Madrid, 1920 - 1996
ArchitectHis earliest ideas and sketches for a new headquarters for Nationale-Nederlanden seem to have leapt straight from the heart, and perhaps that is why even the most commendable bear little resemblance to the finished building. How, after all, was Cano Lasso to convince the largely Dutch jury of a restricted competition of the merits of a stonework building smothered in vines, half-buried in the sharply sloping terrain amid pools of light and water?.
It hardly seemed possible that his introverted design could succeed, sequestered beneath the holm oak trees, complementing the natural landscape and screening all corporate swagger from the outside world.
Little by little, the stone – and then concrete – bones of his creation emerged from the earth, giving shape to a cascade of infinitely reconfigurable spaces. The developing building bore traces of a certain Mendelsohnian influence, evoking the image of a great ship anchored in the landscape.
And so it was presented, back in the nineties, an architecture with a mastery of horizontality that was gently losing material as it descended, as shown in the competition drawings.
Thus, a new architecture was born in 1990, a masterstroke of horizontal lines tapering subtly towards the ground, as we see in the drawings submitted to the jury.
The project was not straightforward, nor would we expect it to be. The architect, now seventy, found himself in a daily battle with the iron discipline of the Dutch engineers, who, as we learn from his notes, saw the creation of buildings from an almost exclusively technocentric perspective. His words reveal that he was acutely aware of the risk of jeopardizing a different set of values, to him the very essence of architecture, but he accepted the realities of his fate as an architect: to be one more cog in a complex machine with no clear sense of where the project was heading. Even so, some years later he was able to look back on the result with satisfaction: an engaging building that cleaves to the earth, supported by a solid masonry shell. These walls envelop a series of sculpted courtyards, sumptuous with greenery and traversed by waterways, a visual echo of the very first sketch.
These walls form the envelopes of carved patios, furrowed by water channels among leafy species, like echoes of the first sketch.
Madrid, 1920 - 1996
ArchitectHis earliest ideas and sketches for a new headquarters for Nationale-Nederlanden seem to have leapt straight from the heart, and perhaps that is why even the most commendable bear little resemblance to the finished building. How, after all, was Cano Lasso to convince the largely Dutch jury of a restricted competition of the merits of a stonework building smothered in vines, half-buried in the sharply sloping terrain amid pools of light and water?.
It hardly seemed possible that his introverted design could succeed, sequestered beneath the holm oak trees, complementing the natural landscape and screening all corporate swagger from the outside world.
Little by little, the stone – and then concrete – bones of his creation emerged from the earth, giving shape to a cascade of infinitely reconfigurable spaces. The developing building bore traces of a certain Mendelsohnian influence, evoking the image of a great ship anchored in the landscape.
And so it was presented, back in the nineties, an architecture with a mastery of horizontality that was gently losing material as it descended, as shown in the competition drawings.
Thus, a new architecture was born in 1990, a masterstroke of horizontal lines tapering subtly towards the ground, as we see in the drawings submitted to the jury.
The project was not straightforward, nor would we expect it to be. The architect, now seventy, found himself in a daily battle with the iron discipline of the Dutch engineers, who, as we learn from his notes, saw the creation of buildings from an almost exclusively technocentric perspective. His words reveal that he was acutely aware of the risk of jeopardizing a different set of values, to him the very essence of architecture, but he accepted the realities of his fate as an architect: to be one more cog in a complex machine with no clear sense of where the project was heading. Even so, some years later he was able to look back on the result with satisfaction: an engaging building that cleaves to the earth, supported by a solid masonry shell. These walls envelop a series of sculpted courtyards, sumptuous with greenery and traversed by waterways, a visual echo of the very first sketch.
These walls form the envelopes of carved patios, furrowed by water channels among leafy species, like echoes of the first sketch.
