Doors of Toledo

I visited Toledo yesterday, which is the old capital of Spain, and where there are just too many different shapes and sizes of doorways.

Also yesterday, when I got off the train (a short 30 minute ride) I realized that I have officially fallen in love with Spain. Somewhere between the toasts with everything imaginable on top and the potato pancake sandwiches, Spain caught hold of my heart. I’m looking forward to working here, really picking up the language, and getting a real Madrileña experience. My experience here feels like it has the possibility of a closed door, with me wondering what may be on the other side. I just have to open it!

One prism a day

So I started doing these drawings every day – minerals from a place deep in the earth, or instruments of great sensitivity and precision. This first series (these are 4 of 9 so far) I created with colored pencils. I only have a few colored pencils here with me in Spain – I will get more next week when I go back to NY for a bit. I like the limitations of using the same set of colors and abstract shape, and I’m excited to do one of these each day for a while.

It’s almost cliché to do “something a day” at this point, but it will be really positive for me to have the discipline and inspiration to make something beautiful every day. It will give me the opportunity to explore a few different mediums as well – watercolor and collage, in addition to colored pencils. I’m going to record the time of day that they are created in the title (a code). The series will be classified by different codes creating an ontology of these mythical objects.

I’m still debating whether I should start another blog, posting one each day. That seems excessive however. Maybe.

Cibeles and the Cathedral of Communications

On Saturday, I decided to explore the area of Madrid surrounding the Cibeles fountain.

Here she is, in all her glory.

The statue is not fully accessible because it’s at the center of one of the busiest roundabouts in Madrid, so the best spot to get a photo is from the bus stop on the southern side. The four corners surrounding the fountain is known as the Plaza de la Cibeles, which was mistakenly marked as “Plaza de Cibeles” for a while until the Spanish uproar about the purity of their language. Now the signs properly read “Plaza de la Cibeles”.

Cybele is the Goddess of Nature in Greek mythology, and her chariot is drawn by two male lions who have a mythology of their own… An infant girl, Atalanta, was abandoned by her father and left in a basket that floated down the river. The girl was taken in by wild bears who raised her as their own. As she grew older, she reluctantly went to the town to reunite with her father, who subsequently demanded that she marry. However, an oracle had once told Atalanta that she shouldn’t marry, because if she did she would be turned into an animal. Needless to say, she really didn’t want to get married. Since no one could run faster than her, she decided to require her potential suitor to beat her in a footrace in order to win her hand in marriage. One young man, Hippomenes, fell madly in love with her and decided to enlist the help of the Goddess Aphrodite to win the race. Aphrodite gave him three golden apples to drop on the track during the race. Atalanta couldn’t resist the gorgeous apples and, although she was winning the race, she would stop to eat each of the apples as he placed them down. Hippomenes won the race, and they married. It became a passionate and loving marriage, and Atalanta started to think that the oracle’s prophesy wouldn’t come true. However, one day the couple were out hunting and decided to stop and rest – and make love – in the temple of Zeus. Zeus saw their sacreligous deed and punished them by turning the lovers into lions on the spot. After some time, the Goddess Cybele came upon the lions, and feeling pity for them, hitched them to her chariot so they would always be together.

…The strangest thing about the statue, however, is that the two lions are male. Was it purely an aesthetic decison, or does this maybe give us some insight about the sculptor… ?

At Cybele’s feet is a man’s face – actually part man, part vegetable – spouting water. Oh, this guy was just Cybele’s grandson, Attis, who she fell in love with (not knowing that he was her grandson of course). He was in love with someone else so Cybele vowed to drive him mad. In frustration he fled to the mountains and castrated himself, and died from loss of blood. Cybele felt terrible and resurrected Attis as a pine tree, and he became the God of vegetation, in control of the death and rebirth of plant life. The sculptor Ventura Rodríguez created many pine cone details on the statue, as a reminder of this struggle and resurrection.

When Real Madrid wins a championship, this area is completely blocked off to traffic and the players and fans celebrate here. People used to be able to climb to the top of the statue but because of vandalism, no more. The fans of Atlético de Madrid actually celebrate at another fountain four blocks south of this one.

