"I met Jorge Silvetti in Boston, in 1980, when I went to teach for a semester at the Rhode Island School of Design. His partner Machado was a professor at RISDI, and Jorge was in the Architecture Department at Harvard, where he is now Chairman. They shared a splendid house in the Bacon Hill neighbourhood, furnished with carefully selected Empire-style pieces. Even then, I admired his work, which would later become world-famous, especially starting with his renovation project for the Getty Villa and its campus in Los Angeles.

◻️ Although they might not like being labelled as Postmodern Architects, there is no doubt that they are key figures of this much-maligned movement, which they continue to follow without a trace of humour, taking it all very seriously.

◻️ The fact that Silvetti has chosen to award a work of strict restoration may seem controversial, but he explains it brilliantly in the jury report."

Oscar Tusquets Blanca

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Jury Report for the Premio Década 2004 (Works completed in 1994)

"When considering the works selected to compete for the fifth Premio Década, corresponding to the year 2004, and comparing them with the body of work reviewed in the previous four years, certain remarkable peculiarities stand out that will distinguish this prize from the others and which undoubtedly result from the peculiar 'post-mortem' conditions of 1992 in Barcelona.

▪️ No longer are the great urban infrastructure works in transportation, landscaping, sports and cultural buildings, or large tourist service and recreational projects that marked the transformation of the city around, but not exclusively, the 1992 Olympic Games, present. With the distance of a decade, knowing what came before 1994 and what followed after, the year we are now observing presents itself almost as a hiatus, as a rest, and as a sketch of a prelude to the actions that would define the great urban works that began to be conceived in those years and whose results we are beginning to see today. Architecture has long cycles, and thus its 'interludes' may, at first glance, appear unproductive. The great merit of the Década Award is not only in its most well-known features as defined by its own guidelines (i.e., considering works already 'tested' by time, restricting them to a limited geographical area so the jury can visit and judge them in-situ, and considering it essential), but also in other implicit features that have truly been clear and definitive in this wheel of the Década 2004, activated by the previously mentioned peculiarities.

▪️ First, I refer to the special relationship that the Premio Década establishes between the jury and the work, stripping the latter of all adjectives, controversies, or silence that surround a new work; secondly, protecting the jury from all those ideological burdens that academic and popular criticism brings to the newly-born building. All of this, occurring ten years later, also isolates both the work and the jury from the contaminations of current fashion and trends, the constant media scrutiny, and the absurd implicit obligation found in many awards today to assume and pontificate that a new, worthy work undoubtedly contains the seeds of the future of architecture and perhaps of humanity. With great relief, and for the first time in my life as a jury, I feel that the Premio Década has freed me from the burdens and frenzy imposed by fashion and grandiloquence.

▪️ Thus, in this context, when seeing the pre-selected works, I note that all of them are of modest scale, with clearly defined ambitions, and their authors approach their task with a full range of tools necessary to solve a problem that they understand and do not shy away from. These are not works that try to establish new paradigms; they are works where imagination is used to solve very well-framed and clear architectural and urban planning problems. In this way, in a notable list of 13 candidates, where renovation, extension, and/or restoration works dominate over new constructions, and once again encouraged by the generosity and fairness of the Premio Década, which in its rule number 3 tells us that: ▪️ "Any construction work can be architecture. The Premio Década does not make a distinction between interior works, buildings, restorations, and urban spaces."

▪️ Thus, I have felt very at ease in judging the merits of each and comparing them, though it was not easy since all display some meritorious value.

▪️ However, in the visits to the exclusively historical restoration works, their merits stood out above the others and, without any doubt, in my opinion: for their seriousness, for the responsibility so well assumed in intervening in historic buildings of tremendous value for the artistic heritage of the city and the world, for the great technical and cultural competence of their authors, and for the real and concrete lesson they leave in this such important, difficult, and often contested field, both by preservationists and interventionists. They are also the only works that truly, and paradoxically, add something new to our knowledge of architecture, though in these cases, it is not at the level of formal invention (which has been somewhat overrated lately, I must add), but rather technical, scientific, and humanistic.

▪️ Perhaps this decision to focus on such works may surprise, especially when everything that apparently attracts and is worthwhile in architecture today is the new, the inexplicable, the unprecedented, and the flashy. But again, the Premio Década gives us a unique opportunity to clearly see and touch what positive contribution buildings leave us—not only as values in themselves but also as contributors to the advancement of architecture in general. And in this regard, I repeat in other words, these works give more to architecture by giving less in terms of conventional creativity.

