Juan Pablo ASCHNER | Associate Professor Director - DEARQ Journal Department of Architecture Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia jaschner@uniandes.edu.co
Abstract
With this paper I intend an approach to the composition of Rogelio Salmona’s architecture and its influence in the later experience of the built work. Apparently accidental phenomena that we experience in his work, can be explained in the light of the previous processes of composition;
and compositional processes, in turn, are informed and supported in phenomena that are revealed in the experience of his buildings. By stringing processes of composition and experience it is possible to find continuities and ruptures in the architect's career.
Key words: Rogelio Salmona, Architectural composition, artistic relations Decomposition of the composition
I start by saying that the formal structure of an architectural work is a set of components that are not independent between them; and are bounded by internal laws. An analysis of the composition of the form involves an understanding of the laws that govern it as well as a decomposition of this form.
In architecture it is common to use the words design or project when referring to undergoing procedures. Salmona opposes both notions and prefers, when speaking about what he does, the word composition which in its simplest expression means giving good order to things.
“Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language”1 Composition as a disciplinary notion is rarely used today but its implementation has a long tradition that begins with Vitruvius, revives in Alberti and consolidates in Durand. It is in the arts, areas where composition prevails, that we can find a confluence between the subjective and the objective in stating this notion, thus reestablishing the link between experience and composition.
Julian Guadet said that architecture like music is composed of elements2. A change in the order of a same set of elements can give you a new condition to space and with a different interaction, the same elements endow each space very different qualities. To this end the architect’s
1 Foucault, Michel. The Order of things. An Arthaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
2 Guadet, Julian. Éléments et théorie de l'Architecture Vol. 1. (Paris: Librarie de la Construction Moderne, 1910)
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
28 composition requires a systematic knowledge of the elements of architecture. A brief tour of the components of the composition in an increasing degree of complexity and an analysis of the artistic relations between elements and phenomena in the work of Rogelio Salmona are the basis for this presentation.
A central hypothesis of the paper proposes the existence of four instances for the delimitation of the compositional units: materials and techniques applied to them; elements; parts; and wholes.
Each of these contains the preceding instances.
Materials and techniques applied to them
Let us begin with the materials. The starting point when understanding the composition of form is the smallest unit in which the form can be decomposed. These minimal units are the materials that compose it, and their governing laws are the techniques by which they are manipulated.
Fig. 1: Picture of Salmona’s Torres del Parque form the architect’s office. Brickwork in first plane designed by the architect. Picture: Juan Pablo Aschner.
Salmona works with five predominant materials chosen according to their formal malleability, durability, nobility and historical use: the brick and concrete complemented by the use of wood, metal and glass.
29 Salmona uses and experiments with a limited number of materials in a large number of combinations which entails a high degree of innovation. Innovation in the handling of materials means advancing techniques that over time have acquired cultural and social acceptance in a place, by introducing new strategies that help strengthen and improve their employment without affecting the already acquired habits. On a personal level for both the architect and the user it is easier to establish a bond with those materials that are locally well known and that involve an artisan work rather than those that are unknown and come from the industry.
Fig. 2: Example of material exploration in Salmona’s National Archive. Picture: Juanita Barriga.
The physical properties corresponding to each of the five materials used are highlighted in the experience when the materials interact or are subject to contrast with each other. Masonry and pavements such as the one seen here are subject to composition and as his work was moving forward in time, these compositions were becoming increasingly rich and complex.
The elements
We turn now to a next instance in the analysis of the components. I shall briefly present those architectural elements that are not divisible in themselves and are able to articulate each part through repetitions and interactions.
The elements used in the work of Rogelio Salmona experience their material genesis in the
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
30 manipulation of already mentioned materials and take shape and meaning according to the role they entail within the building. The architect’s interest in composing all scales of his projects resorting to previous experiences allows the same elements used in previous works to reappear with variations, and to this extent the elements are enriched from one work to another.
The criteria for the classification of elements in order to analyze them can not be material or formal as these conditions are not constant. What does not change is the usual role the elements carry out in the composition and the actions they perform within the system of the building.
Consequently we can identify in the work of Rogelio Salmona four families of elements.
The families are composed of: the elements that support the building and that close space, the elements that serve as filter between the outside and inside; elements that allow transition between spaces, and finally the elements of natural interaction.
Fig. 3: Closure and support elements in the Garcia Marquez Cultural Center. Picture:
Carolina Cantor.
The earliest architectural actions that elements undertake consist of support and delimitation.
These functions are observed both in the origins of architecture as well as in the beginning of any construction process. The elements that support and close are the first to make presence in construction and the last to remain in the transit of a building to ruin. This family is made out of walls, parapets, floors, vaulted, flat or sloping roofs, columns, beams and trusses.
