Roadside Attractions: Architecture Expresses Hope in Bilbao and Malmo

Sometimes traveling to another city can transport you to another time.  A couple of works in Bilbao on the Bay of Biscay remind us how different the world was only a third of a century ago. When construction began on Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao Museum in 1991, democracy seemed to be expanding.  An attempted authoritarian Kremlin coup failed that year, and the Berlin Wall had fallen 2 years before. Midway through the the construction of the Guggenheim's free-form titanium curves, in May of 1994, the apartheid regime in South Africa gave way to the country's first democratically-elected president, Nelson Mandela.

Gehry's exuberant design expressed the optimism of the era, seeming to imply a future of limitless possibility. The vast amount spent on the building during its six years under construction seemed a kind of bet placed on a future of prosperity and peace, in which people would travel to see an art museum that was itself a work of art.  

Not far away, Santiago Calatrava's daring design for the Zubizuri Footbridge was completed in May 1997, a few months before the opening ceremony at the Bilbao Guggenheim.  The 75 meter span of the glass-tiled walking surface over the Nervion river, suspended from a tilted steel arch by a curtain of cables, formed a link between the Uribitarte left bank and a popular pedestrian area on the Campo de Volantin right bank. The name Zubizuri means "white bridge" in the Basque language, and like Gehry's Guggenheim, Calatrava's bridge instantly became a landmark and a symbol of the city.

Over time the glass tiles of the walking surface, never especially practical in a rainy climate, have been covered with a non-slip surface, but the graceful optimism of the Calatrava bridge, as some fans now call it, seems to land like a cheerful alien spacecraft in a world haunted by the fires and floods of climate change, and by seemingly endless wars... 

Around 24 hours of road travel in the northeasterly direction from Bilbao will land you in Malmo, Sweden, where you will find a 54-story apartment building, also designed by Santiago Calatrava, called the Turning Torso, completed in 2005...

The building can trace its origins to the shipbuilding past of Malmo, and to a marble sculpture Calatrava based on a twisting human form.  The head of the HSB housing cooperative was intrigued by the sculpture, and familiar with Calatrava's bridge designs. Meeting with Calatrava led to a exploration of the "turning torso" concept.

Up until 2002, the. tallest element in Malmo was a shipbuilding crane called the Kockum Crane. Upon its demolition, city planners were looking for a tall element that would serve as a landmark and also as a link to that blue-collar, shipbuilding past.  Calatrava's Turning Torso, with its 9 vertical segments of rotating pentagonal solids and its external steel framework, serves that symbolic function...

The top segment of Turning Torso is turned 90 degrees in a clockwise direction from the bottom segment.  The bottom two segments serve as office space, while the top seven segments provide 147 apartments.  The building won a Gold Emporis Skyscraper award in 2005, and in 2015 it won the 10 Year Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.  Like the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Zubizuri Bridge, it seems today a visitor from a happier time, when architecture, engineering and sculpture met in a zone beyond categories or labels, but with plenty of funding for construction...

*Photo Credits:  

All photos were graciously provided by Veronika Sprinkel, who has become our unofficial, and so far unpaid, European correspondent.

*Footnotes:  

The Guggenheim Bilbao was previously featured in our post from June 9, 2019, entitled "Roadside Attraction: Guggenheim Bilbao—Sketches of Spain Part 1".  

 

Roadside Attraction: The Salvador Dali Museum, with a '41 Cadillac in the Courtyard

During the 1960s, the mayor of Figueres, Salvador Dali's birthplace in Catalonia, asked if the artist would like to donate one of his works to the town's museum.  Dali instead suggested creating a new museum for dozens of pieces he would donate, inside the space of the town's municipal theater, which had been badly damaged by air raids during Spain's Civil War, with only its perimeter walls surviving.  Dali liked the location because it had housed the first-ever public exhibit of his work, long before the war. He also suggested including works by other Surrealists, and worked tirelessly on the design for the museum until it was finally open to the public in 1974. The exterior parapets of the radically reconfigured Teatro-Museo included a series of large sculptural eggs to complement an airy interpretation of a geodesic dome by architect Emilio Pérez.  Why eggs, you may be wondering.  Well, why not eggs?

