Dibujo de una libreta de viaje. El Escorial, España. Juan Borchers, 1948. / Travel book drawing. El Escorial, Spain.
Key 4: ARCHITECTURAL EXTENSION as a heterogeneous magnitude Although modernity conceived architectural extension as a mathematical ideal and therefore as alien to experience - detached from reality, preserving its objectual and self-referential status expressed in the complete indifference to place and local conditions (isolated, off-the-ground buildings) - Borchers poses that you can’t escape the context and tirelessly draws the landscape, places, objects and the changes on perception imposed by changes on the work caused by the different distances on which it is located. The remnants of perspective based on similarity and geometric analogy of figures remained in the architect’s design basis, causing what is far and what is near to have their resolution in a single geometric and abstract plane, not considering perceptual differences. By accepting the facts of reality, architectural extension then acquires connotation from the limits and changes in the perceptual phenomenon, depending on where the user is located and therefore considers the differences in the visual and tactile phenomena, incorporating them into the plastic definition of the work. To the acceptance of the limits of perception, that is, the capacity and perceptive reach of each sense, Borchers also adds the ability to discriminate, or when one perception is indistinguishable from a different one. With this, the work should consider the existence of a high degree of uncertainty and variability, according to light, distance, climate and the context in which it stands. The following question then arises: How can you have control of the form if the architectural elements are subject to continuous change? Until that time the various attempts to coordinate dimensions had considered the architectural object as fixed and immovable, and therefore capable of maintaining harmony and dimensions according to the simple proportional systems used as an aesthetic canon. The integration of variability of perception led him to establish a characterization of architectural extension based on the location of the subject, who defined from himself the differences regarding the context. Borchers distinguished the different
limits on the changes in perception, defining the immediate (objects at hand), the close (up to 20 m), the surrounding (up to 100 meters) and the distant (up to 2500 meters). These limits are determined according to experience and not theory. The margins of variation resulting of the changes affecting the placement site were incorporated into the dimensional system by factors of sensory discrimination. In the reality of a place, things were not possible to be considered as absolute and fixed. What in the distance remained flat and as a simplified silhouette, in the vicinity acquired roughness and detail. The Borchers discovery was that the variability relationships of form with different distances were a constant and were therefore possible to measure. The body and its sensory capabilities, while moving, brought these relationships along. Borchers investigated this situation and recorded on his travels how works behaved frontally. During the trip to Egypt and Morocco he draws in his notebooks what he called “remote architectures”; in Italy and Central Europe, the “surrounding” area; and in the forests of Sweden the “close” experience, to mention some locations. Therefore the body and its environment come together in a close relationship and architecture is conceived as mediation between both. When do objects lose their real condition of existence and move to another state? Where are the boundaries between perceptual changes? What good is superabundant baroque detail when we are over 100 meters away and only the large shapes remain? What about the construction of perspective when we are 10 meters away and it disappears as a spatial order? How to simultaneously incorporate all perceptual limits in the work? To answer to what his senses showed him, he had to find a new system to control form and dimension. From the landscape in the distance, to the railing on a staircase, the operation of the architectural system should be able to incorporate these limits and so the work becomes a new unit of perception and measurement. The extension of geometric space whose characteristics are homogeneity, isotropy (does not vary according to position) and endlessness, differs from architectural expansion space whose characteristics are the opposite, that is, heterogeneity, orientation and limitation.
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