Nader Tehrani / Probable Architectures of Improbable Reason

Prob­a­ble Archi­tec­tures of Improb­a­ble Reason

Confluence in the Work of Eladio Dieste: A Belated Book Review

Nader Tehrani

"The Collective Invention", 1934, Rene Magritte
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"The Collective Invention", 1934, Rene Magritte

"Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper", 1913, Pablo Picasso
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"Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper", 1913, Pablo Picasso

From left to right: "Cadavre Exquis" (Exquisite Corpse), 1938, André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy and "Photomontage", George Grosz
From left to right: "Cadavre Exquis" (Exquisite Corpse), 1938, André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy and "Photomontage", George Grosz
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From left to right: "Cadavre Exquis" (Exquisite Corpse), 1938, André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy and "Photomontage", George Grosz

CONFLUENCE: From the Seamless to the Exquisite Corpse

Con­flu­ence, from the Latin con­fluere,” sig­ni­fies the idea of flow­ing togeth­er,” a con­cept that is cen­tral to how artis­tic pro­duc­tion is often con­ceived: as frag­ments of ideas, arti­facts and nar­ra­tives woven togeth­er to cre­ate anoth­er real­i­ty. At the same time, what is inter­est­ing about the idea of con­flu­ence is that beyond the recog­ni­tion that two (or more) ele­ments are brought togeth­er, it con­notes that they some­how flow’ togeth­er with­out indi­ca­tion of con­flict, predica­ment or fric­tion. Thus, while many his­tor­i­cal pas­sages of art have had to con­tend with the chal­lenge of com­pos­ing var­ied pieces togeth­er, not all find mean­ing­ful ways to bring out the con­cep­tu­al dif­fi­cul­ties in the act of rec­on­cil­ing dif­fer­ences. In the 20th cen­tu­ry, Cubism, Col­lage, Mon­tage and Sur­re­al­ism were just four move­ments that dealt with the ques­tion of dif­fer­ence in sig­nif­i­cant­ly var­ied ways, and each played out those the­o­ret­i­cal posi­tions in accor­dance with the medi­um at work. Whether in paint­ing, sculp­ture or pho­tog­ra­phy, the medi­um was often instru­men­tal to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of even­tu­al inter­pre­ta­tions. As such, the dis­persed nature of the objet trou­vé’ in the Cubist col­lage con­tributes to an aes­thet­ic of frag­men­ta­tion that is cen­tral to the expres­sion of col­lage as medi­um. The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of irrec­on­cil­able real­i­ties in one image, the con­cur­rence of mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives in one view and the simul­tane­ity of front and back views of the same arti­fact are just some of the tropes that char­ac­ter­ize the ways in which these aes­thet­ic prac­tices were com­posed of mul­ti­ple real­i­ties, but delib­er­ate­ly denied of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of fusion, nat­ur­al flow or nor­ma­tive rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Alter­na­tive­ly, in the mon­tage of pho­tographs, this idea takes on a sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent dimen­sion, as we wit­ness the medi­um address het­eroge­nous real­i­ties that are blend­ed, graft­ed or fused togeth­er seam­less­ly to cre­ate images that, while seman­ti­cal­ly diver­gent, were nonethe­less for­mal­ly con­flu­ent. The same could be said of the paint­ings of René Magritte, whose depictions—in con­trast to the tech­niques of the exquis­ite corpse—are formed as sin­gu­lar, whole and seam­less real­i­ties even when their seman­tic aim is to dis­rupt, de-sta­bi­lize and chal­lenge the very canons of clas­si­cal real­ist rep­re­sen­ta­tion.1 [ 1 ] [ 3 ]

The Dominican Motherhouse, 1965 - 68, Louis I. Kahn, Plan. Image courtesy of Robert McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, Phaidon Press, 2005, 294.
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The Dominican Motherhouse, 1965 - 68, Louis I. Kahn, Plan. Image courtesy of Robert McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, Phaidon Press, 2005, 294.

Hadrian's Villa, Rome, Plan
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Hadrian's Villa, Rome, Plan

ARCHITECTURE: Between Construction, Representation, and Perception

In the con­text of archi­tec­ture, the ques­tion of com­po­si­tion­al dif­fer­ence has his­tor­i­cal­ly played itself out through a range of scales, tech­niques and aligned debates. Among them, the chal­lenge of syn­the­siz­ing mul­ti­ple typolo­gies (from con­fig­u­ra­tions in Hadrian’s Vil­la to orga­ni­za­tions in Louis I. Kahn’s Domini­can Moth­er­house), the dif­fi­cul­ty of rec­on­cil­ing dis­so­nant geome­tries (the cir­cle, the square and the struc­tur­al inven­tion of pen­den­tives and squinch­es) or the dif­fi­cul­ties of devel­op­ing a com­mu­ni­ca­ble lan­guage out of dis­so­nant gram­mat­i­cal frag­ments (from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s stacked totems to Robert Venturi’s com­plex and con­tra­dic­to­ry icono­graph­ic assem­blages) are three dif­fer­ent modal­i­ties of engag­ing dif­fer­ence, com­po­si­tion and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. A dis­cus­sion on typol­o­gy invari­ably deals with the mor­pholo­gies of orga­ni­za­tion­al sys­tems, the per­pet­u­a­tion of cer­tain pat­terns of con­fig­u­ra­tion over a long peri­od of time and the per­sis­tence of for­mal tropes over mate­r­i­al, func­tion­al and urban­is­tic dif­fer­ences. [ 4 ] [ 8 ]