View of the fountain and La Gran Via from the observation deck

One building looms over the plaza more majestically than the rest. In the JUST recently completed centrocentro, which was converted from the early 20th century Cathedral of Communications into a cultural hub for the city, there are a wide variety of exhibitions from urban planning studies to 9/11 photography. The architecture studio Arquimática did an amazing job of renovating the building with an open, spacious update and maintaining it’s historical soul.

So, in 1905 they called it the Palace of Communications but it was actually just the city post office. Apparently the magnificent Renaissance architecture demanded more monumental naming.

One strategic note: if you want to go up to the observation deck, it’s necessary to get a ticket on the 2nd floor, and you can only go up at specific times. We had to wait 45 minutes to go up so the best strategy would be to buy the ticket, then walk through the exhibitions, and afterwards head to the 8th floor for your time on the deck. It’s worth it, btw.

Palacio de Comunicaciones de Madrid, 1920. Photo from this blog

And today.

A view of the funky glass elevators inside.

And lastly, from the architecture studio responsible for the renovation, this is their creative interpretation of the building tower and it’s surroundings.

La Torre. Exposición El Palacio de Cibeles. Arquimática

Play, Space and Place

I so thoroughly enjoy artwork that changes the way we view our cities. Similar to the artists I talked about in this previous post, Chris Martin and Arnaud LaPierre are two artists asking us to rethink our city experience. It’s not about focusing on or changing small details in our environment, but more of a feeling of who we are as city-dwellers and how we define ourselves in relation to our surroundings.

Chris Martin, “East River Williamsburg,” Brooklyn, 2005. Image via Eflux,
Courtesy Chris Martin, KOW BERLIN, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, Foto: Donna Alberico

With this installation Chris Martin used pop colors and unusual shapes to bring our attention to the comparison – artwork vs. skyline. We compare the colors and shapes of his work to the backdrop of the New York city skyline, and it offers the possibility of breaking from reality into a color-coded fantasy city. Yes please!

Arnaud LaPierre, “The Ring Installation”
on the Place Vendome in Paris
Images from MocoLoco

Arnaud LaPierre uses mirror cubes to emphasize the connection of people with their surroundings, and the results are this gorgeous funhouse in the middle of Paris. It transforms many Parisian’s everyday walk, and gives them a chance to ponder who they are in relation to their city. I really need to see this btw.

The installation plays with the concept of place. As James H Kunstler tells us in this entertaining TED talk, “Your ability to create places that are meaningful … depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms, and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.” LaPierre isn’t defining space, instead he’s distorting and fragmenting it, and placing us right in the center of the urban landscape, encouraging people to take a break from their usual routine and play with the sense of place.

The Houses of Malice

Walking around my neighborhood you see a lot of these signs that start with “Visita G. Manzana” and then a number:

Naturally I needed to figure this out. It turns out that the signs are the vestiges of a system created when Madrid first became the capital of Spain in the 16th century. King Felipe II, after finding that the city lacked adequate housing for all of the members of his entourage, passed a law that required residents with more than one level in their house to designate part of that space to members of the royal court. This law was called the Quartering Ordinance and it required inspections of each city block and subsequent numbering to make sure that residents were adhering to the law. If they didn’t have space for the members of the court, they were required to pay a tax.

Needless to say, Madrileños were not happy about this law. Many people began to build one-story houses. If they did have a second story, they designed the windows so that it was impossible to be able to tell how many stories the house had from the outside. These houses that were created to fool the king are nicknamed “casas a la malicia” (houses of malice) and some of them still exist in the city today.

In 1751, tax-collecting was so difficult because of the labyrinth of streets and confusion of houses, someone came up with the idea to number each city block. Thus, tiles were placed on the corner of each building. “Visita G” stands for Visita General de la Regalía de Aposento (Quartering Ordinance) and “Manzana” means city block.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that Madrid streets were properly named and signposted with the help of city historian Ramón de Mesonero Romanos. Before then, letters to residents would be something like “Sr. Rodrigo Corral, Street behind San José church, next to Leon brothers bakery”. Romanos and the mayor, Marqués Viudo de Pontejos, named over 240 streets with the names of important historical events and figures, identified with a plaque on every corner building. Also, each doorway was marked with numbers beginning closest to the Puerta del Sol with even numbers on the right and odd numbers on the left.

