.
The Olly and Dolly sisters, Love your neighbor, murder on the railway line, y Behind back of God, between heaven and hearth. Impresión en gelatina de plata.
[imagen. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy] [sitio. the moholy-nagy foundation] [ver+]
3 Gelatin Silver Prints / Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
.
The Olly and Dolly sisters, Love your neighbor, murder on the railway line, y Behind back of God, between heaven and hearth. Impresión en gelatina de plata.
[imagen. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy] [sitio. the moholy-nagy foundation] [ver+]
Cartografía / Manuel Gausa
.
José Antonio Sosa indicaba, parafraseando a Deleuze, como “a cada sistema de representación cabe asignarle una distinta capacidad organizadora del mundo”.
Si la representación perspectiva (pre)suponía una estructuración jerarquizante del mundo, si la planimetría moderna oponía a aquella la relatividad de sus propias organizaciones fragmentadas y autorreferente, hoy intuimos el paso de lo que había sido, en ambos casos, una cartografía determinista (unívoca, total, exacta, y literal en sus referentes, pero también en sus procedimientos y sus trazados) a una cartografía cada vez más “indeterminada” (abierta, versátil, abstracta) y, por ello mismo, también más evolutiva en sus trayectorias. Al observador clásico o al flâneur moderno les ha sucedido, así, el explorador contemporáneo.
En efecto, para el observador clásico, el término “espacio” se traducía en un concepto estático y permanente; un marco absoluto, exacto y literal en sus manifestaciones, pero siempre observado “desde el exterior”, desde un encuadre aparentemente estable que iba a presentar en el punto de fuga - en la relación con el ojo humano- su máxima referencia.
La modernidad iba a exacerbar, por el contrario, la noción de “posición relativa”. La idea compacta (y cohesiva) del espacio jerárquico, absoluto, genuino, clásico, dejaba paso, así, a una visión más atonal, de experiencias discontinuas en “posiciones correlativas”; una planimetría discontinua de figuraciones fijas, aunque fragmentadas; fundamentalmente estáticas en su concepción, aunque incipientemente dinámicas en su percepción objetual; propias de una visión confiada aun en escenarios (o trazados) autónomos -panoramas- de codificaciones tan predeterminadas como exactas y unívocas.
El explorador contemporáneo -navegante, cazador y “militar” a un tiempo- se enfrenta hoy, sin embargo a un espacio polifásico, por complejo y heterogéneo. Un espacio multiplicado, físico -y no siempre físico- en constante situación de cambio latente y de simultaneidad entre mensajes y escalas diversos en el que las tradicionales distinciones entre ciudad, naturaleza y territorio han perdido aceleradamente sus tradicionales acepciones para confundirse en geografías progresivamente equívocas y solapadas. Escenarios plurales e indisciplinados -cada vez menos “domables”- identifican físicamente una estructura que, sin embargo, se vuelve más inasible e invisible en su globalidad y de la que tan solo emerge un campo de proyecciones y desplazamientos simultáneos y entrecruzados, apenas ajustables a los parámetros tradicionales -y estáticos- de la percepción y la representación tradicionales.
De la misma manera, representación no puede ser, ya, una simple cuestión de figuración o trazado sino una operación que debería remitir, necesariamente, a un conjunto de informaciones multicapa “n-dimensionales” (mapas abiertos y elásticos) destinados a reconocer el entramado de múltiples relaciones ocultas que en ella se desarrollan simultáneamente en el tiempo y cuya forma es imposible definir con exactitud.
La antigua idea de representación se complementa ahora -en esa nueva cartografía inteligente- con la capacidad de proyección, combinación y modificación que propician las nuevas lógicas interescalares y los nuevos instrumentos de reconocimiento basados en una sofisticada organización de una información, captada no ya (solo) en el lugar sino a distancia (vía satélite) , propia de las actuales tecnologías digitales.
Lógicas destinadas a articular la superposición y el cruce de datos, de corrientes, de flujos y de fuerzas. Lógicas que introducen la variable temporal, la modificación y la alteración. Lógicas surgidas de procesos abstractos más que de figuraciones literales.
Matrices sintéticas, evolutivas y a-figurativas (capaces de comprimir -de sintetizar- información) más que formas -o modelos- predeterminados. Estructuras de rastreo concebidas a partir de formatos diagramáticos -gráficos, parrillas, entramados, etc.- destinados a registrar y procesar datos múltiples: parámetros de incidencia asimilables a signos -o trayectorias- sintéticos (puntos, líneas, superficies) que experimentarían, posteriormente, las oportunas alteraciones y/o manipulaciones específicas en procesos indeterminados de concreción y, por tanto, un traspaso de lo abstracto a lo singular en situaciones tan inciertas como específicas.
[texto. en Diccionario Metápolis de Arquitectura Avanzada por Manuel Gausa] [descarga. diccionario metápolis]
[ver+]
José Antonio Sosa indicaba, parafraseando a Deleuze, como “a cada sistema de representación cabe asignarle una distinta capacidad organizadora del mundo”.
Si la representación perspectiva (pre)suponía una estructuración jerarquizante del mundo, si la planimetría moderna oponía a aquella la relatividad de sus propias organizaciones fragmentadas y autorreferente, hoy intuimos el paso de lo que había sido, en ambos casos, una cartografía determinista (unívoca, total, exacta, y literal en sus referentes, pero también en sus procedimientos y sus trazados) a una cartografía cada vez más “indeterminada” (abierta, versátil, abstracta) y, por ello mismo, también más evolutiva en sus trayectorias. Al observador clásico o al flâneur moderno les ha sucedido, así, el explorador contemporáneo.
En efecto, para el observador clásico, el término “espacio” se traducía en un concepto estático y permanente; un marco absoluto, exacto y literal en sus manifestaciones, pero siempre observado “desde el exterior”, desde un encuadre aparentemente estable que iba a presentar en el punto de fuga - en la relación con el ojo humano- su máxima referencia.
La modernidad iba a exacerbar, por el contrario, la noción de “posición relativa”. La idea compacta (y cohesiva) del espacio jerárquico, absoluto, genuino, clásico, dejaba paso, así, a una visión más atonal, de experiencias discontinuas en “posiciones correlativas”; una planimetría discontinua de figuraciones fijas, aunque fragmentadas; fundamentalmente estáticas en su concepción, aunque incipientemente dinámicas en su percepción objetual; propias de una visión confiada aun en escenarios (o trazados) autónomos -panoramas- de codificaciones tan predeterminadas como exactas y unívocas.
El explorador contemporáneo -navegante, cazador y “militar” a un tiempo- se enfrenta hoy, sin embargo a un espacio polifásico, por complejo y heterogéneo. Un espacio multiplicado, físico -y no siempre físico- en constante situación de cambio latente y de simultaneidad entre mensajes y escalas diversos en el que las tradicionales distinciones entre ciudad, naturaleza y territorio han perdido aceleradamente sus tradicionales acepciones para confundirse en geografías progresivamente equívocas y solapadas. Escenarios plurales e indisciplinados -cada vez menos “domables”- identifican físicamente una estructura que, sin embargo, se vuelve más inasible e invisible en su globalidad y de la que tan solo emerge un campo de proyecciones y desplazamientos simultáneos y entrecruzados, apenas ajustables a los parámetros tradicionales -y estáticos- de la percepción y la representación tradicionales.
De la misma manera, representación no puede ser, ya, una simple cuestión de figuración o trazado sino una operación que debería remitir, necesariamente, a un conjunto de informaciones multicapa “n-dimensionales” (mapas abiertos y elásticos) destinados a reconocer el entramado de múltiples relaciones ocultas que en ella se desarrollan simultáneamente en el tiempo y cuya forma es imposible definir con exactitud.
La antigua idea de representación se complementa ahora -en esa nueva cartografía inteligente- con la capacidad de proyección, combinación y modificación que propician las nuevas lógicas interescalares y los nuevos instrumentos de reconocimiento basados en una sofisticada organización de una información, captada no ya (solo) en el lugar sino a distancia (vía satélite) , propia de las actuales tecnologías digitales.
Lógicas destinadas a articular la superposición y el cruce de datos, de corrientes, de flujos y de fuerzas. Lógicas que introducen la variable temporal, la modificación y la alteración. Lógicas surgidas de procesos abstractos más que de figuraciones literales.
Matrices sintéticas, evolutivas y a-figurativas (capaces de comprimir -de sintetizar- información) más que formas -o modelos- predeterminados. Estructuras de rastreo concebidas a partir de formatos diagramáticos -gráficos, parrillas, entramados, etc.- destinados a registrar y procesar datos múltiples: parámetros de incidencia asimilables a signos -o trayectorias- sintéticos (puntos, líneas, superficies) que experimentarían, posteriormente, las oportunas alteraciones y/o manipulaciones específicas en procesos indeterminados de concreción y, por tanto, un traspaso de lo abstracto a lo singular en situaciones tan inciertas como específicas.
[texto. en Diccionario Metápolis de Arquitectura Avanzada por Manuel Gausa] [descarga. diccionario metápolis]
La Ville / Henri Cartier-Bresson
Los antagonismos de la ciudad contemporánea representados en dos imágenes de Cartier-Bresson, el suburbio de ciudad jardín y la urbanización tradicional con sus mutaciones. Fotografías tomadas en Holanda y Grecia, 1953.
[imagen. Henri Cartier-Bresson] [texto. Luis Hevia][sitio. foundation henri cartier-bresson]
[ver+]
[imagen. Henri Cartier-Bresson] [texto. Luis Hevia][sitio. foundation henri cartier-bresson]
Los bajos de los edificios altos / Marcelo Faiden
Un itinerario construido con 4 visitas puntuales. ¿Dónde comienzan y dónde acaban los bajos de los edificios altos? / Hasta el momento la construcción en altura ha sido analizada desde una perspectiva totalizadora. Su reciente historia se describe a través de la evolución conjunta de sus sistemas y organizaciones, intentando abarcar la generalidad de cada episodio. Es así como la mayor parte de estos enfoques concentran sus esfuerzos en la parte repetitiva del edificio: el apilamiento de plantas tipo, o lo que sería empezar por la mitad…
Empecemos desde abajo, tomemos la mirada del peatón como referencia y crucemos el límite de la acera. Intentemos situarnos en el vacío crítico conformado entre el programa funcional ubicado sobre nosotros (el edificio) y el conjunto de flujos que circula a nuestros pies (la ciudad). Posicionémonos en la intersección, un instante antes de que el edificio aterrice. En ese confuso mundo donde lo público y lo privado se reordena, donde el plano de la ciudad sube a la vez que el edificio baja a su encuentro. Al igual que Nolli en la Roma de 1748, imaginemos una sección horizontal por la cota cero de cualquier ciudad y verifiquemos cuánto es el espacio urbano consecuencia de la negociación entre los edificios y este plano de sección. Escojamos el sillón más cercano y observemos, estáticos, el movimiento continuo dentro de esta interfase de múltiples entradas. Ensayemos una descripción de este ámbito tan escurridizo, tan difícil de acotar, ligado a costumbres, programas y usuarios siempre cambiantes.
El itinerario que aquí se presenta contará con cuatro paradas. Cuatro edificios seleccionados con la intención visitar algunos de los modos de proyectar y entender la intersección con el plano del suelo. Estos serán capaces de tipificar soluciones técnicas y espaciales, de generar cierto canon que posibilite al lector la aparición de una constelación (subjetiva) de proyectos y edificios en sintonía con los criterios que en cada caso se establezcan.
1a parada. Planta baja libre. Le Corbusier, Unidad Habitacional de Marsella, 1952 / “Y el corte revolucionario moderno entronca el edificio al terreno por medio del espacio libre, el vacío, el paso posible, la luz y el sol bajo la casa. Los postes de hormigón armado han pasado a convertirse en los pilotes, clave de múltiples problemas capitales de organización de las ciudades.
