Location: Banyoles, Spain
Year: 1989

Our project for a hotel at the site of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics rowing events is no longer a primary form – a single metaphysical enclosure. The line of its geometry (necessitated by the repetition of like units) is no longer Cartesian – that is, the same at any section along its length. Instead, exponential torsions and phase shifts characterize the line. This produces a building of richness and complexity while preserving the simple autonomy and replication of bedroom units.

It is also not a building in the traditional sense because it is part of the landscape, which in turn becomes part of the building. Three different trace conditions of time inform the project: the trace of time past as represented in the form of the agricultural divisions that existed on the site at the turn of the century; the trace of time present in the extension of the building form into the landscape, and the trace of two motions in the arc of sweeps of an eight-oar shell in both the building and landscape. The resulting form and space can no longer mean in the conventional sense of architectural meaning.