completed at Leicester University seven years earlier. “It is possible to support the argument, but only just, that each building should be a creative experiment in first principles, with examples such as Van Nelle, Maison de Verre and Fallingwater, each of which operates a particular vocabulary taken to an extreme limit rather like an engineer’s bench test to destruction,” he explained. “In a sense Leicester does this, the style is pushed to a technical breaking point leaving nothing more to investigate and, if one really accepted the implications of the [modernist] manifesto, a fresh language would have to be conjured up for the next building.” What a provocative observation this is. Can it really be that the fundamental quality shared by those buildings we acknowledge as the high points of architectural achievement is the sense of closure that they embody?

The word masterpiece is not one that I have used often in these pages, but it is an accolade that the ferry terminal at Yokohama surely deserves. When Foreign Office Architects’ submission beat a field of over 600 candidates in the 1995 competition for the project, it was obvious to all that this was a project that radically expanded the possibilities of architectural expression. That said, the design cannot be claimed to have emerged entirely out of the blue. Its language of folded surfaces owed a clear debt to recent developments in the work of Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, a practice for which FOA partners Alejandro Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi had both worked, and whose very name was referenced in FOA’s own. OMA’s Jussieu Library competition entry of 1992, for example, also played on the idea that a building might be conceived as one continuous folding plate. However, recognisable as its core motif was, Yokohama was marked by a fundamentally different sensibility. Where Jussieu proffered an episodic, almost picturesque, spatiality, FOA’s building was altogether more rigorous in its pursuit of a structural, material and programmatic economy. Extraordinary as its imagery was, the building still somehow convinced as a work of hard-headed functionalism: a mind-boggling but incontrovertible QED.

Dangerous pull

So convincing is the project, in fact, that it can surely be seen in terms of the James Gowan bench test. To be blunt: after Yokohama, what unexplored potential remains in an architecture of folded planes? Koolhaas, one suspects, realised this early on, soon abandoning the line of inquiry that had dominated his work in the early nineties. Others were slower to appreciate that the wind had changed. Countless students, not to mention such practices as Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Plot and UN Studio, continue to merrily plunder Yokohama’s imagery, invariably bypassing the methodology from which these forms emerged.

Given that the terminal has exerted such a dangerous pull on the imaginations of FOA’s contemporaries, one can only wonder at how hard it has been for the practice itself to shake its influence. Certainly, in the years since it designed the project, FOA has produced work that has restated its themes but lacked its plausibility. I am thinking particularly of the series of schemes, including the BBC auditorium in White City and the Azadi Cineplex in Tehran, that developed the folding idea vertically, generating elaborate sections that are baldly stated on the facades like a slice through Brighton rock. These projects appeared to lack the density of consideration that underpinned FOA’s debut work. Its image, one could not help thinking, had been found too quickly.

It is therefore a pleasure to report that in the La Rioja technology transfer centre the practice has completed a magnificent building — its best work since Yokohama. It is an achievement surely not unconnected with the fact that the building represents a considerable departure from the vocabulary with which the practice has long been associated.

La Rioja is the smallest of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities, and world-renowned for its wine production. However in recent years the area has sought to diversify its industrial base, particularly by capitalising on the decision of one of Spain’s largest internet service providers to establish its headquarters in the capital city of Logroño. FOA’s building, which contains a graduate school, a research facility and a suite of start-up units for web-based companies, has been created to cultivate this emerging economy.

The local government’s choice of such a high-profile architect reflected its recognition of the project’s capacity to reframe public perceptions of La Rioja. That awareness also informed the selection of a prominent site at the heart of a major urban expansion to the east of Logroño. Bordering the Iregua River, this land sits within a government-owned nursery where trees are grown for eventual planting in other parts of the city. The designated area was generous to the point that the building could have been sited as a solitaire, enjoying expansive grounds on all sides. Indeed, given its concern that the centre should assert a public presence, it was this configuration that the client initially envisaged being adopted, but FOA was reluctant to set up so classical a relationship between the building and its territory. Instead, it has placed the structure at the very south-west corner of the site, enabling much of the nursery to remain untouched.