Ciudades a partir de ahora sin barreras.
El edificio está despegado del suelo: salubridad” (Le Corbusier, 1942).
La ciudad entendida como fondo natural y los edificios como objetos detrás de los inmensos árboles que Le Corbusier dibuja. En el medio no hay nada: un plano de Nolli completamente blanco.
La característica de este esquema es la intersección vacía entre el edificio y el plano del suelo. La ausencia de materia en los bajos, el sol bajo la casa, trae consigo la ruptura de la continuidad del sistema estructural y de las instalaciones justo antes de alcanzar la cota cero. Aparece así una bandeja –hueca, de gran espesor– que recoge las cargas puntuales y las bajantes, para luego alcanzar el suelo con la menor cantidad de elementos posibles.
Si analizamos la primera implementación de este dispositivo ideado para la construcción del Pabellón Suizo, observamos que aún las columnas son macizas y que los tramos horizontales cuentan con un espacio muy reducido entre las dos vigas que conectan los seis pares de columnas.
La Unidad Habitacional de Marsella trae consigo no sólo un cambio de escala, sino la aparición de sistemas técnicos más complejos. Es aquí donde el dispositivo que despega al edificio del suelo acaba por adquirir identidad. La planta técnica antiguamente ubicada bajo rasante, se sitúa en el espacio residual que generan las dos enormes vigas encargadas de traspasar todo el peso del edificio hacia las columnas (“le sol artificiel” como lo llamaría Le Corbusier). Los diecisiete pares de columnas pasan de ser macizas a contener los tramos verticales de las instalaciones que necesitan intercambiar fluidos con el tendido público. Con su planta en forma de U, las columnas concluyen la formalización de este dispositivo que entronca el edificio al terreno por medio del espacio libre, el vacío. Refiriéndonos esta vez al vacío su propia oquedad, atributo indispensable para ligar, o mejor dicho, entroncar el edificio a la ciudad.
2a parada. Caja desplazada. Mies van der Rohe, Lake Shore Drive Apartments, Chicago, 1948-1951 / En la visita anterior hacíamos referencia a la bandeja estructural, a ese plano de transición horizontal capaz de mediar entre el bloque y la ciudad. Un elemento que adquiere jerarquía por diferenciación, ajeno al sistema estructural (y en algunos casos ajeno también a la materialidad) del edificio que soporta.
Al mismo tiempo que Le Corbusier proyecta desde París la Unidad Habitacional de Marsella, Mies da respuesta a un programa idéntico con los Lake Shore Drive Apartments desde su estudio en Chicago.
Si bien una mirada distraída podría afirmar que los bajos que ahora nos ocupan resultan similares a los anteriores, no cabe duda que los criterios que construyen este ámbito canonizado por Mies son simétricamente opuestos a los anteriores. Nos encontramos frente a una solución basada en la puesta a punto de una serie de elementos y las relaciones que permiten su cohesión. Ya no dos partes inconciliables, sino un sistema capaz de escenificar espacios urbanos diversos. Pilares, forjados, núcleo vertical y cerramiento. Un total de cuatro elementos que configuran una estructura sin interrupciones ni acentos.
Si anteriormente nos referíamos a la aparición de un plano horizontal que separaba al edificio del mundo, ahora presenciaremos el desplazamiento del plano vertical. Un desplazamiento que ya se nos anticipa en el desarrollo del edificio, en el paso atrás que da el vidrio respecto a los montantes T. Abajo también será solo eso. Un sutil movimiento, libre de complicaciones y apartado de cualquier gesto heroico: planos de cristal que discurren por la cota del suelo, desde el perímetro hacia adentro, hasta lograr encerrar el núcleo.
3a parada. Bandeja programática. Arne Jacobsen, Hotel Royal SAS, Copenhague, 1955-1960 / A mediados de los cincuenta los edificios en altura se establecen definitivamente como tipología y comienzan a absorber programas de otros esquemas edilicios. La necesidad de ubicar cada vez más funciones ligadas al flujo horizontal de la calle desborda la capacidad del prisma, organizado con una lógica de uso exclusivamente vertical. A tales efectos aparece una nueva pieza que según su situación se adapta a las tensiones del ámbito donde se asienta: se alarga, crece en volumen, es atravesada con patios, toma la línea de otras edificaciones. Es decir, varía. Su principal función, su invariante, será la de crear las condiciones para que el prisma se pose sobre ella, facilitar la articulación entre formas y programas complementarios.
El Hotel Royal SAS se nos presenta como el esquema más contundente para esta manera de entender la intersección del edificio con el plano de la ciudad. Al observar los primeros estudios volumétricos, comprobamos la independencia con la que se conciben el prisma del hotel y el basamento longitudinal. La torre gira, crece, se desdobla en dos cuerpos más bajos, mientras que el basamento permanece inalterable. Funciona como una bandeja programática sobre la cual es posible ensayar infinitas disposiciones. Sólo se modifica ligeramente la posición de sus patios, su forma se tensa respondiendo a distintas variables que la torre.
Los sistemas estructurales son igualmente independientes. El cuerpo bajo se sostiene mediante vigas y pilares, mientras que el cuerpo alto lo hace por medio de una estructura tridimensional de tabiques verticales y horizontales: solución óptima para evitar mochetas en las habitaciones, sistematizar encuentros con el muro cortina y contrarrestar el momento de vuelco generado por las solicitaciones horizontales. La articulación entre ambos sistemas se resuelve reduciendo la presencia de la torre a tres pares de pantallas.
Por último, la expresión material de los elementos también será diferenciada. Mientras que el basamento –relacionado con la escala peatonal– se recubre con un despiece horizontal de paneles grisáceos y opacos, la torre –ligada al sistema de agujas de Copenhague– se envuelve en vidrio y paneles reflectantes divididos verticalmente por montantes de aluminio anodizado, obteniendo así un prisma mucho más ligero y sensible a los cambios cromáticos del cielo.
4a parada. Los bajos altos. Bertand Goldberg, Marina City, Chicago, 1960-1967 / Pasamos ahora de la ciudad regida por la lógica peatonal a un modelo de segregación vertical, donde el intercambio de flujos entre edificio y ciudad deja de estar concentrado en un único plano para localizarse en diversos puntos, ya sea por debajo o sobre la cota de la calle. Un modo de entender y proyectar la ciudad inaugurado por Ludwig Hilberseimer (Ciudad vertical, 1924), continuado por Louis Kahn (Plan para el centro de la ciudad de Filadelfia, 1952-53) y materializado finalmente por Bertand Goldberg.
El conjunto Marina City es una verdadera ciudad comprimida dentro de los límites del solar. Este complejo fue la primera estructura de usos mixtos construida en Estados Unidos y es actualmente el edificio con mayor densidad de Chicago. Cuenta con 896 apartamentos además de incorporar oficinas, teatro y áreas deportivas y comerciales. Todos los programas se ubican a distintas cotas, de manera tal que sea la sección la encargada de estructurar el proyecto. El peatón no ocupa la cota más baja; para él se destina un plano exclusivo, liberado, desde el cual descender o ascender a los programas públicos. Las viviendas aparecen como terminal vertical de dos redes: la fluvial, accesible desde un embarcadero desde el río Chicago, y la viaria, concluida en aparcamiento helicoidal. Se conforman así dos rascacielos en los que las viviendas ocuparán exclusivamente la parte superior de la sección, dominando con su presencia el skyline de Chicago.
Ahora el plano de Nolli parecería haber girado 90º, convirtiéndose repentinamente en sección: de mapa urbano a organización espacial.
Referirse a los bajos en esta última visita podrá resultar impreciso ya que este ámbito ha perdido la jerarquía con la que hasta aquí lo describíamos. Las intersecciones se han multiplicado y con ellas los puntos de análisis, obligándonos a revisar todo lo que hasta aquí hemos aprendido, impulsándonos a imaginar una relación entre arquitectura y ciudad que aún no existe. La quinta parada de este itinerario.
Referentes
Le Corbusier y François de Pierrefeu. La casa del hombre. Original de 1942. Editorial Poseidón, Barcelona, 1979.
[texto. en Revista ARQ nº63, Mecánica Electrónica por Marcelo Faiden] [sitio. adamo-faiden]
A Home is not a House / Reyner Banham
.
When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi re-verberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters -when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up. When the cost of all this tackle is half of the total outlay (or more, as it often is) what is the house doing except concealing your mechanical pudenda from the stares of folks on the sidewalk? Once or twice recently there have been buildings where the public was genuinely confused about what was mechanical services, what was structure-many visitors to Philadelphia take quite a time to work out that the floors of Louis Kahn's laboratory towers are not supported by the flanking brick duct boxes, and when they have worked it out, they are inclined to wonder if it was worth all the trouble of giving them an independent supporting structure.
No doubt about it, a great deal of the attention captured by those labs derives from Kahn's attempt to put the drama of mechanical services on show - and if, in the end, it fails to do that convincingly, the psychological importance of the gesture remains, at least in the eyes of his fellow architects. Services are a topic on which architectural practice has alternated capriciously between the brazen and the coy - there was the grand old Let-it-dangle period, when every ceiling was a mess of gaily painted entrails, as in the council chambers of the UN building, and there have been fits of pudicity when even the most innocent anatomical details have been hurriedly veiled with a suspended ceiling.
Basically, there are two reasons for all this blowing hot and cold (if you will excuse the air-conditioning industry's oldest working pun). The first is that mechanical services are too new to have been absorbed into the proverbial wisdom of the profession : none of the great slogans - Form Follows Function, accusez la structure, Firmness Commodity and Delight, Truth to Materials, Werzig ist Mehr - is much use in coping with the mechanical invasion. The nearest thing, in a significantly negative way, is Le Corbusier's "Pour Ledoux, c'était facile - pas de tubes," which seems to be gaining proverbial type currency as the expression of a profound nostalgia for the golden age before piping set in.
The second reason is that the mechanical invasion is a fact, and architects-especially American architects - sense that it is a cultural threat to their position in the world. American architects are certainly right to feel this, because their professional speciality, the art of creating monumental spaces, has never been securely established on this continent. It remains a transplant from an older culture and architects in America are constantly harking back to that culture. The generation of Stanford White and Louis Sullivan were prone to behave like émigrés from France, Frank Lloyd Wright was apt to take cover behind sentimental Teutonicisms like Lieber Meister, the big boys of the Thirties and Forties came from Aachen and Berlin anyhow, the pacemakers of the Fifties and Sixties are men of international culture like Charles Eames and Philip Johnson, and so too, in many ways, are the coming men of today, like Myron Goldsmith.
Left to their own devices, Americans do not monumentalize or make architecture. From the Cape Cod cottage, through the balloon frame to the perfection of permanently pleated aluminum siding with embossed wood-graining, they have tended to build a brick chimney and lean a collection of shacks against it. When Groff Conklin wrote (in "The Weather-Conditioned House") that "A house is nothing but a hollow shell ... a shell is all a house or any structure in which human beings live and work, really is. And most shells in nature are extraordinarily inefficient barriers to cold and heat ..." he was expressing an extremely American view, backed by a long-established grassroots tradition
And since that tradition agrees with him that the American hollow shell is such an inefficient heat barrier, Americans have always been prepared to pump more heat, light and power into their shelters than have other peoples. America's monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors - the porch, the terrace, Whitman's rail - traced plains, Kerouac's infinite road, and now, the Great Up There. Even within the house, Americans rapidly learned to dispense with the partitions that Europeans need to beep space architectural and within bounds, and long before Wright began blundering through the walls that subdivided polite architecture into living room, games room, card room, gun room etc., humbler Americans had been slipping into a way of life adapted to informally planned interiors that were, effectively, large single spaces.
