“A sentimental monumentality”: a conversation with Alberto Veiga about inspirations, competitions, work on continuity in the first 20 years of Barozzi Veiga
“A sentimental monumentality”: a conversation with Alberto Veiga about inspirations, competitions, work on continuity in the first 20 years of Barozzi Veiga
by Paola Mauti
Barozzi Veiga is a Barcelona based firm founded by an Italian architect from Rovereto, Fabrizio Barozzi, and a Spanish architect from Santiago de Compostela, Alberto Veiga.
After working together at “Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra Arquitecto” in Sevilla, they decided to start their own practice, celebrating in 2024 their first 20 years of activity. During “Architecture for Heritage” course at YACademy I had the opportunity to interview Alberto Veiga and talk about how their work evolved since 2004, the secrets behind their timeless architectures and how their “sentimental monumentality” embraces all their projects since the beginning.
“Every architect has his own story, a deeply personal narrative”. Barozzi Veiga references in architecture are always related to their hometowns. And even if they have different backgrounds, in these 20 years they shared common interests and kept evolving together while working on several international competitions. But there is a building in history that they consider as their architectural reference: Casa Malaparte (Naples, 1938-1942).
Casa Malaparte, the masterpiece by Adalberto Libera in Capri, for Alberto Veiga is the example of “working with fundamentals”. It is a simple prism in a natural context with a great staircase that reminds Chiesa dell’Annunziata in Lipari, the place where the owner Curzio Malaparte was photographed. This is a client’s memory that transforms itself, through a simple shape - the prism - and a simple object - the staircase - , into a timeless architecture that is able to reveal a totally unexpected dimension by becoming part of the natural landscape.
“Working on continuity” for Barozzi Veiga does not mean to fully preserve or being obsessed with understanding all the great history of a place. It means to extrapolate fragments that are often hidden - a detail, an atmosphere, a memory, a light - and reinterpret them in a completely unexpected way.
“There is always something to draw from it” and in Szczecin Philharmonic Hall, their first project in Poland in 2007-2014, “working on continuity” means drawing the shape of the rooflines as the expressionist architectures in the Central Europe suggest. Szczecin Philharmonic Hall is a Polish building that belongs to this specific site but simultaneously it is an independent and unexpected object that can belong to all places. Inside the architecture, as in many other projects, the foyer becomes a public square, carrying the traditional concept of the European plaza within the architectural object for a collective space that belongs to everybody.
The same plaza is inside the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, realised in Switzerland in 2011-2019. An elementary form - a block - regenerates a difficult urban setting affected by old and disused railway yards , turning the former warehouse into an art district. Working with industrial heritage, in Lausanne, meant risking and demolishing the 19th-century building by creating a new architecture that reinterprets the industrial atmosphere. The façades incorporate the collection of fragments from the former warehouse as surrealist objet trouvé and use the rhythm of the railways as an evocative sign of Lausanne specific site.
Ribera del Duero, realised in Spain in 2006-2011, is a completely different context. It is located on the edge of the town between urban and landscape and it splits the program into small-scale volumes that draw a public square. The tower is an archetype that reminds Castilian history and Castilian landscape by rooting in the specificity of the site.
Barozzi Veiga started their shared practice by participating to international competitions, using their studies and their own backgrounds to discover their personal approach. And the amount of competition they keep winning shows how their simplicity in the approach, their empathy towards a specific site and their abstraction in designing architectures from a sensitive fragment of the reality can create sensory places that go beyond the threshold of time. There is not a strategy to win a competition for Alberto Veiga, but “The only secret is to try… and to lose. It’s like going to the gym. It hurts after you’ve trained but you still keep going. And it’s not because you have to participate in the Olympics”.
In one of the last won competitions, Göteborgs Konstmuseum in Sweden (2022-2030), their personal approach is enhanced. “Working with fundamentals” means realising an elongated plinth as a complementary extension to the existing museum - instead of creating a new building that hides the historic museum as the competitors did. “Working on continuity” means making the characteristics rocks of the site become part of the new plinth’s façades, so that the extension seems rooted in the site and emerging as a half-buried plinth from the ground. The new plinth is attached to the old museum by an in-between space that becomes the inside public square around which all the public functions are set. The natural light of this interstitial space is the mark of the transition between old and new.
Göteborgs Konstmuseum is a project simultaneously sentimental and monumental, as Barozzi Veiga translated their personal approach in A sentimental monumentality installation in 2016 for Venice Biennale.
“In the opposition between monument and sentiment our work resides: it is something that aspires to belong to a place but at the same time to belong to all places. It is an architecture that is simultaneously specific and autonomous, intimate and monumental, capable of preserving the richness and singularity of each place while never failing to discover the unexpected landscapes that each hides”.
(Fabrizio Barozzi, Alberto Veiga, Barcelona, 18 November, 2015).