Japanese influence in the architecture of Viaplana and piñon.


Discovering that one of the most outstanding duos, for its novelty of the concept design, which is separated from the rest of the landscape architectural authors shown, was fully immersed in these coordinates. Fruit of the "oddity" that presented their working, we believed them as out-Siders. Actually what happened to us is the result of profound ignorance that we suffer the western roots and conceptions outside the Judeo-Christian culture.

Western misery -apart- we have to prune it more possible for a more comprehensive, unfinished, real and humble of culture.

This duo comprised of a gentleman from Onda (La Plana Baixa) and one from Barcelona, are a renovator encouraged air to be inserted at the last batch of architects that stinks nominate the Mass-Mèdia, international architects.

The excellence and timeliness of this work lies in an effort feedback from one side to know the original conception of the world of the hands of Japanese Shinto and subsequent contributions of Buddhism, in particular the contribution of the sect Zen and the other, a greater understanding of influences between us and concrete architecture developed by staff as Piñón Viaplana.

While I tried to find out other characters in the area of the Balearic and Valencia influenced by Eastern thought was not possible and in any case is less interesting than the perpetrators brought here.
It is in Barcelona, as core more in touch with concepts most distant that from the 30s begins to be interested in such concepts.

In small nuclei avant-garde, we must not say so! Minorities selected. Ligue may differ, who are trying to find outlets other than those traditionally known. That's why it transcribes a text by Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, professor, art historian and winner of the prize Josep Pla 1972.

Widely spread among intellectual circles resistant, at a time when our people and their culture was severely persecuted and mocked-without the current subterfuge, I mean - by the Spanish dictatorship that bears witness to what I am talking about:
Faced with internal division caused between the desire to change the world and the inclination to compensate for the inability to do so by utopias of countries dreamed, appeared a third perspective. The exoticism of which tended to locate the ideal world somewhere real.

One of the moments of this exoticism, which was essentially Orientalism, appeared reading, the Book of the jungle Kipling, the story of a saint to whom the thieves had stolen the carpet and putting in new carpet otherwise expressly door, when thieves would return. I saw the model of a way of life as it should be believed.

But reading decisive for the valuation of the Middle over the European tradition was the Book of Tea, Okakura Kazuzo, published as a Flyer, illustrated with Japanese woodcuts, in "From Here and There", to my fourteen years. This reading aroused a certain area of conscience, as if it were a discovery of myself. The main doctrine that there is translucent was the Zen, which I found eloquent expression in a series of facts of my sensibility until then cornered by the European cultural pressure.

The doctrine of the emptiness I followed, and the preference for the asymmetrical. I felt exactly the idea that what counts in a Botija is not the same Botija, but precisely the emptiness, not Botija, which he leads.
I also saw, in another aspect, the valuation of the emptiness in a fable that has since been and is one of the cornerstones of my personal life: the legend of Peiwoh and harp.

It was the story of the harp wonderful that everybody was trying to play and which no harpist had reached more than boot sounds inarticulados. Peiwoh contributed to the attempt and emerged victorious, playing largely a wonderful melody. When asked how he had done, he said that others had tried sung themselves, forcing the harp to express something he was abroad. This had been submitted submissive. He had left it, between his hands, the harp play what she wanted. Then, the old wood of the instrument, which had been tree in the middle of the woods, sang storms and rains, winter and spring, throughout its history tree. So he had sung so emotionally. He said, very clear, Peiwoh that others had gone full of themselves. He, however, had been emptied of himself in front of the harp.

The aphorism that summed up this philosophy was the one who said that only Botija going to empty the fountain can collect water.

The doctrine of emptiness of Zen was also the asymmetrical. The school of the superiority of those things that do not claim to be whole-with which I understood they were limited-they're open-and obey well-lit at the beginning of life.

Most, I thought a lot about this subject and I saw that it was the manifestation of life in the fight against entropy.

Kakuzo made me realize things ridiculous of redundancy. From the European rhetoric puts a round plate in a cup round, a dinner in a dining room, a portrait of a head of company behind the chair of head of enterprise.

I did see the absurdity of flowers to decorate the vases of flowers, and so many faults of the delicacy of Westerners.

Moreover, the same tea ceremony brought me unforgettable lessons, such as respect for the pinocha that has fallen on slabs of the road and the need for cats to enter the house of tea to forget the whole pride, a prerequisite to any contemplation possible.

In the fourteen years, Zen had conformed to tail out of my world view and I practiced every time they watched nature. I knew that was the art of seeing the polar star at noon and look across the land that the stars are low.

