du Portugal
Like it or not, I’m only here in Portugal for the day. I took a train yesterday afternoon from Seville and arrived here in Lisbon this morning. I finally broke down and bought a guidebook. Until now I had been trusting my instincts on what to see and had pretty much thought that if whatever’s worth seeing isn’t well-marked enough for me to notice it, it’s not really that much worth seeing. But today while avoiding a brief Portuguese rain shower, I dodged into a bookstore and wandered into the tourism section. Upon opening a guidebook to Lisbon I flipped to the architecture section, and low and behold, there it was - Alvaro Siza’s Portugal Pavilion from Expo ‘98! Honestly, I don’t think we ever studied it in any of my architecture classes, but it’s been one of my favorites for about as long as I can remember. What’s really ‘cool’ about this building is the outside space made by way of covering steel cables in concrete. Sure, you’re probably thinking, “that doesn’t sound very neat or impressive.” Well, let me then tell you that the cables have been allowed to sag (as gravity would have them do anyway) so that this multi-multi-ton area of concrete and steel looks and acts like a large piece of fabric - remarkably thin for the span it covers. If you still don’t think it’s cool I guess you won’t care that this weblog entry is being typed inside a train station designed by Santiago Calatrava. (Architecture-philes, you know what I’m talking about!)
I’m on a train back to Madrid tonight and by Saturday morning I’ll be in Bilbao - home of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum. Ciao!