Jacob's ladder - office for Spanish shipping firm

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1995 by Penny McGuire

The dynamic focus of this office conversion for a shipping company in Barcelona is a gravity defying staircase, lightly suspended by a lattice of tensile wires from a new steed roof structure.

Alfredo Arribas' conversion of an old palace into offices for a shipping company marks a twist of focus in an explosive career. As the author of strange and original clubs and bars in Barcelona he has been one of the main contributors to the cult of the bares de diseno there. The phenomenon is explained variously, but however it is explained, it does have a bearing on how it is a young architect like Arribas has been able to hone his architecturally athletic skills to such an individual point.

Part of Barcelona's headiness is certainly due to the social habits of the Catalans. It is said that in this Catalan capital, you go out to see people; in Madrid you go out to meet them. There is also the Spanish tradition of apparently not sleeping. Arribas' work seems to reflect a restless energy palpable in the air.

But very particular social and economic conditions have played their part in his development and that of his contemporaries.

In his book, New Spanish Design, Guy Julier notes the discrepancy between disposable income and taste for the new that existed in the 1980s in Barcelona. On the one hand, there was a section of the population with a great deal of money, but with traditional inclinations. On the other, the post-Franco youth with little money and a great desire for innovation. The second group, he notes, could not commission innovative design, the first did not want to. The bars therefore carried out an important function. `By paying a bit more a drink, one could sit on a Transatlantic stool or a Carlos Riart chair without actually having to buy them.' Or, he could have added, experience the strange surrealism of one of Arribas' fun palaces.

In his foreword to Georg C. Bertsch's book on Arribas, Oscar Tusquets adduces the tradition of apprenticeship for Catalan architects who prefer to work in some admired architect's studio, and if the opportunity arises do a little work of their own, `however modest it may be: bars, boutiques or private interiors'. This describes Arribas' relatively short career. It has been one in which, for all these reasons, he has been able to refine the melting geometries to which he seems attached, and to explore similarly obsessive themes that recur in different guises -- the ship's stairway is one, the ellipse is another. The fluidity, as well as a feeling for surface and an ability to extemporise on the spirit of the place on which he is working, give his work a fantastic quality and make minimal connections with the fin de siecle in Barcelona.

In designing offices for the shipping company, Arribas has erupted through the centre of the palace with a fantastic hanging stairway while acknowledging the immediate Classical context and forging a new link with the surrounding city. The building, situated in the historic Barri Gotic, had a central courtyard under a glass roof and was somewhat dilapidated. The shell was kept and carefully restored, while the interior was demolished except for the first floor structure and the load-bearing walls. Organisation of the interior spaces responds to the pattern of the original walls. A gallery on each floor runs parallel to the front and contains private and executive spaces with general open offices being disposed around the central courtyard. A smaller gallery contains the various services, washrooms and lavatories.

But it is the luminous stairwell and strange Jacob's-ladder that is the focus of the scheme. The stairway is held within the form of a double ellipse and, counterweighted, is suspended from the cat's cradle of steel cabling which supports a new and extended glass roof. In meeting the ground, it rests on an illuminated floor. Its design has origins in earlier ones. The seed exist in the taut attenuated lines of stairways designed in 1986-87 for the Elisava School of Design and L'Hort de les Monges Restaurant, and in the surreal twists of another rising up from the vaults of the latter.

High above, the glass roof cut into the profile of the original now shelters a terrace from which you can see over Barcelona.