El Ciego - Color, Earth, and Karma Shoes

After the magic of Bilbao, we went to see another of Frank Gehry’s works, the colorful winery at El Ciego, Spain.  El Ciego is a small traditional Spanish town, located a bit more than an hour by car south of Bilbao.  For logistics reasons, we had made the decision to drive the North/South length of Spain, so that we could see works in Bilbao, El Ciego, Valencia, and Barcelona in a short period of time.

The winery at El Ciego is a colorful, playful work, featuring colored ribbons of metal wrapping an almost traditional beige stone structure.

The beige stone complements the architecture of the very Old World town of El Ciego, a town featuring ancient alleyways, stone homes with tile roofs, and vineyards full of growing grapes.

The colorful ribbons are a bold choice, and they serve to take the heavily earth-toned nature of the homes, churches, and fields of El Ciego and add an element of surprise.

 
The twisted metal adds a distinct Gehry element to the hotel and winery.

Those who consider Frank Gehry’s work to be “a box wrapped in ribbons” may find ammunition for their arguments at El Ciego.   But for a small work in a small town, the winery works well as a fun, colorful, modern oasis in an otherwise architecturally conservative town.

The winery building is lighthearted, and the town has done a nice job creating a context for the structure which invites the public in (even if the winery/hotel itself makes it very expensive to get inside).  They have allowed a surrealistic graffiti art to flourish along the road leading from the winery/hotel to the old town area of El Ciego.

We saw some of this kind of artistic graffiti in Tenerife, in that case placed subversively on walls alongside the port.  In El Ciego, the graffiti art is clearly designed to go where it does, and offers a people’s antidote to the exclusive hotel, and a charming bridge between the modern Gehry structure and the traditional town.  I like this idea of inviting in public art to the setting of an iconic work.  I want to incorporate this idea into our work in Boston.

El Ciego Graffiti Art

Tenerife Graffiti Art

Certainly not Bilbao (http://trinityspire.blogspot.sg/2012/10/genius-realized-gehrys-bilbao-guggenheim.html), but a fun work which puts a small town on the map.

After El Ciego, we spent the night in nearby Lograno (not wanting to spend $400-$500 a night to stay in the Gehry winery/hotel), where we happened to stay at an Airbnb apartment designed by a surfer with a key eye for design.  While I have confined our posts so far to the marvelous exterior architecture we have seen, we were so struck by the interior design sensibility of the surfer artist in whose flat we stayed, that I have included a few pictures here.

But first a story.  The story of the Karma Shoes.

The story of the Karma Shoes starts in Austin, Texas, during the annual SXSW conference in March of 2012.  I attended the conference on behalf of my smartphone authentication startup Bloink, looking at key technologies in user authentication.  The conference is a fun event, because like Steve Jobs himself, it incorporates technology, art, music, and design.  So, a session on crowdsourcing startups can be followed by a keynote by Bruce Springstein on his roots in rock (and, in point of fact, was).

It is a great event. 

After 25 years of business travel, I have gotten tired of hotels, so have been thrilled with the recent advent of sites like Airbnb and Homeaway, which allow you to rent homes, flats, and apartments from individuals.  It is virtually the only way I travel anymore, and I can often find a quirky artist’s loft or designers studio to stay in for far less than the price of a boring business hotel room.  In fact, for most of our trip around the world, we have stayed in Airbnb apartments (with exceptions for countries with invasive visa requirements like China).  In Austin, I was staying with colleagues at an artist’s home in funky East Austin, complete with a chicken coop in the back from which we could pluck eggs for breakfast each morning.  And to get around the large expanse of SXSW, I had a rental car.

One evening, upon returning from SXSW activities, I was driving home to a scene of chaos.  It seemed that the number of revelers in town far exceeded the number of taxis, and I passed many groups of people wandering through Austin clearly distressed that they could not get to their SXSW lodging.  Finally, I decided to pick up a group of travelers and give them a ride to their home.  Turns out the group was part of the cast and crew of an LA-based reality TV show, but that is a story for another time.

I dropped them back at their home, and they thanked me for the favor, promising me good karma for my good deed.

I though no more about it.

Two days later, my flight was leaving from Austin airport, and I waited in the Skycap line to check my bag.  For no apparent reason, a young man in his early twenties came out of the airport with a shoebox, looked around, stood next to me, and asked me “Do you want a pair of brand new Vans skateboarding shoes?  My bag is too heavy and I don’t have room to carry them on.” 

