Saturday, August 28, 2010

palacio longoria



as alligator pilasters cling on to the back entablature of this singular modernista specimen in Madrid,

other parts of the façade are ornamented with creamy swirls of sculptural adornment

and accentuated with intricate metalwork...

not quite as fantastical nor as muscularly portentous as Gaudi's creations, but more luscious wedding cake art nouveau - an all-out visual ambrosia to a fault...


Palacio Longoria
Calle de Fernando VI
Madrid 

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

casa de blas


this is a house inspired by a book of Luis Cernuda poems...
by an architect who is sublimely poetic with his play of light...
this is a house built for a professor of spanish literature...
for listening to the music of silence, the music of the soul...

I have carried an article about this house for years now, taking it with me to France, to Spain - where the house was built outside of Madrid for Francisco de Blas, the receptive literature professor...
The architect, Alberto Campo Baeza, is based in Madrid, and I was tempted to visit his firm to find out more about his work...but shyness overcame me...
Like the Casa Malaparte, it is another idiosyncratic house that I have fallen in love with, another isolated structure conceived on another impossible site with an elongated plinth or "cave" housing the living areas and the "stage" above on which to absorb the all-encompassing views, to while away time following the sun's daily path and of course, to be lulled by the musicality of the landscape - the lightness and openness of the glass pavilion an ethereal counterpoint to the solidness and practicality of the concrete box below...
This purist elegance of a basic geometric form pushing up from the arid mount, its lustrous glass wings lifting to the widening sky - a most elemental shelter and a most resonant temple for well-read, well-tuned earthy beings...

"La Quimera susurra hacia la luna
Y tan dulce es su voz que a la desolacion alivia."*

[line from "Desolacion de la Quimera" by Luis Cernuda]

*["The Chimera murmurs at the moon
And its voice is so sweet it eases its desolation."] 

Casa de Blas
oil and acrylic on canvas;
55 x 70 cm

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

l'arquitectura madrilena

a very small and haphazard selection of edifices snapped around Madrid, not including any of the many grand monumental buildings that frequently overwhelm our visual field...

basic live-work vernacular...

Escher-inspired tile motif...

the backside of the Palacio Longoria...

under renovations in the Chueca district...

demolished and awaiting something new...

Caixa Forum's oxidized lacy blocks...

 and the hot pink bedsheet spices up life in work-a-day Madrid...
[a prosaic view from the top of the Jean Nouvel expansion of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia]