RCR Arquitectes 1991-2010

AV Monographs/Monografias #137

Luis fernandez-Galiano (Ed.)

The architecture of RCR (Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta) combines romantic rauxa with rational rigor. Based in Olot, the capital of La Garrotxa – a Pre-Pyrenean region in Catalonia, filled with extinct volcanoes and pleasant landscapes that have attracted painters, origin of its ancient industry of religious imagery – in no more than two decades they have built in their area a crop of works with a unique language that combines the romantic desire to blend with nature and to seek the sublime through extreme relinquishment, with the rational determination of geometric rigor, abstract composition and constructive refinement, with details that bring together violently tactile materials. It is an architecture at the same time essential and eloquent, reductive as corresponds to what popular language calls minimalism, and at once expansive in its horizontal dialogue with the landscape, that is framed or perforated with resolve.
The traces of these artistic interventions are a series of buildings, pavilions and parks so compactly woven into the territory, and in such exact harmony with its volcanic and abrupt beauty, that it is easy to imagine how they might serve as pedagogic and touristic lure, in a manner not very different from the one we can experience today with the work of Mario Botta in the Swiss Ticino Canton or with that of César Manrique in the Canarian island of Lanzarote. Though their projects nowadays reach the Catalonian coast, the south of France and, in the future, more distant geographies, the legacy built in La Garrotxa and its close surroundings makes these architects inseparable from the history of Olot. This regional condition, which is reinforced by a romantic sensibility towards nature to shape a strongly local identity, which in no way reduces its universal character – is Palladio a localist because he is so obviously associated with the Veneto region? –, has been underestimated by some critics, who either fit them into a hypothetical ‘Catalonian school’ or see them as followers of the lessons of Wright or Kahn. Their training, however, points towards a fusion of the Fine Arts studies in Olot of Ramón Vilalta and Carme Pigem – who would later marry – with the natural talent of Rafael Aranda, a son of Andalusian immigrants settled in the same town, and all of this in the melting pot of the Vallés School of Architecture – located near Barcelona, and with a landscape-oriented curriculum –, where they begin to show a keen interest in Mies van der Rohe or Donald Judd that will be enhanced by the influence of Japanese architecture, brought about by a long journey undertaken a few years after graduating.