I have always liked Vans shoes, and many many years ago, was pretty into skateboarding with my junior high school gang, back when the Z boys of Dogtown were turning a California craze into a national obsession. 

My son is even more into skateboarding now than I was then, and in one of those student surpasses the master moments, is far better at skateboarding than I ever was.

I asked the man with the shoebox the size of the shoes inside.  He said “Ten and a half.”  My shoe size happens to be... ten and a half.

I shrugged, said “sure,” and he handed me shoebox containing a beautiful brand new pair of Vans.

Thereafter, these became the Karma Shoes.  As my son would say, a “pretty sweet” pair of grey, white, and black slip on skateboarding shoes.  Vans - like most things skateboarding - started as a surfing company, making boards and apparel, before broadening into skateboarding shoes and gear.  Love these shoes.

I brought those Karma Shoes on our worldwide trip, because they are light, simple, and great for hot climates like Dubai, but versatile enough to wear with jeans.  When packing for 19 cities in 42 days, a pair of shoes with multiple purposes which dresses up and down is a handy thing.

And the tale of the Karma Shoes isn’t quite over. 

A few days before heading to El Ciego and Lograno, we flew from Tenerife to Bilbao, excited beyond belief at the work we were soon to see.  On the way, we connected through Madrid and changed to a tiny plane to go to Bilbao.

Madrid Airport Ceiling - Alien Invasion?

As we boarded the plane in Madrid, a few places ahead of us in line was a group of three guys who could have been straight out of my childhood skateboarding magazines - tall, tanned skin, long hair bleached by sun and tightened by salt to the consistency of dirty-blond straw.  Half jokingly, I whispered to Rachel “those guys look like surfer dudes.”  She smiled one of those “oh, Dad” smiles, as I thought wistfully of the day when my uncle went to one of the first skateboard shops in Southern California to get one of those brand spanking new Hobie skateboards with the polyurethane wheels to mail to his nephew in New Jersey for Christmas.  I used that skateboard throughout junior high and high school and even used it to commute to classes in Cambridge in college.

On the tiny plane from Tenerife to Bilbao, the straw-haired guys happened to sit right in front of Rachel and I, and as the flight leveled off, I noticed them watching surfing videos on their computer.  Not just any surfing videos.  Epic surfing videos.  The kind of surfing videos which would be Warren Miller movies if they were skiing videos.  Awesome, huge waved, crazy-tricked surfing videos.  Waves 30+ feet tall.  Pipelines which went on for ten seconds.  Carving and tricks that blew my mind.  I was trying not to watch too much (didn’t want to be a peeping Tod), but it was mesmerizing.

Then I noticed two crazy details.  The guys surfing in the videos looked an awful lot like the guys sitting right in front of us.  And the website they were watching the videos on was the website for Vans...

An hour later, we had landed in Bilbao and swapped stories with new friends and Vans Surf Team members Dane and Tanner Gudauskas and Dylan Graves, who were headed to Southern France to surf (and I thought we were on a fun trip). 

And the Karma Shoes had three new believers and a trio of black Sharpie Vans Surf Team autographs.

So anyway, all the pictures below are from the beautiful interior of the surfer/artist designed apartment we stayed in in Lograno, but you’ll see the Karma Shoes - complete with autographs - making a few cameo appearances.  Sorta like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - you can’t touch something without changing it.  Or is that the Prime Directive?

Surfboard and mobile

Details of post and beam

Iron motif on homemade table

Sliding door to bedroom - wrought iron framing pictures of the street below

Sliding glass door to bathroom

Door partially open showing tile

Karma Shoes and Surfboard

One special thing about Lograno.  We finally had a free couple of hours for the first time in days, and I worked on something which had been vexing me.

If we are able to build a monument to celebrate America’s next 250 years, if we are able to bring this Trinity Spire project to fruition, we need an epitaph, an inscription which captures the the purpose of the structure, the message it is there to convey.  The Statue of Liberty, the beacon of Liberty for America, has these words on the inside of its pedestal:

The New Colossus

 - Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, 
with conquering limbs astride from land to land; 
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand 
a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
is the imprisoned lightning, and her name 
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand 
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command 
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame, 
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she 
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, 
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Wow.  Tough act to follow.

After a good bit of consternation, several drafts, and input from some Trinity Spire collaborators back home in Boston, this is what came out in Lograno as an inscription for Trinity Spire, shown at the moment of creation:

With a few tweaks, I think I like this version best:

Come dreamers, mavericks, and non-conformists.  

