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: