The fame in Spain

An uncanny visual fusion occurs here between the sky and the ponds, creating a mirror effect in which the predominantly white and glass buildings seem to be afloat on a sea of such azure brilliance that structural features melt into a kind of shimmering plasma. I've never seen an effect quite like it: The architecture assumes a dimension utterly detached from its terrestrial purposes, and it's enough, for a while, just to sit on the edge of a pool and marvel at the achievement. There's certainly never been a better example of creating an atmosphere — almost an aura — for buildings by co-opting the natural elements and the climate, rather like the collusion at Giza of the pyramids and the desert.

Of Calatrava's works, the Science Museum is the one I found disappointing. Externally, the impression is of a massive vertebral frame, the bones blanched by the sun — of a mastodon, if you will, that spent too long sprawled on a Mediterranean beach and dehydrated to a skeleton. The effect is cleverly to eliminate any sense of bulk. As a consequence, when heading for the entrance you expect to find yourself inside a lofty space flooded with light. Instead, the facilities that stretch out along a corridor — ticket desk, gift shops, cloakrooms, and restaurants — conceal rather than reveal the scale. It's not until you take one in a bank of escalators and reach the second floor, where the exhibits begin, that you start to see natural light. One side of the building is a three-story atrium, kept for special shows and receptions, where the arching ribs are free to liberate light and space. But on the other side, each of the permanent exhibit floors is compartmentalized — the scale is lost, and you could be in a humdrum municipal museum, not a building of this ambition and art. Perversely, the museum turns its back on the magic of La Clara.

There are no Arab imprints on the northwest province of Galicia — the Moors barely gained a foothold in this corner of Spain and were ejected after only 30 years or so. Perhaps they didn't care. The climate would not have been to their taste: This is not a place in which to lounge indolently in balmy, watered courtyards. Atlantic air, gales, and rain make the region as green as Ireland, and it is as far from the Mediterranean as you can get in Iberia — the antithesis of the generally promoted picture of heliotropic Spain. Nonetheless, there are more than 700 beaches on the Atlantic coast, many of them in secluded coves, and Galicia's fishing fleet delivers a quarter of all the fish landed in Europe: Seafood underpins a regional cuisine as good as any in Spain. As climate change threatens to turn southern Spain to toast, Galicia is being touted as Green Spain.

The highway I took from Bilbao west to Galicia follows the legendary pilgrim route, the Camino de Santiago, ending at the barrel-vaulted Romanesque cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. But these days, it is not just the supposed sepulcher of the disciple Saint James (Santiago the Greater) that draws devotion here. One of the most protracted architectural endeavors in Europe is beginning to emerge on a hill outside the city. A Google Earth view of the site reveals a strange mirror image of the kidney-shaped plan of Santiago's medieval center. This was part of the vision of New York architect Peter Eisenman, who won an international competition in 1999 to create the Cultural City of Galicia.

Eisenman (who competed against ten other architects, including Daniel Libeskind and Jean Nouvel) was an unlikely avatar of this remote region's ambitions. His architecture is highly intellectual in its genesis: Eisenman's theoretical epistles are so prolix that they would have given Pythagoras a migraine, peppered as they are with allusions to the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. (In person, it has to be said, Eisenman, whose favorite garment is a feral sweater, is congenial and highly accessible, with eyes eager for argument.) It was not until he was in his 60s that Eisenman began to get major works built — his spectral new football stadium in Phoenix, for example, and in Berlin his bleak, haunting Holocaust memorial, a field of dissonant cubes. In Spain, however, his design was persuasive because of one surprisingly simple inspiration. Rather than build something triumphal, using the hill as a podium for a trophy that would be visible for miles, Eisenman instead proposed a series of buildings that would conform to the very shape of the hill. To put it simply (far more simply than he would be inclined to articulate), this meant scooping out the top of the hill and then replacing it, in metal and stone.

This could be, literally, the instigation of what might be called the architecture of topography — or, more catchily, of ground-scrapers — in which the earth itself becomes an organic element of a building and imposes a discipline of contours that, instead of creating a new skyline, subverts the architecture to the embrace of its site. (There are at least two similar schemes under way — or underfoot — in Spain: a park in Alicante and an athletics stadium in the Canary Islands.)

Rick Lew / Conde Nast Traveler The 15th-century Hostal de los Reyas Católicos, in Santiago de Compostela, is now a luxury parador.

