Using banal materials to poetic effect, this dining marquee sits between architecture, landscape art and minimalist sculpture
The marquee stands to the rear of a precinct belonging to the restaurant Les Cols (‘The Cabbages’ in Catalan) in the small town of Olot, 40 kilometres west of Girona on the edge of the volcanic park of La Garrotxa in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It is the latest in a series of interventions by RCR Arquitectes on the site, beginning with the main restaurant constructed just over a decade ago, and continuing since with a sequence of minimalist pavilions for overnight stays.
The restaurant has established a style of its own combining quality local produce with a sophisticated up-to-the-minute cuisine. One is tempted to say that the building and the contents are from the same table as they both fuse modernity and tradition, east and west.
The architects of RCR are very much of their place but they also possess a cosmopolitan architectural culture reaching beyond Catalan traditions to a wider world of inspirations including the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, the steel blade sculptures of Richard Serra and the Zen gardens of Kyoto. The marquee fits into this trajectory. With its slender structure suggesting both temple and tent, it exists on the knife edge between the industrial and the rural, the artificial and the natural.