Cloistered creativity

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1994 by Raymund Ryan

On a site in Spain where medieval penitents once made more spiritual journeys, Alvaro Siza has created an architectural promenade of elegant functionalism in this unashamedly Modern gallery for contemporary art.

Since the early Middle Ages, the Shrine of Saint James at Compostela has been the focus of pilgrimage from across western Europe. The landscapes of France and Spain are lined with hospices and high crosses marking the penitent's route to Santiago. Now, in this new Europe of the Regions, the Galician capital is implementing an ambitious plan of growth, preserving the mini-fortresses of its ecclesiastical core and (under the tutelage of its Mayor, architect Xerardo Estevez Fernandez, and J.P. Kleihues) substantially extending its periphery with contemporary usages. On the edge of the old town, Alvaro Siza has recently constructed the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art with in the redundant monastic property of San Domingos de Bonaval. The great achievement of Siza's project is to be both appropriately contemporary and unmistakably of its place. Siza has a stellar reputation as critical regionalist with a built oeuvre that combines abstract and international tropes with indigenous realities. At Compostela (field of stars), he heads a prestigious list of invitees, which includes Grassi, Hejduk and Viaplana Pinon, who are inserting twentieth-century architecture into a massive archaic fabric. His total project is the walled precinct of the monastery, the principal edifice of which is the independently realised Museum of the Galician People. At the time of writing, minimal interventions to the enclosed cemetery and gardens (portals, paved thresholds, geometric planting) are almost complete with a site on the farthest hill awaiting a second Siza design. His Centre of Contemporary Art is deliberately low, next to town, fortifying the boundary of San Domingos and a damaged side-street named after Ramon del Valle-Inclan, Galicia's most famous writer. The gallery nudges south to present its sculptural portal in a small plaza between town and monastery, heightening one's sense of arrival from urban density to semi-rural compound.

Siza starts with horizontal masses shifting beneath the signature elements (tower, gable, gateways) of the monastery, the new bulk subsuming itself geologically beneath the silhouette of the old. Two controlling axes are established alongside and rectifying rua Valle-Inclan and, at a 21 degree rotation, parallel to the linear walled cemetery piercing deep into the total site. This principal geometric system originates physically and metaphorically from the small stepped forecourt without being explicitly stated. The new architecture holds itself back in respect to the old and enjoys a kind of blunt sectional resolution. Excavating his stereometric form at the southern tip of Valle-Inclan, Siza creates a grand orthogonal canopy, open to town and monastery but sealed -- except for an iconic steel-supported strip -- to the plaza. Finally, the parti is set by rising up into the arrival porch so that one enters between an upper rooflit floor and a lower level eroded and swelling into a surprisingly expansive base.

This is an unashamedly Modern work. Growing from the broader monastic strategy and ameliorating an immediate context of urban route, place and edge, Siza's building is further engendered by a borrowed palette of granite and plaster. From within his portico, the building's flanks are almost unrelievedly of granite, bright but streaked and occasionally smeared. As the typical streets of Santiago are formed of contiguous stone slabs (kerbless, hollowed by wear, and in places diagonally set) so the gallery's outer envelope is wrapped, tautly but with exposed joints, in the same material (a lapidary Christo) with main expanses of glazing, as at the ramp from Valle-Inclan, recessed as subtractions from the primary form. At the triplicate entrance doors, such grey hardness switches to a luminous inner world of traditional white plaster and brilliant Greek marble. The exterior responds to the temperate climes of northwestern Spain -- sun and rain -- while the interior appropriates that light and directs it with minimalist artistry.

Siza's two blocks come together at the foyer but their meeting is screened or evaded by a segment of wall. As if to negate the weight above, energy is at both peripheries, to right and left, as panoramic windows towards the park and over the ramp onto the street advance into the volume spectacularly admitting east and west light. The former indentation overlooks a small skewed pool aligned with a chain of water features up through the terraced gardens, perpendicular to Valle-Inclan. The latter backs a serpentine desk of silver marble leading inwards where the intersection of Siza's axial systems is revealed in a triangular ceiling void with indirect zenithal illumination and rectangular upper openings. This is the inside flank of that block against the park, a block with an enfilade of permanent exhibition rooms above and temporary galleries below. A great vacant opening on to the pivotal triangular void punctures a parallel subsidiary spine of ramps and stairs connecting all levels. Into the crossover between these systems Siza locks his fluid movement pattern.