THE WANDERER RETURNED
Seat’s well-travelled design director now takes inspiration from Barcelona’s rich cultural legacy. Mark Tisshaw tours the Spanish city with him
Think of design in Barcelona and you think of Antoni Gaudí. In the early 20th century the Spanish architect created some of the most extraordinary buildings in the world, let alone Barcelona, including the famous Sagrada Família catholic church, which remains unfinished to this day because so many of Gaudí’s plans were in his head and died with him.
As an outsider, then, you might expect Alejandro Mesonero-romanos, the design director of Barcelona-based Seat and therefore one of Spain’s leading practitioners in the field, to have a Gaudí pocketbook ready to reference for inspiration.
So when I ask if that is indeed the case, I don’t get the answer I expect. “To me, he wasn’t really influential,” he says. “What I like about Gaudí is that he pushed things so far with his thinking. Today it’s hard to do unique work as people are quick to comment and everything is everywhere in the media. Gaudí’s work was local then, commissioned by wealthy individuals in a small city.”
Mesonero-romanos took up his role with Seat in 2011 and has overseen the transformation of the car maker’s range to become the largest, most coherent and successful line-up in its history. Today Seat is anything but a local car maker in a small city.
He hasn’t done things like Gaudí, of course, but he has displayed some of that individual thinking at Seat to at last give it a real identity of its own within the Volkswagen Group. A generation ago that simply wasn’t the case.
We meet Mesonero-romanos to take in the sites of Barcelona that do inspire him. It’s a hot Friday afternoon in late September and he is fresh from a meeting with Seat boss Luca de Meo to discuss planned motor show launch cars for next year.
Our meeting point is El Nacional, a tapas restaurant tucked away off the main Passeig de Gracia and the kind of innocuous-looking place you’d walk by a thousand times without twigging what’s behind the entrance. Just three years ago it was a huge indoor car park, having been a fabric-dye factory, cafétheatre and car workshop in previous guises since it was built in 1889, but it has now been converted into a thriving café-bar-restaurant, and a beautifully decorated one at that.
It’s a bustling, informal place and Mesonero-romanos’s current favourite weekend haunt. He’ll ride his motorcycle with his wife from the hills above Barcelona down into the city, have some lunch and then go exploring. “Food puts me in a good mood,” he says. “When you’re happy, you create good stuff. Happy designers create happy cars. If you were in the far east of Russia you wouldn’t come up with the same kind of things…”
Mesonero-romanos is well travelled. He has lived the kind of nomadic life in vastly contrasting cities that builds up your internal reference points when creating rounded products with widespread appeal. He grew up in Madrid, moving to Barcelona to study when he was 18 and then onto London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) for further education in automotive design. Upon graduation, jobs in Barcelona at Seat and the Volkswagen Group design studio followed, before a switch to Renault in Paris. From there he went to Renault-owned Samsung Motors in Seoul to take his first design director job.
He spent just over two years in Asia before the call came to join Seat – just as he was about to head to Japan to take up a new job. “I was asked by Walter de Silva [former VW Group design boss] to take the Seat job. He knew I liked the brand and I’d worked with him briefly at Renault in 2000. We maintained the relationship and I couldn’t say no. It was an immediate thing,” he says.
More than a decade after leaving Barcelona, Mesonero-romanos was back. Despite spending the first 18 years of his life in Madrid, it’s Barcelona that has always felt like home to the 50-year-old.
“People here don’t want to stand out as much as in Madrid,” he says. “This is good, as it gives you a chance to create in a fresher, friendlier place. Barcelona is also more casual than Madrid. In Madrid, you have to be smart and elegant; in Barcelona, image is not as important. You can have a nice life here with very little – you have the sea, you have the mountains, the weather is milder. It’s more relaxed and less stressful.
“Compared with Madrid, and other cities like Paris and London, Barcelona is also pretty small. You can ride your motorbike from the mountains and be by the sea in 15 minutes. The city is smaller so more people know each other.” That soon becomes evident on our post-lunch walk up Passeig de Gracia, where Mesonero-romanos bumps into a friend who runs a luxury fashion house. “He is a rich guy, but you wouldn’t know it. His wife drives a Cupra, too…”
The next stop is one of Gaudí’s best-known buildings, Casa Batlló. The façade of this townhouse is most notable for its ornate
WHAT WE DO IS BASED ON EXPERIENCES. THIS IS HOW YOU FEED CREATIVITY
exterior mosaic of small ceramic tiles, and its elaborate waves and structures are designed to bring the outside of the house in. “You can’t take literal inspiration, but general: why can’t you bring the outside of the car in?” muses Mesonero-romanos.
Cars touch every part of Mesoneroromanos’s life. He moved house recently, partly to gain a larger garage to fill with classics. He also declares a love of reading. “Car books mainly,” he adds, before showing me a picture album on his iphone of 573 of his books, a simple design project he’s working on. “There are more books than that,” he says.
Motorcycles play a key part in Mesoneroromanos’s life, too. He rode his first motorcross bike aged five in the countryside by his family home near Madrid. He is the youngest of seven children and the only one of his family to have moved away from that city.
“I’ve always had a passion for cars,” he says. “I wasn’t a great student but I knew I wanted to do something with cars. I’d been drawing them since I was 12; I’d draw them in every book I could, adapting drawings already in there to cars… It drove my teachers mad but I thought it was an early Photoshop. At 18 I decided I wanted to work with cars. My mother let me study industrial design, a profession that was not known then.”
