Journals

Abstract:

Material, Space and Color are elements employed by Mies van der Rohe as principles and factors of a new expression in the exhibitions executed together with Lilly Reich as essays identified with an intellectual proposal or idea of architecture. In the Cafe Samt & Seide, the visual structure of opposites born out of the double antagonistic textile material of the exhibition unfolds in an order of independent elements in which the intellectual synthesis art-science-philosophy guides the process of formalization in an intention transferred to its architecture in the use of technology.
The creativity and repercussion of the avant-gardes show the integrating will of the protoarchitectural exhibition as total art. The interpretative aspects of the plastic, visual and musical arts are integrated as criteria and sensibilities applied to the juxtaposed material, spatial and color intentions. Modernity and tradition converge in this constructed space whose surfaces cover a hidden metallic framework. The minimal textile construction will be incorporated as an idea of form in the future construction of the metal pillar, the floating wall of its dwellings and open to nature pavilions, and the large technological façade of the public space of its groupings in the city. The total space of the Cafe Samt & Seide within the large hall in Berlin anticipates the artistic and industrial exhibitions realized together with Lilly Reich inside the spacious metal-framed rooms as conceptual installations of gravity and light preceding the large-scale pavilions and universal space.
Architecture, construction and place are integrated in the installation by the structural principle of support-cladding as an intellectual proposal developed in the exhibitions. Oscillator and frame are scaled constructions within the illuminated porticoed nave, expressing an order of parts that reflect an integrated whole in nature and the universal. The multiple spatial, constructive and conceptual relationships of the exhibition reveal the installation as an exponent and precedent of his work and idea, which he defined as a structural proposal. The structure, understood as a set of cultural values and technical means, is the concept with which Mies van der Rohe identifies the technological intellectual synthesis of his time, constituting the purpose of the material, spatial and color expression.

Publication: book chapter
Publisher: Fundación de Arquitectura COAM, ea! Ediciones.

Abstract:

If there is something that characterizes the work of Ramón Vázquez Molezún it is creativity, risk, emotion. This work, vital and optimistic, was innovative and absolutely personal, and the origin of all this should be sought in something as prosaic as a motorbike. As a pensioner in Rome in the early 1950s, Molezún acquired a Lambretta C125 which he transformed and adapted completely until appropriated it and turned it into a real house on his back and a perfect companion on his journey through Europe. A vehicle that allowed him mobility and independence that reflected his restless vitalist and artistic character in formation, becoming an indispensable object, full of meaning, that Molezún photographed insistently alongside the beautiful landscapes and buildings that he visited during the more than 100.00 km he travelled on his great journey. The motorbike is revealed in Molezún as much more than a fast and cheap means of transport; it is discovered as the driving range and transformations of the future architect. Mind and hands united in work; symbiosis of architect and craftsman. A journey of life that begins on land on a motorbike in Rome and ends on a boat, his dorn, in the Bueu Sea.

Publication: Research Article
Journal: rita_ Revista Indexada de Textos Académicos, nº14. ISSN 2340-9711
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24192/2386-7027(2020)(v14)(01)

Abstract:

The silent presence of the great pavilion in Corona Park at the New York World’s Fair (1964) is representative of Javier Carvajal’s proposal for an alternative city integrated into nature. Industrial and artisan materials are rhythmically repeated to the exhibition contents in a synthesis of cultural values in which the Nordic model, integrating the everyday and natural, is added to the monumentality and sensoriality of tradition interpreted in a contemporary key. Especially of the Alhambra, recognizable from the cushioned-mural of the prefabricated cladding of its hermetic exterior volume to the natural paradise of the interior formed by the courtyard-garden and the suspended ceiling firmament, in a fluid atmosphere full of mystery, shadow and backlighting furnished with the padded Granada armchair. The criticism of a dehumanized urban growth, the technique applied to spaces made for living oriented from climate adaptation, the cultural revision of the Alhambra Manifesto and the affirmation of the principles of the modern masters, align the proposal of the New York Pavilion by Javier Carvajal with the critical and humanist aspects (Ockman, 1993) that characterized, in the significant period of transition between modernity and post-modernism, the international avant-garde architecture.

Publication: Research Article
Journal: REIA Revista Europea de Investigación en Arquitectura, nº16. ISSN 2340-9851
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5713368

Abstract:

The artisan and empirical thought that characterizes Mies’ formation in the use of material evolves into a philosophicalscientific thought that identifies matter and its expression with a significant structure. In the Friedrichstrasse Building 1921 and Crystal Skyscraper 1922, transparency, reflection and mass are the three factors that determine their shape, represented in the models, perspectives and elevations as independent visual qualities. The light that passes through the glass, which is reflected on its surface, in an abstracted vision-mass of glossy-colour, is directly linked in the light study of the skyscraper with the physical laws of nature established by science since the 17th century in an interpretation of matter and structure close to the unifying or total scientific thought of the 20th century. Transparent glass, mass or reflective glass is used as the main effect of the project, a way extended to the rest and diversity of opaque or translucent materials explored in the interior in the exhibitions held in conjunction with Llilly Reich and in the German Pavilion 1928-1929, whose complex atmosphere of transparency, reflection and mass is materialised under the new plane free of horizontal light, type and essential contribution of his work with the glass skyscraper.

