Replicating spaces for knowledge

Last week I visited the building by Herzog & De Meuron: Caixaforum in Madrid. OT is an excellent Art center close to the Prado managed by the big savings bank La Caixa. These architects have built several wonderful Art centers in famous cities like San Francisco, Barcelona and Madrid.

In these recent years there sound voices claming the presence of more personal identity in public buildings and asking local authorities to contract rather local architects than famous international ones. These critical voices of the international constructive style argue that most buildings appear as replications and cities look all the same.

As an observer of these architectural networks, I feel that spaces belong people once they’re built. And people are different in every city.

Art centers look more similar due to the way exhibitions are designed than because of the buildings that are hosting them.

Today people have the power to transform any space through the usage. In an abstract representation spaces, art, people, time, and buildings knitt a network of knowledge where the architect is the less important element. Though the style becomes a bridge between cultures and gathers virtual links through triggering sensations of common art spaces.

City networks

Again with my iPhone I’m writing this post. I’m on the AVE the fast train connecting Barcelona and Madrid in two and a half hours. From city center to city center.
The airshuttle between Bcn and Mad has been for years the most crowded in Europe and now the AVE train is getting the same way.
These two cities are competitors and allies at the same time. They produce together more than the 50% of the Spanish GDP and host approximately the 60% of the research and innovation.
Madrid has become a principal financial city bridging Europe and South America. Barcelona, traditionally industrial and commercial capital of Spain is shifting to services and knowledge economy. Bcn wad recently nominated as the seat of the General Secretary of the Euromediterranean Union starting in 2009.
This is a great challenge for Bcn to become also a bridge between Europe and the Eastern countries of the Mediterranean Region.
We may ask ourselves what makes Spain so attractive to interregional relations? Probably the fact that Spain has been one of the First countries in Europe to have to live with a permanent negotiation inside its State limits. Bascs, Catalans, Galicians and Andalusians but later the rest of the regions have been a permanent negotiation scenario and all this after 40 years of dictatorship and centuries of authoritarian monarchy.
The case of the federal lands in Germany is similar but with less greave because in Spain discussions go beyond practical politics and are dealing with national sentíment and identify.
Knowlwdge creation requires permanent negotiation. As long as this happens links are working and knowledge flows.
Today I’m travelling to meet colleagues from different parts of Spain to work in a report for the Spanish Government on the publc support to R+D.
I wish we can do a good job.

Times are chaning for all of us!

MLKing

One of the inconveniences of getting older is that you loose the perception of time. Perpective of the history means better understanding, but shortens the time scale. I was 11 when Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. It was short before the riots in Paris and a few months before my awakening to politics, which happened  in August when the soviet army occupied Czechoslovakia.  1968 was a stressing year and most families in Spain started thinking that Spanish dictatorship could also be beaten This happened 7 years later though the dream of Dr. King took a little bit longer: just forty years.

As a child or a young teenager I could have not imagined that things would have gone the way they’ve done.  Now it seems to me that time has passed fast and that efforts have been worth but I imagine how many families have suffered for all those changes, how many people have died for those causes, and how many people will miss their sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, parents, etc.

This is why I could understand yesterday’s tears in Jessy Jackson’s eyes while listening to Barak Obama’s victory speech. Those people must have felt the fast transition of history on their skins and this causes a feeling of sadness and happiness at the same time. A feeling of relief and anger at the same time. An internal impulse to cry and to sing hymns of victory at the same moment. I’m convinced that today they feel a stronger belief in humankind.

That’s my case. I want to believe that we have gone a big step forward, towards a better world for everyone.

To Barak Obama, a great thank you, and congratulations for the victory that belongs too so many silent and honest people.