Come thinkers and doers who see the world not as it is, but as it might be.

Welcome to America.

I think it fits.

- Tod and Rachel

PS - the Vans guys were previewing their latest film on the plane (at the time it had not yet been released) - you can see it now at http://www.vanssurf.com/video.php.  The video is called Get-N Classic Volume 2.  Go about 15 minutes in to see the epic stuff.

This might embed it if we’re lucky:

Genius Realized - Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim

Bilbao, Spain


If you are fortunate enough to have spiritual people in your life, and you get to that place in your friendships where they express the wonder which is in their hearts, you hear things like: “You must experience the magic of New York at Christmas...”  “Next year in Jerusalem...”  and “Have you been to Mecca?...”

In the high tech circles where I have spent my career, you also hear reverential questions filled with wonder at science, technology, and that special magic where they blend with design: “Have you ridden in a Google self-driving car?...” “Have you experienced a Steve Jobs talk?”  “Have you played with the new iPhone?”  “Have you seen Rod Brook’s new Baxter robot?”

In architecture, only one work in modern times seems to evoke such wonder and reverence.  Only one question comes up time and again when you talk to architecture and design enthusiasts: “Have you been to Bilbao?”

This is the hardest blog post that Rachel and I have written so far.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could write it; I wasn’t sure that my words could do justice to what our eyes have seen, and to the experience of our senses.

Wow.

In a world where perfection is rarely realized, this place is almost as close as you can get. 

How do you describe a feeling of great beauty, of genius realized, and of visual wonder, on paper?  How do you describe a painting when your only brushes are words?

The only way I know how is to break it down, and to use words to illustrate the photos we have taken.  Let’s start with the setting.

Setting and Context

In my summer 2012 meeting with Frank Gehry and his wonderful partners Brian Aamoth and Meaghan Lloyd, he talked a lot about CONTEXT, about the place where a work lives, and about how the context and setting of a building is as important to its design as the architect’s defining vision.

As we talked about design for a monument to celebrate America’s next 250 years, I heard how difficult it is to design something beautiful and iconic in isolation, without knowing first where exactly it will be built.

New York

I began to understand that feeling of context as I watched the Freedom Tower in New York City rise from the ashes of our country’s greatest modern tragedy.  I felt it more when we experienced the sublime context of Gehry’s buildings in the extraordinary Dusseldorf Harbor, a harbor transformed in the last 10-15 years by vision, modernism and artistry.  I felt both the challenge and the success of context in Tenerife, experiencing both extraordinary context and inadequate context depending on which side of Calatrava’s Tenerife Concert Hall you stood.

Dusseldorf

Tenerife

But at Bilbao, I finally understood what a marvelous context can bring to a work.

I wonder what the setting looked like before the Guggenheim, because the building and surrounding structures feel as if they have organically emerged there from river and the earth, like some primordial surrealistic sea monster.

The setting is terrific. 

A bridge crossing the estuary of Bilbao flows straight into the Guggenheim, cutting a part of the structure visibly in two, and providing a vantage point from which to view the work.  The bridge is the main entrance to the city of Bilbao, and the first experience of this beautiful, artistic, seaside city is the twisting, playful Guggenheim, beckoning a visitor into the city with verve and charm.  The bridge itself is playful and fun, anchored by an enormous red H, a supporting structure for the bridge painted in a glowing red, drawing the eye as you cross into Bilbao, and offering a brightly colored contrast to the earth-toned and metal-toned structures all around.  This use of BRIGHT COLOR AS A BRILLIANTLY CONTRASTING ELEMENT WITH MATTE EARTH AND METAL TONES plays marvelously with the Guggenheim Museum and the river below it.

The Guggenheim itself occupies a river bank in Bilbao.  Across the river from the structure runs a beautiful pedestrian walkway, and a set of old world European buildings with 17th/18th century charm. 

Along the river side the structure, Gehry has constructed an arching walkway, sweeping out into the river from the Guggenheim, and offering a stunning approach.  The city side of the structure stands across from a set of shops and hotels with cafes on their roofs for taking in the Guggenheim from the air.  One end of the structure is anchored by the gateway bridge.  The other end is anchored by a charming park, with playgrounds and benches inviting relaxation.

