CATEGORY: PORT TOWNSEND

Several years before our trip to Spain, I had seen, in an architectural magazine, a recently completed Spanish building complex on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.  It was an apartment complex named La Muralla Roja (the red wall) and was designed by an architect named Richardo Bofill.  I thought it was wonderfully original and one of the most beautiful examples of modern architecture I had ever seen.  It was not modern like Richard Meyer or Corbusier: white plaster, glass and steel.  It was more like the Barcelona Pavilion turned on end with many other similar forms all jammed together.  It was tall, full of varied rectilinear forms and painted in Grand Canyon colors: rust, purple, orchid, magenta, cobalt blue, and lighter shades of all these colors.  I saved the magazine, but by the time we left for Spain, I had forgotten about it.

Alicante is on the south side of a big bay.  After we arrived and got settled on Jim’s boat, I stood in the cockpit looking out over the bay as the sun was setting.  Clear across on the other side, I saw a building that looked familiar.  Wow!  It looked like Bofill’s brightly painted building!  It was so far away that I couldn’t tell for sure; maybe it was a different building colored by the setting sun.  However, I was very excited thinking it might be.

The next morning when I looked again, there it was, still with its sunset colors.  I decided to walk around the bay and see if it really was the Bofill building.  Bob was busy helping Jim with something on the boat.  They didn’t care if I took a long walk.

And it was long, maybe five miles one way.  But it was the building I had supposed it to be.  As I approached and started to walk around it, I was stunned by its unique beauty.  What seemed to be a single colored highly textured wall changed as I moved, because the sides of the ins and outs were another color.  It had high, narrow wing walls that had no other purpose than to have a high, narrow opening that framed a view of the sea.  These wing wall glassless windows in different sizes were all around the building.  Standing and looking through one at the water was magical.  The whole building was magical.  I discovered that all the entrances to the apartments were through courtyards via Escher-like stairs.  The interiors of the courtyards were painted in all one color.  It was a lesson in the psychology of color.  First I entered a blue one.  It was a moderate blue, lighter than true blue, muted with a little gray.  I felt oppressed and immediately wanted to leave.  The next one I entered was bright magenta pink.  I never thought I would feel euphoric surrounded by pink, but I did.  I thought how grand it would be to come home every day and enter my apartment through that pink courtyard.  The other courtyards were rust and purple.  They felt good, but not as good as the pink.  The whole experience was provocative and entrancing.

I love color in buildings.  I have often thought that concrete-gray cities full of high rises look like a bug scale on a tree: a disease.  They look like something that is sucking the life out of the earth.  I loved this colorful building.  It was not that I always liked color.  I loved the taj mahal too.  I love the colors in a Peacock’s tail.  I am also thrilled when I see a white peacock.

When I got back to the boat, I was bubbling over with what I had seen.  Bob and Jim peered across the bay and then started speculating how long it would take to sail to Ibiza.

If you want to see photos of this building, search “la muralla roja images.”  Isn’t the internet wonderful?