The work created in my studio doesn’t start only from architecture but is nourished by different sources: cinema, music, dance, painting, or literature are, in many occasions, what give guidelines to my spaces.
For me every project has always been a constant search, I don’t have a predetermined system or repeat a former project, but in each new project I want to be able to discover and experiment new possibilities. In this way each project has a special character that opens me diverse possibilities to do the next one. Each project is a window that opens and drives me to another.
Iván Juárez, Barcelona, 2009
Endless. landscape observatory.
Site- specific intervention at the Joya Honda crater. Desert of México (Tropic of Cancer)
Ser el desierto es ser la vida que no cesa de seguir adelante.
El desierto no es el vacío sino el esfuerzo denodado, la
paciencia infinita, el gozo de lo poco y lo breve
A few kilometers south of Tropic of Cancer, in the desert of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, is located the Joya Honda volcano, which is a large elliptical crater (800 x 1,200 m), excavated more than 200 meters below the pre-volcanic surface. A Quaternary maar of unusual type that was formed about 1.1 million years ago, from the interaction of groundwater with rapidly ascending intraplate-type basanitic magma in which the local aquifer characteristics controlled the style of eruption and the nature of its deposits.
Conceived to provide a place for self-reflection, the site specific intervention, endless, consists on an approach to the landscape context of Joya Honda crater, in which the notion of time and temporality constitutes the essence of the work. An observatory- piece that emerges from the landscape to define a new relation of human beings with their intimate perception of the desert. An introspective piece to reflect about the empty immensity of the landscape: earth, sky, silence, loneliness, endless.
The intervention, proposed as an interactive and sensitive piece that explores the natural environment through the personal experience, is related to its surroundings through diverse scales and visual levels. One hand, the observatory-piece invites towards a contextual approach to the place, towards the fixation of the moment facing the perception of the wide landscape, and on the other hand, establishes a more approximately scaled relationship at the ground level, in which people can recognize and observe in detail the textures and colorful layers of the inner side walls of the volcano crater and observe in detail each one of different types of desert species.
The project was made by Iván Juárez . x-studio, with the support of Fund for Culture and Arts Program, San Luis Potosí, Mexico.