Bridge.  Park.  Curved riverside walkway.  Old World Europe buildings and pedestrian walkway across the river.  Buildings with rooftop cafes on one flank.  These elements of CONTEXT offer AN ALMOST ENDLESS ARRAY OF VISTAS AND VANTAGE POINTS, each revealing a different aspect of the structure.  From some vantage points, like climbing the spiraling stairs to the bridge, you seem to actually walk inside the skeleton of the structure.  From other vantage points, like the cafes and the bridgeway itself, you seem to tower over the structure, watching the sun play on the matte metal wrapping the building like rays of sun on water. 

The array of vantage points invites the walker to come play with the building.  The building REVEALS DIFFERENT CHARACTER UP CLOSE AND AT DISTANCE.  The effect is one of constant discovery, and it draws you in, coaxes you to linger, and CREATES A SENSE OF WONDER AND DISCOVERY AROUND EACH TWIST AND TURN.

 

Two aspects of this setting really stand out in how they enable Frank Gehry’s design to work so well:

• The setting, with its multiple clean sight lines and differences in elevation and vantage point, allows the use of distance and point of view as key elements in the consumer’s experience of the building.

• The setting allows the building to reveal different character at different times of day by playing with surrounding elements of light, river water, color, and reflection. 

Light, Water, and Change

Years ago, on one of many business and pleasure trips to Australia, I visited Ayers Rock  (Uluru) in Australia, the enormous orange rock in the center of the Australian subcontinent.  One of the remarkable things about Ayers Rock is that this oblong, distinctly orange rock  - some two miles in length and 1100 feet in height - looks very different throughout the day, as the sunlight light hits the rock and plays games with its texture and hue.

So it is at Bilbao.

Just as Frank Gehry discovered as he nailed pieces of titanium and stainless steel to the telephone poles outside his office in LA many years ago, the light plays off the metal sheeting on the building in amazing ways, changing color, texture, and feel as the sun rises, crests, and sets.

The sides reflect the bright red of the bridge cutting through the structure, the glistening grey of the water below, and the yellows and oranges of the waning sun.

Shapes, Color, and Reflections

Gehry makes full use of the natural elements of color available in the Guggenheim’s setting - the orange and yellow light of the sun as it rises and sets over the structure, the gunmetal grey river water, the Blue sky, the earth-toned buildings across the way.

To this mix of sunlight and earth tones, Gehry adds:

• White fog, bathing the grey concrete walkway in an eerie mist, like the Moors of Scotland on a dewy morning,

• Matte and glossy metal in all varieties of curves and shapes, allowing for play and reflection which draws the eye and lifts the spirit

 

• The glistening red bridge H, which reflects in wonderful ways on both the river and the Guggenheim,

• Sparkling glass, offering a view into the museum,

• The greenery of the parkland, providing an inviting setting to sit, linger, and watch

Dr. Suess and the Building

The building itself is playful and fun, as if Dr. Suess himself (or turn-of-the-century German architect Hermann Finsterlein) came to the river to play.  An almost endless array of imagined images creep into the mind as we walk around the structure - waves, a ship, a pile of clay, an mound of whipped cream...

Feels like good, clean fun.

Whimsey and Menace

In Dusseldorf, Germany, we were captivated by the use of play and whimsey to turn a dull grey harbor into an inviting, amusing, warm place to walk and explore.

At the Guggenheim Bilbao, Frank Gehry also approaches the design with a spirit of play, inviting the consumer inside the joke, letting Rachel and I feel the sense of child-like play at work in the structure.

He slices the structure, inviting us inside its skeleton:

He builds an improbable towering red H over the structure, creating great fun as the H beckons from below, anchors from above, and reflects on metal and water:


But we also find something new here, a sense of play cloaked in menace.  As young children toddle down the walkway alongside the Guggenheim, they routinely jump, as jets of fire unexpectedly fly out of the reflecting pool alongside the structure, creating a mesmerizing feeling, a disturbing sound, and a fascinating reflected light.

 

And finally, there is the most menacing structure of all at the Guggenheim, the element of the museum which is probably it’s single most photographed feature.  It is ridiculous.  It is creepy.  It is improbable.  It is completely out of its context.  But it works.  It is an enormous monstrous spider, caught in mid stride walking along the riverside plaza.  Two parts menace, one art visual anchor, the spider menaces pedestrians, frames the river, draws the eye from water to building, provides an eerie silhouette against the evening sky, and despite its creepy gangly structure (which should be horrifying to an arachnophobe like me), draws you into the plaza and alongside the monument.

