The Alhóndiga Bilbao complex is located on seven floors (including two underground), occupies 43,000 m2, took eight years to build and cost the municipality 75 million euros. Now Bilbao, famous for its collection of "iconic" architecture, has added to it the work of a man, without whom this collection would be - truly - incomplete.
Alhóndiga Bilbao is an old wine warehouse built by the architect Ricardo Bastida in 1906-1909 in the Art Nouveau style. In 1977, the firms located there moved to a new building, and the old building was abandoned. The city authorities from time to time tried to adapt it to a new function - in particular, they offered Frank Gehry to set up a museum of modern art there. In 1999, the building was recognized as a "landmark", and in the next year, 2000, the Mayor of Bilbao Iñaki Azkuna commissioned Philippe Starck to design a cultural and entertainment center for him.
Only the outer walls remain of the old wine warehouse building. Inside their perimeter, there are three brick “cubes”, each of which has a specific function. In one of them - a media library, in the other - gyms and swimming pools, in the third - premises for "additional activities": an auditorium, two cinema halls for 250 and 77 seats, an exhibition hall. The space between these blocks is a flat-roofed atrium with a solarium; in the atrium itself there are two restaurants and a cafe. The walls of the "cubes" are one floor higher than the roof of the atrium, which turns it into a kind of square, where two streets open - narrow passages between cubes.
The facades of these volumes, built into the walls of the old building, are remarkable - a bare steel frame, the cells of which are filled with brickwork with monotonous rows of arched openings in the spirit of the melancholic architecture of Aldo Rossi. In the 2000s, this looks like a strange anachronism, but let's not forget that Philippe Starck is a man from the 80s: his career began with the design in 1982 of the interior of the private residence of François Mitterrand, then President of France.
At the ground floor level of Alhóndiga Bilbao, the “cubes” are lifted off the ground, so that the space below them merges with the atrium, where they are propped up by 43 columns designed by the Italian stage designer Lorenzo Baraldi. The columns are striking in their variety - among them there are kitsch "samovars" that make you remember the drawings of Apollinarius Vasnetsov, and fluid forms created by a computer program that can be considered a parody of the style of Zaha Hadid and Greg Lynn. All this is a bit like the lower level of the Moscow shopping center Okhotny Ryad (with the difference that in Bilbao the columns are made of real brick and marble), but the Basques like it. Stark hung a large image of the Sun in the middle of his structure.
“I am proud of him,” says the designer himself, “because this is not a monument to the fame of the incredible designer Philippe Starck. It's just a place where people meet, love, hate, work, play, have fun, buy vegetables, kiss - something like that. It seems that Stark is completely unaware of what exactly he built.