Dali had enthusiastically adopted the automobile, and featured cars in his paintings as early as 1924. Cadillacs from the 40s would also figure in Dali paintings with titles like "Clothed Automobiles" and "Dressed Automobiles". They were paintings of 1941 Cadillacs that were, sure enough, wearing clothes.  It appears that General Motors never took up the challenge of using them in their advertising program, though.  It is not surprising, then, that Dali decided that a good focus for the museum courtyard would be provided by the Cadillac Series 62 that he'd gifted to his wife Gala...

And of course, it wasn't just any Cadillac Series 62, but a four-door convertible, one of around 400 built in the last year for that body style, 1941, two years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, in which Dali stayed neutral, and in which Pablo Picasso sided with the Republicans*.  The installation called "The Rainy Cadillac" was said to have been inspired by a piece called "Rainy Taxi" exhibited by Dali in Paris in 1938.  Like that piece, the courtyard Cadillac has two occupants, but here the chauffeur is not a shark, and there's some greenery to keep the driver and passenger company.  And a watering system to fog up the windows, because this is, after all, "The Rainy Cadillac."  

It's all in the "waking dream" spirit of Surrealism, and the Dali Museum in Figueres is said to be the most all-encompassing surrealist object made by the artist, as he spent time on every detail, including the sculptures in the courtyard windows reflected in the glass below...

Other than than being a 4-door convertible, the Dali Caddy was like others of its era, with a 346 cubic-inch L-head V8, independent front suspension and hydraulic brakes when Ford (and some English car makers) still favored mechanical ones. 1941 was the first year for the Hydramatic transmission option, with about 30 percent of Cadillacs equipped with it. But Gala's Caddy would not be entering the courtyard under its own power...

While it seems like the logical way to get this car into the courtyard would have been to drive it in before the outer enclosure was complete, the car was craned in, maybe because Salvador Dali liked theatrical touches, and after all, this had once been a theater building.

The boat which is now perched on a sculptural column in the courtyard also entered it by crane. Here it's seen making its grand entrance with that crowning dome in the background...

And though Gala's Caddy already had the standard hood ornament supplied by General Motors, Dali decided the car needed a more notable ornament.  The massive "Queen Esther" created by Austrian sculptor Ernst Fuchs seems an exercise in surrealist irony, a hood ornament so heavy that she would keep the vehicle from going anywhere...

But that was probably part of the artistic intent.  Once this museum and its signature courtyard were complete, Gala Dali would never need to ask the question, "Where is my large automobile?"  She would always know it had a safe place for its mechanical slumbers.   

Dali moved into the Teatro-Museo in 1984 after being injured in a fire at his house in nearby Pubol.  He died of heart failure at the Teatro-Museo in 1989, and is buried there, in what he considered the largest Surrealist object, and his most complete work.

*Footnote: Dali lived in France for the duration of the Spanish Civil War, from 1936-39, and went to the United States in 1940, returning to Catalonia in 1948.  

 *Photo Credits:  

All color photos were graciously provided by Veronika Sprinkel, a frequent commenter in early days of this blog.  

Monochrome photos of the Cadillac installation and the building under construction are from the Dali Museum at salvador-dali.org.  The monochrome exterior shot is from Wikimedia Commons.

Roadside Attraction: Lagomar Cave House in Lanzarote, Bought on an Impulse and Lost in a Card Game

If you ever travel to the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries and have an interest in architecture, you'll probably hear the name César Manrique.  He was born in Lanzarote in 1919, and after fighting in the Spanish Civil War and briefly pursuing architectural studies, established a career as a sculptor, artist and advocate for sustainable tourism.  He succeeded in obtaining a long-standing ban on high-rise hotels* on Lanzarote, and in outlining planning regulations aiming for visual harmony...  

And along with designing an art and culture center, numerous houses and the Timanfaya National Park visitor center, Manrique came up with the design concept for this cave house near the village of Nazaret for British developer Sam Benady, whose goal was to create a kind of show house that would spur orders for other (perhaps less ambitious) structures.  Local sculptor Jesus Soto designed and detailed the interior spaces, and Benady's team began construction on the site of a lava rock quarry in the early 1970s.  

