How did Alejandro de la Sota
design? This is a relevant question, in fact, it is a very
important issue for an architect and especially for students and teachers of a
school of architecture to whom are mainly addressed this reflection. It is
important because, it is supposed whether we know how to an architect designs,
we could probably imitate him; we could behave in a similar way. Learning, in
architecture, after all, consists in imitating particular attitudes, more than
copying certain buildings: the “ethos” of a master.
If we want to know how to
Alejandro de la Sota projected, more than ask ourselves for the method, we must
ask ourselves for the “hummus”, the breeding ground that makes possible
birthing his architecture: his architectural idea, his first experiences –projects-,
constructed or not, and third his sensitivity, or if you want with the world of
his own personal awareness, which is for his own nature of difficult
apprehension and expression.
Alejandro
de la Sota’s architectural idea is of anti-formalism determinate, such as Mies
van der Rohe draws up in his ‘working thesis’. He places the construction in
the beginning of the architectural form, therefore in an overrating of the
technology that it becomes in admiration. On the other hand, his architecture
is been characterized for a great sensibility. Sota draws extraordinarily well.
In his drawings, there is a will aware of silence, and expressive renounce. His
drawings –always very few, even at the executing projects- are used as a
musical partiture: are dimensional schemes that allow the carrying out the
work; They are not an advance that how it will be the finalized work.
How
do this ideas work applying them to three works related before?: Sota designs
the Maravillas gym with great ease and determination, solving the particular
problems that they are formulated –logical method-. As “the architecture is a
overdetermined fact”, in most of his following buildings, his designing
strategy will not consist in solving, but in investigating, in proposing an
idea that be able to generate the architectonic form; moving the main purpose
of his discourse about architecture from the importance of technology to the
primacy of the idea. The houses in Alcudia, the houses in Caeyra too, arise of
a reflection collected in a series of brilliant and beautiful drawings about
how to place yourself in the land and live as a particular way to live the
Mediterranean land.
Perhaps
this letter that I humbly submit to judgment of my readers, doesn't be useful
but only to justify and do a bit easier to understand the title of the book:
“Alejandro de la Sota. Construction, idea and architecture”, that is the
publication of my doctoral thesis, if somebody was a bit well interested in the
ideas that it is about. At the end, I think that the book should have a new
title: “Alejandro de la Sota: from the Mystification of Technology to the Idea
as a principle of strategy of design”; more or less.
