The latest issue of Architectural Digest (August 2009) has just published a fascinating article “La Concha Revival: San Juan’s Tropical Modernist Gem Makes a Comeback,” detailing the gradual and painstaking process architect José R. Marchand and designer Jorge Rosselló went through to rescue and reinvent La Concha Hotel from “the basic bones.”
Located in Condado, Puerto Rico, La Concha was for some an icon of tropical Modernism and for others an elephantine cement eyesore. It was saved from demolition in the 1990s and has just now risen from its ashes with Marchand and Rosselló’s preservation, reinterpretation, and contributions to the original design. Marchand and Rosselló worked closely together on La Concha to restore the hotel’s original plan while at the same time putting their own stamp on the interiors. Speaking about their joint project, Rosselló says, “In the past, La Concha was a happy place. You always felt free there. Our goal was to bring back that sense of freedom, to wake Puerto Rico’s most beloved sleeping beauty from her long and damaging sleep.”
Here are some excerpts from Michael Frank’s article:
Once the epitome of Puerto Rican cool, an icon of tropical Modernism from the moment it was completed in 1958, by the mid-1990s the venerable La Concha hotel had been shuttered, abandoned and left to rot. Yards of its interior detailing had been stripped away. The cabana wing had been torn down. A complete demolition was scheduled to begin when, following vocal protests from local architects, historians and the community at large, the enterprising folk at Renaissance Hotels decided to give the old building a new life.
Originally designed by Osvaldo Toro and Miguel Ferrer, with an eccentric but utterly lovable seashell-shaped restaurant by Mario Salvatori, La Concha was a beautifully massed, expertly sited, vividly inventive building perfectly in sync with its time. Closely attuning the hotel to its sun-swept setting, the architects created deep-shading overhangs, open corridors, windows and doors that gave onto lush interior courtyards and provided cross-ventilation, and a beautifully lacy quiebrasol (their take on a brise-soleil) for further modulation of the light and heat. The hotel featured vaulted ceilings that capped poolside cabanas, a sea of white marble in its interiors and Salvatori’s whimsical mollusk of a restaurant floating in a reflecting pool that seemed to merge into the infinity of the ocean beyond.
[Thanks to architect and photographer Ivonne María Marcial for bringing this article to our attention.]
For full article (in English) and photos, see http://www.architecturaldigest.com/homes/hotels/2009/08/la_concha_article
