Tag: contemporary architecture

Postcard from Bilbao, Spain: Art scarcely has a chance to shine

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Above: Detail of “Tall Tree and the Big Eye,” Anish Kapoor

Guggenheim Bilbao has turned 25. While 25 years is but a small blip on my age chart, I feared it might prove too long to wait to visit architect Frank Gehry‘s monumental project. People described it as a ship, a giant flower, a fish with shimmering titanium scales. Would it simply seem dated, as much contemporary architecture does after a decade?

My answer is no! It’s a massive, awe-inspiring, sculpture – its scale rendering it overwhelming both inside and out. The deconstructive shapes seem not unlike the Pablo Picasso sculptures of women featured in a major exhibition while we were there. Or Richard Serra’s curvilinear weathered-steel sculpture, “A Matter of Time,” drawing people inside like a giant human mousetrap.

Even spectacular, large-scale artworks encounter difficulties asserting themselves inside the soaring sensuous interior. This is a building one would pay to explore even if there were no art inside.

Maybe that should not be a conflict up for debate. So often architecture is dumbed down by budget, with function superseding inspirational design.

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Postcard from Zaragoza, Spain: Escalating focus on modern art

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Above: Escalators in the Pablo Serrano Instituto Aragones de Arte y Cultura Contemporaneous

Science and humanism must be an embrace and not a wall that separates reason and feeling.”

Pablo Serrano (1908-1985)

Born in Crivillen in Teruel, a province of Aragon Spain, Pablo Serrano must have felt his calling toward art at a young age. When he was 14 years old, he left home to begin eight years of study in sculpture in Barcelona. At age 22, he packed his bags and moved to Montevideo, Uruguay.

Despite his distance from Spain, the abstract sculptor’s influence rose as a major force in the Spanish avant-garde movement. Known as an expressionist, he interjected his subjective perspective in his work instead of feeling compelled to accurately replicate nature or his subjects. Serrano returned to Spain in 1957, continuing to exhibit internationally and often working on major public art commissions, including a sculpture of King Juan Carlos of Spain unfinished at the time of his death.

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Postcard from Bordeaux, France: Blending touches of modernity in with the old

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Above: The view from our bedroom window in our rental in Bordeaux

Mysterious mushrooms appeared popping up from the traditional tile rooftops surrounding our temporary headquarters in the midst of the historic center of Bordeaux. And tucked behind the residential building next door was a contemporary adaptation of space for brightening up offices – most likely for attorneys, as shingles on first floors all around us seemed to have as primary occupants.

As we explored, we found the mushrooms sprout up from a major ultra-modern addition behind the 1846 Palais de Justice fronting Place de Republique. Architect Joseph Adolphe Thiac (1800-1865) drew his inspiration for the impressive façade of the original structure from the Parthenon. Not visible from the square, the new construction does not intrude upon the classical majesty of Thiac’s design.

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