brick: the material of Eladio Dieste stephanie white
E ladio Dieste was a Uruguayan engineer who developed reinforced brick shell construction for large span installations such as factories, workshops, storage and agricultural buildings. The Church of Christ the Worker, 1955-60, in Atlántida, with its vertical rippling walls, is almost the only example of his brick work most of us know about, but he worked up until the late 1990s. Ceramica armada or reinforced masonry was Eladio Dieste’s material, a material arising from the particulars of Uruguay over his lifetime, from 1917-2000. Dieste has lingered on the edges of the discourse of modernism, overshadowed by the Latin American triumphs of Neimeyer in Brazil, Barragan in Mexico. Dieste’s work was grounded in Montevideo and only toward the end of his life did he work outside Uruguay. Hector Abarca, architect and archivist, describes a lecture Dieste gave in Lima in the 1990s — ‘attended by few… it was a lot of maths and old b/w slides. Real archival material not well appreciated in the 1990s.’ There is not a diversity of material to be found on Dieste, however the richly definitive resource is Stanford Anderson’s Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art of 2004, assembled from a symposium Anderson held at MIT in 1999 after he visited both Uruguay and Dieste for the first time in 1998. It includes analyses of his many projects, the technology of ceramica armada , his innovations, historical appraisals, Dieste’s own writings plus technical appendices that explain everything about vaults and reinforced and pre- stressed brickwork. Stanford Anderson’s lecture, ‘Eladio Dieste: A Principled Builder’, was published in Seven Structural Engineers: The Felix Candela Lectures , the Museum of Modern Art, 2008, also prohibitively costly if you can find it. There is a copy on the MOMA website. Julian Palacio, on a 2012 Norden Fund grant, went to Uruguay to visit Dieste’s work. His 2014 lecture, ‘Material tour de force: the work of Eladio Dieste’ is on the Architectural League NY website. In 2017, Heinz Emigholz made the film Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917- 2000) . It was streamed on MUBI in November 2018. The film visited 29 Dieste buildings still standing in 2017, from bus terminals to warehouses, gymnasiums and garages; some churches, a shopping centre, but mostly huge brick arched shells in semi-rural, semi-derelict districts. Emigholz arranges the film as a series of stills: a fixed camera in a number of locations — static and silent except for the wind blowing the trees and grass, dogs wandering in and out of the frame, traffic sounds, children, barking, but very little activity and none of the forced dynamism of a moving hand-held cine-camera. And oh, how inadequate is that little description for the solitary beauty of these
Eladio Dieste, Horizontal Silo, CADYL Agricultural Cooperative Limited 1976- 1978 Young, Rio Negro, Uruguay Span 28.5m, length 120m, height 15m, area 3420 m2. Capacity 30000 tonnes of grain This grain silo is located in an area of extensive agrarian production. The work was left unfinished for economic reasons, but was adapted to operate partially, without full capacity or the installation of the mechanized loading and unloading system. The roof is formed by a set of double curved vaults resting on a reinforced concrete edge beam founded with vertical and inclined perforated piles filled at the site. The vaults are made of hollow ceramic bricks (vaults 25x15x15) joined with sand mortar and portland, finished superficially with a layer of mortar of 3 cm painted white to reflect the solar radiation. Filling the silo was to be by a bucket elevator and conveyor belt hung from the top of the vault. The floor of the silo was designed as a triangular hopper buried at a height of -12.37m with the slope of its sides sufficient to discharge the grain by gravity to a lower tunnel, located at -14.10 m. This explanation from www.fadu.edu.uy/ eladio-dieste/obras/young/ The Stanford Anderson book ( Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art) has drawings of the cross section and foundation details on p110. The fifth image down (left) shows the top of the hopper, but a concrete floor was poured when the project was curtailed by economic circumstance. It is easy to get completely transfixed by Dieste’s engineering feats: they are magical and paradoxicallly practical. However, we are thinking about material culture, and this horizontal silo, forty years on, is still full of grain, still a silo. Emigholz’s film, which is without dialogue, just printed building names and dates, puts this silo into a peaceable landscape where agricultural rhythms pass days full of birds, wind, trucks and dogs, men with shovels and ladders, weight and angles of repose of grain.
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , D 2017, 95 min Streetscapes – Chapter IV / Photography and beyond – Part 27 / Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917– 2000)
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On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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