Rear Window

The uproar surrounding the FC Barcelona stadium remodeling project continues to offer chapters worthy of a suspense film.

Since its inauguration in 1957, the stadium designed by architect Francesc Mitjans together with Francesc Soteras and Lorenzo García Barbón has undergone several transformations.

The 1982 one, directed by Mitjans and Soteras themselves to expand its capacity for the Naranjito World Cup, involved adding a third stand and some hanging ramps to the East entrance which, together with the brutal reinforced concrete façade, ended up disfiguring the original project. The final climax came at the end of the 1990s, when the pitch had to be lowered by almost three metres to compensate for the loss of capacity due to having to seat all the spectators. This ended up unbalancing the panopticons, the complete vision of the field that the entire public must have, which forced the consideration of a future in-depth remodeling that has not been possible to carry out to date.

After the failed attempt in 2006 to award this project to the famous Norman Foster, the architect of the Tibidabo communications antenna, a new competition was called in 2014, which was won by the Japanese architectural firm Nikken-Sekkei, with the Catalans Pascual-Ausió.

This project is now being developed by the Japanese, but together with another Barcelona firm, B720, author, among others, of the mirrored roof of the Mercat dels Encants de les Glòries. Something happened with the first Catalan firm that made it give up on continuing with the project.

Previously, with the change of Barça presidency, Laporta took the opportunity to take the project away from its authors and give it to a couple of local engineering firms to develop the architecture, on the one hand, and the facilities, on the other, with the excuse of reducing costs (they are fighting to keep it below one billion euros) and speeding up the construction process.

The initial inspiration comes from the most diverse sources. How much of these ideas are new and how much borrowed?

Between claims of authorship and with the involvement of the Catalan Association of Architects in the middle, it now seems that the Japanese-Catalan tandem will be able to continue leading the construction of the works as Design Guardian, but maintaining the two engineering firms. The fashion of giving English names to euphemisms in order to soften their consequences has reached architecture. Let’s hope it doesn’t spread. Otherwise, the intrusion will be used so that other professions end up developing the projects of their authors at lower prices. It will be enough to hire them as Guardians of Design.

This is something that already exists in other countries. In Brazil, for example, architects design the buildings up to the stage where the building permit is obtained, what we call the Basic Project here. From then on, engineering firms appear, which are in charge of developing the project, as if they did not have to continue making architectural decisions after drawing the basic ideas. A lack of trust in the same technicians who conceived the proposal makes us wonder why they were given the assignment at that time. With luck, the construction company sometimes entrusts the architects with a kind of “surveillance” to prevent excessive aberrations from the initial project.

As Bruno Munari explained in his book How are objects born?, there is a whole process of creativity and experimentation linked to the construction of a building or the development of an object that cannot be reduced to having had a good idea. There are hundreds of decisions that involve materials, construction strategies or adaptation to available means that mean that the design, by force, must be adapted.

The initial idea for a project is of little use if there is no skill or talent to make decisions that bring the design to fruition. Initial inspiration comes from the most diverse sources. How much are these ideas new and how much borrowed?

The architects of Nikken Sekkei, while building their Mitsui Garden hotel in front of the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, also by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, probably always had inspiration in front of them.

As L.B. confessed Jefferies, the photographer played by James Stewart in Rear Window, directed in 1954 by Alfred Hitchcock, once he started spying on his neighbors he couldn’t take his eyes off them anymore.