In June 1961 the basis for the competition to finish the apse of Arantzazu are published. The period is more favourable for this commitment mainly due to the liturgical renovation backed by the Second Vatican Council and, in some way, by the definitive support of the Dominique José Manuel Aguilar (head of the movement of sacred art at that moment). The jury was made up of Muñoz Aguilar, the architects Luis Alustiza, Fco. Javier Sáenz de Oiza, Rafael Laorga, Ramón Vázquez Molezún and Modesto López Otero, the painters Francisco Cossío, Godofredo Ortega Muñoz and Daniel Vázquez Díaz, the sculptor Eduardo Chillida and the art critic Enrique Lafuente Ferrari. A prestigious jury that awarded with first prize to Lucio Muñoz and with other five awards to different creators. The group of materials created for the competition as well as the models of the awarded proposals make a compound of great historic-artistic interest.
But returning to Lucio Muñoz1, we are talking about one of the most remarkable persons of what has been known as “Spanish informality” that immediately connects with the space and natural environment of Arantzazu. Once again, matter and space, nature and arts in a perfect symbiosis.
In this personal experience, the identification process with Arantzazu, with its nature, with its art and spirituality, is captured in that outstanding wall of 620 square meters, where the timber and colour, the texture and light, transfer the fusion to the spectator with this environment. As we will see later, this is one of the essential points about which the exhibition will work.
1 Lucio Muñoz. Madera de Fondo. Madrid, Ministerio de Asuntos exteriores y cooperación, 2004.
24 2.6. Jorge Oteiza
When the relationship between Oiza and Oteiza1 is analysed, it is surprising to find some symmetry, mainly because of the transcendence of the first and the latest Oiza’s work where both of them collaborate. Those works enclose, like a symbolic parenthesis, a unique and difficult relationship. But above all, a relationship based on a mutual understanding of their creative processes.
In 1951, in the moment when the building is finished, contacts between the architects and Jorge Oteiza had already taken place so that Oteiza made the sculpture. That year, he gets the Honour Diploma in the Milan Triennial and he takes part in the first Hispano-American Arts Biennial held in Madrid. From the very first moment, he identifies the apostleship like “dynamic centre and goldenly proportional”, making an explicit reference to the main theme of the congress held that year on the occasion of the Milan Triennial about the “golden section”. Between 1951 and the precautionary suspension of the project, the sculptor starts a personal process of reflection that is partly gathered in his testimony to the magazine Aranzazu in 1952:
“I would like to make a good choice in this work and conciliate the formal requirements, of which I am part due to my experimental vocation as sculptor of this era, with the religious properties, of which the religious feeling is part of and I may say that the artistic feeling, of the people of my region”.
3. Technology
The execution project of the new Basilica of Arantzazu, approved in June 1952, included an austere, simple, tight-budgeted air-conditioning installation, which not only fits in with the project, but clearly supports the architecture it serves. This installation was finally carried out in 1968, and is still working (with its virtue and defects) as it did when it began.
The archived documents of this project are fascinating thanks to the light they throw on the construction process (true architecture, beyond the realms of architectural theory) of the Basilica of Arantzazu2.
The heating, ventilation and acoustic records of the Arantzazu project, which make up two thirds of the total documents for the project, show the full development of the project (thus confirming Sáenz de Oíza’s knowledge of air conditioning installations).
1 Pilar Muñoa, Oteiza. La vida como experimento, Zarautz, Alga Memoria, 2006.
2 César Martín-Gómez et al. “Heating and Ventilation in the Basilica of Arantzazu”. Architecture Research, 2015; 5(1):
1-9.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
25 Fig. 4: Air conditioning ducts (recirculation) and ventilation of the crypt of the Basilica of Arantzazu
In fact, the translation from Spanish and the account of this documentation makes up most of this article, as the fact that what is described is so interesting and never before published in spite of being clearly explained, demands that it should be better known. For instance, apart from some specific terminology, the description given by the architects (not engineers) of this installation could well be that of a modern-day installation.
26 Fig. 5: Heating through finned tubes in choir and retro-choir (not executed) of the Basilica of Arantzazu
The records on the Basilica of Arantzazu make this project even more outstanding. Unfortunately, the project does not represent the spirit of global analysis of the questions on projects that architects, as professionals, should ask themselves.
