Proposta para a Cidade da Cultura

Author: Luis Fernández-Galiano ("CODEX. A Cidade da Cultura")
Year: 2024 (Fundación Cidade da Cultura de Galicia)
Source type: article (short critical/promotional text)
Raw file: raw/articles/fernandez-galiano-2024-cidade-da-cultura.md

Summary

A short text on Peter Eisenman's winning competition design for the Cidade da Cultura de Galicia (Santiago de Compostela), accompanied by a biography of the architect. Fernández-Galiano describes how the design reconciles respecting an intact natural site with a unique imagery: laying out the buildings as an "artificial topography" on the hilltop, superimposing the ground plan of medieval Santiago on the ripples of the pilgrim's scallop shell, so the building seems carved from and melded into the terrain.

Key Claims

• Artistic reconciliation: the award-winning project "reconciles with great symbolic and artistic intelligence the conflicting requirements of respecting a miraculously intact environment and bringing forward a unique, charming imagery."
• Artificial topography: by laying out buildings "as an artificial topography on the top of the hill, and excavating it in such a way that it looks as if the hill were carved out, the architect buries the building without really doing so, and builds on the top without seemingly occupying it."
• Formal superimposition: an undulating landscape generated by superimposing "the ground plan of the medieval city of Santiago" onto "the striated ripples of the pilgrims' scallop shell," extending the street clefts as promenades toward the highway parking and the Cathedral skyline.
• Biographical frame: Eisenman as a member of the New York Five, founder of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and an internationally renown "modern deconstructivist" architect.

Connections

Concepts: Star Architecture · Iconic Architecture
Authors: Peter Eisenman · Luis Fernández-Galiano
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Changes are Coming (Belogolovsky & Eisenman) · Spain Halts Eisenman's City of Culture (Archiweb)

Direct Quotes

"[T]he architect buries the building without really doing so, and builds on the top without seemingly occupying it."

"[E]n Eisenman project reconciles with great symbolic and artistic intelligence the conflicting requirements of respecting a miraculously intact environment and bringing forward a unique, charming imagery."

"The result is an undulating landscape, generated by Eisenman superimposing the ground plan of the medieval city of Santiago on to the striated ripples of the pilgrims' scallop shell."

Open Questions

• Does the Cidade da Cultura's "unnatural nature" (Eisenman, in the Belogolovsky interview) here read as topographic reconciliation or as another spectacular object imposed on a "miraculously intact environment"?