MADRID MUSEUM OF ARCHITECTURE
SPRING 2016
Beginning with a January trip to Spain to visit the site, this semester-long project used an existing corner in urban Madrid and asked students to design a Museum of Architecture on the site, with full freedom to demolish or maintain the current early 20th century building that is there. The catch was this: the site is immediately adjacent to the CaixaForum by Herzog & De Meuron, completed in 2007. The iconic cultural center needed to be reacted to in the student work, there was no way around it.
A few things about the CaixaForum came to me while studying it. First, its treatment of the existing building is truly unique; the lower third of the brick facades are removed to make the entire building appear to hover. Second, the structural gymnastics required to make this feat possible are fascinating upon further research; yet the architects took great pains to hide any sign of the engineering involved. Third, the CaixaForum is a Complete work; it is finished, polished, and on public display. Taking these observations as a whole, I found the building to be an intriguing, unnerving, and frustrating oddity in the urban landscape of Madrid.
I decided to use my project as a total critique of the neighboring CaixaForum - an uncontained backlash that my studio peers nicknamed the “FaixaCorum.” Where the CaixaForum took the legs out of its existing shell, I would keep mine grounded. Where it cloaked it’s inner workings behind polished cladding, I would hide nothing and clad nothing. Where it is a fully resolved jewel, carefully placed, mine would be a jumbled mess, open to changing forms on a whim.
I drew heavily from Art Lubetz’s five conditions of the Incomplete: fragmentary, unfinished, imperfect, impermanent, and open. I also drew on my experience as a child that found buildings under construction to be inherently more interesting than when they were done. I kept only the outermost walls of the original building intact, but utilized the existing windows and doors instead of filling them in. Early study models filled this hollow shell with a haphazard structure resembling scaffolding. Modules, built with cheap materials representing the museum galleries, auditorium, and other programmatic elements, slot into the scaffold, built to be re-arranged with a crane depending on the display. The ground plane is kept public and open to the columns, bracing, air systems, and vertical circulation, which are all on full display in all their crude glory. As I developed and detailed a steel structural system to accomplish this, my professor offered a golden kernel of advice: make it three times taller.
Where the CaixaForum is a reluctant landmark; squat and defensive, the FaixaCorum is a loud urban intrusion; tall and reaching for all it can.