The Kursaal Culture Centre
Rafael Moneo´s glass cubes in San Sebastian
Few buildings illustrate the development of international architecture during the 1990's in such a thought-provoking way as the Kursaal culture center complex in the Basque town of San Sebastian. The architecture was determined by a closed design competition in March 1990 with the Spanish architect, Rafael Moneo (b.1937) as the winner, and the scheme was completed in August 1999. In addition to spanning the period of the 1990's, Kursaal also represents the minimalistic excesses of the decade mixed with an understandable fear of being locked into a stereotyped form idiom.
Originally, Kursaal was the name of a gambling casino that functioned during Spain’s Belle Epoque period from 1921-24, until a ban forced its closing, which was followed by sixty years of unsettled conditions until it was finally torn down. In 1985, the municipality acquired the attractive casino property, which made it possible to supplement Spain’s most exclusive resort town with a combined congress and concert hall.
The site lies on a corner of Playa de la Zurriola, Europe’s best surfing beach, bordered to the south by the main street and toward west by the mouth of the Urumea river in the Bay of Biscay. Moneo found his inspiration for the design of the new Kursaal in the large, two-cubic-meter stone blocks that were used as jetties and breakwaters at the mouth of the river. As opposed to the jetty blocks, his two building volumes are not especially rectangular, but lean three degrees in relation to the horizontal plane, and five degrees to the vertical, while they also at the tallest wall are oriented to the nearby mountaintops, Monte Urgull and Monte Ulia. Where the lowest parts of the volumes approach each other, they are tied together at the base by secondary building functions (restaurant and shops), the roofing over the main entrance and a subterranean parking area for 500 cars.
Visually, the two dynamic main forms seem to be repelling each other in an interesting contrapuntal figuration. Like the Sidney Opera, the Kursaal complex was placed on a plateau raised above the surrounding dock and promenade along the beach. The scheme’s secondary building functions differ in their characteristic horizontal fenestration and decorative integrated slate elements, while they functionally link the congress and concert halls. The largest building mass measures 65x46 meters and is 22 meters high, while the smaller is 43x32x20 meters, Concealed behind double glass facades mounted on steel frames, are the foyer and cedar wood boxes that contain the stages and halls, which seat 1828 and 624 spectators respectively. The interiors of the theaters are sided with cedar, the floors are bleached oak strip-flooring, and in the foyer, the ceilings are covered with gold leaf.
At closer inspection, one can see that the exterior of the large glass facades has an unusual construction consisting of two-meter long, concave glass troughs, which at the end walls are cut off at an angle so that together they have the same characteristic oblique form as the building itself. The glass trough sections run lengthwise, and at the top and bottom, are edged by thin aluminum moldings (though not at the joints). They are also mitered at the building’s main corners (also sealed here by thin aluminum sections). Where the glass sections meet the building’s two-meter high concrete base, Moneo chose to allow them to step down over four trough elements, which means a step of 12.5 centimeters per trough.
Other interesting features are the facade’s few, but deeply recessed transparent incisions or “holes” in the translucent whole, that allow those in the foyer to look out over the Atlantic Ocean. In an architectural context, these openings give the oblique glass cubes the lowest possible human scale. And in relation to the city’s (building) scale, the glass cubes harmonize nicely with the general building height of about twenty meters, just as the greenish translucent glass facades match in color the nearby river water so perfectly that it almost hurts.
On the other hand, there is a problem with the main character of Kursaal’s twenty-meter glass facades. During the day, the trough structure gives the appearance of rice paper window shades, or even the sails on a Chinese junk. There is a certain matt, fineness of character about the excessive use of glass, in any case during the day. However, it is more convincing at night, when the hollow facades radiate an inviting, yellowish light, which reveals the steel module of 6 meters (=3 troughs) and the depth of the somewhat narrower facade cavity (2 meters). The way the glass cube’s multipurpose activities are revealed at night without the need of other signage than the size of the facades and the warm light, is an original and successful touch. When the activities cease around midnight and Kursaal extinguishes the lights, the tipping cubes again lie in somber darkness, like the stone blocks that protect the coast by the river.
As a building mass, one can hardly call Kursaal beautiful in a traditional sense. Despite the elongated concavity of the glass sections and the play in daylight, there is a pent up feeling about this extensive use of glass. However, the problematic texture does not prevent the greenish glass cubes from indulging in an exemplary interplay with the homogeneous building mass along the main promenade with its variation of windows and materials.
Kursaal’s underplayed building mass lies clearly within the area of minimalism’s aesthetic demands, but the act of emphasizing the two glass crystals’ mutual relationship and their relation to the nearby mountaintops dramatizes a rare and different expressionism withing the neomodernistic dogma. Thus Kursaal, which until now is Moneo’s most neomodernistic work, seems to herald the final escapades of this movement. By tipping and twisting the almost cubic figures, neomodernism’s notorious rectangularity is transgressed - without seriously offering convincing proof that the future holds additional trump cards in this style, which has clearly dominated the architectural expression of the 1990's.
Flemming Skude