The plan resembles one of those chalk lines that the police draw around murder victims. From a central trunk, limbs flail out in all directions, following a logic that is not immediately apparent. Closer inspection reveals that the configuration serves to address the open ground to the east while fixing a complex set of spaces against the adjacent site boundaries to the south and west. Significantly, both of these edges are formed by an embankment that rises a full 9m from the level of the nursery to that of the highway above. The loss of public presence that results from locating the building here is thus considerable. It would have been possible for FOA to mitigate this problem by building high, but its impulse has actually been the reverse. The lowest floor is jacked up above the highest recorded flood level, with car parking sited below, but above that datum, accommodation varies between just one and two storeys. In fact the upper roof level has been set to correspond to the top level of the embankment, effectively concealing the building from much of its surroundings.

Counterintuitive as this strategy may be, it unlocks one very significant dividend: at two points the structure locks into the embankment, allowing the public to appropriate its roof as a promenade. This route, which links the retail development west of the site and a park that is now being built to its south, remains open across the day, while at night a vast drawbridge is employed at either end, blocking access.

Cultural consciousness

Although the modelling of the roof surface is far less elaborate than that of the park at Yokohama, this gesture to the public realm is evidently the product of a similar motivation. Again, the building takes on the character of an artificial ground and, intriguingly, one again realised in steel and timber rather than a more obviously chthonic material such as concrete. Ultimately, it is the admission of public access to these territories — rather than the fabrication of iconic imagery — that enables the buildings to embed themselves in the cultural consciousness.

Indeed, much about the Logroño building is strikingly laconic. The presence of three functions within one structure is belied by a cross section that varies hardly at all from a corridor loaded to one side with cellular spaces. It is an arrangement that enables any of the departments to expand or contract as needs dictate, but clearly had the potential to instill spatial tedium. What saves it is the way the cranking plan breaks the extrusion into manageable stretches, interspersed by generous vertical circulation spaces at each crank.

While the building’s horizontal structure is expressed externally, all columns are sited slightly inboard of the edge of the plan, allowing for the creation of a taut skin of floor-to-ceiling glazing throughout. This has been realised in high-performance California glass, with manually operated blinds sited behind. The only punctuation of the skin is offered by the external glass door with which each room is provided. Even here the specification of a flush-closing and extraordinarily minimal door assembly ensures that the slick, quasi-Miesian character of the facades is maintained.

Artificial landscape

There is one further crucial component to the facade build-up: stretching all the way from the rooftop balustrades to a circular hollow section fixed just above the ground is a series of cables on which climbing plants have been established.

In time, the plants should completely engulf the building, rendering the reading of it as a piece of artificial landscape that much more compelling. The angle of the cables is far from consistent, and the arrangement becomes particularly elaborate where it has to negotiate the external ramps that track along the west elevation. The cranking in plan means that views through the cables are repeatedly overlaid in one’s field of vision, creating a crosshatch effect of fantastic complexity.

In this respect, the scheme recalls the investigations of elaborately layered facades that preoccupied the Smithsons in the 1970s, the unbuilt Lucas headquarters of 1975 being the most developed example. A further refinement has been introduced by planting different species along different lengths of the facade. We will have to wait a couple of years to see, but the building should eventually resemble a kind of patchwork mountain emerging out of the low planting of the nursery.

This is perhaps a building that marks a retreat from the quasi-scientific methodology from which the Yokohama design emerged. Certainly, it is far less obviously the product of a process of number crunching. The project remains, however, avowedly at odds with conventional notions of “signature architecture”. Refusing to provide any immediately apprehensible image, it nonetheless offers a fantastically captivating environment both for the building’s users and the wider public.

The fascination now lies with the question of what bearing this project will have on FOA’s future work. A number of recent projects such as the bamboo-clad social housing it has just completed in Madrid have also been concerned with incorporating organic matter into their architectural language. Indeed, partner Zaera Polo acknowledges he is keen to investigate La Rioja’s cable technology in future work. It is not hard to see the attraction: his practice has made another extraordinary building and one that it may take several years to digest.

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