Now, large single volumes wrapped in flimsy shells have to be lighted and heated in a manner quite different and more generous than the cubicular interiors of the European tradition around which the concept of domestic architecture first crystallized. Right from the start, from the Franklin stove and the kerosene lamp, the american interior has had to be better serviced if it was to support a civilized culture, and this is one of the reasons that the U.S. has been the forcing ground of mechanical services in buildings so if services are to be felt anywhere as a threat to architecture, it should be in America.
"The plumber is the quartermaster of American culture," wrote Adolf Loos, father of all European platitudes about the superiority of U.S. plumbing. He knew what he was talking about; his brief visit to the States in the Nineties convinced him that the outstanding virtues of the American way of life were its informality (no need to wear a top hat to call on local officials) and its cleanliness - which was bound to be noticed by a Viennese with as highly developed a set of Freudian compulsions as he had. That obsession with clean (which can become one of the higher absurdities of America's lysol-breathing Kleenex-culture) was another psychological motive that drove the nation toward mechanical services. The early justifications of air-conditioning were not just that people had to breathe: Konrad Meier ("Reflections on Heating and Ventilating," 1904) wrote fastidiously of "... excessive amounts of water vapor, sickly odors from respiratory organs, unclean teeth, perspiration, untidy clothing, the presence of microbes due to various conditions, stuffy air from dusty carpets and draperies ... cause greater discomfort and greater ill health." (Have a wash, and come back for the next paragraph.)
Most pioneer air-conditioning men seem to have been nose-obsessed in this way: best friends could just about force themselves to tell America of her national B.O. - and then, compulsive salesmen to a man, promptly prescribed their own patent improved panacea for ventilating the hell out of her. Somewhere among these clustering concepts-cleanliness, the lightweight shell, the mechanical services, the informality and indifference to monumental architectural values, the passion for the outdoors-there always seemed to me to lurk some elusive master concept that would never quite come into focus. It finally came clear and legible to me in June 1964, in the most highly appropriate and symptomatic circumstances.
I was standing up to my chest-hair in water, making home movies (I get that NASA kick from taking expensive hardware into hostile environments) at the campus beach at Southern Illinois. This beach combines the outdoor and the clean in a highly American manner - scenically it is the ole swimmin' hole of Huckleberry Finn tradition, but it is properly policed (by sophomore lifeguards sitting on Eames chairs on poles in the water) and it's chlorinated too. From where I stood, I could see not only immensely elaborate family barbecues and picnics in progress on the sterilized sand, but also, through and above the trees, the basketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller's experimental domes. And it hit me then, that if dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of control (sex left in, streptococci taken out) by other means, the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether.
Bucky Fuller, of course, is very big on this proposition: his famous non-rhetorical question, "Madam, do you know what your house weighs?" articulates a subversive suspicion of the monumental. This suspicion is inarticulately shared by the untold thousands of americans who have already shed the deadweight of domestic architecture and live in mobile homes which, though they may never actually be moved, still deliver rather better performance as shelter than do ground-anchored structures costing at least three times as much and weighing ten times more. If someone could devise a package that would effectively disconnect the mobile home from the dangling wires of the town electricity supply, the bottled gas containers insecurely perched on a packing case and the semi-unspeakable sanitary arrangements that stem from not being connected to the main sewer - then we should really see some changes. It may not be so far away either; defense cutbacks may send aerospace spin-off spinning in some new directions quite soon, and that kind of miniaturization talent applied to a genuinely self-contained and regenerative standard-of-living package that could be towed behind a trailer home or clipped to it, could produce a sort of U-haul unit that might be picked up or dropped off at depots across the face of the nation. Avis might still become the first in U-Tility, even if they have to go on being a trying second in car hire.
Out of this might come a domestic revolution beside which modern architecture would look like Kiddibrix, because you might be able to dispense with the trailer home as well. A standard-of-living package (the phrase and the concept are both Bucky Fuller's) that really worked might, like so many sophisticated inventions, return Man nearer to a natural state in spite of his complex culture (much as the supersession of the Morse telegraph by the Bell Telephone restored his power of speech nationwide). Man started with two basic ways of controlling environment: one by avoiding the issue and hiding under a rock, tree, tent or roof (this led ultimately to architecture as we know it) and the other by actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire, which, in a more polished form, might lead to the kind of situation now under discussion. Unlike the living space trapped with our forebears under a rock or roof, the space around a campfire has many unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability.
The direction and strength of the wind will decide the main shape and dimensions of that space, stretching the area of tolerable warmth into a long oval, but the output of light will not be affected by the wind, and the area of tolerable illumination will be a circle overlapping the oval of warmth. There will thus be a variety of environmental choices balancing light against warrant according to need and interest. If you want to do close work, like shrinking a human head, you sit in one place, but if you want to sleep you curl up somewhere different; the floating knuckle-bones game would come to rest somewhere quite different to the environment that suited the meeting of the initiation rites steering committee... and all this would be jim dandy if campfires were not so perishing inefficient, unreliable, smoky and the rest of it.
But a properly set-up standard-of-living package, breathing out, warm air along the ground (instead of sucking in cold along the ground like a campfire), radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo, with well-aged protein turning in an infrared glow in the rotisserie, and the ice-maker discreetly coughing cubes into glasses on the swingr-out bar-this could do something for a woodland glade or creek-side rock that Playboy could never do for its penthouse. But how are you going to manhandle this hunk of technology down to the creek? It doesn't have to be that massive; aerospace needs, for instance, have done wild things to solid-state technology, producing even tiny refrigerating transistors. They don't as yet mop up any great quantity of heat, but what are you going to do in this glade anyhow; put a whole steer in deep-freeze? Nor do you have to manhandle it-it could ride on a cushion of air (its own air-conditioning output, for instance) like a hovercraft or domestic vacuum cleaner.
All this will eat up quite a lot of power, transistors notwithstanding. But one should remember that few Americans are ever far from a source of between 100 and 400 horsepower - the automobile. Beefed up car batteries and a self-reeling cable drum could probably get this package breathing warm bourbon fumes o'er Eden long before microwave power transmission or miniaturized atomic power plants come in. The car is already one of the strongest arms in America's environmental weaponry, and an essential component in one non-architectural anti-building that is already familiar to most of the nation-the drive-in movie house. Only, the word house is a manifest misnomer - just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car. You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill and god-wot else they don't provide at Radio City.
The car, in short, is already doing quite a lot of the standard-of living package's job-the smoochy couple dancing to the music of the radio in their parked convertible have created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor by courtesy of the Highway Dept. of course) and all this is paradisal till it starts to rain. Even then, you’re not licked - it takes very little air pressure to inflate a transparent Mylar air dome, the conditioned-air output of your mobile package might be able to do it, with or without a little boosting, and the dome itself, folded into a parachute pack, might be part of the package. From within your thirty-foot hemisphere of warm dry lebensraum you could have spectacular ringside views of the wind felling trees, snow swirling through the glade, the forest fire coming over the hill or Constance Chatterley running swiftly to you know whom through the downpour.
But ... Surely this is not a home, you can't bring up a family in a polythene bag? This can never replace the time-honored ranch-style tri-level standing proudly in a landscape of five defeated shrubs, flanked on one side by a ranch-style tri-level with six shrubs and on the other by a ranch-style tri-level with four small boys and a private dust bowl. If the countless Americans who are successfully raising nice children in trailers will excuse me for a moment, I have a few suggestions to make to the even more countless Americans who are so insecure that they have to hide inside fake monuments of Permastone and instant roofing. There are, admittedly, very sound day-to-day advantages to having warm broadloom on a firm floor underfoot, rather than pine needles and poison ivy. America's pioneer house builders recognized this by commonly building their brick chimneys on a brick floor slab. A transparent air dome could be anchored to such a slab just as easily as could a balloon frame, and the standard-of-living-package could hover busily in a sort of glorified barbecue pit in the middle of the slab. But an air dome is not the sort of thing that the kids, or a distracted Pumpkin-eater could run in and out of when the fit took them-believe me, fighting your way out of an air dome can be worse than trying to get out of a collapsed rain-soaked tent if you make the wrong first move.
But the relationship of the services-kit to the floor slab could be re-arranged to get over this difficulty; all the standard-o£-living tackle (or most of it) could be re-deployed on the upper side of a sheltering membrane floating above the floor, radiating heat, light and what-not downwards and leaving the whole perimeter wide-open for random egress-and equally casual ingress, too, I guess. That crazy modern-movement dream of the interpenetration of indoors and outdoors could become real at last by abolishing the doors. Technically, of course, it would be just about possible to make the power membrane literally float, hovercraft style. Anyone who has had to stand in the ground-effect of a helicopter will know that this solution has little to recommend it apart from the instant disposal of waste paper. The noise, power consumption and physical discomfort would be really something wild. But if the power-membrane could be carried on a column or two, here and there, or even on a brick-built bathroom unit, then we are almost in sight of what might be technically possible before the Great Society is much older.
The basic proposition is simply that the power-membrane should blow down a curtain of warmed/cooled/conditioned air around the perimeter of the windward side of the un-house, and leave the surrounding weather to waft it through the living space, whose relation ship in plan to the membrane above need not be a one-to-one relationship. The membrane would probably have to go beyond the limits of the floor slab, anyhow, in order to prevent rain blow-in, though the air-curtain will be active on precisely the side on which the rain is blowing and, being conditioned, will tend to mop up the moisture it falls. The distribution of the air-curtain will be governed by various electronic light and weather sensors, and by that radical new invention, the weathervane. For really foul weather automatic storm shutters would be required, but in all but the most wildly in climates, it should be possible to design the conditioning kit to with most of the weather most of the time, without the power consumption becoming ridiculously greater than for an ordinary inefficient monumental type house.
Obviously, it would still be appreciably greater, but this argument hinges on the observation that it is the American Way to spend money on services and upkeep rather than on structure as do the peasant cultures of the Old World. In any we don't know where we shall be with things like solar power in next decade, and to anyone who wants to entertain an almost-possible vision of air-conditioning for absolutely free, let me recommand Shortstack (another smart trick with a polythene tube) in the december 1964 issue o£ Analog. In fact, quite a number of the obvious common sense objections to the un-house may pove to be self evaporating: for instance, noise may be no problem because there would be no surrounding wall to reflect it back into the living space and, in any case, the constant whisper of the air-curtain would provide a fair threshold of loudness that sounds would have to beat before they began to be comprehensible and therefore disturbing. Bugs? Wild life? In summer they should be no worse than with the doors and windows of an ordinary house open; in winter all right-thinking creatures either migrate or hibernate; but, in any case, why encourage the normal processes of Darwinian competition to tidy up the situation for you? All that is needed is to trigger the process by means of a general purpose lure; this would radiate mating calls and sexy scents and thus attract all sorts of mutually incompatible predators and prey into a compact pool of unspeakable carnage. A closed-circuit television camera could relay the state of play to a screen inside the dwelling and provide a twenty-four-hour program that would make the ratings for Bonanza look like chicken feed.
And privacy? This seems to be such a nominal concept in American life as factually lived that it is difficult to believe that anyone is seriously worried. The answer, under the suburban conditions that this whole argument implies, is the same as for the glass houses architects were designing so busily a decade ago - more sophisticated landscaping. This, after all, is the homeland of the bulldozer and the transplantation of grown trees - why let the Parks Commissioner have all the fun?
