It has been a long time since I have seen as much formal, spatial, and material inventiveness as is now on display at La Caixa Agora, or the CaixaForum, in Valencia, the latest museum in the network established by the foundation of the Barcelona-based savings bank, La Caixa. What makes the complex even more surprising is that its blobs, satellites, and cardboard mountains shelter underneath the vaults of the original Agora. That Agora, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, is one of the structures erected in 2009 on the site of Valencia’s former port as the $1 billion City of Arts and Sciences. Dominated by structural expression, these buildings have little relation to either their functions or the site. The new Agora, on the other hand, is adaptive reuse with a vengeance, showing how a useless show-off structure can come alive through good and inventive design.
The new Agora was designed by another Barcelona-based architect, Enric Ruiz-Geli (full disclosure: Ruiz-Geli is a colleague of mine at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture + Design, and a friend), who has made a career of experimenting with the integration of advanced technology and materials into free-form shapes while testing different modes of sustainability. His most well-known building, the Media-ICT, sports sails and energy recirculation techniques around a scaffolding of brightly colored metal.
In Valencia, the architect and his interdisciplinary architectural team at Cloud 9 were given a program that exhibits art, but also seeks to make the necessity of preserving our planet and its resources clear through exhibitions, educational programs, and public events. The La Caixa Foundation is drawing on both its extensive art collection and a long history of community activism to focus on that subject here, as opposed to the more purely either art- or education-focused institutions they have opened in other cities (including its Madrid museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron). Ruiz-Geli was also given the constraint of having to remain within Calatrava’s building, which was designed as a flexible auditorium or gathering space for up to 6,000 people but has been empty for more than a decade. He had to build his objects independent of the original structure, which comes all the way down to the ground in continual ribs. Only the floor was available as a site, and there he had to add micropiles at strategic locations underneath that base to support his structures.
Ruiz-Geli’s design consists of five structures: the main exhibition “mountain” that contains approximately 10,000 square feet of space; an education hub hovering over this stepped structure; an auditorium to its rear, visible only through a private room at the top; a restaurant covered with vegetation; and the “brain,” which serves as the offices for the Agora. The physical “agora” or place of knowledge and exchange, is formed by the space between the restaurant, the brain, the entrance cut through the steps into the exhibition spaces and the wooden stairs, doubling as a second auditorium, that flank that entry tunnel. This whole area is in fact open to the public without ticketing.
The “brain” hovers over the reception and ticket desk on steel column splaying out behind a protective covering of wood. Covered in ceramic circles (Ruiz-Geli calls it a “ceramic skin using molecular parametric design”) whose geometry minimizes waste because no piece had to be broken to fit, the structure evokes the vaults that cover so many public spaces in Valencia, here liberated to become its own object. Inside, those three-dimensional arches are covered with more ceramic, this time in elongated, sound-absorbing bricks.
If the brain is a hovering head, the restaurant is a covered on all sides with vegetation and resembles a stomach or other organ blown up to a public scale. Where the tubes and trachea should be attached, skylights gesture out to the light streaming in-between Calatrava’s skeletal structure. The main body of the Agora then lies recumbent next to these two objects, its legs splayed to allow entry. All this body imagery, although perhaps not as definite as I have here interpreted it, is intentional, but Ruiz-Geli also sees the composition as a landscape of hills around a valley of gathering.
The belly of the educational hub posed on more steel stilts over the exhibition spaces is covered with a polymer open mesh that Ruiz-Geli had 3D-printed, while its dome resides under a covering of spray-on plaster made in part with recycled glass, so that it gleams and refracts light. Steps made out of a form of polyurethane (also created from recycled material) lead up into the interior, lit both from the top and by an arched window over the rest of the Agora. Perhaps this is the womb of this disassembled body of knowledge?
After all these curving shapes and different materials, the exhibition spaces and auditorium are mainly straight and straightforward, even if the architect took pains to insure that as many of the materials are recycled or otherwise use minimal amounts of natural resources (by insisting on the use of wood and natural fabrics, for instance). In the exhibition spaces, the exhibition designers have taken over, and their work favors explanation and the clichés of what makes for good art and science displays over aesthetics and innovation.
The climax of the Agora is a private dining or meeting room above the auditorium’s stage, which mimics the brain at the bottom of the procession and provides a view over the whole complex. It is a shame that this privileged space, from which the design’s landscape metaphor is most clear—including cardboard triangles that cover the highest part of the auditorium, strengthening the sense that this a mountain—is not available to the general public.
The Agora is one of the few buildings (or set designs, if you will) that manages to evoke its function as a place to educate and inform people about the forms and functions of natural objects, from the body and its organs to the landscape we as bodies inhabit, in a manner that neither falls into being a one-liner type of representation, nor is a vague kowtowing to “organic” shapes. Filled with materials and shapes that are both industrial and expressive of the base elements out of which they are made, its spaces are strange enough to invite you to speculate about them even as you use them for the functions for which they were designed. That all this reposes under the vaulting arches of Calatrava’s building that soar up into vacuous structural bravura makes the argument for complex and experimental architecture all the more convincing.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
