Renegotiating globality: Catalan architecture in a transnational context
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[1] Harvard University
Harvard University
City of Cambridge, Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Catalan Review: international journal of Catalan culture, ISSN 0213-5949, Vol. 37, 2023, págs. 19-32
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The 2017 Pritzker Prize was conferred on the Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes for an architecture that has its “roots firmly in place” and its “arms outstretched to the rest of the world.” RCR’s work was praised for their mediation of the local and the global, at a historical moment of the simultaneous dissolution of the nation-state by global capitalism and the rise of an inward turn in the form of recalcitrant nationalism across the world. Their work can be taken as a model for an optimistic global localism or local globalism without its social and political pitfalls – or, at the very least, a stand-in for the form that that path might take. RCR’s works may also seem to express the aspirations a new Catalonia may be striving to realize: a place that (as the Pritzker Jury stated) is “both local and universal,” that is, built as a “true collaboration and at the service of the community.” It is not by chance that RCR designed the Catalan Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale. This paper discusses some of RCR’s projects and critically interprets them as a postindustrial version of critical regionalism, as embodying certain local identities within a globalized architecture, and as serving as one of Catalonia’s soft political powers.
