Pears To Apples. In other words, talking about sociology when it is about architecture.
Held at the Roca Barcelona Gallery on December 12th, 2013. ” A speech for Grup Idea ” by Jaume Prat Ortells in ARQUITECTURA ENTRE OTRAS SOLUCIONES blog:
GrupIdea regularly organizes meetings for an audience of various sectors named Idea PikaPika, animated by speeches to exchange point of views. I was invited at the last December edition. I had no idea what I had to say, so I proposed a generic title. Following a discussion with Miquel Àngel Julià, I prepared a speech to learn interesting things to novice.
The speech was prepared during a walk that began from the COAC to Roca Gallery Barcelona, where the event was celebrated, through the Paseo de Gràcia, Diagonal and Joan Güell Street. During the walk, i took more than 600 photos and drew conclusions to become this presentation.
The first conclusion was the walk was disrupted. Nobody takes this walk because it is too long, tortuous and most important, because the route did not have the conditions for a walk. The Jordi Hereu´s mistake (mayor of barcelona 2006-2011) to call the referendum of Diagonal made that the project stopped until now. The result is that more than half of the shops on the section of Diagonal visited were empty or for rent.
From here, the speech changes: on one side, the empirical verification that exists, in all the urban buildings, a parallel to the ground on the four or five meters of height which separates and defines its base. The bottom section of the building is not considered like architecture, except the shops, always separated from the building part. Because the upper section is the section we look when we look buildings.
The own rules for the various store typologies and connections to the city have not been properly. This speech is a first approach, an observation not a synthesis.
The second part of the speech is about the city of Barcelona and its current state: the Paseo de Gràcia section sidewalks or various sections of Diagonal, the connections separating these sections (especially the El Corte Ingles building and the consequences of its implementation) and finally a building like Roca Gallery Barcelona and its architecture-function relation are more fragile than you think. The building is a non-transparent translucent box surrounded by larger scale neighbors, which works with surroundings contaminated by redundant and clumsy signage that dirters and degrades the building. But is the unique way to get the building of the company Roca and not for another company: the volume is elegant, harmonious, constructed with cleanliness and aspirational.
The video was edited by GrupIdea, who made the presentation and emended some urban mistakes. The final result was authorized by Jaume Prat Ortells.