I excite with passion. So tune with a phrase that came from Dostoyevsky to say that it is true that two and two are four, but that two and two are five is much more interesting.

Before it was invented dice to seven that it was more or less philosophy.

Zen prepared me to tune in a cordial manner with the first news of surrealism, who came across Josep-Vicenç Foix. I was interested in him with the same sense pilot with what I had cultivated the zenismo, the task of abolishing the border between reality and unreality, eve and sleep, logical and absurd.

There wasn't an irrational position. It was the will of cover all aspects of what exists, to believe that the unrealistic imaginations of hallucination, the game of fantasy, mythology or sleep, are also facts rooted in a set of natural causes or historical, so real as pilot, although not know.

He spent something similar with another of the fundamental aspects of zenismo: the taste for gambling, which also claimed surrealism.

It is also immaterial whether a collection, "FOTOSCOP" devoted essentially to Catalan culture in the most prominent such as Gaudi, Tàpies, Miro, Modernism, crafts, Ibiza (remember the praise of GATCPAC), etc.. In addition to issues of Finnish architecture, india, Eskimo, the world's toy, etc.. intercala "Japanese Art of the object", "Contemporary Japanese Architecture" and "Katsura-Daitokuji" the three produced by MS Lluïsa Borràs, one of aesthetics most successful of the moment, belonging to the circle of Cirici Pellicer and in contact with everyone in Thereafter, well ahead dovetailed into powerful editorials thereafter as may be Salvat, Destiny, 62 issues, etc..

On the other hand it must be said that we are at the end of the 60s and early '70, with all the wave of foreign influences and search more or less exotic encouraged by the rejection of war and Vietnam, Tibetan influence of the hands of The Beatles, etc.. Concurrent with the period of training and certification of the school of architecture in Barcelona in our players.

While the Valencian, with his doctoral thesis, who has focused more on the phenomenon of Catalan architecture, basically, about what is cooked in around the School of Barcelona. By also with editing and publishing several works is the exegete of the group. It is against the Barcelona who, in my view, developed between silences and little tangible-references, design East in general and Zen in particular its architectures.

I extracted a passage of Nationalism and Modernity in the Catalan Contemporary Architecture, Helio d'Piñón, where we can begin to spot the incardination of the development of knowledge as a tool for separating and other concepts that develop other architects of Barcelona. I think premonitory and enlightening of what will happen afterwards:

However, the panorama can be considered polarized by two extreme attitudes, for which you can put totalling spectrum.

For one, the project is a finding on which the success is guaranteed by an exemplary reasoning, while the object acquires a unique, unrepeatable, linked to their intrinsic artistic event of unforeseen condition. The act of invention is assumed that since the project is supporting an operation of nature quasi-literary, poetic side which is privileged, but often in conjunction with other components of the work. This behavior is part of full, in contrast, the convention of professional relationships: the details of the order laid down conditions for the possibility of form and at the same time constitute stimuli on which this work will have to produce. The effectiveness of direct object architecture, its ability to meet the basic requirements of physical or symbolic-which sets the agenda, is the sole condition that, from this perspective, justifies the practice of the project.

That patent medicine of the architecture would be, in this way, the set of principles capable of translating the pressures of the context in forms; the good sense and the accumulated experience constitute the critical support of a behavior that identifies, often, rigor and virtuosity, imagination and wit.

The form acquires status of infrastructure of an image that, here, reaches a substantive character; the evocation, the symbolic association, phenomena are frequently summoned from an architecture that one wants heiress of the one that, in concrete moments of the past, established decisive models of social interaction.
The use that, from this position, one acts as the history is literal, concrete; with the trasfer in ways nothing more but the decontextualisation of signs is not pursued, the current appraisal of which their coming symbolism must always be related.

The other one, however, understands the project as an essentially selfreflexive, cognitive activity and, therefore, in this sense, freelance.

The recognition of a specific disciplinary frame, the constant interaction of which with the cultural and productive environment the virtual presence of the context insures, allows to center the speech on the strictly formal relations; its limits establish the area of possibility of the form: the "real" conditions -the infrastructural aspects of the architecture as a productive system- do not fall upon the project in a direct, immediate way, but across the demarcation of the disciplinary area that characterizes each situation historical - cultural.