If the elements of support and closure delimit and provide stability to spaces that shelter human beings, the filter elements are responsible for mediating sensory and perceptually between exterior and interior. The filter elements, in association with the closure elements determine
31 degrees of intimacy and extroversion. By establishing formal and material actions that allow the passage of light and wind without allowing entrance to water or humans, the basic premises for the definition of the elements grouped under the action of filter are set. The filter elements are therefore the latticework, framing windows, sliding windows, pergolas and skylights in various forms and dimensions.
Fig. 4: Contrast between brickwork and concrete, between closure and support elements.
Picture: Carolina Cantor.
We now turn to the transition elements that facilitate movement between the parts of the building. The architecture of Salmona proposes different routes and spatial concatenation of parts and these elements encourage and diversify transitions and shifts between them. Bridges, stairs, ramps and thresholds constitute the family of the transition elements.
The fourth and last family of elements that I will present allows for interactions with nature.
Natural interaction elements are those that empower relationships with water, earth, fire, air, vegetation or landscape. Natural interaction elements are then water mirrors, water stairs, water threads, earth slopes, flower beds, fireplaces, balconies and planters.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
32 Fig. 5: Water stair at Virgilio Barco Public Library. Picture: Carolina Cantor.
Parts of a whole
For the purpose of such rearrangement, the constituent elements are treated essentially as coordinated equals. Cardboard cutouts are moved about on a board.
Inevitably, however, the search for the proper configuration is also an attempt to establish a suitable hierarchy. The various components carry different weights, although these weights may be readjusted in the process1. Arnheim, Notes on creative invention, p. 262.
As elements are already presented we move towards a more complex scale. It is said of a part that it is a portion of a whole and that it is a major division of it. It is therefore a portion elaborate enough to constitute an autonomous unit but equally dependent as to interact with other parts in order to form a whole. We can try here an analogy with language or music: the materials are to be formalized by techniques that can turn them into the equivalent of letters or musical notes.
1 Arnheim, Rudolph. “Notes on creative invention” in W. Curtis. Le Corbusier at Work. The Genesis of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (pág. 262). (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)
33 Not by the mere existence of notes can we speak of music because we are missing the relations between the notes by means of composition. The same applies to architecture. Clay, for example, is a materiality that in music is equivalent to a sound.
Following the grammatical and musical simile, elements are equivalent to syllables or bars, while composite units and parts are equivalent to words or verses. If we further extend the metaphor we can say that an architectural work either a building or public space is equivalent to a sentence.
A sentence is the maximum scale of study of grammar. The city acts as literature: a multiplicity of variations and connections between sentences. It can be said that verbs are words that refer to concrete actions. Not every part, as not every word, has this nominal experiential aspect. Hence the finite number of parts that are addressed here and the explanation of the scope of the parties in the experience of the built work.
An intelligent way of dividing up a book on philosophy would be into parts of speech, kinds of words. Where in fact you would have to distinguish far more parts of speech than an ordinary grammar does. You would talk for hours and hours on the verbs ‘seeing’, ‘feeling’, etc., verbs describing personal experience1 Wittgenstein: Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. p. 63
Fig. 6: Parts distributed on a sketch of the Postgraduate Building. Source: Rogelio Salmona Foundation
The parts that Salmona uses are: vaulted pavilions, patios, four column halls, semicircular spaces, amphitheaters, etc.; these parts appear in floor plans as outlines or signs, quality that allows them to move freely through the choreography. Though it can’t be observed in projects schemes, all parts are composed of architectural elements.
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Indianapolis: Basil Blackwell, 1966
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
34 Throughout the history of architecture, the definition and classification of parts of a building has changed. Since the diversification of living spaces and up to the twentieth century parts were classified according to their destination. Thus the building wholes consisted of parts such as living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, lobbies, atriums, etc. and they were spatially characterized by the activities carried out inside. But as the number of activities increased, or became more complex, it became more difficult for architecture to work upon preconceived and interlinked parts characterized by sheltered activities.
Another way of conceiving parts independent of its use, is in a formal or typological sense.
Therefore typology can also help understand the constitution of parts. A part understood from the perspective of typology is not dependant upon the activity within but rather understood based upon the formal structure associated. The problem with typology when used for the analysis and the composition of parts is, however, its inflexibility. The more consolidated the part is, understood as type, the more difficult it might be to alter it for design purposes.
Architects such as Louis I. Kahn, prefer to use geometric solids as integral parts of the whole1. Thus the constituent parts are modeled and fit better within the whole, a consideration that does not happen with parts that behave like types. Through the use of cylinders, pyramids, rectangles or cubes the architect composes his buildings. Salmona, on the other hand, works with parts that can be understood as hybrids between typologies and geometric solids; that are either open or covered and that have an archaic experiential origin.
Fig. 7: Interaction betwwen patios and pavilliones in Subachoque house. Source: Rogelio Salmona Foundation
When the parts act jointly or in associations, they acquire a different behavior that attend to the whole. Hence, once set up, the ensemble makes the parts indivisible. It is possible to establish an analogy with drama where a director seeks a group of actors to give organic form to a complete work.