As was said above, this argument implies suburbia which, for better or worse, is where America wants to live. It has nothing to say about the city, which, like architecture, is an insecure foreign growth on the continent. What is under discussion here is an extension of the Jeffersonian dream beyond the agrarian sentimentality of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian / Broadacre version -the dream of the good life in the clean countryside, power-point homesteading in a paradise garden of appliances. This dream of the un-house may sound very anti architectural but it is so only in degree, and architecture deprived of its European roots but trying to strike new ones in an alien soil has come close to the anti-house once or twice already. Wright was not joking when he talked of the "destruction of the box," even though the spatial promise of the phrase is rarely realized to the full in the all-too-solid fact. Grass-roots architects of the plains like Bruce Goff and Herb Greene have produced houses whose supposed monumental form is clearly of little consequence to the functional business of living in and around them.
But it is in one building that seems at first sight nothing but monumental form that the threat or promise of the un-house has been most clearly demonstrated-the Johnson House at New Canaan. So much has been misleadingly said (by Philip Johnson himself, as well as others) to prove this a work of architecture in the European tradition, that its many intensely American aspects are usually missed. Yet when you have dug through all the erudition about Ledoux and Malevitsch and Palladio and stuff that has been published, one very suggestive source or prototype remains less easily explained away-the admitted persistence in Johnson's mind of the visual image of a burned-out New England township, the insubstantial shells of the houses consumed by the fire, leaving the brick floor slabs and standing, chimneys. The New Canaan glass-house consists essentially of just these two elements, a heated brick floor slab, and a standing unit which is a chimney/fireplace on one side and a bathroom on the other.
Around this has been draped precisely the kind of insubstantial shell that Conklin was discussing, only even less substantial than that. The roof, certainly, is solid, but psychologically it is dominated by the absence of visual enclosure all around. As many pilgrims to this site have noticed, the house does not stop at the glass, and the terrace, and even the trees beyond, are visually part of the living space in winter, physically and operationally so in summer when the four doors are open. The "house" is little more than a service core set in infinite space, or alternatively, a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There. In summer, indeed, the glass would be a bit of nonsense if the trees did not shade it, and in the recent scorching fall, the sun reaching in through the bare trees created such a greenhouse effect that parts of the interior were acutely uncomfortable - the house would have been better off without its glass walls.
When Philip Johnson says that the place is not a controlled environment, however, it is not these aspects of undisciplined glazing he has in mind, but that "when it gets cold I have to move toward the fire, and when it gets too hot I just move away." In fact, he is simply exploiting the campfire phenomenon (he is also pretending that the floor-heating does not make the whole area habitable, which it does) and in any case, what does he mean by a controlled environment? It is not the same thing as a uniform environment, it is simply an environment suited to what you are going to do next, and whether you build a stone monument, move away from the fire or turn on the air conditioning, it the same basic human gesture you are making.
Only, the monument is such a ponderous solution that it astounds me that Americans are still prepared to employ it, except out of some profound sense of insecurity, a persistent inability to rid themselves of those habits of mind they left Europe to escape. In the open-fronted society, with its social and personal mobility, its interchangeability of components and personnel, its gadgetry and almost universal expendability, the persistence of architecture-as-monumental-space must appear as evidence of the sentimentality of the tough.
ANATOMY OF A DWELLING
With very little exaggeration, this baroque ensemble of domestic gadgetery epitomizes the intestinal complexity of gracious living – in other words, this is the junk that keeps the pad swinging.. The house itself has been omitted from the drawing, but if mechanical services continue to accumulate at this rate it may be possible to omit the house in fact.
SUPER-COUPE DE LONG-WEEK-END, 1927
Dallegret's 20-20 hindsight and foresight produced this historical capriccio from. the First Machine Age well before the present article was first mooted. In the mode of its time, services are in a separate outhouse instead of beeing a mechanical clip-on.
TRAILMASTER GTO TRANSCONTINENTAL
Trailmaster GTO + 2 with beefed rear axle and drive-train.
Transcontinental “Instant Split-Level” trailer home.
U-Tility Life-Support pack.
The present mobile home is a mess, visually, mechanically, and in its relationship to the permanent infrastructure of civilization. But if it could be rendered more compact and mobile, and be uprooted from its dependency on static utilities, the trailer could fulfill its promise to put a nation on wheels. The kind of mobile utility pack suggested here does not exist yet, but it may be no farther over the hill than its coming-attraction. style would suggest.
The Environment-Bubble
Transparent plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output.
In the present state of the environmental art, no mechanical device can make the rain go back to Spain; the standard-of-living package is apt to need some sort of an umbrella for emergencies, and it could well be a plastic dome inflated by conditioned air blown out by the package itself.
TRANSPORTABLE STANDARD-OF-LIVING PACKAGE
To the man who has everything else, a standard-of-living package such as this could offer the ultimate goody - the power to impose his will on any environment to which the package could be delivered; to enjoy the spatial freedom of the nomadic campfire without the smell, smoke, ashes and mess; and the luxuries of appliance-land without those encumbrances of a permanent dwelling.
POWER-MEMBRANE HOUSE
The goal of present trends in domestic mechanization appears to be ever-more-flimsy structure that is made habitable by ever-more-massive machinery, and the Power-membrane house then pushes this idea to its logical/illogical conclusion - the open plan to end open plans, a walless, garden house sheltering under the spreading arms of the ultimate appliance. Architecture-world faint hearts who fear this total conditioner as the leviathan that will trample down their ancient should observe how near Dallegret has come to making a monument of the Power-Membrane; like true-blue breeding, architecture will out, even in the most unlikely circumstances.
[texto. en Art in America Number Two, April, 1965 por Reyner Banham] [descarga pdf]
[ver+]
No doubt about it, a great deal of the attention captured by those labs derives from Kahn's attempt to put the drama of mechanical services on show - and if, in the end, it fails to do that convincingly, the psychological importance of the gesture remains, at least in the eyes of his fellow architects. Services are a topic on which architectural practice has alternated capriciously between the brazen and the coy - there was the grand old Let-it-dangle period, when every ceiling was a mess of gaily painted entrails, as in the council chambers of the UN building, and there have been fits of pudicity when even the most innocent anatomical details have been hurriedly veiled with a suspended ceiling.
Basically, there are two reasons for all this blowing hot and cold (if you will excuse the air-conditioning industry's oldest working pun). The first is that mechanical services are too new to have been absorbed into the proverbial wisdom of the profession : none of the great slogans - Form Follows Function, accusez la structure, Firmness Commodity and Delight, Truth to Materials, Werzig ist Mehr - is much use in coping with the mechanical invasion. The nearest thing, in a significantly negative way, is Le Corbusier's "Pour Ledoux, c'était facile - pas de tubes," which seems to be gaining proverbial type currency as the expression of a profound nostalgia for the golden age before piping set in.
The second reason is that the mechanical invasion is a fact, and architects-especially American architects - sense that it is a cultural threat to their position in the world. American architects are certainly right to feel this, because their professional speciality, the art of creating monumental spaces, has never been securely established on this continent. It remains a transplant from an older culture and architects in America are constantly harking back to that culture. The generation of Stanford White and Louis Sullivan were prone to behave like émigrés from France, Frank Lloyd Wright was apt to take cover behind sentimental Teutonicisms like Lieber Meister, the big boys of the Thirties and Forties came from Aachen and Berlin anyhow, the pacemakers of the Fifties and Sixties are men of international culture like Charles Eames and Philip Johnson, and so too, in many ways, are the coming men of today, like Myron Goldsmith.
Left to their own devices, Americans do not monumentalize or make architecture. From the Cape Cod cottage, through the balloon frame to the perfection of permanently pleated aluminum siding with embossed wood-graining, they have tended to build a brick chimney and lean a collection of shacks against it. When Groff Conklin wrote (in "The Weather-Conditioned House") that "A house is nothing but a hollow shell ... a shell is all a house or any structure in which human beings live and work, really is. And most shells in nature are extraordinarily inefficient barriers to cold and heat ..." he was expressing an extremely American view, backed by a long-established grassroots tradition
And since that tradition agrees with him that the American hollow shell is such an inefficient heat barrier, Americans have always been prepared to pump more heat, light and power into their shelters than have other peoples. America's monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors - the porch, the terrace, Whitman's rail - traced plains, Kerouac's infinite road, and now, the Great Up There. Even within the house, Americans rapidly learned to dispense with the partitions that Europeans need to beep space architectural and within bounds, and long before Wright began blundering through the walls that subdivided polite architecture into living room, games room, card room, gun room etc., humbler Americans had been slipping into a way of life adapted to informally planned interiors that were, effectively, large single spaces.
Now, large single volumes wrapped in flimsy shells have to be lighted and heated in a manner quite different and more generous than the cubicular interiors of the European tradition around which the concept of domestic architecture first crystallized. Right from the start, from the Franklin stove and the kerosene lamp, the american interior has had to be better serviced if it was to support a civilized culture, and this is one of the reasons that the U.S. has been the forcing ground of mechanical services in buildings so if services are to be felt anywhere as a threat to architecture, it should be in America.
"The plumber is the quartermaster of American culture," wrote Adolf Loos, father of all European platitudes about the superiority of U.S. plumbing. He knew what he was talking about; his brief visit to the States in the Nineties convinced him that the outstanding virtues of the American way of life were its informality (no need to wear a top hat to call on local officials) and its cleanliness - which was bound to be noticed by a Viennese with as highly developed a set of Freudian compulsions as he had. That obsession with clean (which can become one of the higher absurdities of America's lysol-breathing Kleenex-culture) was another psychological motive that drove the nation toward mechanical services. The early justifications of air-conditioning were not just that people had to breathe: Konrad Meier ("Reflections on Heating and Ventilating," 1904) wrote fastidiously of "... excessive amounts of water vapor, sickly odors from respiratory organs, unclean teeth, perspiration, untidy clothing, the presence of microbes due to various conditions, stuffy air from dusty carpets and draperies ... cause greater discomfort and greater ill health." (Have a wash, and come back for the next paragraph.)
Most pioneer air-conditioning men seem to have been nose-obsessed in this way: best friends could just about force themselves to tell America of her national B.O. - and then, compulsive salesmen to a man, promptly prescribed their own patent improved panacea for ventilating the hell out of her. Somewhere among these clustering concepts-cleanliness, the lightweight shell, the mechanical services, the informality and indifference to monumental architectural values, the passion for the outdoors-there always seemed to me to lurk some elusive master concept that would never quite come into focus. It finally came clear and legible to me in June 1964, in the most highly appropriate and symptomatic circumstances.
I was standing up to my chest-hair in water, making home movies (I get that NASA kick from taking expensive hardware into hostile environments) at the campus beach at Southern Illinois. This beach combines the outdoor and the clean in a highly American manner - scenically it is the ole swimmin' hole of Huckleberry Finn tradition, but it is properly policed (by sophomore lifeguards sitting on Eames chairs on poles in the water) and it's chlorinated too. From where I stood, I could see not only immensely elaborate family barbecues and picnics in progress on the sterilized sand, but also, through and above the trees, the basketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller's experimental domes. And it hit me then, that if dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of control (sex left in, streptococci taken out) by other means, the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether.
Bucky Fuller, of course, is very big on this proposition: his famous non-rhetorical question, "Madam, do you know what your house weighs?" articulates a subversive suspicion of the monumental. This suspicion is inarticulately shared by the untold thousands of americans who have already shed the deadweight of domestic architecture and live in mobile homes which, though they may never actually be moved, still deliver rather better performance as shelter than do ground-anchored structures costing at least three times as much and weighing ten times more. If someone could devise a package that would effectively disconnect the mobile home from the dangling wires of the town electricity supply, the bottled gas containers insecurely perched on a packing case and the semi-unspeakable sanitary arrangements that stem from not being connected to the main sewer - then we should really see some changes. It may not be so far away either; defense cutbacks may send aerospace spin-off spinning in some new directions quite soon, and that kind of miniaturization talent applied to a genuinely self-contained and regenerative standard-of-living package that could be towed behind a trailer home or clipped to it, could produce a sort of U-haul unit that might be picked up or dropped off at depots across the face of the nation. Avis might still become the first in U-Tility, even if they have to go on being a trying second in car hire.