The lat­ter two cat­e­gories, how­ev­er seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed, gain an uncan­ny con­nec­tion to each oth­er because of the dis­tinct way in which the idea of tec­ton­ics is con­strued with­in archi­tec­tur­al dis­course, between the actu­al­i­ty of con­struc­tion and the expres­sion of a build­ing. Com­mon­ly con­strued as the con­flu­ence between the arts and sci­ences, the nature of con­struc­tion is such that it is char­ac­ter­ized by a com­bi­na­tion of two fun­da­men­tal­ly dis­tinct imper­a­tives: the actu­al tech­ni­cal res­o­lu­tion of mate­r­i­al and geo­met­ric parts on the one hand, and on the oth­er the expres­sion of that rec­on­cil­i­a­tion: some­thing that is arguably root­ed in the inven­tion of an archi­tec­tur­al lan­guage in com­bi­na­tion with what I will call the optics of per­cep­tion.” These optics invari­ably deal with a mix of illu­sion, scenog­ra­phy and trick­ery, and are not reducible to the actu­al­i­ties of con­struc­tion. It is this rift between the dual-func­tion of tec­ton­ics that prob­lema­tizes the way in which archi­tec­ture oper­ates as a dis­ci­pline: effec­tive­ly what makes the build­ing stand up is nec­es­sar­i­ly not the same as what makes it seem to stand up and, as such, archi­tec­tur­al debates have inter­nal­ized the rel­e­vance of each cat­e­go­ry in com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent ways, and in accor­dance to the rel­a­tive tech­niques deployed. 

Hagia Sophia Pendentive, Photo by Steven Zucker
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Hagia Sophia Pendentive, Photo by Steven Zucker

Isfahan Squinch
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Isfahan Squinch

A clas­sic exam­ple of tec­ton­ics is root­ed in the idea of the enta­sis’ of a col­umn, where­by the per­cep­tion of weight is pro­duced in the cre­ation of a bulge’ in the Doric col­umn: a fea­ture cast in stone, as if it were a func­tion of the flesh. In oth­er words, tec­ton­ics deals with the slip­pery rela­tion­ship between fact and fic­tion, where the cold cal­cu­la­tion of tech­ni­cal solu­tions (stereotom­ic stone carv­ing) comes into con­ver­sa­tion with the art­ful craft­ing of per­cep­tion (the effect of grav­i­ty). Part of the curi­ous sophis­ti­ca­tion of tec­ton­ics deals with the intel­li­gent moral stan­dards it has to nego­ti­ate as it weighs ques­tions of truth ver­sus nar­ra­tive. As such, the enta­sis of the col­umn effec­tive­ly absolves us, as archi­tects, from the guilt of believ­ing in the fic­tion of its con­struc­tion; the nar­ra­tive of weight’ that bulges through the stone has its own verac­i­ty, notwith­stand­ing the actu­al mate­r­i­al per­for­mance of mason­ry and, thus, architecture’s moral com­pass inter­nal­izes this fic­tion as a cen­tral part of its val­ue sys­tem. This inter­pre­ta­tion of tec­ton­ics also casts a more chal­leng­ing light on the theme of con­flu­ence, dis­al­low­ing, us to nat­u­ral­ize the pair­ing of het­ero­ge­neous sen­si­bil­i­ties, mate­ri­als and orga­ni­za­tion­al sys­tems togeth­er uncrit­i­cal­ly: whether in ser­vice of an organ­ic whole, or the rev­e­la­tion of dis­crete parts, the tech­ni­cal pro­to­cols of con­struc­tion and their effects remain two par­al­lel con­structs, in both dia­logue and fric­tion. [ 9 ]

St. Mary Woolnoth, Nicholas Hawksmoor
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St. Mary Woolnoth, Nicholas Hawksmoor

Column Entasis
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Column Entasis

ELADIO DIESTE: From Structural Determinism to Improbable Architectures

The pur­pose of this essay, then—by way of detour to Uruguay—will be to re-exam­ine the ques­tion of con­flu­ence in the work of design­er’ Ela­dio Dieste on the occa­sion of the twen­ti­eth anniver­sary of his pass­ing. Belat­ed­ly, it will also offer an occa­sion to revis­it Stan­ford Anderson’s book Ela­dio Dieste, Inno­va­tion in Struc­tur­al Art, which still serves as the crit­i­cal bench­mark on the work of a great, yet less­er known, 20th cen­tu­ry thinker who oper­at­ed out­side of the mod­ernist canons. In revis­it­ing the past, this is also an occa­sion to con­struct a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive around the work, and even inter­pret it through a dif­fer­ent lens. Iden­ti­fy­ing Dieste as a design­er does not do jus­tice to his pro­tean abil­i­ties, but here it serves pro­vi­sion­al­ly to prob­lema­tize the var­i­ous char­ac­ter­i­za­tions that have been cast onto him in pri­or texts. As a pro­fes­sion­al engi­neer,’ Dieste worked an entire life­time, address­ing chal­lenges of struc­tur­al design in an Uruguay of restrict­ed means, putting his knowl­edge and spec­u­la­tive spir­it towards the com­bi­na­tion of mate­r­i­al explo­ration, cal­cu­la­tions, graph­ic sta­t­ics and the con­struc­tion of pro­to­types to advance the propo­si­tion of some of the most extra­or­di­nary struc­tures built to date. How­ev­er, his sta­tus as an archi­tect is almost always left open-end­ed, in part, because of the inge­nu­ity of his struc­tur­al insight, such that all argu­ments are led to the inevitable pos­i­tivist slant prof­fered by struc­tur­al deter­min­ism thus leav­ing some of the com­plex­i­ties of his archi­tec­tur­al deci­sions unad­dressed.2

