La définition d'une stratégie d'intervention - ICOMOS Open Archive

La définition d’une stratégie d’intervention.
La definición de una estrategia de intervención
Defining a strategy for intervention
architecture”, thanks to these hidden human links better physical forms
and social behaviors are achieved.
Coderch intends “to learn” from the vernacular sociophysical chronotope.
That is, the view from the top, the inside-outside vernacular window,
the public life in the narrow street and the “minimal” building elements,
wood and white walls, and colors that mixes ships and houses. The
“modesty” of the renewal obtained paradoxically an “avant-garde”
modern tone.
It is not a “Beaux Arts” copy of the vernacular, but a “modern” chronotope
(abstract relationships, and dynamic composition) that “plays” with
the vernacular features, without destruction of the urban form and
domestic character.
It was a lesson for the future.
In nineteen seventy the Catalan architect Magda Saura followed this
lesson by Coderch and enlarged the “narrative” with new chronotopic
structures coming from California and from Le Corbusier heritage.
The vernacular house maintains all the characters “in dialogical” attitude
with a new domestic modern view. This “dialogical” attitude between
the old and the new, both in relation to the physical and the social
dimensions of architecture, is, according to Mikhail Bakhtin the kernel of
the chronotope in the genre of the novel. The house arrives to combine
two life-styles separated in time but articulated in the same space.
There is a dense “feed-back” between history and design. In order to be
able to build this “feed-back” the architect had to be enthusiastic both
with history and with modern design. As I said above this is pitifully
rare, because of the strong prejudgments against the possibilities of
this potential “dialogue” in architecture.
In nineteen ninety-two, the same architect coordinated the complex
design of a waterfront in Empuries where the Olympic Flame arrived in
the same year to Catalonia.
This landscape design was “dialogical” too, and was published in the
review Quaderns by the Catalan Association of Architects.
It is important to point out the significance of the renewal of landscapes
in order to be able to renew vernacular architecture: they go hand
by hand. Either they are both protected or they are both destroyed.
There the dunes, the threes and the Greek ruins play the role that
walls, windows and roofs play in architecture, but the key chronotopic
sociophysical features have a key role here too.
The waterfront wooden way “optimizes” the experience of the historical
and geographic context, making sociophysical relationships between
dunes, sea, ruins and vegetation alive. Users feel this chronotopical
richness and are grateful for that. A web of relations is in the air. You
need only to walk and to breathe to notice it.
3. The “Vernacular” and the “Modern” Chronotope
In recent works 9 I have developed a “dialogical” view of architectural
design, where the key concept of chronotope created by the founder
of this theoretical trend, the Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin,
occupies a privileged place 10 . A chronotope is a link between objects
and subjects, that is, between physical (cosmic) space and time, and
social (historical) space and time. This concept is used by Bakhtin in
the analysis of literary works. For example the development of the
novel since classical Greek time until now, some two thousand and five
hundred years later.
The vernacular chronotope is basic for Bakhtin, because it is the first step
in any artistic human development. It has an enormous richness and it
is an inexhaustible source of feelings, stories, personages, etc. However,
wrote Bakhtin with his proverbial irony: “the vernacular chronotope
has only one defect: it never changes.” So the modern chronotope is
on the contrary, very dynamic and changes all the time, but often has
no content, only form. The complementarity we have seen between
vernacular and modern architecture has the same characteristics
defined by Bakhtin, as was already pointed out by the architect and
famous historian Sigfried Giedion in his last and posthumous book:
Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition, 11 where he defines the
evolution of architectural design in Europe throughout chronotopic
sociophysical basic changes. See diagram IV below as an example of
the value of historical urban planning.
Visual network in the Middle Ages in the south of France. This network
is the reason of the “order” we see in the vernacular architecture. Doors
and windows follow this invisible web of visual interrelationships. If we
need to destroy this order, at least, we should be able to build a better
one.
In conclusion, modernity can be either the end of vernacular
architecture in the Mediterranean area or, on the contrary, can be the
best way for renewal. It depends upon political, economic and cultural
attitudes, which, for the moment are still oriented towards destruction.
However ecological new developments (climate changes) and new
social cultural attitudes can slowly change this orientation, as late
professor Lewis Mumford wrote to me in a last letter before his death,
where he argued about the new ecological awareness among young
students in USA: “a new hope”.
I hope so too.
1 See review Arquitectura 63. School of Architecture. Barcelona, 1963.
2 Very important the book by Martha Pollack The Architect. MIT Press.
3 See Muntañola, J. La Topogénèse. Anthropos. Paris, 1997. (Spanish text in La Topogénesis.
UPC Edicions. Barcelona, 2000.
4 See too. Rapoport, A.
5 I do not mean that Franco dictatorship was better than a democracy. Democracy
should be able to combine modernity and renewal of historical urban form, in a
complementary way. Pitifully, in Spain, this has not been the case. Speculation made
this impossible.
6 See . Chapter 10. Lewis Mumford sent to me the Spanish version of
the book.
7 This is the reason of the International Review Arquitectonics (See the web www.
arquitectonics.com.
8 See (Muntañola, J. editor). School of Architecture in Barcelona
Proceedings 4th International Congress in Barcelona in June 2004.
9 See Muntañola, J. . (Volume I).
Editorial Abecedario. Badajoz, Spain, 2007.
10 See by Josep Muntañola in the series Arquitectonics.
11 See Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition by S. Giedion. I wrote the introduction
of the Spanish translation of this posthumous work in 1972. (Gustavo Gili. Barcelona).
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