buildings as Emigholz filmed them. They go on and on, one after another, great ribboned caverns, the background to a fruit packing plant, or a big garage full of cars and mechanics, or a wool warehouse stacked with stinking filthy fleeces in great bundles on their way to huge steaming washing vats, overhead conveyer belts, tatty bits of wool falling through the air, men in singlets heaving fat bales around — it is mediaeval, the scene under a Sistine chapel of waving brick. One of the most beautiful scenes in The Buena Vista Social Club was Ruben Gonzalez on an upright piano playing for a class of elegant little Cuban gymnasts in the Ballet School and National Centre for Gymnastics, a stained and crumbling classical building, formerly the Merchants Association on the Paseo del Prado. The building was beautiful – cream and shadowed, arched and colonnaded, a space originally meant for something else but, by necessity and opportunity, a ballet school – colonial architecture, colonised by one of the arts of the revolution, ballet; a colonial art, but revolutionary in its insistence despite blockades, poverty and the passage of time. Dieste’s buildings strike me the same way. Revolutionary design for conventional use. These are not specimen buildings, they are, in Uruguay, fabric. The material culture of mid-century industrial Uruguayan architecture: brick. Brick. Julian Palacio, in his 2012 Norden Fund lecture, puts Dieste’s use of brick in the context of both a Latin American tradition of adobe block, and a ‘push back against the Modern Movement’s machine aesthetic and use of industrial materials such as concrete, steel and glass’. Dieste was influenced by Joaquin Torres Garcia and his universal constructivism movement to develop ‘a modern Latin American language that would permeate all of the creative arts’. This is the language of de-colonisation twice over: the development of an architecture that was not colonial Spanish, but also not international modernism, itself, allegedly, a de-colonising architecture. Thus structure not decoration; brick not concrete. It is interesting to consider the economic conditions of Uruguay during the arc of Dieste’s career. The Batlle era, 1903-33 used a collective leadership model based on the Swiss Federal Council: a presidency (ministries of foreign affairs, the interior and defence) that shared power and responsibility with a national council of administration (education, finance, economy and health). It seems prodigiously progressive: social welfare, nationalisation of foreign-owned businesses, taxes waived for low incomes, a national telephone network, unemployment benefits, an 8-hour work day, all of this before 1915. The split executive model lasted until a military coup in 1933, a fallout of the Depression. Uruguay’s subsequent prosperity increased
Solsire Salt Silo (1992-94), Montevideo. One of several horizontal silos. The lenses are set at the peak of each section of vault, the point of zero stress because although the roof acts as a longitudinal vault, each lateral section is an independent structural element. All stresses are carried to the side footings, allowing the end tympanum walls to be completely glazed, as below.
Deposito per la lana ADF, Juanicó. Canelones, 1992-94
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min Streetscapes – Chapter IV / Photography and beyond – Part 27 / Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917–2000)
Film Galerie 451 filmgalerie451.de
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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