There is lit­tle schol­ar­ship that miss­es the tar­get in iden­ti­fy­ing the engi­neer­ing inge­nu­ity of each of Dieste’s struc­tures, and with­out excep­tion Ander­son, Allen, Ochsendorf, Pedreschi, Lar­ram­be­bere and Cac­eres all cap­ture the detailed rela­tion­ship between struc­tur­al analy­sis, mate­r­i­al spec­u­la­tion and for­mal inven­tion; but few focus on the archi­tec­tur­al in any detail. They iden­ti­fy, with clar­i­ty, the dis­ci­plined and method­i­cal way in which Dieste worked, and the many struc­tur­al typolo­gies he test­ed through mul­ti­ple iter­a­tions, com­posed of four cat­e­gories: Gauss­ian Vaults, Self-sup­port­ing Shells, Fold­ed Struc­tures and Ruled Sur­faces. While each author is dis­tinct in their approach, work­ing in depth through var­ied areas of schol­ar­ship, what is con­sis­tent about the five essays is the way in which art and sci­ence are brought into con­flu­ence, reveal­ing with great ana­lyt­i­cal pre­ci­sion how Dieste worked with the sci­ence of engi­neer­ing to achieve geo­met­ric and struc­tur­al feats that are deemed great works of art.’ There is also an ide­o­log­i­cal dimen­sion to these essays because their point of depar­ture is char­ac­ter­ized by a pre-ordained and lov­ing accep­tance of the affect’ of these projects: inso­far as the projects gen­uine­ly tran­scend the terms of every­day build­ings, the devices behind these trans­for­ma­tions are also left to some degree of won­der. They are always treat­ed with sci­en­tif­ic fideli­ty, but alter­na­tive­ly, they are also left in the inef­fa­ble fog of artis­tic val­ue as an after­math. Some­where in between, the nature of the archi­tec­tur­al dis­course and rhetor­i­cal inten­tion­al­i­ty of the lan­guage Dieste pro­duced is left open, and this is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to engage that lim­i­nal intel­lec­tu­al space.

Door of Wisdom ("The Gull"), Salto, Uruguay
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Door of Wisdom ("The Gull"), Salto, Uruguay

Church of Christ the Worker, 1958 - 60, Atlántida, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.
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Church of Christ the Worker, 1958 - 60, Atlántida, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.

Gymnasium, Durazno, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Nader Tehrani
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Gymnasium, Durazno, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Nader Tehrani

THE PRESENCE OF THE STRUCTURAL FIGURE: Between Performance and Signification

Ander­son appeals to Dieste’s own metaphor of a dance with­out effort” as the basis for the jug­gling act between the effi­cien­cies of engi­neer­ing and the kinet­ic qual­i­ties attrib­ut­able to his struc­tur­al shapes. The fig­u­ra­tive nature of the metaphors are a cen­tral part of that iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, like the Sea Gull” canopy in Salto, whose form appears as two half-arch­es, but upon exam­i­na­tion, is revealed to work as a sin­gu­lar beam, oper­at­ing in a per­pen­dic­u­lar axis to the arch because of its pre-ten­sioned mem­bers. Imbed­ded behind the idea of the fig­ure is an artis­tic notion that is some­what of a self-ful­fill­ing proph­esy: on the one hand, the pos­i­tivist idea that these fig­ures are the result of struc­tur­al deter­min­ism, and on the oth­er, that they achieve a cer­tain sym­bol­ic poten­cy because of their pro­ject­ed alliance with nature—whether as sea gull,’ wave’ or gill’—all allu­sive fig­ures that are encrypt­ed with­in his var­i­ous projects. Here, nature and tech­nol­o­gy are brought togeth­er in an ide­o­log­i­cal entwine­ment, each legit­imiz­ing the oth­er in what I have char­ac­ter­ized pri­or as the con­flu­ent: that which appears to nat­u­ral­ly flow from one state to anoth­er. I will try to argue that the efforts of Dieste were far from nat­ur­al, nor con­flu­ent in the ide­o­log­i­cal sense of the term: instead, he intro­duced devices and archi­tec­tur­al instru­ments into these projects that were delib­er­ate not only in their arti­fice, but also in pro­duc­ing effects that brought the actu­al and the per­ceived into a more com­plex and con­tra­dic­to­ry set of results. I bor­row Venturi’s the­o­ret­i­cal appa­ra­tus here with the idea of extend­ing the rich­ness of Dieste’s archi­tec­tur­al oper­a­tions beyond the deter­min­is­tic and, in turn, to under­line Venturi’s own intel­lec­tu­al lat­i­tude beyond the seman­tic. Though left unwrit­ten, one can imag­ine how the forces of struc­ture could work into the com­plex and con­tra­dic­to­ry, to reveal the pow­er of improb­a­ble rea­son, and the pos­si­ble archi­tec­tures it could produce—especially under the aus­pices of Dieste. [ 10 ] [ 12 ]

