Prizewinning Catalan Architects Are Happy at Biennale’s Margins

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/arts/design/catalan-pavilion-venice-architecture-biennale.html

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VENICE — The Pritzker Prize is considered architecture’s highest award. So it might come as a surprise that last year’s recipients, the three partners of RCR Arquitectes, presented their work at the Venice Architecture Biennale not as a centerpiece of the exhibition, but in an industrial space on its periphery.

The architectural partnership didn’t choose the venue. RCR was selected to create a pavilion for Catalonia, one of a handful of regions that take part in the Biennale’s “collateral events,” outside the official exhibition, which is limited to entries from nation states.

RCR’s three partners — Carme Pigem, Rafael Aranda and Ramon Vilalta — seem comfortable on the outskirts, however. Ever since they founded their firm in 1988, they have avoided building gravity-defying, eye-catching structures.

“Architecture shouldn’t be about doing difficult projects and iconic buildings but about creating spaces in which people can have their own experiences and develop their own creativity,” said Ms. Pigem in a joint interview with her partners in their studio in Olot, Spain, in April.

“We don’t like fireworks,” Mr. Aranda added. “We don’t want people to search for any seal of authorship, for whether the building is recognizable as a work of RCR or Frank Gehry,” who himself won the Pritzker in 1989.

RCR’s Catalan pavilion, called “Dream and Nature,” takes the visitor far away from Venice’s canals by evoking the woodlands, fields and volcanic hills of Catalonia. The pavilion presents images of 120 hectares of land in Catalonia that the three architects bought and have started to turn into what Mr. Aranda called “our legacy” — a farming property that they aim to make a place of study and reflection about architecture and how it interacts with nature and with other disciplines.

The pavilion plunges the visitor into a Catalan landscape, but the three architects explained that they did not ignore Venice in their design. Glass disks hang from the pavilion’s ceiling, on which text and images are projected. On some, part of the glass is curved so as to create a magnifying effect over key words.

The use of glass, they said, was a tribute to the glassblowing workmanship of Murano, one of the islands in the Venice lagoon. The pavilion’s shiny floor and bright lights pay homage to the Byzantine heritage of Venice, a city where “the sparkle has always been present,” Mr. Aranda said.

Last year, when the Catalan government selected RCR for its Venice pavilion, Santi Vila, who was then Catalonia’s regional culture minister, told reporters that RCR would be perfect ambassadors for Catalonia. He also defended the decision to select RCR without holding a public competition. “It makes sense that a firm with planetary recognition should be the one to showcase Catalan architecture,” he said at the time.

But since then, Catalonia has been at the heart of a Spanish territorial crisis, which reached boiling point last October when separatist lawmakers unsuccessfully defied Spain’s courts and government to unilaterally declare independence. In fact, the pavilion was inaugurated in late May without any Catalan politician being present, as Catalonia was then without its own government and under home rule from Madrid.

At some of the Biennale’s other pavilions, architects and curators questioned why the event continued to be structured around a concept of the nation state drawn from the colonial era. The pavilion of the Philippines, for instance, traced how its people’s identity had been misrepresented in international events since the 19th century.

At the Biennale, “there’s something inherently wrong about how the available space is used, if we are serious about moving away from the concept of powerful nation states and their colonies,” said Edson Cabalfin, a Filipino curator who teaches at the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati.

Still, RCR’s partners made clear they wanted to distance their architecture from the politics of Catalan secession. If anything, they said, their pavilion was conceived as a moment of escapism.

“The main challenge is to remember that the visitors of the Biennale get to see a lot of things and only have little time, so we wanted to create an environment in which they were made to disconnect from everything else,” said Ms. Pigem.

RCR’s buildings are purposefully understated, including their studio, located in a former bell factory on a back street of Olot, the hometown of all three architects. The three partners studied architecture together, forming a friendship that, for Ms. Pigem and Mr. Vilalta, turned into a marriage. After graduating, they followed a professor’s advice and turned down their first major contract proposal, because it involved a large-scale project.

During a joint interview, they repeatedly completed each other’s sentences. Their commonality extends as far as their finances, down to the idea that any lecture fee earned individually should always be shared among the three.

“It’s been important for our relationship that we always understood that if we wanted to do things in an interesting manner, we shouldn’t put money first,” said Ms. Pigem.

“We’re at the point where even if you’re taking a decision without all three of us being present, you feel accompanied and somehow know that your decision will be respected and trusted by the others,” added Mr. Aranda. “Of course there are many architects working in partnerships, but I think few do it to such extremes.”

Even with the additional fame brought by winning the Pritzker, the architects insist that they will neither scale up their work, nor loosen their connection with Olot.

“The Pritzker isn’t for us to be able to build more around the world, but to help us transmit our way of seeing the world,” said Mr. Aranda.

Identity is important to RCR’s partners, but mostly in terms of valuing the environment in which they work and live, in Olot. “We’re clearly from Catalonia and from Olot,” said Mr. Aranda. “The starting point is to know oneself, which means to have strong roots and know your place and the nature and people around you. Once you know that, you can travel the world and understand it.”

Valuing one’s roots, Mr. Vilalta argued, is not a narrow-minded form of nationalism, but instead gives a strong and positive sense of identity.

“If you look at a tree, you understand that having roots shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a downward force and something that shuts you off,” he added, “because it’s really about elevating ourselves as far as possible, just as the tree could never grow so tall without strong roots.”