Architecture: Curveballs Are In Play

As far as architecture is concerned, if the 20th century was the age of the box, the 21st is fast becoming the age of the wiggle. Over the past few years, and especially after the debut of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the sturdy glass-and-steel rectangle, for decades the default mode for serious buildings, has begun to give way to the parabola, the whiplash curve and geometries so irregular, there’s no point in looking them up in geometry books. Thanks to a combination of insistent forward thinking by architects and ever more ingenious computer-design software, buildings that once would have been no more than architecture-student fantasies are being green-lighted every year as real-world construction projects. And one of the newest, the Metropol Parasol, is a sign that those forces are carrying buildings to a place where the word building may not be up to the job of describing what they will become.

Or to put it another way, why shouldn’t the ancient Spanish city of Seville sprout a few 90-ft. mushrooms? For 150 years, Seville’s Plaza de la Encarnación was a market in the heart of the old quarter. In 1973, in an act of municipal hooliganism that was typical for its time, the market stalls were torn down by the city and replaced by a parking lot. A few years ago, plans were moving ahead to replace the lot with an underground garage when workers excavating the site discovered a cluster of Roman ruins. This time a wiser city government made two important decisions. First, it chose to preserve the ruins within a below-ground museum. Second, it opted to hold an international competition for an overhead structure to connect the museum to the surface and to transform the plaza from a parking lot into a people magnet.

One other thing: the city authorities did not specify what kind of structure they had in mind. That created a very large opening for Jürgen Mayer H., a Berlin-based architect who understands that a solid structure can be a thought balloon. What Mayer, 42, proposed was a series of six voluptuous forms made of high-strength laminated wood that would rise above the plaza like massive mushrooms–or shade trees. Or maybe they’re umbrellas. Whatever you think they look like, the Metropol Parasol, as they are officially called, refuses to be one thing–or to serve one purpose. With a café layered into their upper reaches and walkways laid across their tops, the forms provide a canopy, a promenade and a swashbuckling sculptural fantasy.

Mayer says most of the inspiration for the project, which is expected to be completed next year, came “from outside of architectural terms. We jumped from mushrooms to trees to clouds.” There’s not a right angle in any of those. Like Antoni Gaudí’s Parc Güell in Barcelona, with its swelling plazas and ribboning pathways, the Parasol emerges from a place where architecture meets the unconscious, a source outside the merely rational faculties, one that gives rise to whatever is soft, concupiscent and shape-shifting.

It is also the best evidence in years that the design options made possible by computers, which allow architects to experiment with the structural stability of some very unconventional forms, are well along in transforming the language of architecture. That means a future with more buildings that are whimsical, sensual and possessed of a substantial wow factor. In the end, however much the Parasol works as a café or a concert venue, wowing may be its abiding function. That’s one reason Terence Riley, the chief architecture curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, decided to feature the Parasol in “On-Site: New Architecture in Spain,” a show that runs at the museum through May 1. “This thing has the same purpose as a triumphal arch,” he says. “It’s a generator of wonder.”