Institutional Prosthesis
Institutional Prosthesis materialize and it’s the preamble to a wider reflection that it’s wanted to be done from de EACC (Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló), about the museum, it’s limits and its new capacity to make links with the urban, social and politic framework: the city and its associated sceneries.
Institutional Prosthesis is a production of Santiago Cirugeda in a narrow collaboration with the EACC, which comes from a common reflection about the new uses and possibilities of an art centre.
The project consists of two 50 m2 cells which are projected from the frontage of the EACC towards the square in front of it. Both sells are joined by a corridor that passes in parallel to the above mentioned frontage and stops in the terrace next to the building’s office. The access to this new architectural set is independent of the rest of the centre’s installations. Those spaces, baptized with sarcasm the “fat man” and the “thin man”, are covered by a skin of black plastic mouldings, wish are habitually used to cast concrete, crossed each of them by four metallic rods. The frontal part of this habitable cell is made of glass in its entire surface, which turns it in a public space or a semi-public space depending on its use and the will of its occupiers. The optical perception of the Cirugeda’s prothesis, like an organic vibrant structure, comes based in a principle of economy and displacement with regard to the materials that shapes it.
The skin of industrial element, almost handmade, can be read as an ironic comment about the (ab)use of the high-tech in the majority of the actual architectonical production.
Even if this is a temporary intervention, its construction and staging get nearly to the idea of architecture, therefore, turns its author in an architect. Even when this is obvious, it is worth to be said, knowing the strategies and methods that Cirugeda uses to make his work.
The constructive process, as have being habitual in his project, is based in the principle of a formula or a pattern applicable to any other previous architectural situations. Under the organizational scheme of “Recetas Urbanas”, that the artist put to the disposition for potential authors of this constructive solutions, is established a repertoire of functions and responsibilities that goes from the architecture (architect), the construction ( the constructor y the operators), the social environment ( the users), the urban subversion (the okkupas…)… all of them are agents who have to establish their own laws and have to establish new devices of shock in the frame of urban legalities.
Though an architectural vocabulary, strident with the urban context which surrounds it, this intervention, which parasite the most public frontage of the pre-exist buildings, compromise a true declaration of intentions on the role and responsibilities of the museum’s institution. The city understood as a the defined frame of performances- not only because of its capacities as a possible scenario for interventions, but also because it comprises a complex network of situations, confluences, misunderstanding, of, definitely, social energy- this prosthesis or built parasite represents not only a antechamber of meetings and negotiations, it also represent a space of resistance.
Juan De Nieves (EACC Director)
Architect: Santiago Cirugeda
Collaborators: Carlo Magoni, Gianluca Stasi
Prosthesis surface: 143 m2
Floating concrete platforms surface: 181 m2
Surface of residual space of existing building prepared for new use: 264 m2
Cost: 240.000 Euros
Construction time: 7 ½ weeks
