Portrait of the month

1 Josep Lluís Mateo

2 AC Forum Hotel 2004 Barcelona (2004)

3 Convention Center Forum 2004 Barcelona (2004)

4 Bundesbank in Chemnitz, Germany (2004)

5 The Factory, office building, Boulogne-Billancourt, France (2010)

6 PGGM Headquarters, Zeist, The Netherlands (2011)

7 Filmoteca of Cataluna, Barcelona (2011)

8 New Access to the Prague National Gallery, Czech Republic (2012)

9 Castelo Branco Cultural Centre, Portugal (2013)

Josep Lluís Mateo, Barcelona
Mateo Arquitectura

Being at the same time designer, guest speaker and professor, Josep Lluís Mateo is one of the most prolific Spanish architects of this period, sought everywhere throughout Europe. Retrospective of his most important projects.

Graduated as architect from the Barcelona Superior Architecture Technical School (ETSAB 1974), Josep Lluís Mateo (born in 1949) becomes chief editor of the magazine Quaderns from 1981 to 1990. In 1991, he gets fully involved in his architectural activity and creates MAP Arquitectos with Marta Cervello. This office works today with a team of 30 refined professionals, coming from many European countries, and has specialized in many fields – city planning, residential and office buildings – with a great capacity to adapt to international environments. Combining his professional activity with his teaching at University (he obtained his Doctorate in 1994 from the Cataluna Polytechnic University), Josep Lluis Mateo is since 2002 an Associated Professor at the Federal Polytechnic School (EPF) in Zurich and since 2008 the President of BIArch (Barcelona Institute of Architecture). «Good architecture is generous, he likes to repeat.» He gives priority to research and opening and believes his role as an architect is to improve and not to destroy: «Any change has to be imagined in relation with the site’s history and spirit.» His office will therefore look for the alchemy with the site by setting a sensitive and intelligent relation with the environment with functional projects, at human scale, centered on the the connection interior/exterior and on the tensions between private and public spaces. From the Bundesbank building in Chemnitz (Germany), with a translucent façade revealing the old structure, to the multimodal Nice-Airport business district hub 'Grand Arénas' which imagines the town of tomorrow (Mateo is very present in France at Boulogne-Billancourt, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nice,…), it is a long list of ambitious projects.

The architect felt that the Castelo Branco Cultural Centre in Devesa (Portugal) presented the challenge of addressing the great complexity of the public space and the various traffic and urban problems at the historic centre of Castelo Branco. The aim is furthermore to turn the old town into a cultural nerve centre for the city. The building with its wooden façade in contrast with the zinc-clad reinforced concrete of the suspended part, is also covered by a roof floating above the site opening on the exhibition hall with a great skylight. Available in 2012, the new access to the Prague National Gallery is situated between two existing palaces. The vertical limits being already fixed the architect has created horizontal limits to organize the space. «The ground emerges as a stratum which changes shape depending on the level differences whilst the roof is a continuous covering, he adds. This roof forms itself a courtyard which collects water and defines a green space. Structur ed that way, it underlines the site’s organic life. The interior space is open, flexible, multiple, complex, permanent but fragile, at the same time.» Situated near Utrecht (The Netherlands), the PGGM headquarters were transformed to create a visual and aesthetic harmony and integrate it to the existing building. «The extension’s reflective glass and steel give a gliding impression. Following the building’s outside morphology and its environment, we have proposed interior working spaces designed to create an homogeneous system: repetitive glazed buildings, wooden and corten steel coverings complete the glass abstraction».

In Barcelona, built for the Forum 2004 on an industrial zone close to the city, the AC Forum Hotel and the Office Tower are a solid piece, a sculptural volume with relatively small windows.The cut at the middle of its height and a certain shaping of the mass are reinforced by the different quality of its external surfaces. Whilst the International Convention Center shows a structure composed like a musical score. The climate, the light, the shade, the sound and the silence shaped the project said the architect. Also in Barcelona, conceiving Architecture as an art to intervene in the environment in order to improve it, the building of the Cataluna Filmoteca in the Raval, one of the most dilapidated places of the historical centre, meant an enormous responsibility. The building with varied façades is situated in the middle of other constructions with dilapidated walls. «The cinema, on which the project is centered, was put underground to reduce the building’s volume. Then, we have transformed the square into the integral ground floor of the construction. The technical constraints study started in 2005 and the building itself was initiated in 2007, after deciding to fix a vertical spatial axis in the centre of the construction to attract the light and the space in the movement.

As some excavation work was necessary, the construction was a very complicated process by setting the cinema underground, as the site was an ancient medieval lagoon... Our choice was to use special water resistant concrete. As an architect Josep Lluís Mateo likes the feeling of void and is keen to take the responsibility of creating the project. As an example, the organization of the Seguin Island at Boulogne Billancourt involves the construction of a new part of the city. The Factory, the office building and flagship project of this new district’s planning, was based on a new concept: the building’s façade is load-bearing. «The front door opens directly onto a green interior park which defines the small island‘s outskirts. With a system of openings, the façade seems to fold on itself to open up on the garden.
The concrete structure is completely metallic plated, except on the bottom of the construction where one discovers a part of the concrete, as if one wanted to show the real nature of the building, protected by the window frames and the steel. Just like the covering, the gables are made of zinc and are fitted as per traditional methods.»

In an essay named 'Identity and Modernity', Josep Lluís Mateo states that the present globalization context shows that the reasonings in favor of changes and modernization combine well with local, dense and strong logics. «On one side, we have the defense of specific characters, of local traditions, of landscapes, which vary constantly like the climate, of sometimes remote cultures and stories which continue to develop. Then, we have a modern version like a synonym of the abstraction, the generics, the global products...» The objective is to build a worldwide culture which is broken up and collective. «What’s permanent doesn’t interest me as much as what’s different.»

Indeed, from project to project Josep Lluís Mateo doesn’t repeat himself and the material is closely linked to the form... His main interest is the permanent tension between idea and material. The architect, never forgetting his ten year activity in an architecture magazine, keeps a critical eye on his own projects. «The real difference between the architect and the critic’s work is the distance, he adds, because the analysis requires this distance which the architect can’t have, as he is totally inside the project.» What’s most important is the process, the intellectual and artistic adventure and not the finished work, claims Josep Lluís Mateo. The construction of a building is always the expression of a sustainable intelligence and will, involving a precise site. «We must accompany it up to when the idea becomes space and material and starts to lead it’s own life. After that we disappear! The building doesn’t belong to us anymore!»

Legends

1 Josep Lluís Mateo © Jordi Belver
2 AC Forum Hotel 2004 Barcelona (2004) © Mateo Arquitectura
3 Convention Center Forum 2004 Barcelona (2004) © Infinite Light and Albert Masi
4 Bundesbank in Chemnitz, Germany (2004) © Jan Bitter
5 The Factory, office building, Boulogne-Billancourt, France (2010) © Adrià Goula
6 PGGM Headquarters, Zeist, The Netherlands (2011) © Adrià Goula
7 Filmoteca of Cataluna, Barcelona (2011) © Adrià Goula
8 New Access to the Prague National Gallery, Czech Republic (2012) © Adrià Goula
9 Castelo Branco Cultural Centre, Portugal (2013) © Adrià Goula

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