There are still 31 different designations for types of streets in Madrid, with nomenclature such as callejón, travesía, plazuela, ronda, paseo, pasadizo, corredera, cava, costanilla, glorieta, etc. So it might take me a little longer than I expected to get to know my way around.

Research credits to the awesome book Ocultos Madrid and this blog.

A couple process photos for Band of Love album

The artwork is an homage to the Japanese artist Sasakisan.

I love the idea of a mineral deep in the earth as a metaphor for the heart. I listened to the band’s music for a while and started looking at images of Sasakisan’s artwork – he’s a Japanese collage artist who works with 2-4 maximum images at a time so his work is very minimal, but so powerful and it conveys peace and transcendence.

These are sketches that I created using cut paper and a script typeface. The mineral that she’s holding in her hand is a metaphor for a peaceful offering from the heart. She’s offering her heart, however imperfect or awkward it may be.

Final album artwork for The Band of Love coming soon…

How cool is this building?

Caixaforum is an art gallery and cultural center in Madrid, that I passed by today while taking photos of our neighborhood. In 2008 the architects Herzog and de Meuron coverted an 1899 power station, literally lifted it off the ground to create a covered plaza underneath. The higher levels of the structure are sculpted to reflect the roofscape of the surrounding buildings.

Gorg.

I love how the narrow adjacent streets are framed by the low
ceiling and fountain area below.

A vertical garden compliments the plaza in the entrance area,
reminiscent of the botanical gardens just on the other side
of the Paseo del Prado

An image of the original 1899 power station from Arcspace

 When you’re standing in the covered plaza, the sensation of the amount of weight hanging over your head is unbelievable. The sides of the building literally appear to have no support. We didn’t go inside the building this time but there are usually exhibitions and programming curated to promote cultural understanding. Read more about the Caixa Foundation here.

Elena Asins: An architect’s dream artist

Yesterday I went to the Museo Reina Sofia here in Madrid, and in ten enormous rooms on the third floor was the exhibition of Elena Asin’s work: Fragmentos de la memoria. She was born in 1940 in Madrid, and is one of the first artists in Spain to use the computer to assist her work, and somewhere along the way she studied semiotics with Noam Chomsky at Columbia. The seemingly endless walls of lines and planes reminded me a little of Sol Lewitt – The search for perfect geometric abstraction, and an investigation of mathematical principles in art.

In the artist’s statement before you enter the exhibition, she explains that she doesn’t create with the purpose of making art – she just systematically works on the problems of space that preoccupy her mind. I could see an architect walking into any of these rooms and finding endless possibilities of angles, shapes and viewpoints.

She admired the work of Piet Mondrian and in an essay in 1969 she writes “For Mondrian this space-plane is a positive void, as it is an essential condition for objective existence. Creating the void is the main action and therein lies true creation, because this void is positive; it contains the germ of the absolutely new.”
The space in-between is the most important – reminds me of meditation. Her work is a life-long methodical meditation on the structure of the plane.

Images from the Museo Reina Sofia

The eternal search for beauty

We visited Iceland after my graduation in May, and the highlight of the trip for me was visiting this tiny museum on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The museum is dedicated to the artist Ásmundur Sveinsson (b.1893) with a complete retrospective of his lifetime of work, and displays his artistic development with volumes and volumes of sketches. When the process sketches were placed alongside the sculpture it was a comprehensive experience of his work.

His house, which he designed himself, was transformed into the museum. The house is a nod to his interest in the Bauhaus and is a sculpture in itself. Fun fact alert: a view from above shows the footprint of the house makes a smiley face.

Sveinsson’s most famous work is the Water Carrier, which is placed in downtown Reykjavik. He is considered a pioneer of sculpture in Iceland and much of his work was created for use in public space. Throughout his life he remained true to the belief that art should be created for the people, and therefore be among them.

In the sculpture garden outside the museum, I found this. Sveinsson created a form that uses its negative space so beautifully and fluidly that I had to move around to each angle to see how it framed the garden around his house.

From the curator’s text: “To Sveinsson the eternal search for the essence of the subject is one of the most important attributes of each artist… and to emphasize this point he often quoted the words of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin: ‘There is no such thing as beauty, only the search for beauty.’ But Sveinsson added – from his own heart – that the search itself knew no boundaries.”