The data presented on Arantzazu confirm the design possibilities of architecture with air conditioning, that is, with a concept that integrates the whole building process, without undervaluing any of the parts that make up the building.
The acoustic study of the nave (in which both the origins of the sound –organ and choir voices–
and the characteristics of the different surfaces within the nave) are also included in the execution project, because, as can be seen throughout the many cases analysed in the authors’ research, those architects who take air conditioning into account in their projects are also interested in the acoustic performance of their buildings. This is a professional attitude that makes these architectural pieces even more valuable. Compare the study of this case with, for example, the main hall in the Capitol Building or the conference room of the Patronato Juan de la Cierva.
The Basilica of Arantzazu represents the turning point for air-conditioning installations in Spanish architecture. However, what we have described would be difficult to replicate; it is a kind of cul de sac, as it was a one-off commission (a church) erected by an incredibly brilliant tandem of Sáenz de Oíza and Laorga, and so practically unrepeatable.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
27 4. Conclussions
The austerity of its execution and the fact that it continues to be used add even more value to their design, where the common sense and logic of the application of technology to modern architecture are outstanding.
The basilica is a triumph of multidisciplinary architecture, taken in the Renaissance sense, and of logics applied to technology. It is an example of holistic humanistic design, with a virtuosity that is essential in the tortuous world of contemporary architecture.
We believe that the history of Arantzazu is a unique cultural site. And we claim it not only from the view of culture and arts people involved in the project, but from the possibilities that the photographic, musical and documentary resources may offer. We could even go further on and claim that nature, technology, culture and spirituality are the central elements that define the history of Arantzazu. In fact, it is the balance between the integration of nature and artistic creation one of the nodal points, if not the main one, of the privileged and natural incorporation of Arantzazu to the fiery cultural context of contemporaneity. A juncture where simplicity and radical modernity of San Francisco de Asis’ message, settled on the basis of the search for peace and harmony with nature and aimed, in the current cultural context, to stablish fruitful relationships among the different cultures and religions (Interreligious Meeting of Asis, 1986) and to obtain universal ethic values from the singularity of peoples (Nature Ethic, Earth Chart) offer a whole actuality and allow redesigning properly the importance of Arantzazu regarding texts like the new Pope Francis’ Encyclical Laudato si (2015).
Acknowledgments
Juan Biain. Architect and Director of the Arantzazu Gaur Foundation.
Joseba Echeverria. Responsible for the Historical Archive in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Arantzazu.
28
In the Expanded Atmospheric Field
Federica ANDREONI | PhD Candidate in Architecture Landscape and Environment Department of Architecture and Project La Sapienza University, Roma, Italy federica.andreoni@uniroma1.it
Abstract
The ability to create architectural spaces just using subtle substances is a core topic in contemporary design culture. The thesis of this short essay is that architecture, the art of gardens and the artistic practices are nowadays sharing this common design research field: the creation of architectural space using immaterial materials. In this design attitude, the spatial configuration is assigned, largely or wholly, to the wise use of subtle substances. A survey of significant contemporary projects, where topology and phenomenology are overtly inseparable, can show by practice the flagrancy of the topic.
Key words: Subtle Substances of Architecture; Atmosphere; Landscape architecture; Ephemeral Architecture; Art of gardens; Urban design; Expanded field.
Subtle substances. The power of the immaterial.
The subtle substances1 are intangible materials: the thickness of the air, the contest between shadow and light, wind, mist and dust, even smell. They are all ephemeral, evanescent, vague, impalpable, volatile: so weak in their material concreteness and physical weight, as strong in moulding space.
The ability to create architectural spaces just using subtle substances is a core topic in contemporary design culture.
Lawrence Halprin was among the pioneers2. The workshops Experiments in Environment (1966-1968), also thanks to the collaboration with his wife Anna, stimulated students to the sensitive understanding of places, focusing on what is not visible, but equally crucial for the landscape quality (the air warmth or the background noise, for example) and on actual experience of the site as a tool of knowledge and imagination. Furthermore, his studies about the High Sierra - set in the countless notebooks where Halprin noted down the different temperaments of the water, its
1 The expression subtle substances is picked up from Lina Bo Bardi. The brazilian-italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, has been using the term substances (instead of the term materials) to explain what essentially composes her
architecture. Thus, for subtle substances Lina Bo Bardi indicates especially vegetal, mineral, air or aqueous elements. In this text, we consider this expression in a larger way, meaning all the ephemeral elements of which architecture can be made. To deepen the Lina Bo Bardi work, we suggest to especially refer to: Olivia De Oliveira, Lina Bo Bardi: sutis substancias da arquitetura (São Paulo: Romano Guerra, 2006)
2 For a deepening on the subject, please refer in particular to: Annalisa Metta, Benedetta Di Donato, Anna e Lawrence Halprin. Paesaggi e coreografie del quotidiano (Melfi: Libria, 2015).