Out of this might come a domestic revolution beside which modern architecture would look like Kiddibrix, because you might be able to dispense with the trailer home as well. A standard-of-living package (the phrase and the concept are both Bucky Fuller's) that really worked might, like so many sophisticated inventions, return Man nearer to a natural state in spite of his complex culture (much as the supersession of the Morse telegraph by the Bell Telephone restored his power of speech nationwide). Man started with two basic ways of controlling environment: one by avoiding the issue and hiding under a rock, tree, tent or roof (this led ultimately to architecture as we know it) and the other by actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire, which, in a more polished form, might lead to the kind of situation now under discussion. Unlike the living space trapped with our forebears under a rock or roof, the space around a campfire has many unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability.
The direction and strength of the wind will decide the main shape and dimensions of that space, stretching the area of tolerable warmth into a long oval, but the output of light will not be affected by the wind, and the area of tolerable illumination will be a circle overlapping the oval of warmth. There will thus be a variety of environmental choices balancing light against warrant according to need and interest. If you want to do close work, like shrinking a human head, you sit in one place, but if you want to sleep you curl up somewhere different; the floating knuckle-bones game would come to rest somewhere quite different to the environment that suited the meeting of the initiation rites steering committee... and all this would be jim dandy if campfires were not so perishing inefficient, unreliable, smoky and the rest of it.
But a properly set-up standard-of-living package, breathing out, warm air along the ground (instead of sucking in cold along the ground like a campfire), radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo, with well-aged protein turning in an infrared glow in the rotisserie, and the ice-maker discreetly coughing cubes into glasses on the swingr-out bar-this could do something for a woodland glade or creek-side rock that Playboy could never do for its penthouse. But how are you going to manhandle this hunk of technology down to the creek? It doesn't have to be that massive; aerospace needs, for instance, have done wild things to solid-state technology, producing even tiny refrigerating transistors. They don't as yet mop up any great quantity of heat, but what are you going to do in this glade anyhow; put a whole steer in deep-freeze? Nor do you have to manhandle it-it could ride on a cushion of air (its own air-conditioning output, for instance) like a hovercraft or domestic vacuum cleaner.
All this will eat up quite a lot of power, transistors notwithstanding. But one should remember that few Americans are ever far from a source of between 100 and 400 horsepower - the automobile. Beefed up car batteries and a self-reeling cable drum could probably get this package breathing warm bourbon fumes o'er Eden long before microwave power transmission or miniaturized atomic power plants come in. The car is already one of the strongest arms in America's environmental weaponry, and an essential component in one non-architectural anti-building that is already familiar to most of the nation-the drive-in movie house. Only, the word house is a manifest misnomer - just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car. You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill and god-wot else they don't provide at Radio City.
The car, in short, is already doing quite a lot of the standard-of living package's job-the smoochy couple dancing to the music of the radio in their parked convertible have created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor by courtesy of the Highway Dept. of course) and all this is paradisal till it starts to rain. Even then, you’re not licked - it takes very little air pressure to inflate a transparent Mylar air dome, the conditioned-air output of your mobile package might be able to do it, with or without a little boosting, and the dome itself, folded into a parachute pack, might be part of the package. From within your thirty-foot hemisphere of warm dry lebensraum you could have spectacular ringside views of the wind felling trees, snow swirling through the glade, the forest fire coming over the hill or Constance Chatterley running swiftly to you know whom through the downpour.
But ... Surely this is not a home, you can't bring up a family in a polythene bag? This can never replace the time-honored ranch-style tri-level standing proudly in a landscape of five defeated shrubs, flanked on one side by a ranch-style tri-level with six shrubs and on the other by a ranch-style tri-level with four small boys and a private dust bowl. If the countless Americans who are successfully raising nice children in trailers will excuse me for a moment, I have a few suggestions to make to the even more countless Americans who are so insecure that they have to hide inside fake monuments of Permastone and instant roofing. There are, admittedly, very sound day-to-day advantages to having warm broadloom on a firm floor underfoot, rather than pine needles and poison ivy. America's pioneer house builders recognized this by commonly building their brick chimneys on a brick floor slab. A transparent air dome could be anchored to such a slab just as easily as could a balloon frame, and the standard-of-living-package could hover busily in a sort of glorified barbecue pit in the middle of the slab. But an air dome is not the sort of thing that the kids, or a distracted Pumpkin-eater could run in and out of when the fit took them-believe me, fighting your way out of an air dome can be worse than trying to get out of a collapsed rain-soaked tent if you make the wrong first move.
But the relationship of the services-kit to the floor slab could be re-arranged to get over this difficulty; all the standard-o£-living tackle (or most of it) could be re-deployed on the upper side of a sheltering membrane floating above the floor, radiating heat, light and what-not downwards and leaving the whole perimeter wide-open for random egress-and equally casual ingress, too, I guess. That crazy modern-movement dream of the interpenetration of indoors and outdoors could become real at last by abolishing the doors. Technically, of course, it would be just about possible to make the power membrane literally float, hovercraft style. Anyone who has had to stand in the ground-effect of a helicopter will know that this solution has little to recommend it apart from the instant disposal of waste paper. The noise, power consumption and physical discomfort would be really something wild. But if the power-membrane could be carried on a column or two, here and there, or even on a brick-built bathroom unit, then we are almost in sight of what might be technically possible before the Great Society is much older.
The basic proposition is simply that the power-membrane should blow down a curtain of warmed/cooled/conditioned air around the perimeter of the windward side of the un-house, and leave the surrounding weather to waft it through the living space, whose relation ship in plan to the membrane above need not be a one-to-one relationship. The membrane would probably have to go beyond the limits of the floor slab, anyhow, in order to prevent rain blow-in, though the air-curtain will be active on precisely the side on which the rain is blowing and, being conditioned, will tend to mop up the moisture it falls. The distribution of the air-curtain will be governed by various electronic light and weather sensors, and by that radical new invention, the weathervane. For really foul weather automatic storm shutters would be required, but in all but the most wildly in climates, it should be possible to design the conditioning kit to with most of the weather most of the time, without the power consumption becoming ridiculously greater than for an ordinary inefficient monumental type house.
Obviously, it would still be appreciably greater, but this argument hinges on the observation that it is the American Way to spend money on services and upkeep rather than on structure as do the peasant cultures of the Old World. In any we don't know where we shall be with things like solar power in next decade, and to anyone who wants to entertain an almost-possible vision of air-conditioning for absolutely free, let me recommand Shortstack (another smart trick with a polythene tube) in the december 1964 issue o£ Analog. In fact, quite a number of the obvious common sense objections to the un-house may pove to be self evaporating: for instance, noise may be no problem because there would be no surrounding wall to reflect it back into the living space and, in any case, the constant whisper of the air-curtain would provide a fair threshold of loudness that sounds would have to beat before they began to be comprehensible and therefore disturbing. Bugs? Wild life? In summer they should be no worse than with the doors and windows of an ordinary house open; in winter all right-thinking creatures either migrate or hibernate; but, in any case, why encourage the normal processes of Darwinian competition to tidy up the situation for you? All that is needed is to trigger the process by means of a general purpose lure; this would radiate mating calls and sexy scents and thus attract all sorts of mutually incompatible predators and prey into a compact pool of unspeakable carnage. A closed-circuit television camera could relay the state of play to a screen inside the dwelling and provide a twenty-four-hour program that would make the ratings for Bonanza look like chicken feed.
And privacy? This seems to be such a nominal concept in American life as factually lived that it is difficult to believe that anyone is seriously worried. The answer, under the suburban conditions that this whole argument implies, is the same as for the glass houses architects were designing so busily a decade ago - more sophisticated landscaping. This, after all, is the homeland of the bulldozer and the transplantation of grown trees - why let the Parks Commissioner have all the fun?
As was said above, this argument implies suburbia which, for better or worse, is where America wants to live. It has nothing to say about the city, which, like architecture, is an insecure foreign growth on the continent. What is under discussion here is an extension of the Jeffersonian dream beyond the agrarian sentimentality of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian / Broadacre version -the dream of the good life in the clean countryside, power-point homesteading in a paradise garden of appliances. This dream of the un-house may sound very anti architectural but it is so only in degree, and architecture deprived of its European roots but trying to strike new ones in an alien soil has come close to the anti-house once or twice already. Wright was not joking when he talked of the "destruction of the box," even though the spatial promise of the phrase is rarely realized to the full in the all-too-solid fact. Grass-roots architects of the plains like Bruce Goff and Herb Greene have produced houses whose supposed monumental form is clearly of little consequence to the functional business of living in and around them.
But it is in one building that seems at first sight nothing but monumental form that the threat or promise of the un-house has been most clearly demonstrated-the Johnson House at New Canaan. So much has been misleadingly said (by Philip Johnson himself, as well as others) to prove this a work of architecture in the European tradition, that its many intensely American aspects are usually missed. Yet when you have dug through all the erudition about Ledoux and Malevitsch and Palladio and stuff that has been published, one very suggestive source or prototype remains less easily explained away-the admitted persistence in Johnson's mind of the visual image of a burned-out New England township, the insubstantial shells of the houses consumed by the fire, leaving the brick floor slabs and standing, chimneys. The New Canaan glass-house consists essentially of just these two elements, a heated brick floor slab, and a standing unit which is a chimney/fireplace on one side and a bathroom on the other.
Around this has been draped precisely the kind of insubstantial shell that Conklin was discussing, only even less substantial than that. The roof, certainly, is solid, but psychologically it is dominated by the absence of visual enclosure all around. As many pilgrims to this site have noticed, the house does not stop at the glass, and the terrace, and even the trees beyond, are visually part of the living space in winter, physically and operationally so in summer when the four doors are open. The "house" is little more than a service core set in infinite space, or alternatively, a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There. In summer, indeed, the glass would be a bit of nonsense if the trees did not shade it, and in the recent scorching fall, the sun reaching in through the bare trees created such a greenhouse effect that parts of the interior were acutely uncomfortable - the house would have been better off without its glass walls.
When Philip Johnson says that the place is not a controlled environment, however, it is not these aspects of undisciplined glazing he has in mind, but that "when it gets cold I have to move toward the fire, and when it gets too hot I just move away." In fact, he is simply exploiting the campfire phenomenon (he is also pretending that the floor-heating does not make the whole area habitable, which it does) and in any case, what does he mean by a controlled environment? It is not the same thing as a uniform environment, it is simply an environment suited to what you are going to do next, and whether you build a stone monument, move away from the fire or turn on the air conditioning, it the same basic human gesture you are making.
Only, the monument is such a ponderous solution that it astounds me that Americans are still prepared to employ it, except out of some profound sense of insecurity, a persistent inability to rid themselves of those habits of mind they left Europe to escape. In the open-fronted society, with its social and personal mobility, its interchangeability of components and personnel, its gadgetry and almost universal expendability, the persistence of architecture-as-monumental-space must appear as evidence of the sentimentality of the tough.
ANATOMY OF A DWELLING
With very little exaggeration, this baroque ensemble of domestic gadgetery epitomizes the intestinal complexity of gracious living – in other words, this is the junk that keeps the pad swinging.. The house itself has been omitted from the drawing, but if mechanical services continue to accumulate at this rate it may be possible to omit the house in fact.
