During the mid-1990s - a period of rapid regional competition in Spain with the planning of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Valencia opening construction on the City of Science and Art - city officials determined Galicia needed to join this cultural arms race and promote the region’s illustrious heritage to the world. In 1999 an international architectural competition was initiated to create a new 1 million-square-foot cultural complex from a list of eleven finalists submitting proposals, all focusing on a beautiful hillside site (Monte Gaiás) overlooking Santiago de Compostela to plan the new ‘City of Culture’. Organizers acknowledged the proposed project would be a new place of pilgrimage toward a 'city of knowledge and creativity', a dynamic addition to a region with a 1,200 year tradition of spiritual passage. The proposal from New York architect Peter Eisenman would eventually be chosen with a scheme embodying an extensive topographical architecture that would relate to the neighboring granite hillsides - an acknowledgment to both an immense building program and the surrounding Galician landscape. The resulting uniquelly-organic design from Eisenman is derived from a condensation of multiple patterns - first from the pilgrim routes that run through the medieval ‘Old Town’ city center of Santiago overlaid on a topographic map of the hillside site. Then, a geometric Cartesian grid superimposed onto the site diagram and extruded using new computer modeling software to create a deformed topographic surface that ripples in the landscape, incorporating old and new contexts into a singular building matrix. The composed massings can seem to have both a smooth and striated tactile quality, a likeness to the symbolic seashell that has defined the city and its history for centuries.
Model exposing the connection between Old Town and the City of Culture
Walking through the City of Culture site, one realizes the figure-ground urbanism of the original medieval city center is superseded to the project’s emerging deformed grid with sinuous surfaces that are neither figure nor ground, but read as one continuous stone-clad architectural composition. The interstitial space between buildings is a familiar presence found in a new form with narrow pedestrian ‘streets’, carved and affected by its relationship to immediate building adjacencies, all emptying out onto a public plaza overlooking the inspiring Santiago skyline. The entire complex celebrates a regionalist expression with local hand-quarried quartzite (in brown, rose, and off-white hues) cladding all the walls and roofs in 20-inch blocks, proving to be hard for quarries to meet demand.
Although Eisenman’s proposal called for eight buildings, today the entire complex is conceived as three pairs of buildings (totaling six buildings in three construction phases), with the Library of Galicia (186,990 sqft) and Galician Archives (155,205 sqft) opened in 2011, followed a year later by the completion of the Museum of Galicia (223,889 sqft) and Central Services Building (80,729 sqft). The remaining two structures, the International Art Center and Center for Music and Performing Arts, are currently non-entities with uncertain futures that operate as two glaring holes in the site due to cost overruns, creating a lightning rod for debate.
Plan of Proposed Music Theater
Site of Proposed Music Theater
It is too early to fully evaluate a complex that is still unfinished, although it has already become a focal point for debate regarding high cost, excessive space, and an ambiguous program. Initially, the brief for the project called for a six-building complex on a 7 million sqft (160 acre) site for a budget of just around $145 million. Expectations were high when the project was launched during the economic ‘boom years’ and competition was fierce (Guggenheim opened years earlier to much international acclaim). 12 years later, under the cloud of the ‘Great Recession’, the first two phases of the City of Culture would be completed at a budget far exceeding expectations ($385 million). Critics would soon unleash their frustration at the entire project, saying it became a symbol of government’s inappropriate spending during one of the worst financial periods in the country’s history (20% unemployment and 9% budget deficit). Meanwhile, the construction of the final two buildings (the Center for Performing Arts and Arts Center) had yet to be started, being continuously delayed due to the economic downturn (along with all building activity in Spain). Of the two buildings, the Performing Arts Center was to be the ‘jewel’ of the complex, planned as the largest building in the complex at 137 feet high and housing over 2000 seats to promote Galicia to the musical and performing arts world. In 2013, with large construction expenditures for the arts not a high political priority and a Spanish economy showing no sign of improvement, the regional governor of Galicia supported a motion to “definitively” stop construction work on the complex, which would need another $228 million to finish. Currently, the City of Culture, Galicia’s answer to Bilbao, is little more than four large under-capacity buildings adjacent to two big holes in the ground. Last year, 330,000 would visit the Galician site that craved so much attention, compared to over a million visitors for Bilbao’s Guggenheim during the same period. It is an unfortunate result of bad economic timing and high (maybe unrealistic) ambitions that have halted this monumental task, but though still unfinished, it creates a pure architectural landscape that is unique in the world and can been seen as a serious investment to the region of Galicia.
“Instead of the ground’s being conceived as a backdrop against which the buildings stand out as figures, we generate a condition in which the ground can rear up to become figure, the buildings can subside into ground. It is a new kind of urban fabric”
City of Culture / Site analysis of access, circulation, new development, and points of social engagement