The Hilton Hotel in Barcelona, completed in 1990, was designed by two different architects: the client’s architect designed the building, while the elevations were required to be designed by a select firm approved by the city to handle building façades in important, highly vis- ible locations.The hotel is sited on the busiest thor- oughfare in Barcelona.
In each of the above cases, the predominant strategy for deceiving viewers is that of ‘blending’ into the immediate environment: camouflage as architectural contextualism.These buildings have not been designed as attention-seeking objects of aesthetic contemplation but, on the contrary, are therefore intentionally banal. In places where banality is undesirable, camouflage can provide a strat - egy for its concealment. In this case, an architectural surface-as-spectacle deceives by presenting a hollow monumentality. Such is a generic, com- mercial, open-plan office building in Richmond upon Thames, England, by Quinlan Terry that, on the exterior, resembles a Renaissance palace. Another example is a Barcelona Hilton hotel ( above ) where the munici- pality ruled that the façade had to be designed by a different, more vanguard architectural firm (Viaplana and Piñon) than the firm hired by the client to design the rest of the building (Mir, Coll, and Carmona). Although marginal in terms of occurrence, architectural camouflage is nevertheless insightful. It appears to exist mainly in technologically advanced urban societies, and to date mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century. It parallels other post-modern phenomena such as de-industrialization and the societal shift from material produc- tion to services. More precisely, it is an architectural stratagem that responds to particularly urban concerns, both practical—such as crime and privacy—as well as ideological, such as heritage and collective memory. Behind camouflage lurk private interests such as tourism, real estate and lifestyle marketing, as well as public interests such as the maintenance of public order.
Architectural camouflage reveals, in the end, the degree to which the city is a space of illusion; an illusion that is maintained, at times, by highly theatrical means.The fact that camouflage, which is by its very nature adversarial, exists in the artificial and purportedly civilized environment of the modern city says, perhaps, the most about the degree to which the city, as a concept, is shrouded in myth.
Research was made possible by grants from the Graham Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Netherlands Foundation for Fine Arts, Design and Architecture, by the kind cooperation of the buildings’ owners, as well as by helpful tips received from colleagues and friends.
All photographs by Rafael Gómez-Moriana and Sheila Nadimi.
Rafael Gómez-Moriana is an independent researcher and instructor interested in mass- cultural aspects of architecture. He lives in Barcelona. Sheila Nadimi is a visual artist with a back- ground in environmental studies. She is cur- rently a lecturer of 3-D design at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 9 2003
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