landscape than a city of wall-like slabs. The modernist slab may exploit land efficiently, but not landscape —unless of course the slab is a relatively isolated occurrence in the manner of Le Corbusier’s stand- alone unités . Architecture is, of course, premised from the very outset on excep- tionality. Its values are resistant to the massification of ideas. As every architecture student learns, one must always ‘go against the grain’ and never design the very grain itself. As a mark of cultural distinction, architecture privileges the unique, isolated object; figure over ground. In Benidorm, there is no architecture: there is “the tallest building in Spain” which is also “the tallest hotel in Europe” (the Hotel Bali), but there are no buildings that stand out architecturally. Architectural guidebooks to Spain do not list any of its buildings, making Benidorm an exceptional city without exceptional buildings.
This generic quality permeates Benidorm’s urban fabric with per- fect consistency. The point towers contain mostly hotel rooms and vacation apartments inhabited by middle-class Britons, Germans, Scandinavians and Spaniards, such that the city effectively comprises a sort of modern Euro-space . In fact, Benidorm can be seen as a represen- tation in built form of one of the core values underpinning modern Europe: the right of every citizen to free time and leisure (Europeans are entitled by law to an average of six weeks per year of paid vacation time). Leisure is democratised and made affordable by the efficiency of the point tower type. It is no coincidence that Benidorm’s occupancy rates consistently outperform other holiday destinations in Spain whose tourist sector faces growing competition from cheaper eastern European destinations served by discount airlines.
Benidorm’s beach is the main public space, principal organising de- vice and raison d’être of the city. Streets are laid out in a quasi-gridiron
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architecture and land
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