the photovoltaic power plant surrounded by grey asphalt
The area, however, is now a city of architectural ghosts, an abandoned site only in use for anual events like concerts and festivals. The Forum is less a park than a huge parking-space like concrete-desert - the antipode of green urban design: asphalt surfacse replace brownfield land.
Ironically, the site is the favored background of car campaigns: it makes car look green - without green.
Auditorium Park at the Forum of International Cultures, Barcelona, 2004
Design: Foreign Office Architects, Who want to sit on these benches?
Postcard from the BMW shop at the BMW Welt München
Thanks for your insight! Countries in the whole world need to focus in green developments and ways to produce energy in eco-friendly ways.
ReplyDeleteThe Herzog building adjacent is similarly completely vacant. I walked around it for ages thinking it was closed until discovering the entry. They had an amazing exhibition on Spanish contemporary architecture, but I was the only one in there for 2 hours apart from the cleaners.
ReplyDeletePhotoshopping people into renders doesn't mean they will come.
The Forum Esplanade is the biggest mistake on the urban history of my city.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of vision by a complete unskilled city mayor made that part of the water front a ghost area where no one, no locals or tourists go (because there is nothing to do there)
The area is key to articulate a continuous urban waterfront connecting with the towns across the Besos River, with the forum Esplanade this articulation was broken. it is hard to understand the logic behind it, why would you place this huge empty space between the people and the sea? The biggest achievement of the 1992 Urban development was to open the city to the sea, the Forum Esplanade does exactly the opposite. Huge mistake. Time for thinkers to do something about it.
Well I liked forum when I was in Barcelona (for a year). I liked it's ghost-place-like emptiness which is so contrasting to what's happening in the centre.
ReplyDeleteI liked to go there to sit at that concrete beach and read something, because it was so peacefull with so little people around ;).
But economicaly, I don't really understand it, it had to cost fortune and id doesn't really work for the city as it was intended. What is it's purpouse anyway? ;)
Wow - it wasn't too long ago that this project was being held up as a precedent in studio during my undergraduate education. Creepy to see it so desolate!
ReplyDelete