If in your wildest dreams, you imagine that you could design a building as beautiful as the Guggenheim Bilbao, the spider is the element which brings that dream to an end.  It is the element which elevates the Guggenheim Bilbao form ordinary Magic - itself so small accomplishment - to genius.  It is the element which connects the metal, water, fire, and glass of the building and setting to something organic, without breaking the flowing improbable, impossible structure of the place.  It is the element which connects the Guggenheim to man, and it is genius.

Crumpled Paper and Dancing Metal

The City of Bilbao understands the work of genius they got from Frank Gehry, and honors him among their artists and heros in whimsical ways.  On a nearby rotary, not far from the Guggenheim, sit sculptures of Gehry’s self-confessed inspiration for his flowing and impossibly organic forms - crumpled pieces of paper, this time sculpted of metal.  A fitting and funny tribute that made us smile.

I had thought the comparison of Gehry structures to crumpled pieces of paper was a bit of a Hollywood joke, as illustrated in this Simpson’s clip:

Not sure what language this is in, but the joke is still just as funny:



But it turns out to be fact.  Part of the process Gehry puts his apprentices through is crumpling up pieces of paper, then drawing and building structural models out of what the wads look like.  Matt Groening was right.  Go figure.

The Magic Light of Bilbao

One of the things that Rachel and I have learned during our journey is that in architectural photography, magic is constructed out of light.

Photography is about many things - setting, arrangement, framing, the geometry of an image, the emotional resonance of a picture.   But as much as anything else, it is about light.  Too much light can ruin a shot, as heavy shadows create an image partly overexposed and partly in near darkness.  Light can play havoc with depth of field, shadow, contrast, exposure, and texture.  Many a seemingly beautiful portrait shot becomes a shadowy mess, as you look to balance depth of field, dark shaded areas, and light.  And many photographs of great architecture become mundane tourist snapshots if a building is backlit or over-saturated with light.

There is a time which occurs twice a day which filmmakers and photographers call “Magic Hour” - that hour before (and just as) the sun comes up, and the hour as dusk falls and the sky turns to night.  During Magic Hour, colors pop with diffuse and spectral light, textures emerge in pictures, portraits assume an added gravitas, and buildings truly reveal their creators’ dreams.

During our 42 day...19 city...14 country trip around the world, we have taken great pains to be onsite and ready to shoot at Magic Hour twice a day as many days as possible.  This often means:

• rising at 4:30 or 5:00 am to get to a site for sunrise shooting,

• careful planning of what to photograph in morning light, and what to photograph in the evening, depending on the orientation of a structure,

• scouting out perfect vantage points the night before,

• and returning as dusk turns to evening for shots from a West-facing perspective.

The light and the feeling of this time is truly magical, like the feeling you get watching the movie Field of Dreams when you are standing in an Iowa cornfield bathed in evening light with the mellifluous tones of James Earl Jones or Burt Lancaster speaking about baseball.

We have experienced that extraordinary feeling of Magic Hour nearly every shooting day of our trip, whether it is shooting the Concert Hall at Tenerife as the sun broke over the horizon, or shooting the eerie stillness of London’s still unfinished Shard as the sunset painted both the distant Shard and the nearby Tower of London in a medieval glow.

But at Bilbao, the feeling lingers.  As the light plays on the structure throughout the day and night, the hour of magic becomes a day, and the day becomes two, and pretty soon you realize that Frank Gehry has frozen time at Bilbao, and that magic can linger at extraordinary times and places.

I tell my daughter that being with her and experiencing Bilbao together is for me the Magic Hour of my life, as part of my life opens like sunrise before me, and other parts close slowly and gently like sunset.  I am fifty now, an age when a man is fully realized, and capable of diving into life at his maximum potential.  But an age also when the shortness of the days to come begin to creep into daily awareness.  An age when the adventures of the future takes their place alongside the adventures of the past, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry.  An age when striving to achieve becomes somehow bigger than ever, but also an age when magic comes in the little details.  She is sixteen, an age at which the Magic Hour of sunrise is just coming over the horizon.  An age at which she can take her dreams, her skills, her education, her mind, the disciplines and the passions that she has developed, and use them to craft the adult she will become.

Being with my daughter - my firstborn - at Bilbao, as we work and talk together about our dream of building a great wonder of the world for our own hometown, is for me a Magic Hour in my life - part dawn, part dusk, part potential, part celebration.  Thanks Rachel.

I have experienced Magic Hour at Bilbao.  And that is all that matters right now.

- Tod and Rachel