The form, as long as it is a system of abstract relations among elements of the object, inland and patent medicine of this, constitutes the component one he substantivates of this architecture; the eventual use, in the project, of fragments of pre-existent architectures - even in the cases in that for any motive they have acquired a previous symbolic value - it is decided according to their capacity to solve determinate requirements that it brings up the object in as much than formal structure: for their formal competence in a speech the nature of which always goes beyond them. That that could describe like a use "technician" of the architecture of the history is the way by which its symbolic neutralization is brought up. At any rate, the tension that is produced among the abstract use of historical architectures and the symbolic valency of these - their capacity to generate autonomous processes of signification - it characterizes the behavior of project commented on, in which only the haste or the myopia they will reveal of historicist.

Framed in these two attitudes -that they could consider themselves exemplified in the work of Clotet / Tusquets and of Piñón / Viaplana, respectively-, although with presupposition and very different purposes, the practice of the "literate" architecture more generalized in Catalonia solves with a diffuse mannerism that, in spite of its eventual skill -and, on occasions, boldness - does not achieve to conceal the consumeristic fundamental character of the operation in which it leans. The indiscriminate use of styles turned up cultural in circumstances and with different expectations of production, is a fact today enough generalized so that it can be shown as a differential feature of a sector of the current Catalan architecture. The internationalization of poetics and doctrines, previously reduced in| cliches and checkrooms; their irruption in the "market", the symbolic plus guaranteeing that it distinguishes the architecture "of quality", only with the follow-up of the instructions that offer the magazines, phenomena the signification of which only turns up determinate here due to having rooted in a practice that acts as the "liberal exercise of the profession" are the basis of the service -and the control of the efficiency- social and cultural of the architect.

The character and more hermetical demeanour, and however more hermeneutic of Viaplana, that the architecture itself rejects, at the same time, to explain the architecture with other instruments than is for not committing betrayal to her, he makes that is the ideologist of the group in the aspect of oriental influence, and more precisely zenista, in our opinion.

Because of that same have vain appropriate to bring some paragraphs extracted from an interview carried out to Albert Viaplana in the magazine Notebooks nº 175 at the year 1987 for Marta Cervelló and reproduced in the WORK book: VIAPLANA / PIÑÓN. Edited in 1996 by the C.O.A.C. and another carried out on the CROQUIS Nº 28, monographic number dedicated to their work.

"... The architecture has to limit to point out vaguely in a direction and disappear..."

"... but we limit to pointing out some times with the finger, and other to specify what in the place there was in a determining way. We have not made anything more than the one that was already there discovering."

"We can achieve the spatial experience searched if the itineraries, the points of view of the user and the situation of the pillars are the suitable ones. The architectural space has also its black holes, it is necessary to find them or to create them, to be able to construct that in another unthinkable way."

"... on the other hand, I do not believe, in the order to the architecture, at least, as it is a majority in the majority of the architects. For example, a set of rocks spread by a slope are orderly, without the need for following the transformations that have given them form and it has placed for them in the place that now they occupy, I see it him, with every evidence that there is an order."

"... I would like to live in an industrial plant average; something face in the pavilion of reception of the Heart Hall by Bernard Maybeck: a bed in a corner, a table in another, a sofa in the half one, a carpet, and a lot of empty space."

"The following section about the fate, the game and the aggressiveness of the monk-samurai they are there present, the fundamental consider for such of rounding of the what we talk:

"... the game, how speaker of the humor said you before, it is a form of knowledge that I have never left.
The aggressiveness is also something present to our works."

"I want my architecture to have the quality of the being living, and it does not matter that it is imperfect, ugly or beautiful. It frequents that of each it lives that unimaginable, until their definite disappearance. Only after having arrived at the destruction he can think to construct it. Then, if of case, with the strictest geometry."

Almost, with these words, the essence of the process of regeneration of the Sanctuary of Ise is expressed.

And another... "Our works search to have an entity, and once, whatever happens, have achieved it any more they will not be able to lose it|. If when a project is finished, anybody imposes us any change, the work will accept it, in the worst case, like an accident. A wrinkle more in the face, or a scar, they will not make another thing than to increase the intensity of their aura."

I also want to add some words of Aisako Suzuki to collation that, talking of the Japanese culture, and in particular of the sabi-wasi he suggests: "... the things do not have entity, everything flows. The things are suns compositions of different elements, then after a certain time one dilute to form some other compositions."
The luggage of knowledge that we have been able to acquire of the architecture, and more precisely, of the conception of the Japanese world expresses in the series of books and magazines, among other, besides a series that offers the Canal 33 this days about the Japanese culture that goes from the crop of pearls until a report of the tin of Biwa, near Katsura that a Japanese has photographed millions of times for decades and that in their conception expresses that he is always a different tin, of agreement to how he blows the wind, the type of waves that they are produced and the incidence according to the inclination of the jets of the sun, etc that we review in the section of bibliography summary. It is evident that the knowledge that have to treasure in a so short lapse of time, it does not surpass of that of a dilettante However, we believe that it has been a necessary discovery, after the effort and calls out it ignorance in that he was immersed.