▪️ Without a doubt, these are works by architects for architects, and the general public will not feel the same interest in them as we do. At the same time, and very quietly, it is only the public who receives the real benefit from these restorations.

▪️ And so I say, within the framework where I must choose a winner, the works that leave us the most are those that, with respect, professionalism, great technical level, imagination, and cleverness, manage to revive urban artistic treasures that, due to being unusual, condemned, or deteriorated, no longer offered all the richness they were capable of and for which they were created.

▪️ Thus, the projects of the Salas de Lectura at the Biblioteca Nacional de Cataluña, the Palau Güell, and the Park Güell are three projects that should be highlighted in this very dignified and measured year of 1994. And by fine-tuning the perspective, we notice great differences among them in terms of commission, problems to solve, and results.

▪️ As in the end, only one must be chosen (the only requirement of the award which, while necessary and just, is not always welcome, as I would be perfectly happy here), I have chosen, therefore, to radicalise my thinking a little further and search for some criterion that can elevate one of the three above all others.

▪️ In this regard, I believe that the RESTORATION OF THE PERIMETRAL BANK AND THE HYPOSTYLE HALL OF PARK GÜELL represents the most interesting extreme of restoration, where the talents of the designer are combined with the difficulty, and even at times the unfavourable demands of this work, in a previously unseen and, I would say, surprising way. It is a true extreme among the three considered: it is the most austere in results, the least 'interventionist', the most puritan.

▪️ And here is where the personalisation of the work becomes indispensable.

▪️ And so I say: Architects of the stature of Martínez Lapeña and Torres, whose creative energies move us when reflected in each of their works, with originality both formal, stylistic, and operational, showing an unflagging search for the inventive transformation of the existing environment in their long body of work, and from whom we have come to expect the unexpected, that they have imposed the discipline of looking at Gaudí, not as inspiration but as a model, to cure and return him to his finest moment, that they have dedicated all their creative energy and knowledge to understanding, discovering, imagining, testing, and inventing a meticulous, difficult, and complex intervention that would bring life back to an important sector of Park Güell, and that doing so at the cost of tremendous intellectual sacrifices and artistic temptations, and thereby implying their own disappearance as authors, all of this, and in light of the undeniable success of the endeavour, strikes me as commendable, remarkable, and worthy of the Premio Década.

▪️ Moreover, I believe that for all these reasons, the fact that architects like Martínez Lapeña and Torres have taken on and so successfully completed this work makes it not only deserving of the Premio Década, but also worthy of being an example—though the moralistic idea of an example is generally one I do not like to promote. But in this case, and I repeat again, in which part of the prize is based on who the architects are and what they usually do, I think it is valuable to show how much an architect committed to their time, their art, and their contemporary problems can gain from looking at architecture as a whole, in its history, in its territory, and dedicating attention to it—not to promote a personal research agenda, but as a generous contribution to improving the general health of our métier. At the risk of sounding sentimental, I cannot help but notice that at the moment of analysing this work, when approaching the physical evidence of this restoration, in each of the small acts whose total sum defines this restoration work at Park Güell (and literally, there are thousands, as we sometimes talk about the work of recognising and/or reproducing a tile fragment), there is a gesture of love that, in a profession often characterised by vanity, is also something to celebrate and reward.

▪️ Therefore, I grant the PREMIO DÉCADA 2004 to JOSÉ ANTONIO MARTÍNEZ LAPEÑA AND ELÍAS TORRES, and within the authority granted to me on this occasion, I would also like to mention two other works: the Salas de Lectura of the Biblioteca Nacional de Cataluña, by Joan Rodón, for the exceptional quality of the intellectual and research environment created by the clear contemporary intervention with the majestic and magical Gothic spaces of the old Hospital de la Santa Creu, and the restoration work at the Palau Güell, carried out by Antoni González Moreno-Navarro and Pau Carbó, which, unfortunately, is difficult to separate from the ongoing restoration work, but which, based on what has already been achieved, can be expected to be a great success.

All said from my side."

Jorge Silvetti Barcelona, 28 May 2004

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{Photography on the award ceremony by Rafael Vargas}