Spanish architecture enjoys golden age

Madrid, Apr 23: Spanish architecture is riding a wave of international success, driven by generous public spending on new buildings and a willingness to break with the past and experiment with daring new forms and structures.

Eye-catching buildings are popping up all over the country, from a multicoloured phallic tower that has transformed the Barcelona skyline to a spacecraft-like hotel in the northern Rioja wine region.

''If you had to choose a nation that is moving fastest in cultural terms it has to be Spain,'' veteran British architect Richard Rogers told Reuters.

''After 40 years of the limitations of a fascist government, you suddenly see a tremendous vitality. You feel it in the street.'' Rogers and Spain's Lamela Studio are behind Madrid's airy new Barajas airport terminal and its satellite, whose undulating aluminium roofs echo the shape of the surrounding hills and are supported by pillars painted every colour of the rainbow.

The creative surge of building has been fuelled by years of steady economic growth and heavy state and regional government spending on public buildings, roads and railways, often with help from European Union funds.

''Spain is best described as vibrant. It is one of the leading centres of innovation not only in Europe but in the world,'' said Terence Riley, who organised an exhibition of Spanish architecture now showing at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

BUILDING SPREE

The Spanish work on show illustrates how profound economic and political changes have generated an ''unprecedented flowering'' of architecture, the exhibition guide says.

''In the last 20 years, the country has undertaken the most extensive building and rebuilding of its civil infrastructure since the Romans,'' Riley, now director of the Miami Art Museum, says in an essay on the MOMA exhibition.

Spain embraced creative freedom enthusiastically once it had shaken off the effect of nearly four decades of military dictatorship under General Francisco Franco.

Spanish architecture in particular was stimulated by access to EU development funds from the late 1980s and the hosting of a World Expo and the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992 which required landmark new structures to be built.

Spanish towns and cities are littered with centuries-old buildings, some restored and others in varying degrees of decay, but this does not limit the scope of modern architects, says Simon Smithson, the Barajas airport terminal project architect.

''Here there are absolutely no qualms about the juxtaposition of a modern building with a historical one,'' he says. ''You can go to any small town in Spain and find a bold piece of modern architecture right in the historical centre.'' Barcelona's biggest new work is the smooth blue and red tower, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel as a new headquarters for services company Agbar, and Spain's answer to London's controversial ''gherkin'', now headquarters of the insurance company Swiss Re.

The city is stuffed with bold designs.

''Barcelona has the best urban regeneration in Europe. They've changed 6 km (3.75 miles) of rusting port and foul sand into the most beautiful beach where you can practically dive in from your hotel bedroom,'' Rogers says.

In the southeastern region of Murcia, Spaniard Rafael Moneo has designed a bold, pale cube as an extension to the regional capital's city hall, contrasting with the 14th century cathedral opposite.

Both the cube and the Agbar tower are included in the MOMA exhibition, which runs until the end of April.

MIDDLE AGES TO COSMIC AGE

Antonio Lamela, whose studio worked in partnership with Rogers on the airport terminal, designed his first building in 1954, during Franco's dictatorship.

Now 79, he describes the changes in Spain's social and physical environment in his lifetime as being akin to moving from the Middle Ages to the cosmic age.

''Urban design and architecture are always a reflection of society ... Spain is a very active, dynamic and daring society,'' Lamela told Reuters.

His buildings look less revolutionary today than those of younger architects, but in their time many of them were pioneering.

Lamela and his team were behind the imposing Real Madrid soccer stadium and the Torres Colon, a 1990s office block whose top is designed to look like a giant, luminous electric plug and which was built by suspending the floors from the roof.

Better known outside Spain is Santiago Calatrava, who has designed landmark bridges in his native Valencia and is now building a spiky-roofed new transport hub for New York's World Trade Center site.

REUTERS