A good-humored spirit comes along for the ride with formal invention, enhanced by individual sculptures placed around the garden, with sculptural curves of the white building forms around and above the pool, and visible high on the cliffs... 

The approach to the cave house, which is arranged around a garden and swimming pool, follows Manrique's dictum of using the existing rock formations as a guide to creating a kind of organic architecture.  Man-made structures inserted into the cliffs are painted white, as are the exterior walls of the volcanic island's more traditional houses. These white walls are in keeping with Manrique's color guidelines, which also restricted paint colors for wood trim on windows and doorways all over Lanzarote to a palette of bright green taken from fishing boats, dark brown, and along the seaside, bright blue...

Above, a tunnel leads to an entry carved into the cliffside.  Soto designed interior spaces with the aim of transporting inhabitants to a world of dream or fantasy.  As with the work of Antonio Gaudi*, an aura of mystery pervades its many levels. Below, a water tunnel leads to a stairway...

...one of several carved into the rock.  Handmade light fixtures of metal and blown glass accentuate the shapes of openings and walls.

Just how many levels there are is not readily visible, as not all areas are open to the public. The house is just under 530 square meters in area (that's 5,700 square feet), so there's plenty to explore beyond those closed spaces.  The pool and water tunnel are at the ground level, and a bedroom and game room are one level up, and a narrower set of steps ascends to enter the caves.  According to photographer Veronika Sprinkel*, "Overall the place ebbs and flows with the shape of the cave, so in many cases the idea of one level is a little subjective."

Soto's design for the interior spaces follows dictum of letting the rock formations generate the architecture.  

Even the rooms that are mostly enclosed by rock walls and ceilings have openings to stunning outdoor views...

The house passed through the hands of a few different owners after a famous actor bought it and then lost it in a card game, until in 1989 a married couple, Dominik von Boettinger and Beatriz van Hoff, both architects, bought Lagomar with the idea of renovating and opening it to the public. They added a restaurant that serves as a space for art exhibits and cultural gatherings, and opened the renovated cave house to the public in 1997.

We've finally arrived at the game room, with a card table that serves as a reminder to tell that story about the actor who lost this house in a card game.  You were probably beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get around to it...

Sometime in 1972, a Spanish film crew arrived in Lanzarote to film "L'Isla Misteriosa y el Capitan Nemo" with actor Omar Sharif in the title role of the Jules Verne story.  The film was fairly faithful to the original story, and was released in March 1973. The story involves shipwrecked sailors sheltering in a cave, and encountering Captain Nemo, sheltering in a watery grotto along with the Nautilus. During the filming, Omar Sharif happened upon Benady's cave house, then still under construction.  Enchanted by the idea as well as by the living space (and maybe under the influence of that film script), he decided on the spot to buy the place.  A couple of days after Sharif moved in, Sam Benady (seated to the right of Sharif below) challenged him to a bridge game, with the house as the center of the bet.  Sharif lost at bridge, and the house passed back to Benady.  What the actor did not know at the time was that he had lost to someone who'd won the European bridge championship.  Still, despite his brief ownership, the house is known today as the Casa Omar Sharif, or Lagomar.

*Photo Credits:  

All photos were graciously provided by Veronika Sprinkel, a frequent commenter in early days of this blog.  

*Footnotes:  

Antonio Gaudi's Casa Mila was featured in our post from June 26, 2019, entitled "Roadside Attraction: Gaudi's Casa Mila".  The one exception to the Manrique-sponsored prohibition of tall buildings on Lanzarote was the construction in 1974 of the Arrecife Gran Hotel, a 15-story exercise in routine modernism.  It's not clear why an exemption from the rule was granted, but the hotel is the exception that proves the wisdom of the rule... 

Roadside Attractions: Charles Sheeler's Cityscapes and Industrial Landscapes

"Church Street El", an oil on canvas from 1920, is an overhead view of Broadway and Wall Street, with the elevated train tracks and towering buildings dramatized by bright colors, sharply-defined shadows, and radically simplified shapes.  It's all about the dynamism of the Machine Age and seems to reflect a kind of optimism, though it was created by Charles Sheeler only two years after the most destructive war in history...