It is, better than the word, to go to analyzing morphologically some of their works and their comparison with the architecture and Japanese motives of the tradition. Always taking into account the austere stylization, through the formal abstraction that the architects studied by a strong geometryc and the exhaustive use of industrial materials and contemporaries guided carry out.

Because of this it will be necessary that the supervisor of this work him converts, also, in accomplice of the direccionalitat looked for. Then some "Japanese" have happened by now, comparable to the abstractions and reelaboration of the Kikutake Kiyonori, Yamamoto Akio,Sakakura Junzo, Tadao Ando, K. Sejima / R. Nishizawa, etc.
Here it denotes a beginning of the plurality of used axes. We suggest that a use of requirements used in Katsura, they incorporate it into an inland. This yes, about a very guidelineness centime. The movement is from the axes of the Japanese landscape garden or Tsukiyama in the inland of a building that encircles the diverse functions.
In this Square that was an architectural milestone when constructed, we can perceive from the utilization of the Sakkei, represented in the window of the wall of seen blocks.

The sinuous snake or dragon that the benches of wood laths shape.

The sinuous placing of the inclined points of light, with respect to the plan the horizontal.

The screens of metallic centime that give shadow about zones where him there situate the visitors.

The introspective character of the intervention that it makes to forget the about no square.

Canopy of dimensions 30 x 30 x 15 m. that it does not stop being a reference to the oriental temples.
Where we, the divinities, are the citizens that we are placed in the shadow and internalizing entity in the square avoiding the influence of the hostile surrounding one.

The wavy silhouette of rumbles maritime of the inner passage.
Here we can observe the influence through the organic forms of the vegetal masses among half of one guideline inclined where the rest of compositions elements are backed up, even the typical crossroads in “Y” that appears to us in Katsura with the stones of stepping stone, and other places landscaped. The organic forms remember the forms cut of the water depth about role of rice and the water depths of the beams of ramma wood.

The deities’ stones to fall down of one random way, they are those of the Zen gardens of rocks and raked up sands.

It does not leave of him presence debris that proclaims the absence and the inner contemplation of those who penetrate.

The constructive way to leave the metallic straight feet also surprises us: one of them in the constructed inland of that and the other one on the garden. See comparatively pictures with the traffic spaces of both of them.
1) The palm trees of concrete associated with the flashlights are, stylized, the part superior of the flashlights of the gardens, sights of plan and materialized in concrete. Also the hats of the dancers of the folding screen of the dance of the Bugaku, are work of Sakai Sanpoin (17th century) Daigo-ji, Kioto.
Almost, for their situation, they have the same function as the Ishi-doro joint in the plants of small height and surrounding thickets.

2) The screens-visor, illuminated is continua Torii of welcome to the users.

3) The illuminated dragon, green (like the tea), it emerges from land in zigzag.

4) The global and fragmentary composition remembers certain elements compositions of the Hakkei-tei, as now the byobu of the room of the officer ostes where certain soldiers were hidden not to be annoying during the ceremony of the tea and however to protect the man of the house. And also the motive of the fusuma by bound canes and braided of bamboo with the separation in zigzag.
The use of the sakkei is evident in the explained one that sees the inferior part for the window of concrete.

The iterative use of an element the trapeze that generates an inner space, in this case the depression that drives the sight towards the inferior zone of the urban helmet of Badalona, it remembers the spatial organizations of Katsura that encircle the tin and the wooded mass.

The assembly of the pieces of concrete prefabricated they correspond a type of carpentry board that the Japanese carpenters use, according to G. Fahr-Becker, since in Europe we come to use about twenty types of boards, and in Japan some a hundred and twenty. The type of using two L and leaving a piece of support in the middle of the piece that we clamp more one. The ornaments that you direct for us in the niche and cover us the sights correspond to a sakkei in negative prostrate those sights that they do not distort for us for us. Never symmetries in the designs of Viaplana and Piñón are appreciated. Tour cough, is iterative, with non radial axes, they are coupled to the topography. The cemetery is a walk, anything less Catholic. A place of meditation, of itinerant contemplation, with ways, with eclosion in the low part, with organic forms on the floor.