Planks

Stopped in at the Santa Catarina market this morning after visiting our financial advisor who looks after the diminishing pool of our so called old age pension fund (rather worryingly, his advice was to move every last peseta out of Spain!).

The roof shown here was one of the last works of the Catalan architect Enric Miralles, who also designed the often maligned Scottish Parliament building. Whatever your view of that edifice, you can see some clear similarities here. Clearly, whatever planks they had left over from Edinburgh they shipped across here and nailed them up, or was it vice versa! Truth be told, the major highlight of this roof is the colourful tiles on the roof exterior which resemble an abstract of a fruit stall; somewhat perversely they are only visible from on high - never have the neighbours on the upper floors been so well catered for and, indeed, as they are the local buying public what a mouth watering advert the roof must make! Miralles had a certain Scots canniness about him, methinks! roof here

Sadly, Miralles who was regarded as a major rising talent died 12 years ago at the age of 44 of a brain tumour. I do remember seeing his first sketches for the SP building inspired by upturned fishing boats which also seem to have inspired this design. Perhaps, after all, he did have a deep sense of what unites peoples and lands such Catalonia and Scotland.

Tech note re yesterday:   The lower part of the shot is the reflection in the large plate glass window of a Renault dealership.   Inside the showroom, which has a sunken floor, there  is a mezzanine floor set back from this window.   The vertical face of its visible concrete platform is faced with bevelled aluminium which accounts for the reflections in the middle part of the frame.  At one point the left hand image of the men combines the two reflective surfaces (window and platform), the right-most image of them comes purely from the differently angled balcony edge!   Glad that's clear now!