The RCA was the second prestigious design institution at which he studied, having first attended Barcelona’s Elisava design and engineering school at 18. While there, he worked in his spare time designing buses in a small factory 50 miles from the city.
“After graduating I got a job in a design studio, doing everything: architecture, product design, industrial, everything. I loved it but I wanted to design cars. Everyone thought I was mad giving up my job to apply to the RCA. I got a grant from the British government to go there; it was very expensive, so thanks very much!”
Mesonero-romanos lodged in Portland Road in London’s Notting Hill. His landlady, Diana, ran an antiques shop and had a house in Marbella. “She took on Spanish students to speak Spanish to,” he explains. “She had a boyfriend, Brian, who had a house in Cornwall. They lived down there at weekends so you can imagine the parties we had!”
The RCA has produced a ‘Who’s Who’ of car designers. Contemporaries and longstanding friends of Mesonero-romanos include Alex Malval, recently head of design at Citroën and soon to join Daimler, and Mercedes’ Gorden Wagener.
“London was magical. The school, the people, the connections you make. The place breathes passion, history and culture. It was one of the best periods of my life. I still like to go back there over Christmas every year.”
It’s clear Mesonero-romanos looks back fondly not only on his time in London but also on his diverse roles in different corners of the world over the years. Crucially, he’s been made a better designer for it.
“It’s very important. What we do is based on experiences. This is how you feed creativity. When you put people in a dark room for two years, design is impossible. The more you move around, the more you experience. It feeds the library in your brain and puts you in a position to be open to things.
“You have to be curious in what you see, go deeper with it. Why are things that way?
IN THE PAST IT WAS MUCH EASIER TO DO INDIVIDUAL THINKING; TODAY THERE ARE TOO MANY LIMITS ON US
I tell my designers to move around, take a Friday afternoon off, get on a bike and just go around Barcelona on their own and breathe.”
One of the best ways to view the city is from one of the many rooftops open to the public, such as the one atop La Pedrera, another famous Gaudí building. Gaudí was said to be inspired by an ant nest when creating the building. The rooftop is the real treasuretrove, though, an almost child-like creation of shapes, pillars, statues and little walkways.
“It’s childish, yes, like a dream,” says Mesonero-romanos. “But Gaudí projected it into something so big and so important. Imagine what others thought of him then.
“In the past it was much easier to do individual thinking; today, there are too many limits on us. Look at cars from the US in the 1950s, the concept cars of the 1970s. Today we are too pragmatic and too realistic. We don’t think too much; people don’t think the future will be any better than the present.”
Mesonero-romanos is inspired by the future, though, and believes that the dawn of the electric car “sees the door open a bit, allowing you to dream more”. He says modern architecture could do with dreaming a bit more, too: “When things are known, people put their money in. Anything different, people get uncertain and nervous. Things won’t get through a single financial review. There are no risks taken.”
Mesonero-romanos takes a lot from La Pedrera’s rooftop, touching and interacting with the various surfaces, paying attention to the mosaic tile-covered pillars which mix concave and convex surfaces with sharp lines. “You should remember these shapes when you hear from us in the future…” he says, hinting at the next step in Seat design.
We walk to our next stop, another rooftop: Casa Fuster, a 1908 building from modernist architect Domènech i Montaner that is now the most emblematic of designer hotels. We have a drink on the roof, something Mesonero-romanos frequently does across Barcelona. “I like the view from above. Everything looks small: problems, people. You’re taking a breath up here.”
Everything does seem calmer up here, a far cry from the relentlessness of one of Mesonero-romanos’s former cities of residence, the South Korean capital Seoul.
“I liked it there,” he says. “Koreans are like the Mediterraneans of Asia, it’s like Spain and Italy. There’s a real sharing culture – everything there is focused on the group, not on the individual. The team always wins there, people don’t want to stand out.
“I was in charge of 50 Koreans. I evolved and gained the skills to lead a team who didn’t really understand me. When you can’t talk [the language], you transmit in other ways.”
It was Mesonero-romanos’s first design
director job and it taught him the team culture that’s so important when working on so many design projects, which at Seat includes occasional short-term projects for other members of the VW Group.
“You can manage people and have fun,” he says on how he likes to run his team, which has increased from 92 to 190 people in his time at Seat. “When people work together you need to convince them, not force them. You challenge with debate, get some of your ideas through but also concede to others; I can always be convinced otherwise and have no problem. Debate brings the level up, always.”
The Barcelona Mesonero-romanos returned to from Seoul was a very different one from when he first arrived. “Barcelona was a very local place then and not very open. People had lots of ideas for Barcelona but no money – then the Olympics happened.”
The 1992 Olympics inspired huge regeneration to what had been a deprived place in many areas. Back then the area by the sea was a no-go zone, whereas now it’s one of the most visited places in Europe.
Our final stop in this great city is Gràcia, known as the village, and it contrasts starkly with the main busy streets just a block or two over. Narrow streets, packed with independent shops, all converge on several small squares that are packed full of families and children playing, even at 7.30pm.
“I call this ‘de-pollution’,” says Mesoneroromanos, eyes wide at just how friendly and thriving a place Gràcia is. One could easily get lost here, like in a scene from an idealistic novel. “I come here to reset – there is no design here at all, just life, just people. You erase your brain here and don’t need to be involved; life is just happening.”
It’s here where we go our separate ways, but not before Mesonero-romanos introduces us to the very first Cupra-branded model. And it’s not a car, but a fixed-gear bicycle. The sleek, striking piece of design is a realisation of everything we’ve discussed: past experiences used to influence the creation of something good-looking, well-rounded and just right for the modern day.