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  Unveiling the Avant-Garde: New Prado Reveals Spain's Architectural Renaissance

Unveiling the Avant-Garde New Prado Reveals Spain's Architectural Renaissance

By Helene Zuber

Part 2: Spain's Avant-Garde in Demand Across the World

Valencia, a city located on the Mediterranean coast and traditionally best-known for the orange tree plantations and rice fields in its fertile hinterland, had already developed the mega-project of becoming a "city of arts and sciences" in the late 1980s. And architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava succeeded in completing his project last year, despite various changes in the regional government's political leadership.

Calatrava has placed four gargantuan buildings -- all of them a luminous white -- into an artificially dried-out riverbed near the sea. The now world-famous Valencian has used concrete-and-steel structures to give shape, like a sculptor, to visions inspired by nature. While still a young boy, he discovered his first role models in his hometown, whose neighborhoods were shaped by the great architects of modernism. Calatrava's opera house, the Palau de les Arts, resembles an extraterrestrial insect, with a shell that features ceramic splinters that shimmer in light reflected by large water basins.

Calatrava, 56, has not just given his home city a new cultural infrastructure in the form of a planetarium, a museum of natural sciences, an esplanade and a concert hall. His organic architecture, which assumes the legacy of the much-admired Catalan architect Gaudí, is so original that cities across North America and Europe are now competing to have a bridge, train station or airport designed by him.

The Basque region decided early in the 1990s to bring the Guggenheim Museum to Bilbao. The planners arranged an international competition to bring dignity to their run-down industrial city by means of an important architectural creation.

The push towards progressiveness was invigorated by the steel, stone and titanium gallery that Californian architect Frank Gehry placed by the banks of the Nervión River. Gehry has recently contributed another building to the Basque region in the form of the Marqués de Riscal luxury hotel and winery located above the village of Elciego. Slanted metal slabs in pink, silver and gold frame the beige sandstone like an oversized ribbon. "We can imagine no better advertisement for our overseas business," the owners note with satisfaction.

This year, the jury of the Mies van der Rohe Award discovered a worthy winner in Léon, northwest Spain. One of the coolest buildings in the entire European Union is located on the city's outskirts, surrounded by drab apartment blocks. The building is assembled from container-like elements, forming a façade of stacked glass rectangles, as colorful as a library of randomly assembled paperbacks.

A Paradise for Young Architects

This is Léon's Museum of Contemporary Art (MUSAC) and it was designed by Emilio Tuñón and Luis Mansilla, both 48, who worked together for many years in the office of their professor, Moneo. "We wanted to build a scenario for the future," says Tuñón. The architects seem to have succeeded in crafting a building that draws people into one of Europe's most thinly populated areas. Wedding couples already prefer to have their picture taken in front of the colorful museum than in front of the local cathedral.

But it was that very cathedral, a jewel of Spanish Gothic architecture, that served as the inspiration for Tuñón and Mansilla. They created a computer image of the cathedral's oldest window. The color tones are the same, but they are now arranged abstractly instead of figuratively. Tuñón, the theorist in the team, explains their idea: "The cathedral was the public space of the 13th century. In the 21st century, the window that was once looked at from inside has been turned around to face the outside world." City-dwellers like to spend their time in squares and MUSAC has created such a central space in the midst of an otherwise uninspiring commuter town.

Spain is a paradise for young architects. Extensively trained, even recent graduates can test their skills in a wide range of competitions and compete with recognized masters of the craft, including ones from abroad. In Spain, most innovative ideas can take shape in the form of a real building.

Enric Miralles and his wife Benedetta Tagliabue, for example, covered a deserted market square in Barcelona's historic city center with a colorful patchwork canopy, bestowing a new vital center to a neighborhood populated by elderly people and immigrants.

Meanwhile, in the new Prado Museum, the movement's godfather has shown his followers the way once more. Moneo's cuboid construction features a mysterious door: black bronze plates that resemble a thick curtain. Not even the king can enter the Prado through this entrance. The door, whose six wings change position five times a day, is a work of art in itself. The exhibition begins on the street.