SUPER-COUPE DE LONG-WEEK-END, 1927
Dallegret's 20-20 hindsight and foresight produced this historical capriccio from. the First Machine Age well before the present article was first mooted. In the mode of its time, services are in a separate outhouse instead of beeing a mechanical clip-on.
TRAILMASTER GTO TRANSCONTINENTAL
Trailmaster GTO + 2 with beefed rear axle and drive-train.
Transcontinental “Instant Split-Level” trailer home.
U-Tility Life-Support pack.
The present mobile home is a mess, visually, mechanically, and in its relationship to the permanent infrastructure of civilization. But if it could be rendered more compact and mobile, and be uprooted from its dependency on static utilities, the trailer could fulfill its promise to put a nation on wheels. The kind of mobile utility pack suggested here does not exist yet, but it may be no farther over the hill than its coming-attraction. style would suggest.
The Environment-Bubble
Transparent plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output.
In the present state of the environmental art, no mechanical device can make the rain go back to Spain; the standard-of-living package is apt to need some sort of an umbrella for emergencies, and it could well be a plastic dome inflated by conditioned air blown out by the package itself.
TRANSPORTABLE STANDARD-OF-LIVING PACKAGE
To the man who has everything else, a standard-of-living package such as this could offer the ultimate goody - the power to impose his will on any environment to which the package could be delivered; to enjoy the spatial freedom of the nomadic campfire without the smell, smoke, ashes and mess; and the luxuries of appliance-land without those encumbrances of a permanent dwelling.
POWER-MEMBRANE HOUSE
The goal of present trends in domestic mechanization appears to be ever-more-flimsy structure that is made habitable by ever-more-massive machinery, and the Power-membrane house then pushes this idea to its logical/illogical conclusion - the open plan to end open plans, a walless, garden house sheltering under the spreading arms of the ultimate appliance. Architecture-world faint hearts who fear this total conditioner as the leviathan that will trample down their ancient should observe how near Dallegret has come to making a monument of the Power-Membrane; like true-blue breeding, architecture will out, even in the most unlikely circumstances.
[texto. en Art in America Number Two, April, 1965 por Reyner Banham] [descarga pdf]
Sanaa / Maximo Tuja
.
Pasajes de Diseño magazine comissioned me an illustration for an article reviwing Sanaa´s intervention in Mies Van der Rohe´s Barcelona Pavillion. The illustration had to address the blending of the "transparent" attitude of the japanese architect´s work with Van der Rohe´s mithycal building.
[texto e imagen. maximo tuja] [sitio. maximo tuja]
[ver+]
[texto e imagen. maximo tuja] [sitio. maximo tuja]
Las Cosas / Georges Perec
1. La mirada, primero, se deslizaría por la moqueta gris de un largo pasillo, alto y estrecho. Las paredes serían armarios empotrados de madera clara, cuyos herrajes de cobre brillarían. Tres grabados, representando uno a Thunderbird, vencedor en Epsom, el otro un barco de rueda, el Ville-de-Montereau, el tercero una locomotora de Stephenson, llevarían a un cortinaje de piel, sostenido por gruesas anillas de madera negra veteada, que un simple movimiento bastaría para correr. La moqueta, entonces, daría paso a un parquet casi amarillo, cubierto parcialmente por tres alfombras de colores apagados. Sería una sala de estar, de unos siete metros de largo y unos tres de ancho. A la izquierda, en una especie de alcoba, un gran diván de cuero negro desgastado estaría flanqueado por dos librerías de madera clara de cerezo en las que se amontonarían libros en desorden.
Sobre el diván, un portulano ocuparía toda la longitud del panel. Más allá de una mesita baja, debajo de un tapiz de oración de seda sujeto a la pared por tres clavos de cobre de cabeza gruesa, y que haría juego con el cortinaje de piel, otro diván, perpendicular al primero, tapizado de terciopelo marrón claro, conduciría a un pequeño mueble alto, lacado de color rojo oscuro, provisto de tres anaqueles que sostendrían diversos bibelots: ágatas y huevos de piedra, cajas de rapé, bomboneras, ceniceros de jade, una concha de nácar, un reloj de bolsillo de plata, un cristal tallado, una pirámide de cristal, una miniatura en un marco oval. Más lejos, después de una puerta acolchada, unos estantes superpuestos, ocupando el ángulo, contendrían álbumes y discos, al lado de un toca discos cerrado del que sólo se distinguirían cuatro botones de acero rayados con líneas entrecruzadas, y sobre éste, un grabado representando el Gran desfile de la fiesta del Carrusel. Por la ventana, provista de cortinas blancas y pardas a imitación de la tela de Jouy, se divisarían algunos árboles, un parque minúsculo, un trozo de calle. Un secreter de persiana atestado de papeles, plumieres, iría acompañado de una butaquita de rejilla. En una consolita habría un teléfono, una agenda de piel, un bloc. Luego, más allá de otra puerta, tras una librería giratoria, baja y cuadrada, rematada por un gran florero cilíndrico de decoración azul, lleno de rosas amarillas, sobre la que colgaría un espejo oblongo enmarcado de caoba, una mesa estrecha, provista de dos banquetas tapizadas de tela escocesa, llevaría de nuevo al cortinaje de piel. Todo sería pardo, ocre, leonado, amarillo: un universo de colores algo amustiados, de tonos cuidadosa, casi preciosamente dosificados, en medio de los cuales sorprenderían algunas manchas más claras, el anaranjado casi chillón de un cojín, algunos volúmenes abigarrados perdidos entere las encuadernaciones en piel. En pleno día, la luz, entrando a chorros, daría a esta estancia un tono algo triste, a pesar de las rosas. Sería una estancia para el atardecer. Entonces, en invierno, corridas las cortinas, con algunos puntos de luz -el ángulo de las librerías, la discoteca, el secreter, la mesa baja entre los dos sofás, los vagos reflejos en el espejo- y las grandes zonas de sombras en las que brillarían todas las cosas, la madera pulimentada, la seda densa y rica, el cristal tallado, la piel flexible, sería un puerto de paz, una tierra de felicidad. La primera puerta daría a un dormitorio, con el suelo cubierto por una moqueta clara. Una gran cama inglesa ocuparía todo el fondo. A la derecha, a cada lado de la ventana, dos estanterías estrechas y altas contendrían algunos libros incansablemente manejados, álbumes, barajas, botes, collares, baratijas. A la izquierda, un viejo armario de roble y dos galanes de noche de madera y cobre se hallarían frente a una butaquita rechoncha tapizada con una seda gris finamente listada y un tocador. Una puerta entreabierta, que daría a un cuarto de baño, descubriría gruesos albornoces, grifos de cobre en forma de cuello de cisne, un gran espejo orientable, un par de navajas inglesas y su funda de cuero verde, frascos, cepillos con mango de cuerno, esponjas. Las paredes del dormitorio estarían tapizadas de indiana; la cama estaría cubierta con una manta escocesa. En una mesilla de noche, rematada en tres lados por una barandilla de cobre calada, habría un candelero de plata con una pantalla de seda gris muy pálida, un reloj cuadrangular, una rosa en una copa y, en la tablilla inferior, unos periódicos doblados, unas cuantas revistas. Más lejos, a los pies de la cama, habría un gran puf de cuero natural. En las ventanas, los visillos de gasa se deslizarían por varillas de cobre; las cortinas, grises, de una lana gruesa, estarían medio corridas. En la penumbra, la habitación resultaría aún clara. En la pared, por encima de la cama preparada para la noche, entre dos lamparillas alsacianas, la asombrosa fotografía, en blanco y negro, estrecha y larga, de un pájaro en pleno vuelo, sorprendería por su perfección algo formal.
La segunda puerta se abriría a un despacho. Las paredes estarían totalmente cubiertas de libros y revistas, con, aquí y allá, para romper la sucesión de las encuadernaciones en piel y en rústica, algunos grabados, dibujos, fotografías - el San Jerónimo de Antonello da Messina, un detalle del Triunfo de San Jorge, una prisión de Piranesi, un retrato de Ingres, un pequeño paisaje a pluma de Klee, una fotografía ennegrecida de Renan en su gabinete de trabajo del Collège de France, un gran almacén de Steinberg,el Melanchton de Cranach-, fijados en paneles de madera empotrados en los estantes. Un poco a la izquierda de la ventana y en posición ligeramente oblicua, una larga mesa de Lorena estaría cubierta por un gran secante rojo. Platillos de madera, largos plumieres, botes de todo tipo contendrían lápices, clips, grapas, pinzas. Un ladrillo de vidrio serviría de cenicero. Una caja redonda, de cuero negro, decorada con arabescos en oro fino, estaría llena de cigarrillos. La luz provendría de una vieja lámpara de despacho, difícilmente orientable, provista de una pantalla de opalina verde en forma de visera. A cada lado de la mesa, casi frente por frente, habría dos sillones de madera y cuero, con altos respaldos. Más a la izquierda aún, una mesa estrecha estaría atestada de libros. Un gran sillón de piel color verde botella llevaría a unos archivadores metálicos grises, a unos ficheros de madera clara. Una tercera mesa, más pequeña aún, sostendría una lámpara sueca y una máquina de escribir cubierta con una funda de hule. Al fondo, habría una cama estrecha, cubierta de terciopelo azul de ultramar, llena de cojines de todos los colores. Un trípode de madera pintada, casi en el centro de la estancia, sostendría una esfera terrestre de alpaca y cartón piedra, ingenuamente ilustrada, falsamente antigua. Detrás del escritorio, medio oculto por la cortina roja de la ventana, un escabel de madera encerada podría deslizarse a lo largo de un riel de cobre que daría la vuelta a la estancia.
La vida, allí, sería fácil, sería simple. Todas las obligaciones, todos los problemas que implica la vida material hallarían una solución natural. Cada mañana iría una asistenta. Cada quince días traerían el vino, el aceite, el azúcar. Habría una cocina espaciosa y clara, con azulejos blasonados, tres platos de loza decorados con arabescos amarillos, con reflejos metálicos, armarios por todas partes, una hermosa mesa de pino en el centro, taburetes, bancos. Sería agradable ir a sentarse allí, cada mañana, después de una ducha, apenas vestido. Habría en la mesa una gran mantequera de gres, tarros de mermelada, miel, tostadas, pomelos cortados por la mitad. Sería temprano. Sería el comienzo de un largo día de mayo.
Abrirían su correspondencia, leerían los periódicos. Encenderían un primer cigarrillo. Saldrían. Su trabajo sólo los ocuparía unas horas, por la mañana. Se encontrarían para almorzar, un bocadillo o un filete a la plancha, según su humor, se tomarían un café en una terraza, luego volverían a casa, andando, lentamente. Rara vez estaría ordenado su piso, pero su mismo desorden constituiría su mayor atractivo. Lo cuidarían apenas: vivirían en él. La comodidad ambiente se les antojaría un hecho incontrovertible, un dato inicial, un estado de su naturaleza. Su atención se centraría en otras cosas: en el libro que abrirían, en el texto que escribirían, en el disco que escucharían, en su diálogo reanudado a diario. Trabajarían mucho tiempo. Luego cenarían o saldrían a cenar; se encontrarían con los amigos; pasearían juntos. A veces les parecería que una vida entera podría desarrollarse armoniosamente entre aquellas paredes cubiertas de libros, entre aquellos objetos tan perfectamente domesticados que habrían acabado creyéndolos hechos para su uso único, entre aquellas cosas bellas y simples, suaves, luminosas. Pero no se sentirían atados a ellas: ciertos días, irían a la aventura. Ningún proyecto les sería imposible. No conocerían el rencor, ni la amargura, ni la envidia. Pues sus medios y sus deseos se armonizarían en todo punto, en todo tiempo. Darían a este equilibrio el nombre de dicha y, con su libertad, su prudencia, su cultura, sabrían preservarla, descubrirla en cada instante de su vida común. [...]
