San Joan de Reus University Hospital

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San Joan de Reus University Hospital

Aerial view of the entrances to the hospital

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San Joan de Reus University Hospital

Innovative modern architecture is evident in the recently opened San Joan de Reus University Hospital, on the outskirts of the city in the southern part of Catalonia. This is yet another example of where the countries of Europe lead the way when it comes to modern architecture.

I only spent little over an hour in Reus on the way to the airport. My original plan was to spend a few days getting to know the city (I’d never been there before) but as time just seemed to run out all of a sudden that was one of the plans that suffered. It seemed quite an interesting place, in a quiet way, and sitting on the bus I thought to return and make an effort to spend some time there in the future.

That became a certainty as the bus to the airport arrived at the edge of the city itself and the beginning of the industrial estate that contains the airport. Coming around the corner we passed along the whole length of one of the most impressive hospital buildings I’ve ever seen.

It’s officially called the San Joan de Reus University Hospital and was opened only a couple of years ago in 2010. For such a huge building there didn’t seem to be a lot of activity so, at the time of writing, I’m not sure if it’s one of the white elephants that seem to proliferate on the peninsular at the moment. It seems far too big for such a small place as Reus (but it does have a large oncology unit that serves the Tarragona region). There was a programme on British radio, more or less 6 weeks ago, about the airport in Ciudad Real in Castille, that was opened and then closed within a couple of years and now lies collecting cobwebs.

The Reus hospital comes from the architectural practice of Mario Corea, based in Barcelona. Its mission statement for the project introduces an interesting approach which other architects could do well to consider.

‘The project is presented as a major horizontal unit with light wells on which six two- storey hospitalization volumes rest as if they were floating.
The idea of this hospital design is to control its size and make it similar to the urban dimensions, controlling and balancing the landscape impact of such a building in the city.’

But that didn’t come cheap. The cost ranged from 120 to 170 million Euros on the different websites I consulted. Don’t know why there is such a wide variation, it’s not as if you can just ‘lose’ 50 million Euros – or can you?

As I was on my way out I don’t have any pictures of my own of the hospital but have provided a few links to some web sites which will give you an idea of what I’m talking about. On those pages there are a mixture of photographs and artist impressions.

But when I see buildings like this the question that comes to my mind is this: why does Spain, and has done so for, at least 25 years, benefit from interesting, innovative and aesthetically pleasing architecture when we in the UK are (more often than not) presented with the second class, the generic and the banal?

This is the case even when world-famous British architects are involved. For example, Foster has a huge practice just outside of Madrid, you pass it if you go to Segovia by road, due to the fact they have been commissioned to see through a number of projects in the country. And when British architects win commissions in Spain their creations are something unique, different and distinctive.

Whereas in this country we get designs which seem to be ‘off the shelf’, with little originality and if they have anything to say about them it’s that they are tall, as can be seen by The Shard in London.

And that seems to be the ambition of those who want to develop the waterfront in Liverpool. For reasons which I just can’t fathom they want to make the Liverpool skyline rival that of Shanghai. Why?

I’m not that impressed, personally, by what I’ve seen of Shanghai (which I haven’t seen in actuality) nor Hong Kong (which I have) but I’m even less impressed with the idea that Liverpool should compete with those two destroyed cities on the other side of the world.

The early 20th century Pierhead is unique. Those three major buildings (and some of the others close by, on or close to the Dock Road) mean the only place in the world you can be is in Liverpool.

If we are to get some new buildings along both sides of the Mersey it would be a pleasant change if we had structures which can be compared favourably to the bridges of Santiago Calatrava, for example, whose structures have actually enhanced the Guadalquivir in Seville, or the Auditorio de Tenerife, which stands next to the ocean at Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

The proposed design for the new Royal Hospital looks interesting but retains the idea that higher equates to better.

I don’t know when I might have another chance to visit Reus but one of the places I will be heading for is this building on the outskirts of the city.

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Charity is the answer!

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Charity is the answer!

Charity from the Catholic Church or asking for other hand-outs is the suggested way out of the crisis in Catalonia, according to a judge. In Britain and the US the answer is in the growing number of ‘Food Banks’ to provide emergency food aid.

Whilst in Catalonia I wrote a number of posts of the direct action that different groups (starting in Andalusia) have been taking in opposition to the austerity measures of the government. These measures were having the effect of forcing some people into such dire circumstances that they couldn’t even afford to feed themselves. The last post on this issue was about the spread of this action to Catalonia, to the town of Villafranca de Penedes.

En route out of the country (in fact, in a bar in Reus thinking it was better to spend an hour there than in the airport) I was able to read about the decision of the court in this last case.

Things moved very quickly as the action took place on the Monday and the case went before a judge on the Wednesday. The person charged was accused of knowingly trying to pay for goods with a card that had no credit. Don’t know enough about Spanish law to say whether that was actually a crime of fraud or whether it falls into another category. Whatever the case she was condemned to pay a fine of €90 (which it was said were the court costs of bringing the case before a judge) plus the cost of the goods taken away (€240.45).

