Rafael Moneo did not intend to be the center of attention this Friday, at the 25th anniversary party of L'Auditori, but his presence in the room that the city of Barcelona commissioned him to build in 1986 captured the attention and meant for many of the attendees – there was Joan Clos, the mayor who inaugurated it on March 22, 1999 – a proud journey through time.
When at 6 p.m. an exhibition was displayed on the columns outside the building with details of what this music center had experienced in a quarter of a century, the famous Navarrese architect – the first Spaniard to receive the Pritzker, in 1996 – had already had opportunity to admire the restoration of the Lantern by Pablo Palazuelo – “the Auditorium has had a great sense of self-esteem here” – under which rested the piano that Francesco Tristano was going to play later. He had also confirmed that the wood in the Pau Casals room is in top shape and that the concrete and the rusty iron of the façade have made a good match.
“It seems to me that the way in which the concrete and steel have aged at the same time gives rise to something well combined,” said the architect with an elegant yet modest bearing. Sitting on the orchestral podium of the Pau Casals hall – “I feel somewhat impressed” –, Rafael Moneo (Tudela, 1937) spoke to the Auditori's own cameras, assessing the state of the 42,000 m² building. “I see it as very impeccable, it seems to me that the wooden paneling inside the room has also aged well and that it is a great pleasure to use it.”
No one would have sworn that, decades ago, this good connoisseur of Barcelona who marked an era as a professor at the School of Architecture in the seventies and eighties received with frustration the news of the location in some Glòries that were still railways. “Fantasy takes an architect to the most exceptional places, you imagine it in the port or immediately becoming a monument for the city…” he said, without failing to mention his team: María Fraile, who accompanied on this trip to Barcelona, or Lucho Marcial, “whom I called in Lima to tell him that we were coming.”
Robert Brufau, director of the hall, gave his institutional speech and declared to this newspaper that “you have to go to such emblematic cities as Vienna, Paris, London or Amsterdam to find institutions similar to L'Auditori, which has been postulated as a European reference. in the creation of educational projects or in the promotion of new creation with strategic alliances with other institutions.” And while that was happening, the L'Auditori communications team subjected Moneo to a pleasant remembering in the archive: they recorded him looking at old photos of the building or discovering hanging on the wall an enlargement of the freehand drawing he made of the floor plan in a piece of paper, that Olympic year 1992.
“That started almost more as an urban problem: how to finish Ausiàs March and link it with what the theater was going to be. And it was sized thinking about an auditorium that exceeded 2,000 spectators at a time when auditoriums were something else. It is a great pleasure to see how the chamber room and then the museum and the conservatory and the rehearsal room of the municipal orchestra were built around this large auditorium... I am glad that this place where the Cerdà expansion begins to lose his character and becomes something else has made music one of his points of attraction.”
What would you have done if you received this assignment now? “It would be a problem,” Moneo answers. In the eighties, the reference model that was Hans Scharoun's auditorium in Berlin was still clear. I would have had to include other visions, think about more abstract music, electronic music. How should he conceive an auditorium just for Stockhausen?
The mayor Jaume Collboni and the councilor for Culture, Xavier Marcé, among other authorities, passed by the party photocall, as well as former directors of the hall, presidents of companies and a handful of composers: from Benet Casablancas to Joan Magrané, passing through Agustí Charles, José Río Pareja or Raquel García Tomás. The OBC and Ludovic Morlot concert was waiting for all of them.
