Carmen Apartment building, Ancon (north of Lima), built. India ink on Canson card stock, 24 x36” Atacocha mixed use building, ca. 1954, downtown Lima, unbuilt. Photocopy of original india ink drawing on glossy cardstock, 24 x36” Tauro Building & Cinema, 1956-58, downtown Lima, derelict. Black and white photograph of the rendering, 1959 Las Sirenas apartment building , 1959, Santa Maria del Mar, partially demolished. Studio black and white photograph of india ink drawing over gloss cardstock, 8 x12”
Looking back to yesterday is sometimes a painful exercise filled with unbuilt broken dreams blighted with memories of naïveté and wasted time, written or drafted on fine decaying paper, as if taken from an old noir fiction novel or Eduardo Galeano’s 1973 classic, Open Veins of Latin America . Literature might be considered closer to architecture than any other classical art, for its compositional structure, magnitude and temporal narrative. A careful selection of chapters and pages can bring forward a comprehensive account of the piece, but it is mainly in the verisimilitude that fiction becomes tangible, where the project becomes alive and by simple observation we can make the author’s experiences our own. By admiring the silent beauty of architectural drawings, the support of material acquires another dimension beyond its informative task. This is how we choose the precise chapter where the recent past of our magic realist journey can be found. One leading, but quiet, figure of Peruvian modern architecture was Walter Weberhofer (1923-2002). In his seminal projects Weberhofer condensed the broad universality of the modern movement with the tectonics of pre-Columbian architecture, and the American-Spanish baroque heritage of dense adobe walls. He achieved this mix through decision, conviction, enthusiasm and three pencil grades highlighted with watercolours, or in ink with applications of tempera or coloured pencil, writing down the new Latin American spirit set by Brazil when postwar South America was living a moment of fast change, the promise of a utopia and long-awaited development.
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