[texto. Georges Perec en Las Cosas] [descarga. Las Cosas]
Mansilla + Tuñon: una declaración de intenciones / Rafael Moneo
.
La obra que en esta monografía se publica contempla lo que ha sido la actividad como arquitectos de Luis M. Mansilla y Emilio Tuñón, desde que hace diez años establecieron su estudio profesional en Madrid. Sin ánimo de entrar en el comentario crítico de la misma, me interesa, sin embargo, hacer constar que la obra construida hasta la fecha puede ser considerada como una declaración de intenciones de lo que será su trabajo futuro. Desvelar tales intenciones es el propósito que da sentido a un escrito como éste. Diez fructíferos años de trabajo profesional han permitido a Mansilla + Tuñón construir obras tan destacadas como los museos de Castellón y Zamora o el auditorio de León y ofrecernos proyectos tan atractivos como el museo de Santander y el de las Colecciones Reales, obras y proyectos que nos permiten entender su trabajo como una continua reflexión acerca de las cuestiones que, como arquitectos, les preocupan. Con el riesgo que siempre comporta toda reducción, intentaré en estas líneas explicar, mediante diez breves apuntes que me sugieren sus obras, cuáles son, a mi entender, las líneas maestras del ambicioso programa arquitectónico establecido por Mansilla + Tuñón con las obras construidas hasta ahora.
1. La arquitectura como invención de un sistema constructivo.
Casi todos los proyectos de Mansilla + Tuñón entienden la obra de arquitectura como expresión plástica de un sistema constructivo. El edificio surge como resultado de un proceso constructivo que, por lo general, hace de la geometría su soporte. Así lo vemos en las "ventanas apiladas" de León, en las "pilastras superpuestas" de las Colecciones Reales, en los "lucernarios industriales" de Zamora, o en los "tragaluces facetados" de Santander. Lo que se ve, la figura, es el resultado de mostrar el sistema constructivo.
2. La arquitectura como materialidad.
La elección de la materia con que construir las formas que anticipaban las maquetas tridimensionales que ayudaron a definir el sistema a que aludía en el párrafo anterior, es un momento crucial del proyecto. La conciencia de la importancia que tienen los materiales en toda arquitectura siempre está presente en sus obras: a los materiales se confía el carácter de lo construido, convirtiéndose así en componente esencial de sus arquitecturas. De ahí que se pudiera hablar de arquitecturas prendidas fenomenológicamente al material.
3. La arquitectura como otra naturaleza.
La materialización de un sistema formal en arquitectura da lugar a figuras abiertas que no resultan muy lejanas de aquéllas con que nos encontramos en la naturaleza y en las que las leyes de crecimiento no llegan a conocerse, bien que siempre advirtamos el valor que tienen la seriación y la repetición. Como en los cristales que crecen en la concavidad de una roca, los edificios de Mansilla + Tuñón se extienden en el paisaje o se incluyen en las fábricas urbanas, insistiendo una vez más en esta vieja idea que conduce a ver lo construido por los humanos como una segunda naturaleza. La arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón explora la seriación y la repetición inventando sistemas formales en los que la agrupación garantiza la apertura.
4. La arquitectura como ensamblaje de elementos primarios.
El enunciado de este apunte hay que entenderlo como un corolario de los anteriores. La construcción de sistemas arquitectónicos implica la presencia de elementos y de ahí que en la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón se nos hagan presentes siempre. La condición iconográfica de su arquitectura parece residir tanto más en ellos que en cualquier otra posible forma sintética y unitaria. El proyecto de Santander, o el proyecto de las Colecciones Reales, muestran claramente cuánto confían Mansilla + Tuñón en el valor de los elementos primarios: la definición de los mismos es fundamental en la mayor parte de sus obras; deben tener valor iconográfico, pero también responder a las normas de la buena construcción.
5. La arquitectura como geografía.
La arquitectura, obligatoriamente, se inscribe en un lugar consolidándolo o transformándolo, en una palabra, dotándole de una vida. A pesar de que tantos pensadores hablan hoy del no lugar, la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón viene a probar que el lugar no puede olvidarse, que la aparente generalidad de lo construido entra siempre en fricción con lo que había. Cabría decir que aquel momento inicial en el que se imagina, o si se quiere, se inventa el sistema es ya una respuesta al lugar. Así, en Santander, así en Zamora, así en las Colecciones Reales.
6. La arquitectura como ámbito indiferente al uso.
La arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón no parece estar interesada en identificarse de un modo exclusivo con la función. Las arquitecturas están disponibles. Alguien diría que tal actitud coincide con aquélla que insiste en decirnos que los edificios son contenedores capaces de absorber cualquier uso. Puede que Mansilla + Tuñón suscribiesen tal afirmación. Habría en ello cierta voluntad de distanciarse de lo específico, algo que, sin duda, garantiza la indiferencia. Pero puede que también fuera, simplemente, el resultado de haber comprobado en algunos de sus trabajos que así es. Naturalmente estoy pensando en proyectos como la remodelación de la fábrica de cerveza El çguila en Madrid: en ella, Mansilla + Tuñón han dado muestras tanto de su intuición como arquitectos como del valor que tiene pensar en la arquitectura entendiendo que no debe vérsela como una realidad limitada estrictamente por el concepto de función.
7. La arquitectura como experiencia del espacio.
Que la arquitectura proporciona a la sociedad los espacios en los que vivir es algo que todos entendemos y damos por descontado. Pero no lo es tanto, sobre todo en estos últimos años, entender la experiencia del espacio como la sustancia de la arquitectura. Mansilla + Tuñón se mantienen fieles a este presupuesto que con tanto ahínco reclamaron algunos arquitectos el siglo pasado, y no dudaría en incluirlo en esta serie de principios que, a mi modo de ver, definen lo que es su programa arquitectónico. Bastaría pensar en el interior del museo de Zamora. O en Léon, o en Santander. Mansilla + Tuñón piensan su arquitectura desde el espacio y aún me atrevería a decir más, cuentan con el impacto sensorial que el espacio va a tener sobre los usuarios. Así se explica la monumentalidad de algunos de los espacios intersticiales que aparecen en sus obras, en Zamora, por ejemplo, o el valor que tiene el despliegue dilatado e infinito de los mismos, como ocurre en Castellón.
8. La arquitectura como dueña y señora de las luces y las sombras.
La arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón se deja ver: las sombras la dibujan. Pero también es, en muchas ocasiones, filtro que matiza la luz, y de ahí la importancia que en su arquitectura tienen los elementos que la captan. Con frecuencia, la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón se define desde la cubierta y ello no sólo porque responda a programas museísticos, sino por la conciencia de que una obra de arquitectura es un mundo en sí misma que espera con ansias la llegada de la luz. La condición corpórea y táctil de su arquitectura Ñalgo que en cierto modo sería complementario al punto en que hablábamos de la importancia que los materiales tienen en la obra de Mansilla + TuñónÑ explica la atención que prestan a quien es responsable de que así ocurra: la luz. Pero más que el jeu savant lecorbusieriano, el papel de la luz en esta arquitectura tiene algo de soplo del espíritu que infunde vida y da sentido a lo que, de otro modo, sería, en verdad, inanimado.
9. La arquitectura como máquina bien pensada.
Mostrar su lógica, hacernos sentir que todo es en ella inevitable, ha sido la pretensión de mucha arquitectura a lo largo de la historia. Por citar tan sólo una, pensemos por un momento en la arquitectura gótica. Todo está en su sitio. La construcción se exhibe en su desnudez y se nos presenta con implacable lógica. No podría ser de otro modo. Este deseo de hacer una arquitectura inteligible, inmediata, me parece que está muy presente en la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón, algo que, mutatis mutandis, le haría estar próxima a todas aquellas arquitecturas que, en el pasado, se protegieron con la construcción para hacer olvidar cuánto tuvieron, en un principio, de invenciones formales.
10. La arquitectura como respuesta a un arcano social.
Hay en la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón, o por lo menos a mí me lo parece, una cierta voluntad de arcaísmo, de recuperación de situaciones originarias que, sin duda, estuvieron presentes en las obras de aquellos que por primera vez se enfrentaron a la construcción. Hay, a mi entender, un cierto deseo de ofrecer a la sociedad una arquitectura rotunda en la que tal vez cupiese advertir una cierta nostalgia de lo sacro. De ahí su seriedad. Su consistencia. Que, por otra parte, debiera también hacerles pensar en la, tal vez necesaria, otra cara de la moneda.
[texto. en 2G nº27 por Rafael Moneo] [sitio. mansilla+tuñon][blog. mansilla+tuñón]
[ver+]
La obra que en esta monografía se publica contempla lo que ha sido la actividad como arquitectos de Luis M. Mansilla y Emilio Tuñón, desde que hace diez años establecieron su estudio profesional en Madrid. Sin ánimo de entrar en el comentario crítico de la misma, me interesa, sin embargo, hacer constar que la obra construida hasta la fecha puede ser considerada como una declaración de intenciones de lo que será su trabajo futuro. Desvelar tales intenciones es el propósito que da sentido a un escrito como éste. Diez fructíferos años de trabajo profesional han permitido a Mansilla + Tuñón construir obras tan destacadas como los museos de Castellón y Zamora o el auditorio de León y ofrecernos proyectos tan atractivos como el museo de Santander y el de las Colecciones Reales, obras y proyectos que nos permiten entender su trabajo como una continua reflexión acerca de las cuestiones que, como arquitectos, les preocupan. Con el riesgo que siempre comporta toda reducción, intentaré en estas líneas explicar, mediante diez breves apuntes que me sugieren sus obras, cuáles son, a mi entender, las líneas maestras del ambicioso programa arquitectónico establecido por Mansilla + Tuñón con las obras construidas hasta ahora.
1. La arquitectura como invención de un sistema constructivo.
Casi todos los proyectos de Mansilla + Tuñón entienden la obra de arquitectura como expresión plástica de un sistema constructivo. El edificio surge como resultado de un proceso constructivo que, por lo general, hace de la geometría su soporte. Así lo vemos en las "ventanas apiladas" de León, en las "pilastras superpuestas" de las Colecciones Reales, en los "lucernarios industriales" de Zamora, o en los "tragaluces facetados" de Santander. Lo que se ve, la figura, es el resultado de mostrar el sistema constructivo.
2. La arquitectura como materialidad.
La elección de la materia con que construir las formas que anticipaban las maquetas tridimensionales que ayudaron a definir el sistema a que aludía en el párrafo anterior, es un momento crucial del proyecto. La conciencia de la importancia que tienen los materiales en toda arquitectura siempre está presente en sus obras: a los materiales se confía el carácter de lo construido, convirtiéndose así en componente esencial de sus arquitecturas. De ahí que se pudiera hablar de arquitecturas prendidas fenomenológicamente al material.
3. La arquitectura como otra naturaleza.
La materialización de un sistema formal en arquitectura da lugar a figuras abiertas que no resultan muy lejanas de aquéllas con que nos encontramos en la naturaleza y en las que las leyes de crecimiento no llegan a conocerse, bien que siempre advirtamos el valor que tienen la seriación y la repetición. Como en los cristales que crecen en la concavidad de una roca, los edificios de Mansilla + Tuñón se extienden en el paisaje o se incluyen en las fábricas urbanas, insistiendo una vez más en esta vieja idea que conduce a ver lo construido por los humanos como una segunda naturaleza. La arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón explora la seriación y la repetición inventando sistemas formales en los que la agrupación garantiza la apertura.
