Conceived as a collective portrait of contemporary Spanish architecture, Gorod is indeed part of the Arch of Moscow program, which kicks off on May 25, and promises to lead its top 10 events. Of course, the question "why Spain?" Is pertinent, but it can be easily answered by anyone who follows international news at least to some extent. This year our countries are carrying out a cross-country landing of the landing of culture: Russia celebrates the Year of Spain, and Spain celebrates the Year of Russia.
The catchy title of the exhibition is actually more than self-explanatory. Firstly, the city as the main type of modern settlement - more than 70 percent of the Spanish population lives in megacities. Secondly, the city as a model of the exhibition space - models and tablets placed on glass podiums of different heights together form a real city in miniature, with its avenues, squares, wastelands on the outskirts and narrow alleys in the center. Well, and finally, thirdly, the outlines of the city created by the curators coincide with the geographical map of Spain. It is a kind of topographic model that reflects the topography of the country, including all the main mountain ranges and plateaus, peninsulas and islands. “The exposition should have presented architectural works located on our territory and created by our architects. I wanted to include here all types of projects, conditioned by the tasks solved in our architecture, and this naturally led me to the idea of building a whole city,”says the curator of the exhibition, professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM) Manuel Blanco.
However, the Moscow exhibition is by no means the first city in Blanco's curatorial career: at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, he did the exhibition “Spain [f.] City with a Woman's Face” (last year it was also shown in the Spain Pavilion at the Expo 2010 "). And if then the subject of research was the role of women in the art of architecture and the organization of the environment, now the focus is on the phenomenon of the modern city itself - as multifaceted and complex as the very social structure of Spain, with its inherent problems and specific proposals for their solution. These are local urban planning tasks (for example, to create multifunctional public spaces, such as the Vista Alegre Park in Santiago de Compostela by architect Cesar Portela and the Florida Arena roof ramp by Perez Arroyo), and complex urban development and transformation projects (the legendary code for the conservation of historic buildings in Barcelona, developed by Oriol Boigas), as well as, of course, issues related to the use of energy efficient technologies (Eco Boulevard by Ecosistema Urbano or the PO2 Studio Wind Farm Management Center, which the architects make completely invisible by hiding in mountain slope and adapting the latter for grazing).
It is also important that all the objects presented on this volumetric map are placed in exact accordance with their real location. This inevitably limited the curator in the presentation of the architecture of the most actively under construction regions of the country, but it made it possible to highlight the most striking new sights of each of them. And, frankly, when looking at how diverse the modern development of Spain is and how evenly it is at the same time distributed over the territory of the country, obscenely strong envy covers: if the curators did something similar about Russia, most of the "map" would have to be devoted to mobile team games or a children's drawing competition …
True, Manuel Blanco does not hide that the overwhelming majority of objects (and these are 80 complexes!) Were completed before the economic crisis: “The last decade, the results of which we are showing at the exhibition, was marked for Spain by the fact that architecture became its main heroine. The country deliberately relied on the implementation of the dreams and aspirations of society by means of architecture - both in the form of individual buildings and in the form of urban planning projects to restore important parts of historical centers and streamline scattered spaces on the outskirts."
Due to its scale and variety of projects presented, this exhibition is undoubtedly interesting to the widest range of visitors. Someone will come to the "stars" - Calatrava, Moneo, Bofilla, Pinos, FOA, Cloud9 and EMBT bureaus - and someone, on the contrary, will be attracted by objects that have just been completed and have not really been published anywhere. The “City Called Spain” is also very kaleidoscopic in terms of the typology of the selected objects: university buildings and residential buildings, industries, office complexes and state institutions, churches, museums and concert halls, social facilities and even cemeteries are presented here. Manuel Blanco deliberately strived for a variety of not only styles and architectural techniques, but also functions, because, in his opinion, this is what best shows that the high concepts of "environmental friendliness", "energy efficiency" and "social responsibility of an architect" are the essence of modern Spanish architecture, permeating all its spheres, without exception.
