Rafael Moneo: Barcelona Auditorium, 1988-1999

To restore its lost vitality architecture has had to give up its value as a symbolic form and get back to earth; this means that design has had to give up abstraction based on arbitrary forms to which the external world was forced to adapt at any cost.

The result is difficult choices such as construction of structures dictated by precise architectural rules or the search for a new coherence between graphic convention and building convention, that is, between design and production. Yet more difficult was the decision to think of construction as an act of progressive detachment of the architectural object from its creator; thus construction is no longer a forced transposition of a graphic design into reality, but rather its consumption in favour of independent presence of the building in its setting.