The island as a closed, finite place, with endemism as a possibility. The island as the place of the omnipresent horizontal limit.
The desert, conversely, has no limits: indefinite and infinite. It can only be inhabited through movement; nomadism is a necessary condition of survival.
The mountain as experience of the vertical limit; as an attempt to fly, the Icarus syndrome with its possible ending.
In these cases, the refuge finds its primal expression.
Architecture – that prosthesis sometimes necessary for survival – is presented in its initial condition. As degree zero.
ISLAND
The desert, conversely, has no limits: indefinite and infinite. It can only be inhabited through movement; nomadism is a necessary condition of survival.
The mountain as experience of the vertical limit; as an attempt to fly, the Icarus syndrome with its possible ending.
In these cases, the refuge finds its primal expression.
Architecture – that prosthesis sometimes necessary for survival – is presented in its initial condition. As degree zero.
ISLAND
“Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone, or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, beginning anew, recreating. […] the island is also the origin, radical and absolute.”
Gilles Deleuze “Causes and reasons of desert islands” in L’île déserte et autres textes,
Ed. de Minuit 2002.
Ed. de Minuit 2002.
Islands, finite, enclosed spaces: the limit as condition and presence, as unifying moment. Small worlds in some cases extended by repetition: the archipelago, at times an architectural metaphor.
Islands traditionally raise two issues:
First, the priority of nature as an argument. On the continuous horizon of the sea, the figure unfolds with all the rhetoric of the landscape: mountains, rocks, trees, vegetation… these will be the materials that construct the image.
Second, human presence in the activity of construction, until recently limited by the possibilities (scarce) and the impossibilities (large). Examples of astuteness and symbiosis with the environment. Versions of the vernacular. In the past.
Now we have to add the transformation brought about by tourism and modernity.
Cosmopolitanism versus endemism.
DESERT
“In a landscape where nothing officially exists (otherwise it would not be “desert”) absolutely anything becomes thinkable and may consequently happen”.
Reyner Banham (“Scenes in America Deserta”)
Establishing links between the desert and architecture entails imagining an object facing its antagonist, a zero degree of the exterior: infinite, extreme, mobile and incomprehensible.
It also implies recalling that which architecture possesses of protection, of the interior, of opposition to nature.
Also that, in its early days, architecture compelled the radical use of available resources: a stick and a few strips of fabric (which we can take with us: one passes through the desert, one doesn’t stay), a few rocks we come across, some worked clay.
The desert seemed to be a good metaphor for starting to recognise ideas, places and essential architectures.
Instruments of survival.
MOUNTAIN
The mountain as a place apart, a special place. Distant.
As a bleak, inhospitable place, where architecture highlights protection and insulation, one of the themes that underlie our activity.
And then, in all cultures, mountains—some mountains—have sacred conditions, direct contact with divinity: the magic mountain. (I am thinking of Montserrat, Tindaya, Huayna Picchu, and many other places where architecture accompanies by constructing ritual, sacramental places).
The mountain as another situation of limits, as a final moment between earth and air, somehow symmetrical to the island, the interaction of earth and water. The architectures that we find so intensely here also draw on the relation between tradition and present, between endemism and cosmopolitanism.
The mountain as topographical irregularity, as inclination, where we, necessarily, have to introduce flatness, the horizontal surface. Tension between the ascending verticality of the earth and the need to build the horizontal—our habitat.
Josep Lluís Mateo