INVERTING THE HOST AND PARASITE: The Semantic Allure of Composite Systems 

Ed Allen’s con­tri­bu­tion to the book iden­ti­fies the impor­tant con­nec­tion between graph­ic sta­t­ics and the devel­op­ment of mason­ry vaults, link­ing the lay­ered ceram­ic work of Guastavino—who rad­i­cal­ized the effi­cien­cies of mate­r­i­al usage—to Dieste, whose fur­ther work on numer­i­cal the­o­ry in the con­text of math­e­mat­ics estab­lished mor­pholo­gies that were com­plete­ly impos­si­ble in the times of Guas­tavi­no. What is impor­tant is how Allen speaks to the con­flu­ence of the intel­lec­tu­al and the prac­ti­cal to reveal how key moments in his­to­ry are able to cat­alyze rad­i­cal­ly new inven­tions and the pro­duc­tion of new forms of knowl­edge; he effec­tive­ly links Dieste’s depth of knowl­edge in math­e­mat­ics to the his­to­ry of con­struc­tion from the point of view of labor. It is no secret that Dieste’s agency in advanc­ing his research was pri­mar­i­ly through prac­tice,’ and that the pro­fes­sion was some­how a vehi­cle to deliv­er on a social con­tract that over­comes the rar­efied nature of the actu­al research itself. Dieste’s work was deeply imbed­ded in the idea of labor, the com­mu­ni­ties it upheld and the tech­nolo­gies that were avail­able to them. Thus, his focus on mason­ry was cen­tral to his social engage­ment, draw­ing the raw mat­ter from the very earth of Uruguay, and plac­ing it in the hands of the many local crafts­men to serve as basis for the extra­or­di­nary struc­tures he conceived. 

With impec­ca­ble detail, Allen cap­tures the impor­tance of the vicis­si­tudes of mason­ry vault­ing, but here it would be impor­tant to point out a detail that is some­how missed, even if well-artic­u­lat­ed in the work of Dieste him­self. It is a com­mon­ly held notion that Dieste was a mas­ter of mason­ry, and that he cer­tain­ly was. At the same time, it was the strate­gic way in which he brought the con­flu­ence of math­e­mat­ics, geo­met­ric think­ing, the pro­to­cols of con­struc­tion, mate­r­i­al inno­va­tion and his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge into dia­logue that made pos­si­ble the types of inven­tions he unleashed. Of the many things he enabled, arguably the most powerful—and timely—of them was the strate­gic use of steel, not mason­ry. Giv­en the cost of steel being rel­a­tive­ly high in com­par­i­son to mason­ry, it is poignant how Dieste adopt­ed a lim­it­ed, but strate­gic use of steel—whether through rebar or pre-ten­sion­ing cables—to sup­port his struc­tures. With labor being afford­able, he was able to absorb the costs in a way that yield­ed max­i­mum ben­e­fit to the very struc­tures he sought to opti­mize. And though our eyes only see mason­ry on the sur­face of Dieste’s work, his actu­al con­tri­bu­tion lies under­neath it, in the dif­fi­cult inser­tion of steel pre-ten­sion mem­bers that work in dia­logue with ceram­ic units. In this sense, Dieste’s main con­tri­bu­tion to struc­tures resides in the medi­um of com­pos­ites’ in the first instance (much like Candela’s con­crete shell struc­tures), and his use of mason­ry is arguably sec­ondary to it. The mason­ry was a giv­en:’ it came from the earth, it could be han­dled with­in an afford­able labor econ­o­my, and each unit was easy to car­ry, thus requir­ing min­i­mal cranes. The steel, instead, enabled the mason­ry to fly. From a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, it is inter­est­ing to imag­ine Dieste’s thought process in estab­lish­ing his curi­ous inven­tions. If his edu­ca­tion had pre­dis­posed him towards the cal­cu­la­tion of steel and con­crete con­struc­tion, then the idea of com­pos­ites was actu­al­ly ger­mane to his ongo­ing think­ing; thus, the steel rein­force­ment was a giv­en, and the mason­ry a devi­a­tion from the very con­crete that the acad­e­my would have pre­sent­ed to him as a foun­da­tion. Alter­na­tive­ly, if his his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge of mason­ry, as load-bear­ing struc­tures, was the launch­ing pad of his think­ing, then the steel would be seen as a rad­i­cal agent in enabling a form of per­for­mance that is entire­ly alien to the con­ven­tion­al mason­ry struc­ture. No mat­ter the per­spec­tive, the pres­ence of the mason­ry grain, in con­trast to smooth con­crete, offers a stark tec­ton­ic con­trast, and one that is famil­iar and strange at the same time: famil­iar because mason­ry is com­mon­ly used in the region and part of a known vocab­u­lary, strange because the new con­fig­u­ra­tions of mason­ry lay­out pro­duces a behav­ior that rad­i­cal­ly belies its con­ven­tion­al image.

Julio Herrera y Obes Warehouse, 1979, Montevideo, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.
Julio Herrera y Obes Warehouse, 1979, Montevideo, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.
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Julio Herrera y Obes Warehouse, 1979, Montevideo, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.

Julio Herrera y Obes Warehouse, Montevideo. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.
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Julio Herrera y Obes Warehouse, Montevideo. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.