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
2 fickle materiality, its sound atmosphere -, are the indispensable background for several projects, as the public spaces in Portland (1963-1970), masterpieces of the XX century.
More recently, Peter Zumthor defined this design attitude as the search for the magic of things, the magic of the real world. He identified several design principles to achieve an architecture made of atmosphere, closely dealing with the subtle substances: “the light of things”, “the temperature of the space”, “the sound of a space”1.
The atmosphere is increasingly getting the crux for urban space design, as Mirko Zardini asserts with the exhibition Sense of the City, at the Montreal CCA, in 2005: “Challenging the dominance of vision, Sense of the City (...) proposes a new approach, a «sensorial urbanism» whose aim is to analyse urban phenomena in terms of luminosity and darkness, seasons and climate, the smell of the air, the material surfaces of the city, and sounds”2.
The thesis of this short essay is that architecture, the art of gardens and the artistic practices are nowadays sharing this common design research field: the creation of architectural space using immaterial materials. In this design attitude, both in garden design and art installation, the spatial configuration is assigned, largely or wholly, to the wise use of these materials.
A survey of significant contemporary projects can show by practice the flagrancy of the topic.
Gardens. Light, air, water.
The perception of materials, light and time have always been fundamental themes of the art of gardens. Some contemporary gardens translate these topics in a very interesting way.
A poetic perception of atmosphere, especially through the light reflections, is the core issue of The Rotunda garden (Citylaboratory, Quebeq, 2014). Rotunda is an elemental garden, conceived as a device capturing the beauty of nature; it transforms the surrounding landscape into the garden itself by grasping what is outside its boundaries. The garden has to be filled with water at the beginning of its life and has to be left to evolve over time, becoming also a climate register device. So, it is explicitly sensible to the changing light conditions, the fluctuations in temperature and humidity, rainfall and evaporation.
A specific character of the air is, instead, the protagonist of the Nordic Dreams garden (1:1 Landskab, Chaumont-sur-Loire, France, 2008). The ambition of Nordic Dreams, in fact, is to reflect that kind of uncomplicated aesthetics typical of the Nordic air. The Nordic sky has a subtle intensity that creates the special light: the often-changing colours of greys and blues have a simple understated powerfulness. So, the garden is basically a rectangular room, created in a “forest” of
1 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Zürich: Birkhäuser, 2006), pp. 21-61
2 Mirko Zardini, ed., Sense of the city an alternative approach to urbanism, (Baden: Lars Müller Publisher, 2005)
3 Spruce trees and ground covers of Wild Strawberries. The room is furnished with a grid of Willow trees in various sizes and surfaced with gravel. As a backdrop, at the end of the room, a glass screen is set up featuring an image of a Nordic sky. The sky on the glass screen is visible under the tree canopies, eliminating the horizon.
Furthermore, making visible that the atmosphere is not empty, but is full of substances, especially the aqueous ones, with their own thickness, density and temperature, seems to be the aim of the two Weather Garden of Hyatt Hotel (Vogt, Zurich, 2004). In fact, moss entirely covers one of them, changing colour depending on the air damp, from the bright green of the steamier season, to the earthy brown of dry periods. Stone slabs, variously concave, pave the other garden. According with rainfall and evaporation, they retain more or less water, dry more or less quickly.
Fig. 1: The Rotunda garden, Citylaboratory, Quebeq, 2014
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
4 Fig. 2: Nordic Dreams garden, 1:1 Landskab, Chaumont-sur-Loire, France, 2008
Fig. 3: Weather Garden of Hyatt Hotel, Gunther Vogt, Zurich, 2004
5 Art installations. Light, air, water.
Many contemporary art installations also lie in the same conceptual horizon.
