through its role supplying beef, wool and leather to the Allied forces in WWII –Allied, because nineteenth century Britain was briefly involved with Uruguay in conjunction with its role in Argentina; Britain’s WWII debt to Uruguay was paid off by nationalising long-established British-owned rail and water companies. The end of WWII and the loss of such a lucrative market plunged Uruguay into inflation and civil unrest. The collective executive model was briefly re- introduced, but Uruguay never recovered its enviable status of a prosperous Switzerland of the South: it struggled through the 1950s under increasingly repressive military rule, then in the early 1960s came the Tupamaros insurgency, a direct response to the poverty many Uruguayans found themselves in. The US Office of Public Safety began to operate in Uruguay in 1965, teaching ‘security’ protocols of intimidation and torture. It is tragic reading this history, the 1970s and 80s were a violent period of military rule that mirrored neighbouring Argentina, including a cessation of civil rights and, inevitably, desaparacidos. This was Dieste’s time. His first work was in the mid-1940s, his last in 1994. He started out in a prosperous era which subsequently collapsed: Atlántida, was built in 1955, by which time there clearly wasn’t the money to build in anything other than the most available, least expensive building material. It happened to be brick, augmented with tiny amounts of steel, and the thinnest of concrete coatings. A viable brick industry depends on geology; not everywhere has clay. Uruguay is a triangle between two rivers, Rio Plat and Rio Uruguay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Much is flat grazing land, and at the inland point of the triangle is higher, volcanic ground: the north margin of the Patagonian micro-plate where it meets the South American continental plate. A collision in the Permian age laid down a deep layer of volcanic ash and calcite in coastal marine swamps and lagoons, which under subsequent pressure resulted in a deep clay deposit. This has made for both a fertile grassland ecology for cattle and sheep, and an endless supply of brick-making material. Reinforced brick: this is how it works, after all the engineering calculations of course. Moveable formwork, a Dieste innovation, supports one full arch at a time. The surface of the formwork has on it a wooden grid that places each brick. In the spaces between each brick a steel grid is laid and then mortared in. The formwork drops away below, leaving 3-4” brick/reinforcing/mortar fabric with a thin screed of concrete weather protection on the outside. There are a wide range of arch and folded plate configurations. The arches generally spring from a horizontal edge beam datum, increasing their lateral and longitudinal radii to the centre, and then subsiding to a parallel edge beam on the
other side of the space. Calculating the greatest and least points of compression allows a variety of profiles providing clerestory lighting – it is so interesting how stress is in constant flux across the surface — not in motion, but in calculation. The arches themselves are either pre-stressed or held by tie-rods, not Dieste’s ideal. His ongoing project was the most minimal and integrated solution to the roofing of space with the most economical of means. As each site, each function and each orientation is different, each site was an opportunity to do yet another magical structure. Sometimes the longitudinal walls are absent and the whole structure is supported by short end plenums, other times the ends are open, or glassed, and the roof spans the short dimension. There are a number of shelters that butterfly off a single column. Purely vertical walls are laid conventionally, however within this construct of the vertical wall, they ripple and lean – this the how the Atlántida church was done: the walls start as a straight line which then expands to a deeply waved wall which nonetheless maintains its centre of gravity along the original baseline. As an engineer it was the engineering that was the project; brick was the material of default, rather than choice. But he made a virtue of that default, exploiting brick and the way it was laid, shaped, mortared, coursed; its internal strengths and weaknesses, the precise optimal size of a brick related to its shear values. He calculated the optimal size of reinforcement, the strength and dimensions of the mortar, the way to pre-stress a fabric, not just a beam, and the precise points where there is zero tension in a curved structure which allows a lens that can be filled with glass. Given the economics of Uruguay over Dieste’s career, the use of brick was perhaps not a choice, but a given. Brick was the material culture of the region, and what Dieste consequently did with it is rooted in this fact. His focus was not diverted by a plethora of building materials giving endless choices and variations. The influence of the straitened economics of postwar Uruguay comes up in almost every essay on Eladio Dieste along with that modernist virtue of an economy of means. It is possible that straitened economies are the enablers of a kind of genius, which, when paired with a sense of place and material produce truly unique architecture. The material culture of architecture is based on an economic and political culture responsible for the supply of materials. While institutions of the state appear to have been given a generic, and for Uruguay, an expensive international style, Dieste was building factories, garages, churches, gyms. Brick was his, and their, material. n
from the top: Municipal Bus Terminal, Salto 1971-74 Service Station, Salto 1976 Camino de los Estudiantes, Alcalá de Henares, Spain 1996-98
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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