Architecture and Urbanism: Hotel Marqués de Riscal (Spain), by Frank Gehry

No, it's not a bunch of twisted pieces of tin, it's the work of Frank Gehry: the Hotel Marqués de Riscal, located in the Spanish Rioja -world-renowned for its wines- and opened in 2006 by King Juan Carlos of Spain.

The hotel was the first bastion of the Riojan City of Wine. It has a wine museum, a conference center, a wine therapy spa, a new basque cuisine restaurant and a service that organizes golf courses and tours of the area for visitors.

The hotel is located in the town of Elciego, in the northern province of Álava, has 43 rooms with all possible luxuries and is 35 meters high, one less than the town church, according to Gehry so as not to "eclipse" with its works the view of the locality.

The hotel stands out from the moment you arrive in the town of Elciego, and the striking contrast between the ultra-modern architecture of Gehry and the building of the wine cellar built in the most traditional style of a Rioja winery is striking. The project consists of two buildings, the first dedicated mainly to services and administration, and the second dedicated to rooms.

This second building is reached by crossing a tunnel-shaped bridge covered by undulating roofs made of one of Gehry's favorite materials, titanium plates - more than 1,800 square meters - in this case in colors that are symbolic and related to the bottles of wine, and for the first time different from the usual gray palette of the Canadian architect: pink (red wine), gold (the mesh that covers the bottle) and silver (the cap capsule).

Gehry's outgoing four-storey sculptural building also incorporates more traditional materials, such as wood and stone, and attempts to blend into the context through these, and with its generous terraces offering spectacular views of the vineyards and the old town of Elciego , now converted into an attraction in the area and the new favorite destination of the nascent wave of wine tourism.

"I wanted to design something exciting, festive, because wine is pleasure," said Frank Gehry at the press conference after the opening ceremony, where he also acknowledged that, like all buildings with avant-garde shapes, "at first it seems a bit rare, but then they are consolidated in the minds; the building needs its time”.

Since its presentation, the project has captured the attention of the international architectural scene, because according to critics, the language used by Gehry in this project is even more advanced than that used in the Guggenheim in Bilbao.

There are those who think that Gehry has stagnated and turned his style into a kind of franchise, which also has its merits, it must be said, but I think that only time will tell if these increasingly audacious - and expensive - Gehry buildings will have a transcendence, or will they be seen in the future as extravagant architectural contraptions without meaning.

Whether we like his style or not, we have to recognize Gehry for his innovative and possibly visionary character, but once a professor from the faculty told me that there is nothing like simplicity to achieve a good project, and Gehry's projects are anything but simple. Is that a flaw? Time will tell.

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