Word: cruz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...study Cruz y Ortiz is to examine contrasts. The thrust of their work has both encompassed large public projects and smaller private housing developments. They have embraced both pedestrian and vehicular transport concerns and created spaces housing everything from a library’s hush to a stadium’s roar. They also have a penchant for layered flat planes that betray high, open air expanses. What unifies them all is an absorbing, vaguely structuralist style that manages to appear clean without being clinical...
...most visually arresting of Cruz and Ortiz’s work are their designs of Olympic and soccer stadiums. The Madrid Community Sports Stadium, as viewed from the M-40 highway, positively erupts from the ground. A dramatic arc of stadium seating soars out of the grassy meadow, made all the more striking by its elevation above the compressed and linear stands below. The mass concrete is an architectural feat; it is as functional as it is an intense visual statement. The stadium obviously served as the inspiration for the main track and field stadium for the 2000 Sydney Olympics...
Therein lies the beauty of Cruz and Ortiz’s designs: they would be reasonably mundane but for some small tweak that makes them interesting. Their Huelva Bus Station is representative of their spare geometry; it has an aerial outline of a triangular segment cut out of a circle. On two sides the exterior follows that contour, but on the third, the exterior wall curves inwards to create a fluid curve out of an originally straight line. As vehicles enter the terminal, they follow a twisted path around a static circle spoked by bus bays for arrivals and departures...
Praising or condemning this work is a little foolhardy, because the presentation, in serving its function as a lesson to architectural students, focuses on Cruz and Ortiz’s process. An appreciation for the full weight and human implications of their work can only come from a visit to the structures themselves. The GSD attempts to fill that void by displaying coffee table books directly relating to the subject matter, but the exhibit still feels a little unsatisfying. “Cruz y Ortiz” remains a compelling intellectual exercise of minimalist space creation, if only an exercise...
...Cruz y Ortiz Buildings