Among them, working specifically with the potential of the light, there is the series of the English artist Anthony McCall called Solid Light Films. The series is designed studying the mechanical projection of a film: the beam of light is a three-dimensional volume, before being transformed in two dimensions on the screen. Consequently, The Solid Light Films are simple projections that highlight the sculptural volume and quality of the light beam. Line Describing a Cone (1973) is the first of the series, which continues to evolve until the latest Breathe Vertical works (Mccall, Milan, 2009). In a darkened space, filled with mist, the light projections create the illusion of three dimensions through abstract figures, ellipses, waves and flat surfaces which gradually expand, contract or caress the space - as ephemeral architectural walls. In these installations, the light membranes, and thus also the spaces created by that light, are visible thanks to the movements of the mist and the spirals that sometimes are formed and which guide the eye to the point in which they vanish in the lens of the projector.
A construction made of air is the concept design of On space time foam (Saraceno, Milano, 2010).
Conceived as a large transparent membrane that visitors can get into, folded in three layers, it is suspended at 25 metres above the ground, providing a radical bodily experience. The installation can be easily defined as a sculpture made of 7000 cubic metres of air. The artist creates spheres that seethe and break like membranes, full of air. He conceives space, he says1, as a tympanum, a membrane that allows you to listen because it vibrates, through the air’s material.
We can also mention The Mediated Motion (Eliasson and Vogt, Bregenz, Austria, 2001), such an emblem of the configurative capability of subtle substances. The Mediated motion is a large-scale installation spanning all four floors of Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz2. Exploring water in its various and changing aspects of matter - humidity, fog, liquid state, vapour… -, the installation is a sequence of ‘interior landscapes’. On the ground floor was a collection of logs sprouting shiitake mushrooms; continuing to level one, visitors encountered a pond with duckweed floating on its surface, which they could cross via a series of pontoons. On level two, a floor of gently sloping compressed soil could be traversed, and on level three, a suspension bridge spanned a foggy room and terminated abruptly at a blank wall, forcing visitors to return along their original route. A staircase of roughly hewn wood was built on top of the existing concrete stairs, creating an unbroken transition from one landscape situation to the next. The water, its odours, as well as the fog and its humidity, on all four levels, turn the Kunsthaus into a path of experience.
1 Filipa Ramos, Interview (Milano: Domus Web, 2012)
2 The catalogue of this work has been published; it contains various authors’ considerations. Eckhard Schneider, ed., Olafur Eliasson The mediated motion (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Edition, 2001)
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
6 Fig. 4: Breathe Vertical works, Solid Light Films series, Anthony McCall, Milan, 2009
7 Fig. 5: On space time foam, Tomás Saraceno, Milan, 2010
Fig. 6: The Mediated Motion, Eliasson Olafur with Gunther Vogt, Bregenz, Austria, 2001
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
8 Switching to the urban scene.
As Franco Zagari reminded us already several years ago, architecture, particularly the one concerning the open urban space, owes a strong debt to the garden culture and to the artistic sphere1. From landscape designers like Dan Kiley, Russell Page, Geoffrey Jellicoe, architecture undoubtedly draws a morphological range and a botanical richness. In a broader sense, we can consider it a sort of special awareness and sensitivity to the subtle substances, typical of the atmosphere of gardens.
From artists such as Christo, Michaeil Heizer, Walter De Maria and Richard Serra, architecture is instead inspired to conceptual dimensions. These are the exploration of spatial and temporal themes, the richness of symbols and meanings, and above all the leadership of the crowd in movement, as protagonist of the urban scene.
The garden and the art installation, among which we have taken some samples considered significant, are categories whose boundaries sometimes become really blurred. Certainly, though, it can be viewed as both categories sharing an appearance of pure superstructure, almost of superfluity. As such, Zagari noted2, the projects of these spaces, always traditionally identify a particular projection of the collective imagination. The garden -and a special kind of artistic installation, we would like to add- is a project dimension that experiments, with strong
The garden and the art installation, among which we have taken some samples considered significant, are categories whose boundaries sometimes become really blurred. Certainly, though, it can be viewed as both categories sharing an appearance of pure superstructure, almost of superfluity. As such, Zagari noted2, the projects of these spaces, always traditionally identify a particular projection of the collective imagination. The garden -and a special kind of artistic installation, we would like to add- is a project dimension that experiments, with strong