The pow­er of com­pos­ites, as his­to­ry has demon­strat­ed, lies in their ver­sa­til­i­ty of for­mal and dynam­ic per­for­mance. For this rea­son, we wit­ness the use of fiber­glass and car­bon fiber com­pos­ites in the con­struc­tion of air­planes, cars and boats, under­stand­ing the strength of both com­pres­sive and lat­er­al forces on these vehi­cles. With­in the sec­tion­al pro­file of the com­pos­ite pan­el, the hon­ey­comb shell offers simul­ta­ne­ous depth and light­ness as well as a medi­um through which com­pres­sive and ten­sile forces are bal­anced, while the car­bon fiber skin offers a counter-brac­ing to the pre­vail­ing forces on the core, whether in ten­sion or com­pres­sion; the sum total of the com­pos­ite pan­el gives an effi­cien­cy like no oth­er. Dieste’s roofs were com­pos­ites first, mason­ry sec­ond, and here it is impor­tant to iden­ti­fy the lay­ers at work in his var­i­ous vaults. While they are all a com­bi­na­tion of mason­ry as a low­er lay­er, steel rods laid in between or on top of mason­ry units, with a pour of con­crete to cap it off, the actu­al sec­tion­al com­po­si­tion of the vaults var­ied from struc­ture to struc­ture. If the Church of Christ the Work­er in Atlanti­da was com­posed of sol­id mason­ry as a sub­strate, the Gauss­ian Vaults of the Julio Her­rera y Obes Ware­house are com­posed of void­ed blocks, mak­ing the con­nec­tion to hon­ey­comb pan­els much more leg­i­ble. Accord­ing­ly, since the vaults in Atlanti­da work as beams, the steel ten­sion rods that are insert­ed with­in the val­leys of the cross sec­tion help to can­cel its hor­i­zon­tal thrust, and the Gauss­ian vaults of the Julio Her­rera y Obes Ware­house con­tain steel pri­mar­i­ly for the lat­er­al and eccen­tric forces to address the ten­sion on the sur­face. If the steel in Atlanti­da is con­cealed, it high­lights the sacred aspi­ra­tions of the space –to mag­i­cal­ly float, where­as in the Ware­house, the unpre­ten­tious rev­e­la­tion of the steel ten­sion rods dis­plays the util­i­tar­i­an qual­i­ty of a work­space with­out rhetoric or spec­ta­cle. In both cas­es, we may be led to change the nar­ra­tive that guides our under­stand­ing of Dieste’s con­cep­tu­al terms, invert­ing the role of the host and par­a­site: Dieste, the great engi­neer of steel con­struc­tion, who used geom­e­try as struc­ture, mason­ry as skin and con­crete as glue. The con­flu­ence of these ele­ments is also a nec­es­sary mech­a­nism for the suc­cess of his com­pound struc­tures, as the size of the brick allowed for pix­els’ small enough to build up sur­faces that could curve in two direc­tions, using the elas­tic­i­ty of mor­tar to flex the geom­e­try where the brick unit can­not. [ 13 ] [ 14 ]

BEYOND CONVENTIONAL OPTIMIZATION: The Architect of the Horizontal Beam

John Ochsendorf refers to Dieste as a struc­tur­al artist,” in effect, pair­ing up the two dis­ci­plines, with engi­neer­ing giv­ing rea­son to art, and art embody­ing the tenets of engi­neer­ing. As such, aes­thet­ic delib­er­a­tions on beau­ty and ele­gance tend to affirm that which is bound to rec­i­p­ro­cal notions of the fideli­ty between mate­r­i­al usage and per­for­mance, with the idea that struc­tur­al engi­neers pur­sue works of art through their pur­suit of effi­cien­cy, econ­o­my, and ele­gance in con­struc­tion.”3 If Ander­son appeals to the orga­ni­za­tion­al prin­ci­ples behind typol­o­gy to expli­cate Dieste’s com­po­si­tion­al deci­sions, he also attempts to his­tori­cize it in the con­text of oth­er mod­ernist prece­dents such as Le Corbusier’s Mai­son Jaoul, a build­ing that in appear­ance resem­bles Dieste’s own house, though root­ed in fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent struc­tur­al premis­es. Ochsendorf, on the oth­er hand, helps to place Dieste with­in a lin­eage of great engi­neer­ing mas­ters, all of whom were com­mit­ted to research­ing the rela­tion­ship between form and struc­tur­al behav­ior; from his own research on Gusa­tavi­no to the extend­ed works of Eif­fel, Tor­ro­ja, Freyssinet, Mail­lart and Isler, he appeals to the incre­men­tal advance­ment of mate­r­i­al sci­ences and struc­tur­al inno­va­tions as the basis of what makes Dieste so unique. In the think­ing of Ochsendorf, the exem­plary ele­gance of Dieste’s work emerges as a result of the expres­sion of thin­ness of its mason­ry shell, for instance, as wit­nessed on the edges of the Atlanti­da church. A com­mon trope also in the con­crete shells of Mail­lart, Can­dela and Isler, the thin­ness of con­crete is the result of an innate plas­tic’ medi­um, with the liq­uid state of con­crete being the mat­ter from which forms and geome­tries may be molded. 

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Cornice detail. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.
15

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Cornice detail. Photo by Ing. Gonzalo Larrambebere, Courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Sections. Image courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.
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Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Sections. Image courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.

In con­trast, and by choice, Dieste was reg­u­lat­ed by the cadence of the mason­ry unit, and he under­stood that he was a ser­vant not only to its physics, but also its uni­tized means and meth­ods of con­struc­tion. If the fin­ished state of con­crete con­ceals the pres­ence of steel by neces­si­ty (pro­tect­ing the steel from the ele­ments), it also tends to nat­u­ral­ize the pris­tine crust of con­crete that is char­ac­ter­is­tic of clas­sic mod­ern struc­tures. In con­trast, Dieste’s disciplinary—and stubborn—use of exposed brick pro­duces an edge con­di­tion of aggre­gat­ed mason­ry that floats perilously—and mysteriously—off the edge of the Atlanti­da Church, with­out evi­dent recourse to reason.

