Top Architects, Happy on the Margins
VENICE — The Pritzker Prize is considered architecture’s highest award. So it might come as a surprise that last year’s recipients, the three partners of RCR Arquitectes, presented their work at the Venice Architecture Biennale not as a centerpiece of the exhibition, but in an industrial space on its periphery.
RCR was selected to create a pavilion for Catalonia, one of a handful of regions that take part in the Biennale’s “collateral events,” outside the official exhibition, which is limited to entries from nation states.
RCR’s three partners — Carme Pigem, Rafael Aranda and Ramon Vilalta — seem comfortable on the outskirts. Ever since they founded their firm in 1988, they have avoided building gravity- defying, eye- catching structures.
“Architecture shouldn’t be about doing difficult projects and iconic buildings but about creating spaces in which people can have their own experiences and develop their own creativity,” Ms. Pigem said in a joint interview with her partners in their studio in Olot, Spain, in April.
RCR’s Catalan pavilion, called “Dream and Nature,” takes the visitor far away from Venice’s canals by evoking the woodlands, fields and volcanic hills of Catalonia. The pavilion presents images of 120 hectares of land in Catalonia that the architects bought and have started to turn into what Mr. Aranda called “our legacy” — a farming property that they aim to make a place of study and reflection about architecture.
The pavilion plunges visitors into a Catalan landscape, but the three architects explained that they did not ignore Venice in their design. Glass disks hang from the ceiling, on which text and images are projected. On some, part of the glass is curved so as to create a magnifying effect over key words.
The use of glass, the architects said, was a tribute to the glassblowing workmanship of Murano, one of the islands in the Venice lagoon. The pavilion’s shiny floor and bright lights pay homage to the Byzantine heritage of Venice.
Catalonia has been at the heart of a Spanish territorial crisis, which reached a climax last October when separatist lawmakers unsuccessfully defied Spain’s government to declare independence.
Still, RCR’s partners made clear they wanted to distance their architecture from the politics of Catalan secession.
RCR’s buildings are purposefully understated, including their studio, located on a back street of Olot, the hometown of all three architects. The three partners studied architecture together, forming a friendship that, for Ms. Pigem and Mr. Vilalta, turned into a marriage.
During a joint interview, they repeatedly completed each other’s sentences. Their commonality extends as far as their finances, down to the idea that any lecture fee earned individually should be shared among the three.
“We’re at the point where even if you’re taking a decision without all three of us being present, you feel accompanied and somehow know that your decision will be respected and trusted by the others,” Mr. Aranda said.
Identity is important to RCR’s partners, but mostly in terms of valuing the environment in which they work and live, in Olot.
“The starting point is to know oneself,” Mr. Aranda explained, “which means to have strong roots and know your place and the nature and people around you. Once you know that, you can travel the world and understand it.”