• Andalusia from south to south (I): the new normal of the Alhambra

The last hints of good architecture and decoration in Spain occurred decades ago, Franco is still alive, in Torremolinos and a little later in Marbella . From there, as Picasso used to say evoking Altamira, everything was decadence. Does it seem like a provocation? Sometimes the history of a place is associated with a daze that we do not understand until a long time later.

In the 1950s, that humble fishing village at the foot of the Torre de Pimentel began to transform. A decade later, it was paradoxically one of the freest places in Europe and a permanent headache for the regime whose leaders were ordered to look the other way in exchange for accumulating foreign exchange with which to scaffold the tourism business on the recently created Costa del Sol.. In the Seventies, summers were still a catwalk for artists, writers, and bohemians, and in the Eighties everything was spoiled. By then the balance of forces had shifted. Being gay, a pop singer, or a cursed storyteller was no longer so frowned upon and there was no need, tempting as it was, to retreat into one place. At the end of the century, we realized that the world was too big to riot just on Carihuela beach .

Lost its spell, Torremolinos and Marbella have become two stories of nostalgia. The first more than the second. Before bad taste and sloppiness annihilated its myth, there was a time when the old Malaga neighborhood was the testing ground for some of the best architectural projects in Spain at the time. In 1959, the architects Juan Jáuregui Briales and Manuel Muñoz Monasterio designed the Hotel Pez Espada , kilometer zero of that revolution, still active today, an example of the best rationalism on this side of the world.

The noble floor was in charge of the French Jean Pierre Françoise . In 2006 it was declared a Site of Cultural Interest. The Swordfish was our particular way of paying homage to Le Corbusier and his Notre Dame de Ronchamp or the futuristic dreams of Oscar Niemeyer in Brasilia. That reformulation of the Modern Movement and Functionalism found an extraordinary solace that Antonio Lamela cemented a few years later, in 1963, when he projected the towers of Nogalera and Playamar.

In 1967, Rafael de la Hoz and Gerardo Olivares set up the Palacio de Congresos y Exposiciones and in 1971 Luis Alfonso Pagán , inspired by the Torres Blancas de Sáenz de Oiza , built the Los Manantiales complex, known as the Three Towers, one of the the most enthusiastic examples of vertical housing, an organic mix of brutalism and Japanese metabolism.

Relax style

And did all that effort get a name? In 1987 the artist Diego Santos proposed to the photographer Carlos Canal and to the art historian Juan Antonio Ramírez to bring together in a book, published by the College of Architects of Malaga, all the examples that had turned Torremolinos into a paradigm of the so-called Relax Style. Ramírez, who was also from Malaga, wrote that the Relax Style was an ad hoc "spontaneous and syncretic style (...). He exaggerates and vulgarizes the avant-garde styles without worrying about orthodoxy or the intellectual coherence of the results. His aspiration is to delight the consumer. " The challenge, therefore, is for those influences of the Modern Movement to find accommodation in the forge, the reed, the lime and the clay with which that Mediterranean town had been built.

The new aesthetic order brought with it smooth surfaces, cantilevers and reinforced concrete, exterior staircases, light and horizontal structures, abstract sculptures and murals on the facades, glazed ceramic floors and kidney-shaped pools. The dolphin tiling, unfortunately, came a little later. The Hotel Miami still opens its doors in Torremolinos , a notable example of that aesthetic intermingling that fused modernity and southern traditionalism.

Torremolinos Chic

There is a web page that summarizes that Torremolinos that still reminds us of nostalgia. It is a creation of José Luis Cabrera and Lutz Petry that is called Torremolinos Chic and that brings together the characters that internationalized the name of that neighborhood that ended up being segregated in September 1988 from Malaga. The web hosts the images of the most notable buildings, some of them protected, albums of well-known families, vintage postcards, chic locality, swimsuits, hairstyles and props from a world that now only lives in the yellowish prints of our memory. Cabrera and Petry argue that the Transition was cultural rather than political and that it began in Torremolinos. And they may be right.

The best architecture and decoration was founded at a time when Spanish cities destroyed their traditional architecture in favor of a tacky developmentalism from which no provincial capital escaped. Every city has its church, its fool, and its real estate speculator. It is enough to take a look at the signatures that adorn the urbanizations that grew in the first expansion areas of that distant decade of the Seventies to reveal the name of the culprits.

In those years, the Nacional 340 became the Spanish road with the greatest universalist vocation. Modernity did not quite catch on in Benalmádena and Fuengirola , but it found in Marbella a sophisticated way of expressing itself. Ricardo Soriano and Alfonso de Hohenlohe above all assessed a different way of looking at the world. Torremolinos always kept a humble cot for a cursed (and poor) writer, but Marbella shielded itself from bed bugs and only allowed cursed writers (with money) to enter. Only a left-wing populist would criticize this selectivity because the truth is that this way of acting protected Marbella from the bad taste and the overcrowding to which other neighboring towns did succumb. There are no great examples of architecture (there is the brilliant Don Carlos and the clean lines of Los Monteros or Torre Real ), but there was an extraordinary decorative language pontificate by Jaime Parladé who, from his home in Alcuzcuz, in the Benahavís heights, put standing a work that determined the great houses lying at the foot of Sierra Blanca. Eddie Gilbert, one of his followers, transferred that good taste to the Villa Padierna project , the hotel dream of the businessman and art collector Ricardo Arranz , Alicia de Villapadierna's widower . Marbella is a Roman bust, a patio scented by a gallant at night, a wall covered with whitewash and a horizon of blue and still sea. Sometimes such simple wickers are capable of exalting the best architecture and decoration that we have ever dreamed of contemplating.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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