Postmodern glows. Shoe store gallery at Jorge Juan 55 by Francisco Alonso

It is true, that the debate on the destruction of contemporary heritage is a debate yet to be opened, but it is also true that our country is among the countries with the highest number of buildings declared World Heritage Sites. However, if we focus the debate on modernity I would remember the words of Rem Koolhaas rightly commenting that, "Through our respect for the past, heritage is increasingly the dominant metaphor of our lives today, a situation we call Chronocaos. (2010 Venice Biennale). An aspect that he insisted on when he presented the same Biennial as the curator in 2014, venturing that if in past centuries we had destroyed the heritage at the same rate as today, we would have no remains of Architecture.

With this situation of bicephaly, we need to take care of our architecture, but knowing what we pay attention to, it is advisable to know a little more.

A brief review of the work by the author allows us to remember, not without a certain irony, how Francisco Alonso has been baptized by some as the "builder of ruins", and not without great reason his achievements could be considered, (outside of the myth with which some have wanted to adorn them), as the result of a maker of ruins.


Brutalist Shoe Gallery by Paco Alonso. Photograph by Javier de Paz García.


Brutalist Shoe Gallery by Paco Alonso. Photograph by Javier de Paz García.

As a prelude to this work is a house, also unfinished, in Puerta de Hierro, from 1986, with a façade covered with granite stones weighing more than three tons, which required a special anchoring system, and work, in which Alonso doubled, tripled... the budget, and it is said that he practically left its owners bankrupt.

This home was followed by the popularly known as a shoe store, a work commissioned in 1986 and developed over three years for the businessman Manuel Losada, who had actually requested a brilliant gallery in which to display his shoe collections, in a space of about two hundred square meters. on two floors in which Paco Alonso worked again with large stones, green onyx from Iran, black marbles from Calatorao, red travertine from Almería, a floor made with iroko wood blocks or crystals of extreme transparency. The store, or rather gallery, was never inaugurated, simply because it had not obtained an opening license, or perhaps because it had never been requested, as there was no project. For a quarter of a century, it remained boarded up until 2016 when it was temporarily used as an exhibition hall for the work of architecture students.
 

Those unfinished works would be followed by a third, equally unfinished, house of culture of El Molar, from 1994 (actually a monumental complex with three pieces, a bullring, an energy centre and a house of culture), in which the most discreet recognize that the work is between paranoia and supposed genius, where 20-ton pylons are used, or construction systems that are even difficult to apply for their time, ultimately reducing the construction of the project (and after exhausting the public budget), to the foundation of one of the buildings and six giant pylons.


Brutalist Shoe Gallery by Paco Alonso. Photograph by Javier de Paz García.


Brutalist Shoe Gallery by Paco Alonso. Photograph by Javier de Paz García.

With a context like this, in September I decided to tell an alternative story. The images took a while to arrive and I decided to wait for the weather to calm the heat that had arisen. On December 21, with the official arrival of winter, the heat seemed to ease, cooling all the drama with the announcement from the Madrid City Council: The City Council will shield the façade and interior of the premises of the architect Francisco Alonso de Santos on Jorge Juan Street." A declaration, for anyone who knows the regulations, that is nothing more than a toast to the sun, as its text is linked to the subjective interpretations of whoever applies the diffuse regulations.

From here on, its author, Francisco Alonso, seemed to be reborn from his oblivion in time, invited to give a lecture and explain his work in publications (of which it was euphemistically highlighted that the author is evasive), determined to support a dream icon.

The unicorn of the "true work" continued to support itself in a recent interview, comparing the shoe store's work with the Tiffany & Co jewellery store popularly mythologized by the well-known film Breakfast at Tiffany's, located between the 49th and 60th streets of the Big Apple, at 727 Fifth Avenue in New York, an interview in which the interviewee Francisco Alonso, without embarrassment, reminded his interviewer that the jewellery had been selected by the US Library of Congress. USA in the National Film Registry as a national, cultural, historical and aesthetically memorable monument. Obviously, faced with such a presentation, the reader only has the option to ask themselves: how is it possible that the same has not yet happened with Paco's shoe store?

One of the first times I heard about Francisco Alonso, in short, was from one of his colleagues, Alfonso Valdés, with whom he formed the team of young architects created by Francisco Javier Sainz de Oíza for the competition for the Banco Bilbao tower in Azca. Valdés told me how Oíza announced that if they won the contest he would fire all the participants, and he justified this to me by the attempts of some to claim responsibility for the project's ideas. Whether it was true or not, I later met one of the architects, who after Oíza won the competition replaced that initial group with another made up of young architects from the same estate, among whom was Daniel Zarza.

The words of Valdés, which I have already commented on some time, were reproduced again in the echo of time, when José María Echarte and David García-Asenjo recently intelligently pointed out, in their look at "The Naked King", in an article, that one should look at with fairness to the work and its author, "at least try not to categorize in these terms someone who has shown clear disdain, whenever he has found the place, for the professionals with whom he has worked; by those who have welcomed him, appropriating in some cases the achievements of works resulting from common work; and for those who were his colleagues, placing himself one step above them and underestimating a contribution that has managed to bring complex architectural projects to fruition »

That was a generation of architects formed under the myth of the great masters of the second half of the 20th century and whom they tried to emulate and surpass, some of them through hyperbole, in years in which the reality, or absence of pharaonic patrons, prevented those achievements from a more pragmatic everyday life.

The need to redefine the elements that create Architecture in our contemporaneity raises the need to look at our immediate past to revitalize it, conserve it, reuse it and discover its capacity for resilience, in a context that does not allow continuing to create architecture by transferring materials from another corner of the world, generating an unbearable carbon footprint.

Architecture is a profession that does not need mythologized stories foreign to reality, nor adoration of heroically cursed characters, but rather the naked and prosaic reality of makers of architecture for society, in which architects develop the activity for which we set out. have formed.