Thoughts from the Centre de Tenificio:

During one of our many trips to the city of Alicante, we were able to visit the Centre de Tenificio by Miralles.  Alex told us that most of the locals hate the building because it’s not classically beautiful and is made mostly of concrete.  And I have to admit that I had the same opinion when we stumbled out of our taxis and took our first look at its exterior.  It loomed over the curb like a giant, grey, concrete, mass.  Near the door a concrete column reached out awkwardly at a seemingly random angle.  The building appeared disordered, irregular, and slightly disturbing.  But when we got inside and began to move our way through the spaces I began to understand the intentionality of the building and why so many architects flock to it every year.  Alex told us that the designer’s intention was tectonic, or that he cared more about the structure than the form.  The irregular angles of the columns and the non-rectangular spaces had been determined by structural analysis to create a building with maximum structural efficiency.  It was interesting that the spaces that most architects would fuss over to fit a certain program or make pleasing to the eye the architect let go to the nature of physics and gravity.  It must have been very freeing.  My favorite parts of the building were the random spaces that seemed to have been accidentally created.  I was sitting on one of the benches in the main auditorium when someone ran up to me and told me, sounding very excited, that I had to see the bathroom.  I didn’t really see how a bathroom could be worth seeing but I followed her anyway.  The entrance was a dark and narrow as we walked down a ramp and a set of steps.  The space suddenly opened up into a large circle with an expansive ceiling.  I craned my head to see light pouring in through openings at the top.  A concrete wall sliced halfway through the middle of the circle, supporting a number of sinks.  I half expected moaning murtle to come out of one of the toilets or Hermione to be making polyjuice potion in one of the stalls because it was just so (this is going to sound really cheesy) magical.  It was amazing that one of the most spontaneous and beautiful spaces in the building was the bathroom, a space that often is pasted on at the end to make a check off a list.  I feel that studying architecture in Spain has helped me to see the country through a lens that goes much deeper than the typical attractions, and itches its way into core issues of the country and its people.   For example why the people of Alicante are uncomfortable with Miralles’s beautiful and unpretentious building, the economic factors that contributed to the possibility of its construction, and whether or not it will play a different role in the community in the future.   Some of these questions remain unanswered, but for the time being I’m perfectly happy just sitting in awe and sketching a random bathroom in Alicante.

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