Publication: Research Article
Journal: REIA Revista Europea de Investigación en Arquitectura, nº13. ISSN 2340-9851
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5713509

Abstract:

A first-year project is a mechanism that directs the student’s incipient development towards the exploration of diverse fundamental themes of architecture. It is a strategy that triggers several types of knowledge and at the same time, supports itself on them. In its planning, heterogeneous fields are intertwined, links are established, and tactics and procedures are suggested in order to introduce the student to architectural project. The article analyses the internal mechanics of three types of first-year projects aiming to understand the strategies involved in its operation. It presents each type as an operational strategy that uti-lizes concepts, processes and tools it considers essential to develop its working hypotheses.

Publication: Research Article
Journal: Constelaciones, nº7. ISSN 2340-177x
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31921/constelaciones.n7a2

Abstract:

Experimental pedagogical strategies of the Avant-garde of the 20th century, such as the Base Section of the Vkhutemas or the Preliminary Course of the Bauhaus, are teaching methodologies that provided a set of didactic tools in the decades after the Second World War, in which workshop exercises such as those of Albers, Moholy-Nagy or Itten, were adapted to new educational contexts and formats. Since then, numerous researchers and authors (Shellman, McGinty, Jordan, Somol, Stanton, Love…) have analyzed parameters, characteristics and preliminary project procedures of different schools and contexts, in which the families of exercises form types or modalities of action that use a set of elements and project mechanisms, recognizable as operative schemes that admit modifications without losing essential common characteristics. Their analysis shows the evolution and variety of propaedeutic and methodological pedagogies within a permanent debate around the teaching strategies of initiation to the architectural project and the nature of the exercise as a device for disciplinary learning and as a subject for reflection, research and knowledge.

Publication: Research Article
Journal: ZARCH, nº12. ISSN 2341-0531
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.2019123546

Abstract:

“Architecture is always the spatial expression of an intellectual decision.” Mies van der Rohe, 1928

The minimal and ephemeral construction of the Velvet and Silk Café is much more than an atmosphere of textile surfaces. The space is conceived and constructed with ideas. Its architecture is the order that is incorporated into the essentials of experience. Materialist and idealist at the same time, Mies works with the spatial qualities of the textile material and its interrelation.
The new limits are dematerialized by their glow, transparency and light. The intense velvets have a structuring role, parallel and sliding to the background composed by the two large canvases and the exhibition sign. This order or frontality is contrasted by the rotation of the four orthogonal cloths, two high and two curved of the central group of silks of soft tones. This system of continuity and transparency in both directions is subtly arranged in relation to the direction and axes of the space. At the back of the esplanade of the Barcelona Exposition, the velvets will become the parallel and sliding walls of marbles full of texture and color. The silks in the free series of crystals and waters.
Abstraction in the arrangement of the canvases precedes color; there is an echo of the hidden order or grid of Paul Klee’s landscape watercolors. Color is understood as an attribute of the material. Each cloth is a plane enhanced by the decision of its tint and juxtaposed to the whole. The action of depth and dynamism is similar to the perspective of color planes of Kazimir Malevich’s pictorial space. The velvets were of intense colors: reds, oranges and blacks; and the silks of soft silver, lemon-yellow and gold tones. This diversity evokes the chromatic range that distinguishes the different areas and routes of the Charlottenhof Garden Hall in Potsdam and the cheerful romantic and nationalistic architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel.
The contrast of the canvases floating from a slender support is the principle of the tubular furniture and the lightweight or next-to-nothing construction of the installation. The removable cloths are bolted to the 24 mm steel tube frames as is the leather upholstery of the oscillator. The cloth wraps around the tube, its drop is tangent and hides the screw. The bolted cladding is the basis for the original solutions of the chrome structure and the wall cladding of the Barcelona Pavilion. The marble completely adorns the concealed structure as the padded leather upholstery of the Barcelona armchair rests on its frame. In both spaces, the construction of content and container are conceived in extension. The furniture is leather seats and glass envelopes in the air just as the materials float in it. The spatial expression is based on the unitary experience of lightness and the principle of weightlessness.

Publication: book chapter
Publisher: Ministerio de Vivienda y Editorial Rueda SL.