At first, you might think "City Interior", from 1935, is from a different artist.  Here, Sheeler depicts the deep space of the industrial heart of a city in careful detail, with machinery and ductwork casting heavy shadows that contrast with the bright wedge of sky above.  At first it could be mistaken for a photograph.  But Sheeler has used painterly skills to draw us into the train yard, emphasizing its size and power with the shadowed human figures receding into the distance...

Eight years before, an advertising firm had hired Charles Sheeler to photograph Ford's new River Rouge factories.  The integrated facility on 900 acres above the confluence of the River Rouge with the Detroit River had its own steel mill and electric power plant.  Featuring buildings designed by Albert Kahn, the Rouge complex was completed in 1928, the year after Sheeler photographed the criss-crossed conveyors above.  Few human figures appear in Sheeler's photos of River Rouge.  When they do, as in the photo of the giant stamping machine below, they seem overwhelmed by the vast scale and mass of the machines.

By the time Sheeler painted "American Landscape" in 1930, the 1929 Wall Street market crash was sending shock waves through the economy.  In "American Landscape", though, the composition seems serene and orderly, with only a tiny human figure running along the train tracks to remind us that people work here.  This approach is consistent with Sheeler's view that the giant industrial complexes were the Machine Age equivalent of cathedrals in the medieval era.

Sheeler painted "Classic Landscape", below, in 1931, as the Depression deepened and labor unrest spread among workers who still held jobs. The light-filled order of "Classic Landscape" shows us clearly organized geometry with no humans to create conflict.  The diagonal railroad tracks create movement, and underline a sense of power.  When Mexican artist Diego Rivera was commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts to paint 27 frescoes for its building the next year, he took quite another approach, with two murals showing workers at the River Rouge plant.

By the time Sheeler painted "Rolling Power" in 1939, strikes had exploded across the car industry, with walkouts and sitdown strikes affecting Ford, GM and Chrysler, and men from Ford's Service Dept. attacking labor organizers, including Walter Reuther, on a pedestrian overpass at River Rouge. Where Rivera's murals depicted the roots of human conflict in the era of mass production, Sheeler focused on the detached, impersonal mechanism of power itself.  Facing "Rolling Power", you realize it cannot be a photograph, because no functioning locomotive was ever this clean, and everything is in focus, even that puff of steam… Ford's River Rouge plant was the last major Detroit car maker to unionize, in 1941.

By the time Sheeler painted "Incantation" in 1946, critics had labeled his style Precisionism.  In this depiciton of an oil facility, the artist has distilled the forms and their shadows into a kind of essence, and the title seems to imply that these forms are, like cathedrals or pyramids, offered as some kind of tribute to a higher power.  And ominously, that they may have their own power, detached from, and beyond, the human realm.  These implications may resonate as we enter the era of artificial intelligence...

In the painting below from 1949, architectural forms and textures are superimposed and seen from several viewpoints, emphasizing how Sheeler used photography as a tool to advance his grasp of composition.

By "Continuity #2" in 1957, Sheeler was back on the industrial beat, assuming a low vantage point to depict the U.S. Steel blast furnaces in Pittsburgh, assembling the composition of light and shadow by reversing and superimposing photographic negatives to make studies before executing this version in tempera on board.  This painting dates from the era that steel and auto companies were at the pinnacle of industrial might in America.  As with our first example, "Church Street El", there's not a soul in sight.  There is an animating spirit here, but it's all in the geometry...

*Footnote:  For perspectives of  American landscapes and cityscapes by other artists, you may want to visit these posts on our site:

"Roadside Attraction:  John Register's Abandoned Diners and Sleepy Motels", Feb. 24, 2018.

"Roadside Attraction:  Night in the City by Wayne Jiang", Feb. 28, 2018.

"Roadside Attraction:  The American Gas Station as Visited by Hopper, Evans, Lange, Ruscha and Hitchcock", Nov. 9, 2019.

*Photo Credits:
Top:  De Young Museum website

2nd:  Worcester MA Art Museum

3rd:   Metropolitan Museum of Art

4th:   Boston Museum of Fine Art and Lane Collection

5th:   Museum of Modern Art, New York

6th:   The National Gallery, Washington DC 

7th:   The Philadelphia Museum of Art

8th:   The Brooklyn Museum

9th:   Artsy.net

10th:  Sotheby's 

Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 4: Willys Interlagos (Willys?) Reinvented, Sort of...