I haven’t been able to find out what the group that made the raid on the supermarket are going to do in the face of this court decision. I would assume that after they had made their point they would pay up, martyrdom at this stage is neither a good political tactic nor worth the suffering, the movement is still in its infancy.

What I want to address here is the statement made by the (female) judge when she laid down the penalty. (Don’t know why I make a point of it being a female judge, perhaps it’s just that as Spanish differentiates between male and female in the language I know it was a woman.)

Anyway, what she said was that it was not for people to take the law into their own hands, however serious might be their situation, as they always had recourse to Caritas (the charity organised by the Catholic Archbishop of Barcelona) or other social services organisation who can help people in extremis.

After reading that I turn over the page of the Diari de Tarragona and read an article about how the Catalan Red Cross had distributed 3,000 cheques (totalling €180,000) to families with an income of less that €500 per month so that their children could go to school reasonably clothed and with the books necessary for their courses.

Must be getting naïve. Came across that situation in Peru after the Fujishock of July 1990 but didn’t realise that it was also a problem in Europe.

One of the points that was made in the article was that the Red Cross would give the cheques (not the cash) to the families who could then use them in stores that had already agreed to accept them. This was supposed to make it seem as if they were not actually receiving charity, so that they could be ‘discreet’ in their poverty. The article didn’t make clear, or I missed it, exactly how big an area this covered, whether it was all of Catalonia or just the Tarragona area but I can only assume that there must be many other thousands of families in similar circumstances throughout the rest of the peninsular.

I’m only back in Liverpool for a couple of days before there’s a piece on the late night Radio 4 Ten O’clock news about ‘Food banks’ in the UK.

It seems that one of these institutions, run by a church, in Ebbw Vale is regularly feeding 1,600 people.

An organisation called the Trussel Trust has 250 Food Banks throughout the country, now already feeding 200,000 and with the coming Benefit ‘Reform’ it is anticipated that there will be a surge in demand.

Then this piece on the radio went to compare the situation here with that in the US. It seems (I wasn’t aware of this before) that Emergency Food Aid was begun in the States in 1967. Now there are more than 60 THOUSAND Food Banks throughout the country which are providing supplementary food to MILLIONS of Americans.

What’s going on here?

Update 10th October 2012.

This article appeared on the Independent Online website.

Crisis-stricken Spaniards turn to Red Cross for help

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A night in the woods (2011) – Hand held camera

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Recommendation: Go and see it

I didn’t know there was a bit of a fan club for ‘hand held camera’ films until I wanted to remind myself of the name of the first film I can remember seeing that was completely made using this technique (that was Cloverfield, about an alien invasion of New York).

One of the criticisms of that film was the ‘jumpy’ nature of the images. We are accustomed, in contemporary cinema, to the steady-cam which keeps everything on an even keel whatever the action and the seeming directionless and random images produced by the hand-held camera can be disconcerting. I didn’t agree with that as I believed it added to the chaotic situation in which the characters found themselves.

In A night in the woods the director and camera crew have taken this concept to a higher level. Here the camera is used in virtually every possible manner. There are images taken when someone is actually holding the camera and pointing it, openly, at the subject. The tension created by always being filmed can be seen as a metaphor for the CCTV society in which we live. Then there are images taken when the subject is unaware that they are on camera. This also introduces the invidious concept of CCTV as well as the idea of being spied upon.

There are images in natural day light capturing the wildness and stark beauty of Dartmoor. At other times the images are in colour at night but the light this time being provided by the camera’s own built-in lighting system. To create atmosphere, suspense and fear, at times the images are in the infra-red. In a horror film this is a wonderful device as we can see what is happening whilst the subject is unaware that they are being filmed. And the eerie green tint and vacant eyes resulting from that spectrum add to the unworldliness the director wishes to create.

Sometimes we get a static camera, either purposely left so all the players can be in the image or from one that has been dropped accidentally or as a result of an attack, or discarded on purpose, the operator ‘forgetting’ the camera is still recording. On one occasion a static camera is left as a ‘spy’ to record the fears of one of the protagonists, but when it is discovered by one of those being spied upon it is not switched off, it is allowed to continue doing its job of recording events, again in reference to the ubiquity of the filmed image in our society.

Obviously we also have the shaky, erratic, pointing everywhere images, in both colour and infra-red. This is a horror film and it wouldn’t be a horror film if the (normally) heroine wasn’t running, and screaming, for her life. But here the whole idea is twisted and sometimes we see what she would be seeing and at others, when the camera is in the hands of the one chasing and in the infra-red, we see her fear with the added dimension of the unnatural colour.

But hand-held cameras can go wrong. They don’t like being kicked and so at those times the images break down into the oblong pixels (I’m sure there’s a name for them but I haven’t a clue what it might be) and the sound gets distorted and broken. And all this is used to add to the chaos and terror of the story.

The device of the film is that the story of the three characters and their disappearance is being told through the edited images of the handful of cameras found at the scene (that’s not giving away anything as this is stated before we even see any of them) and the way the editing was done is not far short of brilliant.

I was impressed with this film and thought it a cracker and might well now consider myself a fan of hand-held films – especially if they are made this good. Or better. I’m sure this medium still has a long way to go.