4. La arquitectura como ensamblaje de elementos primarios.
El enunciado de este apunte hay que entenderlo como un corolario de los anteriores. La construcción de sistemas arquitectónicos implica la presencia de elementos y de ahí que en la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón se nos hagan presentes siempre. La condición iconográfica de su arquitectura parece residir tanto más en ellos que en cualquier otra posible forma sintética y unitaria. El proyecto de Santander, o el proyecto de las Colecciones Reales, muestran claramente cuánto confían Mansilla + Tuñón en el valor de los elementos primarios: la definición de los mismos es fundamental en la mayor parte de sus obras; deben tener valor iconográfico, pero también responder a las normas de la buena construcción.
5. La arquitectura como geografía.
La arquitectura, obligatoriamente, se inscribe en un lugar consolidándolo o transformándolo, en una palabra, dotándole de una vida. A pesar de que tantos pensadores hablan hoy del no lugar, la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón viene a probar que el lugar no puede olvidarse, que la aparente generalidad de lo construido entra siempre en fricción con lo que había. Cabría decir que aquel momento inicial en el que se imagina, o si se quiere, se inventa el sistema es ya una respuesta al lugar. Así, en Santander, así en Zamora, así en las Colecciones Reales.
6. La arquitectura como ámbito indiferente al uso.
La arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón no parece estar interesada en identificarse de un modo exclusivo con la función. Las arquitecturas están disponibles. Alguien diría que tal actitud coincide con aquélla que insiste en decirnos que los edificios son contenedores capaces de absorber cualquier uso. Puede que Mansilla + Tuñón suscribiesen tal afirmación. Habría en ello cierta voluntad de distanciarse de lo específico, algo que, sin duda, garantiza la indiferencia. Pero puede que también fuera, simplemente, el resultado de haber comprobado en algunos de sus trabajos que así es. Naturalmente estoy pensando en proyectos como la remodelación de la fábrica de cerveza El çguila en Madrid: en ella, Mansilla + Tuñón han dado muestras tanto de su intuición como arquitectos como del valor que tiene pensar en la arquitectura entendiendo que no debe vérsela como una realidad limitada estrictamente por el concepto de función.
7. La arquitectura como experiencia del espacio.
Que la arquitectura proporciona a la sociedad los espacios en los que vivir es algo que todos entendemos y damos por descontado. Pero no lo es tanto, sobre todo en estos últimos años, entender la experiencia del espacio como la sustancia de la arquitectura. Mansilla + Tuñón se mantienen fieles a este presupuesto que con tanto ahínco reclamaron algunos arquitectos el siglo pasado, y no dudaría en incluirlo en esta serie de principios que, a mi modo de ver, definen lo que es su programa arquitectónico. Bastaría pensar en el interior del museo de Zamora. O en Léon, o en Santander. Mansilla + Tuñón piensan su arquitectura desde el espacio y aún me atrevería a decir más, cuentan con el impacto sensorial que el espacio va a tener sobre los usuarios. Así se explica la monumentalidad de algunos de los espacios intersticiales que aparecen en sus obras, en Zamora, por ejemplo, o el valor que tiene el despliegue dilatado e infinito de los mismos, como ocurre en Castellón.
8. La arquitectura como dueña y señora de las luces y las sombras.
La arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón se deja ver: las sombras la dibujan. Pero también es, en muchas ocasiones, filtro que matiza la luz, y de ahí la importancia que en su arquitectura tienen los elementos que la captan. Con frecuencia, la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón se define desde la cubierta y ello no sólo porque responda a programas museísticos, sino por la conciencia de que una obra de arquitectura es un mundo en sí misma que espera con ansias la llegada de la luz. La condición corpórea y táctil de su arquitectura Ñalgo que en cierto modo sería complementario al punto en que hablábamos de la importancia que los materiales tienen en la obra de Mansilla + TuñónÑ explica la atención que prestan a quien es responsable de que así ocurra: la luz. Pero más que el jeu savant lecorbusieriano, el papel de la luz en esta arquitectura tiene algo de soplo del espíritu que infunde vida y da sentido a lo que, de otro modo, sería, en verdad, inanimado.
9. La arquitectura como máquina bien pensada.
Mostrar su lógica, hacernos sentir que todo es en ella inevitable, ha sido la pretensión de mucha arquitectura a lo largo de la historia. Por citar tan sólo una, pensemos por un momento en la arquitectura gótica. Todo está en su sitio. La construcción se exhibe en su desnudez y se nos presenta con implacable lógica. No podría ser de otro modo. Este deseo de hacer una arquitectura inteligible, inmediata, me parece que está muy presente en la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón, algo que, mutatis mutandis, le haría estar próxima a todas aquellas arquitecturas que, en el pasado, se protegieron con la construcción para hacer olvidar cuánto tuvieron, en un principio, de invenciones formales.
10. La arquitectura como respuesta a un arcano social.
Hay en la arquitectura de Mansilla + Tuñón, o por lo menos a mí me lo parece, una cierta voluntad de arcaísmo, de recuperación de situaciones originarias que, sin duda, estuvieron presentes en las obras de aquellos que por primera vez se enfrentaron a la construcción. Hay, a mi entender, un cierto deseo de ofrecer a la sociedad una arquitectura rotunda en la que tal vez cupiese advertir una cierta nostalgia de lo sacro. De ahí su seriedad. Su consistencia. Que, por otra parte, debiera también hacerles pensar en la, tal vez necesaria, otra cara de la moneda.
[texto. en 2G nº27 por Rafael Moneo] [sitio. mansilla+tuñon][blog. mansilla+tuñón]
Conical Inter-sect / Gordon Matta-Clark
Gordon Matta-Clark
In August 1971, I was hitchhiking into New York City from Colorado. I was 23 and on my way to become an artist.
In New Jersey, a pickup truck pulled over and asked where I was going. "SoHo," I said. The two guys in the truck started laughing -- they were heading to the same place. Hop in, one of them said, and we drove south through Harlem and midtown Manhattan to SoHo.
It turned out that I had been picked up by Keith Sonnier, a Postminimalist neon artist, and Dickie Landry, who played saxophone for Phil Glass. I was amazed. They dropped me off on West Broadway and wished me well. "Good luck, kid," Landry said.
The next day I went looking for a job. On Prince Street, I saw an ad in a storefront window for waiters and bus boys. I went in to inquire. The woman in charge -- it was Carol Gooden, who was the owner of the place and also Gordon Matta-Clark's girlfriend -- said, "Sure, you can be a waiter or bus boy, but what I really need is an assistant chef."
"What do I have to do?" I asked.
"Can you chop and boil vegetables? Can you make a salad dressing?"
"Yes," I said.
I was hired. The storefront was Food, the first real restaurant in Soho (besides Fanellis Bar down the street) and a conceptual idea and experiment by Matta-Clark -- a restaurant run and staffed by artists for artists.
Two days later, Sonnier and Landry came in, and saw me cooking behind the counter. Kid, you work fast, said Landry.
Food became something of a SoHo legend, as did its founder. The experimental theater company Mabou Mines, the Phillip Glass group, the dancers of Grand Union, and the artists who were involved with the 112 Greene Street exhibition space either worked or hung out there -- and Matta-Clark was the catalyst. The restaurant was a central meeting place.
For me, too, that experience was something of an epiphany. The openness, research, exploration, camaraderie and energy were unlike anything I've experienced before or since -- and Gordon was at the center of it all.
Soon I was also working as an artists assistant, helping them install their work at 112 Greene Street and at other places around the city. Again, Matta-Clark played an important role, as a founder of 112, an artist-run nonprofit that became an early locus in SoHo for experimental sculpture, painting, dance and music.
Working at Food and at 112, Gordon and I became friends. We talked a lot about architecture. He was developing his theories of An-Architecture -- a dramatically physical, deconstructivist architecture, rather ahead of its time -- and I was making architectural facades by pouring my own cast-concrete 2 x 4s. Gordon liked these pieces, and in 1973 he included me in a show about architecture that he put together at 112 -- my first exhibition. In 1974, Gordon was slated for a solo show in the gallery, but he said he wasn't ready -- and gave me his slot. A year later, we both began exhibiting with the new Holly Solomon Gallery.
I worked with Gordon on many of his projects in the early 1970s. These included CUTTING and FOUR CORNERS, both done in Englewood, N.J.; his shows at 122 Greene Street; and numerous other projects that he called cuttings. We would break into abandoned buildings in the South Bronx and cut large, geometrically shaped pieces out of walls and floors, opening up the spaces to be photographed. This was always scary, with blocks and blocks of empty, boarded-up buildings, haunted by junkies who would steal copper wire and pipe to sell as scrap to get money for drugs.
You never knew what you might run into, and if anything happened, no one would ever know.
But it didnt seem to bother Gordon. We would haul all his saws and other tools, including a power generator, up into these building shells. Sometimes the apartments looked as if the occupants had simply walked out on their lives, leaving their furniture just as it was, their clothes hanging on hooks behind the doors.
Gordon would cut slits or shaped holes in the walls, leading from one room to another, until you could see through the entire apartment. When he could, he would have these views end up looking out the windows. It was even better if the view, through a long horizontal cut, could expose the passage of the elevated subway. It was like watching a movie on a shaped screen. You looked through dark faded rooms, each with its own artifacts, colors and wallpaper, to the natural light outdoors. If the frame of the cut hole was sighted on the raised track of the subway, every few minutes or so you could see a train move across the frame.
Gordon loved the archeological quality of his work. He viewed the layers of linoleum, plaster lath and beams as historical excavations. Michael Heizer cut through natural earth and rock. Gordon cut through the urban landscape. The cultural information of the moldings, doors, windows and wallpaper that Matta-Clark incorporated into his pieces led me to add narration, images and color to my architectural forms and spaces.
One piece we worked on entailed multiple cuts down through one floor after another. With the generator blasting and Gordon bent over cutting into the floor with a chainsaw, I looked up -- and saw two cops on either side of us, their guns drawn. Gordon was oblivious. I shut down the generator and Gordon, losing power, looked up quizzically.
"What's going on here? What are you guys doing?" shouted the cops. Gordon didnt miss a beat. "Demolition, the whole area," he said, blithely waving a gloved hand around to encompass the entire area. The cops nodded, put their guns away and left.
Gordon was always balancing on the edge and usually getting away with it. Another example of his walking on the edge was his cutting of a Hudson River Pier. That time, he had to leave the country until the heat died down.
In 1976, Gordon's twin brother committed suicide by jumping from Gordon's loft, which was located on the corner of Wooster and Houston Streets. This had an enormous effect on Gordon's life. He spent time after that in Europe, making some great work. Not long after that, he was diagnosed with cancer. He was a young man, and at the time, it was hard for me to acknowledge that Gordon was so sick that he could die, that this could happen to anyone. He fought the disease bravely, and was inspiring throughout. Near the end, he calmly told me, "It's all about evolution." For some reason, this remark was both a release and reassurance for me. Gordon was always a great mentor, even at the end.
Years later, I moved to Sag Harbor. On my street is a graveyard with beautiful monuments that I regularly visit. While meandering through it one day, I came upon a new rock gravestone covered with pebbles.
On closer inspection, I saw that it read, Anne Alpert 5-5-1914 to 3-30-1997, John Sebastian Matta 6-22-1943 to 7-14-1976, Gordon Matta Clark 6-22-1943 to 8-27-1978.
I was thunderstruck. Being back on the same street with Gordon was coming full circle, an unbelievable continuum. Now I often pass or visit his grave. Gordon is still on my mind, and his voice still sounds in my ears.
This memoir is presented on the occasion of Gordon Matta-Clark: Bingo, Apr. 10-May 8, 2004, at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York, and the accompanying images are courtesy the gallery.
[texto. Ned Smyth]