It can be said that the director, in this case Salmona, knows the work of the actors involved in his
1 Kahn, Louis. Forma y diseño. (Buenos Aires: Nueva edición, 1984).
35 compositions, because of their role in previous works; has seen them act and therefore knows what they can bring to a new project incorporating variations. It is from this analogy that we can speak about choreography when talking about relations and interactions between the parts and the interstitial space.
Fig. 8: Interstitial space in Virgilio Barco Public Library. Picture: Juan Pablo Aschner.
The parts, understood as "functionally necessary volumes" evoke, in words of Louis Kahn, the function to be contained. In stating the existence of "functionally necessary volumes" and a
"lyrical basis: the different spaces between the volumes"1 Salmona completes the set of components required for the composition without losing sight of place (to which the lyrical basis attends), or specific activities (which each volume attends). How else could we justify the existence of autonomous parts if not for the need to sustain discernable uses? The program has a real inference on the composition insofar as it requires a certain number of actors, each with specific conditions of scale and spatiality. Each part-player is assigned a role and the role in turn gives form to the part.
The parts arrive to the composition of each project to meet a certain performance that has been tested in previous compositions and interstitial space is new to each composition; in each case the interstitial space gives cohesion to the parts; it is responsible for detaching or bringing parts together, it facilitates a direct or mediated dialogue between elements and is also responsible for establishing links with place and landscape. Finally, the interstitial space establishes a narrative that marks the beginning and end in the succession and experience of the parts and provides a space for indeterminate background activities to happen. The whole then consists of highlights (parts), against the background of a connective tissue of intermediate or mediating areas that are both moments of change from one part to another, spatial intervals that are like silences between words of each sentence.
1 Salmona, Rogelio. Comentarios sobre el concurso del Colegio Emilio Cifuentes. (Bogota: Semana, 1960) .
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
36 Relations of artistic nature
Composition demands from the architect knowledge both of components as well as of relations established between the components. As leitmotif of this process the following hypothesis arises:
the formal composition of architectural objects in Salmona is determined by relations of musical nature such as harmony and rhythm, relations of pictorial nature such as collage, geometric assumptions and, finally, relations of dual nature.
Both architecture and music are experience over time; the experience is equivalent to listening, construction to interpretation and composition is common to both. In the two disciplines measurements and proportions are involved. A common denominator in both disciplines is rhythm defined by Matila Ghyka as perceived periodicity, speaking of recurrence of elements, of identical or similar clusters in a spatial artistic composition1.
Fig. 9 Rhythm in Santafe Housing. Picture: Juanita Barriga
You can exchange terms relating to succession in space and time. In fact, spatial succession is perceived in time. In a succession of components a law is discovered; that law is rhythm. The art of rhythm that triggers pleasure in who experiences architecture, is present as perceived periodicity. In the process of composition that Salmona undertakes, components appear, disappear, are repeated, reinforced, and are perceived in an ever changing juxtaposition. The musicality of the composition establishes an emotional link that allows emotional and memorable experiences of the built work. Rhythm determines the sequence and alternation of support elements and filter elements. Rhythm enables tile patterns in walls and pavements or the successive imprint of the formwork on concrete.
Harmony, that attracts us by its stability in order is probably the aesthetic opposite of chaos.
Through harmony we find unity in diversity, a fundamental principle in Salmona’s compositions concerning various components. If we further understand harmony in correspondence with
1 Ghyka, Matila El número de oro. Los ritmos, 1978, p. 170.
37 euritmia, understood as the correspondence between the parts and the whole, we come to an even more intense understanding of the coherence between the microcosm and the macrocosm of Salmona’s architecture; considerations on which I will insist in this presentation.
If the principles of harmony governing classical art and traditions survive in Salmona’s attitude, modernity sets alternate principles to reinterpret tradition. A compositional premise that seems essential to all modern art either pictorial, sculptural, architectural, literary or musical is the technique of collage. Rogelio Salmona deliberately debates between the harmonic interplay of the parts mentioned above and the tight assembly between them. The pieces that make the different wholes seem perfect and harmonically linked by homogeneity in materials but tense and abruptly found by the diversity and uniqueness of the parties.
It can be said without fear of error, that it is cubism which has given its final guidance to the living art of the twentieth century1. Francastel, Arte y técnica en los siglos XIX y XX, 1961, p. 209).
Collage technique is a dominant mechanism in Rogelio Salmona’s composition of complex projects; but even the most basic scales of the composition make collage explicit.
Fig. 10 Collage pavement in Torres del Parque. Picture: Rogelio Salmona
The hierarchy with which the various components are arranged is a compositional premise. In
1 Francastel, Pierre. Arte y técnica en los siglos XIX y XX. (Valencia: Fomento de Cultura, 1961)
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
38 Institutional buildings, for example, we see clear geometries within the constituent parts. In
38 Institutional buildings, for example, we see clear geometries within the constituent parts. In