Here, the con­tra­dic­tion between per­for­ma­tive and optic evi­dence is poignant: if con­ceived as a mason­ry struc­ture, the edges of the Atlanti­da Church would sim­ply crum­ble under both com­pres­sive and lat­er­al forces. How­ev­er, since we know that the instru­men­tal pro­tag­o­nist in these struc­tures is steel, we also know that the brick edges are not slabs in the tra­di­tion­al sense, nor a mere exten­sion of the roof vaults. This is where Dieste’s delib­er­ate role as archi­tect’ becomes evi­dent: as required, he decides to estab­lish a perime­ter beam around the church, such that it takes the nec­es­sary com­pres­sive and lat­er­al forces. Yet, con­trary to the expect­ed ori­en­ta­tion of a beam, nor­ma­tive­ly opti­mized on a ver­ti­cal axis, he shrewd­ly rotates the beam into a hor­i­zon­tal for­mat. Seem­ing­ly irra­tional, this results in the now-famous­ly thin mason­ry edges of the Atlanti­da Church. We also know that the mason­ry edge is held in ten­sion by the very steel rein­force­ments with­in the vaults that require the beams on the perime­ter of the church: a sym­bi­ot­ic set of struc­tur­al forces act­ing upon each oth­er, akin to iso­met­ric body train­ing where the sym­met­ri­cal forces of the body are pit­ted against each oth­er. If, in gen­er­al, the math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­la dic­tates that the height of a beam is ele­vat­ed to the pow­er of three for the moment of iner­tia, oppos­ing the deflect­ing action of a force, in this vault, the hor­i­zon­tal thrust of the whole roof is pro­por­tion­al­ly high­er than any ver­ti­cal load that the ridge beam car­ries, result­ing in the inevitable hor­i­zon­tal­iza­tion of the perime­ter beam.4 Thus, the curios­i­ty of the building’s edges becomes under­stood as part of the tec­ton­ic grain of the build­ing. The brick bond­ing of the crust slaloms back and forth, estab­lish­ing an exact reci­procity between the fig­ure of the build­ing and the con­fig­u­ra­tion of its con­struc­tion. And yet, these very edges appear implau­si­ble, the result of a con­tra­dic­to­ry ratio­nal­i­ty, a fea­ture that adopts the steel rein­force­ment to con­tain the building’s edges in order to sup­port the vaults. [ 15 ] [ 16 ]

Port Warehouse, Montevideo, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste, Gaussian Vault Secton. Image courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.
17

Port Warehouse, Montevideo, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste, Gaussian Vault Secton. Image courtesy of Dieste Y Montañez S.A.

Gymnasium (Estadio Ernesto de Leon), Durazno, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Nader Tehrani
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Gymnasium (Estadio Ernesto de Leon), Durazno, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste. Photo by Nader Tehrani

THE CONSTRUCTIVE INTUITION: The Ruled Surface and the Saddled Beam

Pedreschi and Larrambebere’s essay on tech­nol­o­gy and inno­va­tion helps to fur­ther elab­o­rate some of the cen­tral themes of Dieste’s work, again couched in the ethics of truth, hon­esty and ser­vice to human­i­ty to which mason­ry inno­va­tions are com­mon­ly attrib­uted. With rig­or­ous detail both address Dieste’s devel­op­ment of a con­struc­tive intu­ition, cre­at­ing an alliance between his design sen­si­bil­i­ties in rela­tion to his per­sis­tent engage­ment with con­struc­tion as a cen­tral fea­ture of his intel­lec­tu­al evo­lu­tion. Among oth­er ele­ments, this essay deals with the inge­nious inven­tion of the Gauss­ian Vaults, the evo­lu­tion of which can be tracked through numer­ous projects over the years of Dieste’s panoram­ic career. With the abil­i­ty to with­stand forces beyond what a typ­i­cal vault can achieve, the Gauss­ian Vault is defined by a sin­gle sur­face dou­ble cur­va­ture whose spring-point edges are flat, while the vault sad­dles both up and down as it spans vast dimensions.

Beyond Pedreschi and Larrambebere’s argu­ment, what is remark­able in this struc­tur­al trope is its archi­tec­tur­al abil­i­ty to dis­cov­er rea­son amidst a host of var­ied yet con­flu­ent ali­bis. Evac­u­at­ed entire­ly of any struc­tur­al beams in the con­ven­tion­al sense, the thin com­pound sur­face is called on to span extra­or­di­nary lengths, pure­ly through its own fig­ur­al dis­tor­tion. The asym­met­ri­cal defor­ma­tion of the vault is defined by the added val­ue of the intro­duc­tion of nat­ur­al light into a large open space. The asym­me­try of the sky­light intro­duces a slope in the roof that invari­ably forces drainage to one side. Hence, the moment of inge­nu­ity: the intro­duc­tion of a saddle—in the form of a counter-curve in the vault—is such that in one for­mal swoop, the vault reori­ents itself ver­ti­cal­ly to con­nect with the plane of the cleresto­ry win­dow while also pro­duc­ing a con­struct­ed swale that redi­rects the water away from the glaz­ing, while pro­vid­ing added struc­tur­al strength at the bot­tom of the vault. In this sense, both sad­dles serve as flanges for the vault, rein­forc­ing it through a sur­face fig­ure while allow­ing the rein­forced steel to add com­pos­ite strength. The mul­ti­ple nar­ra­tives that are woven into this sin­gle sur­face describe the kind of phe­nom­e­na that I like to call archi­tec­tur­al con­flu­ence: the form is not deter­mined by a sin­gle ali­bi, nor a lin­ear form of rea­son­ing, evad­ing sim­plis­tic deter­minisms, whether struc­tur­al, func­tion­al or seman­tic. Instead, the tech­nique involves some­thing deeply root­ed in the archi­tec­tur­al dis­ci­pline: beyond the oblig­a­tion to solve prob­lems, the elab­o­ra­tion of a tec­ton­ic lan­guage, the inte­gra­tion of mul­ti­ple con­tin­gen­cies, and the invari­able syn­the­sis of het­ero­ge­neous parts. What is extra­or­di­nary is that Dieste’s func­tion­al frag­ments can­not be seen: the beam, the drainage and the sky­light are all absorbed into one for­mal, spa­tial and mate­r­i­al sys­tem, sup­press­ing their con­tra­dic­to­ry func­tions towards a sin­gu­lar fig­ure. [ 17 ] [ 18 ]

