On how different project mechanisms are capable of building the landscape

Abstract

Our profession maintains an agreement with the law of gravity, which, even the possible structural challenges that engineering advances allow today, cannot save the dependence of the project on the ground. This condition of architecture can be assumed, and when this occurs, a projective exercise begins, in which, on the one hand, it is possible to observe a multitude of variables that emanate from the abundant socio-physical aspects that define each specific place and how these they are interpreted by the experience lived by each architect. As, on the other hand, it is also possible to detect certain constants, which are often repeated, such as those that allow us to talk about how some projective mechanisms are aimed at founding the ground level of architecture by taking more or less distance from a line of horizon that when observed really emanates complexity. Sverre Fehn, on the subject of these questions, became aware, for example, of its thickness, of its layers and of the relationship that exists between its ends, and in fact, in its famous drawing of the fish and the bird, defined this horizon as a state limit. Years later, Steven Holl would further explain what possible positional relationships architecture could take when dialoguing with this border support. Now accepting this possible dialogue around the borders of our inescapable foundations, this article proposes to take some examples here, to further demonstrate how some of these strategies contemplated by Holl under the idea of Fehn, may also hide an interest in building the landscape. Something that can easily be noticed in the Casa Ugalde and La Ricarda on the one hand, and the Parc Cementiri de Igualada and the Parc de Pedra Tosca on the other hand. Projects that around the zero level propose us to take advantage of existing strata, build elevated podiums or even generate new elevated topographies through exceptional degrees of fiction [6], which define the individual character of each intervention, in its interest in constructing the landscape; in his interest in relating architecture to landscape and landscape to architecture.