Vicente Guallart (SP) Vicente Guallart (1963)
The architect Vicente Guallart, who opened his agency in Barcelona in 1992, divides his time between teaching and research (Polytechnic Foundation of Catalonia), multimedia production (NEWMedia Productions), and organizing exhibitions (Metapolis). His architectural projects involve a twofold extrapolation: on the one hand, towards geography, which is called upon as a new urban scale and as a possible architectural form; on the other, towards the digital world, understood as a new "nature", leading to an artificial ecology but one which, in return, acts on physical space. For the Castellon exhibition, "Otras naturalezas urbanas", he thus proposes a Mountain City (2001), a new low speed city for a form of "digito-agro-tourism"; likewise, at Denia (Alicante, Spain), he is designing a 750,000 sq.ft. complex--shopping mall, hotels, carparks, etc--in the form of a "man-made mountain" reconstructed in an old quarry. Going well beyond the real/virtual and site/edifice (style/content) divides, what Guallart is exploring here is a wide range of potential solutions lying between the natural and the artificial, by way of an architecture that adopts the geography of the place amd transforms it, in an on-going dialogue.