Here, admittedly, the surgery is more radical. After amputation and several by-passes, this section of the building will never be the same again; but it will have a new lease of life.

2. A comparison with Doctor Frankenstein might be more attractive, for his creature was part person and part object. Miralles’ creations too are something between a tissue or organism, and a building whose component parts do not fit together perfectly. On the contrary, they seem to connect up without a ‘plan’.
But soon you become aware of a different structure. A new order becomes apparent.

3. Miralles himself holds that an architect works with people – not in the sense of others collaborating in the design process, but literally, people as working material. He quotes a statement by Elias Canetti about Nazi architecture. Canetti thought the Nazis were so good at designing stadiums and public squares because they understood how to fill a space and how to empty it again.
The beach is just such an ideal public space because it admits an endless number of people. You can interpret Miralles’ buildings, especially their ground plans, as traces left by people in the sand. Just before sunset, the abstract order is replaced by an entirely different one, that of the human being.

4. He has shifted the main entrance of the city hall from the front to the back of the complex. Realizing that he had to leave the modestly-dimensioned canal profile at the front unimpaired, he succeeded in creating an incredible amount of working space for himself by this action. There was now room for a forecourt at the rear, and it became possible to take the greatest possible advantage and maximize the exposure of the transition between public space and the interior. The whole thing conjures up an image of open-heart surgery.

5. On entry, the first thing to strike the eye are the familiar ‘projection planes’. The natural stone floor has parquet inserts marking passages into other spaces and window openings. They are ‘annotations’ to an exterior realm, heralding daylight or a neighbouring space.

6. Equally striking is the condition of the floor. The wood looks as though it had been rescued from an old bar floor, and the stone makes a dull impression. The gaze next falls on the interior furnishing and finishing of the hall. Four years of consultation were clearly not enough to avoid nullifying all Miralles’ design intentions by the simple act of putting the hall (as well as other parts of the building) into use. This typifies a more widespread problem in the Netherlands, one in which architects are not entirely free from blame. There is still a complete lack of consideration among building managers and users in their dealings with a carefully designed environment. The idea that a building has another value or function besides its pragmatic purpose goes by the board.

7. It would of course make sense to reconsider the framework within which architects operate. People have gathered so many artificial aids around them during the last hundred years and have come to expect such a high degree of comfort, that a simple schedule of the required spaces with their structural and physical specifications is no longer adequate as the programme for a building project. The interior furnishings and the utilization of the building have too great an influence on the result.
Against this, however, users are increasingly capable of making their own choices about the furnishing and application of their working or living environment. They do not accept the designer’s judgment unquestioningly and may indeed distrust it strongly. A highly specific response to the need is not appreciated. Budgets are generally too low to meet the space requirement, and the demand for a universal standard with a high level of flexibility grows all the greater.

8. The question remains: is a Miralles design apt to these times? What does the City of Utrecht hope to achieve by it? Following the broad initial selection, it was after all decided to go for a limited competition – a two-round competition, no less. With a little extra effort, plus of course the conviction and awareness that there would be some point to this effort, coherence could have been attained and hence a meticulous and meaningful total concept. With an architect like Miralles, the desired effect can not be reached unless the work is regarded and treated as a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’.

9. After reception in the hall, a tour of the building follows: ‘fasten your seatbelts!’ But this remark is not particularly appropriate to the bodily experience of viewing the building. Architecture is a cerebral sport rather than a physical one. Utrecht already had a fine challenge to the mind anyway; in the Educatorium, where the trained intellectual can lose himself in a daydream before OMA’s ‘fold’.
Why do we architects continue to be amused by this kind of thing? It imposes a great financial burden on a plan and suspiciously resembles a piece of academic bravura. Or are these contemporary ornaments, welcome variations which make up for what the general public finds missing from most contemporary architecture?

10. The space used to be the carrier and ornament used to be an appliqué (and it still occurs as such if in an impoverished form), but we can see these two dimensions meeting head-on in the city hall. This, in the end, is the strength of the design: Miralles the ‘spatial artist’ breaks through the walls between several buildings and conjugates them in virtuoso style. He maps the multiple historic layers of the buildings and adds a new layer of his own. His changes often alleviate the limitations of the old, fragmented structure, and the outcome is a fascinating one.

11. In the new structure with recycled parts of the 1930s building, he goes so far in this respect that it all looks rather far-fetched. The ‘effects’ are so explicit and so multi-layered that the result is on the oppressive side. As on a roller coaster, the loop-the-loops are a bit too much for some people. You can no longer hear or see anything, and the fun goes out of the ride.

12. The office section of the building terminates in a strongly truncated and radically altered fragment from the thirties. This part encloses the square at the entrance and includes the canteen. The former external steps are now surmounted by a conservatory with a sitting area. The ‘crook’ of the complex, where the old and new buildings meet, now contains the central staircase. This is built of alternating ‘folded’ steps made of steel and solid ‘block’ steps of wood or concrete – the staircase as a visual and tactile experience.

13. The functions special to a city hall are ranged around the central lobby, whose interior has been left more or less unchanged. The council chamber, the wedding rooms, the foyer/reception room and the aldermen’s chamber are placed here. Instead of the planned break-through of the roof above the council chamber with plastic ‘light catchers’ (as in the provisional design), the entire overlying floor was removed. The floor joists were left in place. Together with a number of (apparently acoustic) ceilings and new, exposed laminated beams, these measures result in a spectacular space.

14. The interiors of the small wedding room and the central gallery that acts as the main entrance were planned in consultation with and under the auspices of Utrecht’s Central Museum. The cordial contact between Miralles and Ida van Zijl from the museum, also a member of the selection committee, has clearly borne fruit here. The walls are adorned with work blithely plucked from the museum’s archives.

15. A piquant detail: one of the guests at the opening noticed that one of the paintings from the museum’s archives portrayed a notorious Utrecht murderer. The picture has since vanished back into the archives.
The likeness of erstwhile mayor Vonhoff glares at you as you descend the staircase next to the main entrance.
It all seems to be about people. In the hall, four figures are busy scrubbing the floor. Two of them are polishing an area of parquet, one of them is tending to the surrounding edge of stone and one is scraping up chewing gum. There is hope yet.

16. Architects make extensive use of the language of images. Metaphors and concepts are becoming more and more important. But Enric Miralles was unique in the way he interpreted these. It was not the beach that interested him as a space, an image or an abstraction, but the traces people leave on the beach. It is not the image or the concept of the roller coaster that intrigues him so much; the route of the roller coaster track is fixed, and for that reason alone is not particularly exciting.