After a certain amount of rumor and anticipation about a project that was supposed to launch a revival of Italy's Carrozzeria Viotti just under a decade ago, the mystery was resolved when the wraps were taken off the car in a slickly-produced video, and at the Bologna Motor Show in 2014...

What appeared was a smoothly aerodynamic, mid-engined coupe dreamed up by Emanuele Bomboi, styling chief of the revived Viotti, and something called Fast Design.  A couple of engines were mooted by the makers, including a 3.8 liter twin-turbo flat six (apparently Porsche) and a Chevy LT-1 V8, but it's not clear if any cars beyond the prototype were built, and what powered them.  Despite the car's frontal similarity to the French Alpine A110 rally cars of the Sixties and Seventies, the name was a real surprise: Willys Interlagos AW380 Berlinetta...

"Tribute to a Legend", the video released by Viotti tells us.  This was likely confusing to a modern European audience, who may have never heard of a Willys Interlagos coupe, and may have lacked any recollection of the Willys* name at all, unlike an older generation who may have associated it with the Jeeps that helped win World War II.

But for some reason, the Viotti / Fast Design effort was named after a license-built version of the Alpine Renault A108, the model preceding the more famous A110 and offered from 1962-'66 by Willys in Brazil...

Like the Alpine A108, the Willys Interlagos, named after a race track, was a tidy little rear-engined coupe with Renault Dauphine-based drivetrain and fiberglass bodywork by Giovanni Michelotti.  Like the French A108, it was offered in coupe, convertible and 2+2 versions, though we've never seen examples of the 2+2.  

The steel backbone chassis was shared with the A108, along with double-wishbone front suspension, rack and pinion steering, and disc brakes front and rear.  The original engine offered was the 845cc Dauphine inline four making about 60 hp with Gordini aluminum head, sending power to swing-axle suspended rear wheels through a 4-speed transaxle.  Not the stuff of legends, perhaps, but a sweet little car... 

Sweet enough that Willys of Brazil sold 822 over a 4-year period. It never, however, established anything like the competition record of the more powerful French cousin that came after it, the Alpine Renault A110.  And it's unclear whether any specimens of the Willys Interlagos were sold in Europe during its production life.  So the decision by Viotti to hang the fate of their revival* project on a not-quite-classic car unfamiliar to Europeans seems an odd one.  

There may have been other problems with selecting that name.  Though Viotti had purchased the Willys "W" logo, Fiat Chrysler apparently had rights to the name, and felt confident enough that it reintroduced "Willys" in 2020 on special Jeep models. This practice continued after Stellantis took over in 2021.  And late in 2017, the Renault Group issued its long-rumored 21st century version of the legendary Alpine A110 that had won the French Rally Championship in 1968 and '69, the European Championship in '70, and the World Rally Championship in 1973.  The new mid-engined car is on the left below, with its over-achieving ancestor on the right.  The front-end styling of both cars is a clear sign that the Alpine A110 is really the "legend" that Viotti had in mind for their tribute all along.  They just didn't have rights to the Alpine name... 

*Footnote:  For a look at other Willys cars produced in Brazil, see "Willys Aero Saga: An Afterlife in Rio"  posted here on August 29, 2019.  A photo essay on the Alpine Renault A310 and its predecessor A110 appeared here on January 9, 2021, entitled "Forgotten Classic: Alpine Renault A310."  Before we knew this business of attempting to revive mostly (or completely) forgotten makes of car was going to be a trend, we posted an essay on the ATS revival.  Then it got to be a trend, and we did a numbered series.  Here are the makes, the titles and the dates:

ATS:  "Forgotten Classic Revival Show: ATS 2500 & 2500GTS", Nov. 11, 2018.

Connaught:   "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 1: The Connaught", March 31, 2021.

Spyker:   "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 2: The Spyker Saga", April 8, 2021.

Frazer Nash:  "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 3:  Frazer Nash, the 3rd Time Around", 

April 30, 2021.

*Photo Credits:
Top thru 4th from top:  Carrozzeria Viotti official video

5th:  Wikimedia

6th: pinterest.com

7th & 8th:  bringatrailer.com

9th:  Renault Group