SECUNDO LIVRO
BUILDINGS WITH WALLS TWISTING AND TURNING THIS WAY AND THAT
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Related to Stiloguedes is a group of buildings with walls twisting and turning this way and that, in the manner which Alberti found so disgusting. They are the first cousins of Saipal and Prometheus, the Smiling Lion and Kiti's dolls' house.
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The famous plan of the Hotel at San Martinho do Bilene gazes lovingly at its own beautiful inverted roof plan. A section and a perspective indicate how the Hotel was to be set into the dune. The Hotel concrete roofs and arched forms were to have been cast on sand mounds and then the sand removed. Water was to have run in the folds of the roofs and into the cascade between the restaurant and the lounge. The first great leak on purpose.
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Afterwards there was the Nelspruit Habitable Woman, but she only got as far as her knees. I saw the owner some years ago and he said he would finish it when he retires.
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The house haemorrhaging into the pool was for a friend in Beira.
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The Swazi Zimbabwe - Goedgegun. This is the younger sister of the Habitable woman who was nearly built for a dentist in Nelspruit.
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Those houses were a pretext for a manifesto: - Architects as Magicians, conjurers, Dealers in Magic Goods, Promises, Potions, Spells. Myself as Witch Doctor. It finished off something like this: "The mechanical and abstract rigours of our various systems and styles appear to be concerned with taking away, disguising, obliterating, the evidence of our whole selves. These self imposed systems do not deal with people and life, they asphyxiate by growing inwardly into themselves. We must become technicians of the emotions, makers of smiles, tear jerkers, exaggerators, spokesmen of dreams, performers of miracles, messengers, and invent raw, bold vigorous and intense buildings without taste, absurd and chaotic, to invent an architecture the size of life. Buildings shall yet belong to the people, architecture shall yet become real and alive, and beauty shall yet be warm and convulsive. |
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