By exten­sion, what is par­tic­u­lar to Dieste is a sin­gle-mind­ed qual­i­ty we see in few oth­er archi­tects: the pen­chant to work in a sin­gle medi­um as a means to rad­i­cal­ize the per­for­mance of mate­r­i­al and pro­gram­mat­ic behav­ior. Inso­far as tra­di­tion­al tec­ton­ics is defined by log­i­cal dif­fer­ences in mate­ri­als in accor­dance with con­ven­tion­al func­tions, it is also a deep-seat­ed and his­tor­i­cal­ly ground­ed atti­tude that is impart­ed as part of the acad­e­my. Got­tfried Semper’s The Four Ele­ments of Archi­tec­ture comes from one such ide­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tion. For this rea­son the obsti­nate adher­ence to a medium—to make mate­ri­als go beyond what they are meant to do—is also a sig­nif­i­cant­ly defi­ant intel­lec­tu­al act. Since noth­ing can work in accor­dance with nor­ma­tive adap­ta­tions, it forces the archi­tect to tran­scend the terms of both mate­r­i­al and social con­ven­tions to pro­duce new forms, whose use will, in turn, chal­lenge every­day rit­u­als and prac­tices. We wit­ness some­thing sim­i­lar in the St. Petri Church of Lew­er­entz, where floors, walls and roof are all cast in brick, forc­ing each to dis­play the predica­ment of dif­fer­ence through the elab­o­ra­tion of brick bond­ing, in both struc­tur­al and icono­graph­ic terms.

19
Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Interior View of the Tower. Photo by Nader Tehrani
20

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Interior View of the Tower. Photo by Nader Tehrani

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, View Up the Tower. Photo by Nader Tehrani
21

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, View Up the Tower. Photo by Nader Tehrani

THE CATALYTIC DETAIL: The Stepped Tower of Altantida

What none of the writ­ers address­es direct­ly, but which they insin­u­ate through­out, is the degree to which the struc­tures of Dieste are bound to par­tic­u­lar mate­r­i­al rules. His direct reliance on, and engage­ment with, the con­struc­tion site is cen­tral to his research. Yet, none of the his­to­ri­ans speak direct­ly to the part-to-whole rela­tion­ships cre­at­ed by the mason­ry log­ics he deploys. In part, Dieste’s ini­tial adop­tion of brick is root­ed in the prin­ci­ple that links it to the cost of labor: first, the idea that labor was rel­a­tive­ly eco­nom­i­cal, sec­ond that the brick, as a unit of con­struc­tion, is designed around the dimen­sion of a hand, and third that an edi­fice of siz­able dimen­sions can effec­tive­ly be built by an indi­vid­ual if a self-sus­tain­ing part-to-whole con­struc­tive prin­ci­ple is at work.

The most direct and fas­ci­nat­ing archi­tec­tur­al dis­play of a cat­alyt­ic mate­r­i­al detail can be seen in the tow­er of Atlanti­da. From the out­side, the tow­er is com­posed of mono­lith­ic ver­ti­cal brick piers that are incre­men­tal­ly inter­rupt­ed by what seems to be a ver­ti­cal run­ning bond pat­tern, albeit at a mon­u­men­tal scale. On clos­er inspec­tion, and as is revealed by a view into its inte­ri­or, we dis­cov­er that the hor­i­zon­tal brick bands that make the so-called run­ning bond pat­tern are mere­ly the extrud­ed brick treads of a spi­ral stair­case that nav­i­gates all the way up the tow­er. The log­ic of the spi­ral stair, the bond­ing of the brick wall and the scale of the tow­er are all inter­wo­ven, but the seed for its incep­tion lies in a small detail of a stair tread and ris­er, whose engage­ment with the wall defines the log­ic of an edi­fice far greater. From a dis­cur­sive per­spec­tive, the archi­tec­tur­al allure of this strat­e­gy speaks as much to the log­ic of Trajan’s Col­umn in Rome as it does to the horse ramps at the Chateau de Cham­bord, both in their own ways weav­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the stair into the fig­ure of a tow­er. In the case of Dieste, with an aus­ter­i­ty of reli­gious restraint, his build­ings thrive on the rich­ness of abstrac­tion, and the refusal to orna­ment out­side of the tell-tale detail5: his cat­alyt­ic details are both struc­ture, orna­ment and the genet­ic code that releas­es the log­ic of how these curi­ous build­ings work.6

Giv­en his pro­tean abil­i­ties, the details do not nec­es­sar­i­ly repeat them­selves, but remain a crit­i­cal part of the log­ic of each struc­ture.7 For instance, if the Atlanti­da Tow­er estab­lish­es a tight reci­procity between tec­ton­ics and the func­tion of the stair, in the Gauss­ian vaults, Dieste devel­ops a loose fit between the grid of tiles and the geom­e­try of the vault. The loose fit allows him to con­tain the same num­ber of tiles in each row, while using the mor­tar as the elas­tic dimen­sion that per­mits the geom­e­try of the vault to expand and contract—in effect, an embod­i­ment of a wire mesh mod­el. In con­trast, Dieste’s self-sup­port­ing shells are com­mon­ly cut at the end of their extru­sions, slic­ing against the grain of the grid, if only to under­line the can­tilevered log­ic of the arch­es. They are not arch­es as such, but can­tilevered beams. [ 19 ] [ 21 ]

Church of San Pedro, Durazno, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste, 1967-71. Photo by Nader Tehrani
22

Church of San Pedro, Durazno, Uruguay, Eladio Dieste, 1967-71. Photo by Nader Tehrani