The City of Culture of Galicia, it turns out, has been constrained by more than its site. In Spain, anything that comes with a regional tag is inevitably bound up in the politics of devolution, the wish to assert a cultural independence of Madrid that would never have been tolerated by Franco. In Galicia, 60 percent of the people speak Galician, a Latin tongue that sounds a lot like Portuguese — and, as in Catalonia and the Basque Country, cultural independence is a hot-button issue. But in Galicia, things are more complicated. This was Franco's birthplace, and it has been slow to shake off the vestiges of his politics: From 1990 to 2005, the region was run by Manuel Fraga, a former minister and ambassador in the Franco regime, a Holocaust denier, and by all accounts unrepentant in the joys of absolute power. The City of Culture was to be part of a personal legacy wrapped in Galician patriotism.

Eisenman told me that once Fraga saw the model for his design — a beautifully crafted scallop-shaped cluster — the result was a slam dunk, proving that Fraga operated with the impunity of a Medici prince. As Eisenman refined his ideas (the model conveyed little more than a shape), the two of them — the aging Fascist and the radical postmodernist — bonded. It was an architect's dream: a single client with a load of money. And then, in 2005, Fraga was voted out. The regional government switched to a left wing–controlled coalition, and Eisenman's project was stalled while the new regime decided whether it fit their definition of cultural ecstasy. Finally, last year, they gave it the green light. Galicia supports two successful classical orchestras and badly needs the 1,400-seat opera house that is part of the scheme — and which, on its own, will come close to the $120 million cost of Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao. But like the Sydney Opera House that was notoriously late in emerging, Eisenman's vision, when it is completed, promises to be a remarkably original achievement, one that will influence a new generation of architects who will, like the pilgrims heading for saintly bones, have to take the road to Santiago — as will the rest of us for whom this idiosyncratic corner of Iberia offers a refreshing diversion.

My journeys through the country confirmed a widely held contention: In Spain, the regional distinctions are more numerous, sharper, and more ardently guarded than elsewhere in Europe. You could never confuse the cultural signatures of, say, Galicia (Celtic goes Gothic), the Basque coast (clannish obduracy), Catalonia (all blazing primary colors), and Andalusia (Moorish at heart). But, creditably, as architectural patrons, these places have not turned out to be parochial and self-regarding. Everywhere there is an openness to visual originality, an appetite for unfettered ideas that has drawn an astonishing parade of international stars.

However hard they try, though, nobody seems likely to top Bilbao's trick, where a single building, Gehry's Guggenheim, regenerated a whole city. (The museum has been extraordinarily successful as an art venue, with the attendance for some shows getting into the world's top ten.) But there is much more emerging than just the work of architectural superstars. Many of the new constructions have social purposes — city halls, schools, colleges (and in Leon, a striking mortuary!). I saw a lot of unsung felicities of design and imagination. Add to all this the infrastructure — highways, bridges, airports, railroad stations — and you get a terrific display of skills and style. Nothing seems too daring. If the spirit in Spain can be categorized at all, perhaps the best word for it would be Latin, a term used by Richard Rogers's partner, Ivan Harbour, who worked on both Barajas and Heathrow's new Terminal 5. "You could never build Barajas in London because it's Latin," Harbour said. "You could never build Terminal 5 in Spain. It wouldn't work. They're different animals."

But this idea of "Latin" is secular and singularly Iberian, and it should incorporate the hand of those who rode into Europe's southernmost peninsula from the desert, carrying with them the spore of cultures from as far off as China, Persia, and the Levant, and built cities far more sophisticated than anywhere else in Europe.

Rick Lew / Conde Nast Traveler The 15th-century facade of Valencia's Museo Nacional de Cerámica.

The airiness of Barajas — the rare lightness of a building this large — conveys something of the feel of a tent, or of many tents hitched together under that wavy roof, as though deflecting a searing wind. Was this, I wondered aloud to Rogers, another subconscious mutation of the architecture that began in the desert?

"One of the things that fascinates me," said Rogers, "is the whole Moorish invasion. That brought a very rich vein to the culture ... In Spain, they have learned so much from North Africa."

It is their influence you feel in his airport, too. As in those Moorish courtyards, the air in the Barajas Terminal is, once chilled, free to circulate by convection through the high, open space of the canyons.

"So the Moors do still have an influence?" I suggested.

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