Complejidades Visibles e Invisibles: Casa de Té Japonesa, Frank Lloyd Wright, Tadao Ando, Hans Scharoun e Ivan Leonidov

Imaginemos a un historiador o escritor de ensayos como a un cocinero. La heladera es la historia, y dependiendo de qué plato se elija confeccionar, seleccionaremos las materias primas, los elementos y artefactos de la cocina y por supuesto aportará a la distinción, especies y toques personales. Si no es hábil en la profesión, repetirá mismos ingredientes, mismos procedimientos y comeremos siempre lo mismo, aunque disponga un título imaginativo para cada plato. Desde que leí esta nota hace más de diez años, y de la cual transcribo sólo la última parte, me asombró la habilidad de Chris Abel para moverse muy suelto entre los hechos de la historia e hilvanar un escrito claro, y bien fundamentado. Muchos ingredientes no aseguran un buen plato, y conseguir un equilibrio y sabor entre ellos requiere de conocimiento y seguridad en las relaciones. Y sobre todo no alejarse del objetivo principal trazado. Espero lo disfruten.

"Local Space, Global Mind. Japanese space concepts, which are fundamentally different from the logocentric Western concepts Tschumi et al seek to escape, may provide other valuable lessons. In the Western tradition of geometrically defined space, the designer assumes a more or less passive observer, able to grasp the entire space concept from a static viewpoint. The designer’s vision is total and complete in itself; the observer, merely partakes of what has been wholly predetermined by someone else. By contrast, the Japanese tradition of movement space assumes a mobile observer and constantly changing viewpoint. In place of a single, unitary view, Sukiya Style houses and gardens offer a series of sequential experiences whose spatial relations are invariably obscured by discontinuous or intervening events. The observer knows where has he been, but not where is going. Japanese architecture offers up an incomplete world inviting participation. It exists as much in the observer’s mind as it does in the designer’s, whose work is meaningless without the other’s involvement. All this, it may be noted, is achieved in building terms by the use of a basically simple rectangular module, the tatami, used in a loose and irregular fashion. Neither does Japanese architecture pretend to be all things to all men, nor succumb under the weight of its own intricate cosmology. Each building or garden offers a highly localized experience, so that the universal and particular co-exist in subtle and complementary relations appropriate to the scale of the design. Though Western Modernists were influenced by Japanese architecture, the decentric quality of Japanese space was lost on most of them, including Frank Lloyd Wright, who imposed his own hierarchical compositions and values, negating whatever qualities of openness he strove for. Hans Scharoun recaptured the idea of movement space for postwar Modernism, producing a series of complex sequential spaces which can only be appreciated by passing through them. Preferring non-orthogonal geometries, he also showed they needed just as mush, if not more discipline and restraint as conventional forms. At the Berlin Philharmonic, Scharoun achieved in three dimensions what Japanese had only achieved in a horizontal plane, creating a stunning space in the entrance foyed best experienced when full of strolling concert-goers. Where Scharoun’s spaces represents a conceptual shift from West to East, Tadao Ando’s work represents and equivalent shift from East to West. While Ando’s handling of movement space and his sensitivity to nature derive from local traditions, his recent compositions strongly resemble those of Russian Constructivists and Suprematists of the 1930s. Like Chernikov, Leonidov or Malevich, Ando favours simple shapes arranged in a free fashion. The resultant complexity and dynamic quality in his work arises from the tension between the purity and simplicity of the rectangular and circular forms of the different elements, and their free juxtaposition and intersections, which often disrupt the simpler order. However, unlike most Constructivists, and certainly unlike most so-called Deconstructivists, Ando restricts the number of distinct elements and controls their fragmentation in accord with the scale of his programme, and not least with the landscape, to wich everything in his architecture answers. Like the best work of other modern regionalists, Ando’s architecture simultaneously reflects both the local space of nature and the global mind of human culture, of which the Internet and cyberspace are now a fast growing part. We have yet to see what kind of architectural dialogue might be produced out of a conjunction of all the technological, social and cultural developments described here. But for the time being, Ando’s simple shapes arranged in complex relations provide an appropriate metaphor for the changing world we now inhabit, and for the evolutionary processes which have made it the way it is."
Ultimo párrafo del artículo titulado "VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE COMPLEXITIES", escrito por Chris Abel y publicado en la Architectural Review en Febrero de 1996.
Las imágenes corresponden a Casas de Té Japonesas en Los Angeles, Capilla del Monte Rokko de Tadao Ando en Kobe, Instituto Lenin de Iván Leonidov y Filarmónica de Berlín por Hans Scharoun; fueron tomadas de la Web y pueden tener derechos.
Editado por el arq. Martín Lisnovsky.