Concepts Arquitectura e Design contemporâneo | #00 Março 2016 | 5 euros
Marques de Riscal
winery One of the world’s most expensive hotels in Elciego
Guggenheim Museum
Flag of European contemporary sculpture and painting
Estoril Palace hotel
A luxury place of experience and revelation
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One of the world’s most expensive hotels is taking shape at the Marques de Riscal winery in Elciego
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The building is designed by American architect Frank O Gehry, who also built the extraordinary titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, an hour from Rioja on the north coast of Spain, a winery in Niagara, Canada, and other celebrated modern buildings around the world. Titanium is also a key element in the Riscal building, which when it is finished early next year will be a 14-room hotel, restaurant, conference centre, museum and spa. The roof, which echoes the flowing movement of a flamenco dancer’s dress, will be constructed of ‘ribbons’ of red, gold and silver titanium. Photos Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Text Mark Ricc mark.ricci@starwoodhotels.com
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Marques de Riscal is one of Rioja’s oldest and most esteemed producers. From its first vintage in 1862 it pioneered the blending of cabernet sauvignon in its wines, while most Rioja is 100% tempranillo. The winery also introduced French techniques with the use of sorting tables and oak ageing. Chateau Margaux director Paul Pontallier visits several times a year as an informal consultant. The new buildings are part of Riscal’s ‘Project 2000’, a growth plan which includes expanding the winery’s production from 4.5 to 5.5m bottles. The whole project, including new winery buildings and the hotel, are costing some €65m. ‘This will be the most expensive hotel in the world by floor space,’ said Javier Ybáñez, export director at Riscal. It will be run by the Starwood group, a conglomerate which runs the Sheraton and W chains, and other luxury hotels and resorts. The tiny town of Elciego (population 900, one restaurant) is reportedly just as excited as Riscal’s owners by the boom in its midst. Rioja is benefitting from the regeneration of the port of Bilbao, of which the signature building is the Guggenheim, but which also has a host of other striking modern creations. One of these is a footbridge by architect Santiago Calatrava, from Valencia on Spain’s east coast, designer of the super-modern new Bilbao airport – and also builder of the new winery for Bodegas Ysios, a stone’s throw from Riscal. Scheduled to open at the end of 2005, the hotel will be developed within the Marques de Riscal wine complex and designed by internationally acclaimed architect, Frank O. Gehry. The project will be Gehry’s second masterpiece in Spain, where in 1997 he created the landmark Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, facilitating an urban revival in that city. Gehry is known as one of the most important living architects in the world, with other significant projects including the cutting edge “Experience the Music” project in Seattle, the Gehry House in Santa Monica and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The Marques de Riscal Hotel will be the most avant-garde member of Starwood’s prestigious Luxury Collection. Hotel guests will be able to select from a diverse array of suites and rooms 26 | CONCEPTS | Março 2016
designed by Gehry. The hotel will also feature a wellness center, a swimming pool, a large banquet hall converted from an ancient cellar, and a signature restaurant. The hotel’s restaurant will be one of the finest dining experiences in
Spain. In addition, hotel guests will also have access to the Marques de Riscal vineyards, the wine museum and the state-of-the-art process and elaboration center. “We are extremely honored to have
been selected by Vinos de los Herederos del Marques de Riscal to manage this outstanding new Luxury Collection hotel,” said Roeland Vos, President of the Europe Africa and Middle East Division of Starwood Hotels & Resorts. “The Marques de Riscal landmark hotel will be a perfect complement to our existing Luxury Collection portfolio in Europe an elite group of distinctive handpicked hotels that are recognized as some of the finest hotels in the world.” “We consider that Starwood, via its prestigious Luxury Collection, is the perfect complement for this project and for our own wine business, an association of brands which complements the needs of our most demanding customers and strengthens the commitment of Marques de Riscal to quality and innovation,” noted Alejandro Aznar, President of Vinos de los Herederos del Marques de Riscal. Vinos de los Herederos del Marques de Riscal, is a leading company in the production of quality wines, going back more than 140 years, and has always been a pioneer and innovator in the wine industry. In 1860 it became the first cellar in Rioja to produce wines by the Bordeaux methods, and in 1973 it was the first cellar to introduce the Denominacion de Origen Rueda where it produces its famed white wines. Its products, sold in more than 50 countries, enjoy and have enjoyed the highest international distinctions, Diploma of Honour of the 13th Bordeaux Exhibition, the International Wine Competition in San Francisco, La Gran Cruz del Merito Agricola, as well as numerous awards and distinctions in prestigious industry publications such as The Wine Spectator, Decanter, etc. Committed to the strictest quality levels, Vinos de los Herederos del Marques de Riscal includes among its technical advisors the prestigious French oenologists, M. Pontallier de Chateau Margaux and M. Gimberteau of the University of Bordeaux. It is also the official wine of the Ryder Cup for Golf and of the European circuit of the PGA. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is one of the leading hotel and leisure companies in the world with more than 740 properties in more than 80 countries and 105,000 employees at its owned and managed properties. With
internationally renowned brands, Starwood is a fully integrated owner, operator and franchisor of hotels and resorts including: St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, Sheraton, Westin, Four Points by Sheraton, W brands, as well as Starwood Vacation Ownership, Inc., one of the premier developers and operators of high quality vacation interval ownership resorts. 6.000 c.
Meanwhile the winery is thinking about a chef. Asked whether they would be recruiting amongst the top international culinary artists like Ferran Adria of El Bulli in Barcelona, considered the world’s best restaurant, Ybáñez said they wanted ‘someone from the area. Whoever is chef here must understand local Rioja cooking.’
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Ybáñez said they expected visitors to the winery to increase massively over the next few years. ‘At the moment we have around 6000 a year. If enquiries from cruise companies are anything to go by that number could go up to 100,000,’ he said. The hotel’s titanium roof will be started next month.
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Frank Gehry Frank Owen Gehry is a Canadian-American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles. His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as “the most important architect of our age”. Much of Gehry’s work falls within the style of Deconstructivism, which is often referred to as post-structuralist in nature for its ability to go beyond current modalities of structural definition. 30 | CONCEPTS | Março 2016
In architecture, its application tends to depart from modernism in its inherent criticism of culturally inherited givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. Because of this, unlike early modernist structures, Deconstructivist structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. Gehry’s own Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, and in such a manner as to subvert its original spatial intention. MC 1.200 c.
Gehry’s influences Gehry is sometimes associated with what is known as the “Los Angeles School” or the “Santa Monica School” of architecture. The appropriateness of this designation and the existence of such a school, however, remains controversial due to the lack of a unifying philosophy or theory. This designation stems from the Los Angeles area’s producing a group of the most influential postmodern architects, including such notable Gehry contemporaries as Eric Owen Moss and Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne of Morphosis, as well as the famous schools of architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (co‑founded by Mayne), UCLA, and USC where Gehry is a member of the Board of Directors. Gehry’s style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but his work is consistent with the California “funk” art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, which featured the use of inexpensive found objects and non-traditional media such as clay to make serious art. Gehry has been called “the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding”. However, a retrospective exhibit at New York’s Whitney Museum in 1988 revealed that he is also a sophisticated classical artist, who knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting. Reception of Gehry’s work is not always positive. Art historian Hal Foster reads Gehry’s architecture as, primarily, in the service of corporate branding. Criticism of his work includes complaints that the buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms, do not seem to belong in their surroundings and are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate. MC 1.650 c.
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