Church of San Pedro, Durazno, Axonometric Section from Eladio Dieste: Innovation in Structural Art (2004), Stanford Anderson
23

Church of San Pedro, Durazno, Axonometric Section from Eladio Dieste: Innovation in Structural Art (2004), Stanford Anderson

THE TYPOLOGICAL FIGURE: A Basilica in Abstraction

It is com­mon­ly held that the San Pedro Church in Durazno is Dieste’s most accom­plished archi­tec­tur­al work, but also some­how an out­lier in rela­tion to the oth­ers. A mere vis­it to the space is enough to silence both the archi­tect and the believ­er; I can attest to that myself, hav­ing just returned from a pil­grim­age. Set behind an old neo-Romanesque façade, the remains of a fire that gave rise to this com­mis­sion, the new space of the basil­i­ca is con­cealed behind this his­toric rel­ic, and yet locked into it as both struc­tures rein­force each oth­er on the lon­gi­tu­di­nal axis.

In con­trast to the church in Atlanti­da, the fig­ure of this church gains trac­tion from a deep-seat­ed fideli­ty to the church as an archi­tec­tur­al type. The plan of Atlanti­da, archi­tec­tural­ly inge­nious as it is, draws from the sen­si­bil­i­ties of the free-plan, and yet each and every fig­u­ra­tive ele­ment, whether wall or roof, has a struc­tur­al pur­pose, and there is no iden­ti­fi­able ref­er­ence to cul­tur­al con­ven­tions beyond that—it’s almost an entire inven­tion.8 Upon entry into San Pedro, the basil­i­cal impres­sion’ of the church as a cul­tur­al­ly encod­ed space is imme­di­ate and iden­ti­fi­able, though at the same time allu­sive, abstract and dis­ci­plined. The extrud­ed sec­tion­al pro­file of the basil­i­ca is unmis­tak­able, yet all the ele­ments that sup­port its sys­tems of struc­ture, illu­mi­na­tion and spa­tial orga­ni­za­tion are some­how missing…entirely evac­u­at­ed actu­al­ly. Effec­tive­ly framed with­in a mono­lith­i­cal­ly stacked-bond mason­ry orga­ni­za­tion, the fig­ure of a col­umn-less basil­i­ca is sus­pend­ed in space; the bond­ing sys­tem ampli­fies its struc­tur­al ambi­gu­i­ty. The effect of sus­pen­sion is height­ened by the fact that the roof over the nave mys­te­ri­ous­ly floats about two feet above the very walls that would con­ven­tion­al­ly sup­port it. The lon­gi­tu­di­nal walls of the nave are cant­ed out ever so slight­ly, angling towards the tilt­ed roof of the side-aisles, whose com­pressed wings spa­tial­ly but­tress the nave. What is hereti­cal about this space, in part, is its con­scious­ness of the his­tor­i­cal role that struc­ture has played in the con­cep­tion of a basil­i­ca, where­by the side-aisles of its antecedents were not only sup­port spaces for the nave, they were also the space of struc­ture, lodged in align­ment with the fly­ing but­tress­es, set with­in the same zone. Dieste repli­cates the spa­tial lay­out of this reli­gious type but evac­u­ates all fin­er grain ele­ments: the struc­tur­al piers, the bay orga­ni­za­tion, the cleresto­ry win­dows, side chapels, among oth­er things. Aban­don­ing the part-to-whole rela­tion­ship of the ele­ments with­in the type, he reveals some­thing irre­ducible about the spa­tial gestalt of the pro­file of a basil­i­ca, and in doing so, is able to dis­pense with any archi­tec­tur­al sur­plus in ser­vice of a struc­tur­al strat­e­gy that absorbs the struc­ture and skin into one extend fold­ed sys­tem, envelop­ing the entire­ty of the interior.

Indeed, the fram­ing walls around the nave are not mere­ly walls; instead, they are deep beams, run­ning the length of the church—from the main façade all the way to the sup­port­ing wall of the apse—with a depth of about 20 feet. The brick of the inte­ri­or cap­tures the stark light that comes through the reveals of the roof, height­en­ing the effect of weight, and depth. At the same time, the lev­i­ty of its com­po­si­tion beguiles, because one is unable to under­stand how the fig­ure of the church can be sup­port­ed in a struc­ture-less enclosure. 

The effect of this space is res­o­nant with a sense of absence: all the archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments, iconog­ra­phy and elab­o­ra­tions of the basil­i­ca are miss­ing, and yet what res­onates about the basil­i­ca as type, remains pro­found­ly dis­cern­able. In lin­guis­tic terms, we might analo­gize the oper­a­tions on this space to that of an ellip­sis: the rhetor­i­cal device that com­mu­ni­cates through omis­sion. And here­in lies the core of my argu­ment: that while Dieste’s pro­found knowl­edge of struc­ture was unde­ni­able, his con­tri­bu­tions were in ser­vice of an even more sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of tec­ton­ics, whose premise was to rec­on­cile the rela­tion­ship between struc­ture and its expres­sion. Giv­en his some­times-man­nered sense of rationality—and here, I would not want a con­fu­sion with the man­ner­isms of architecture—his self-con­scious visu­al tropes estab­lish a dif­fi­cult and some­times illu­so­ry rela­tion­ship with the real­i­ty of the build­ing, even when he is oper­at­ing with absolute faith­ful­ness to its struc­ture. Often cit­ed in the con­text of the baroque and man­ner­ism, Dieste is any­thing but; the lin­guis­tics of his mason­ry work are not of a lan­guage of scenog­ra­phy, but rather metic­u­lous­ly tied to a con­struc­tion sys­tem to which they were married—and revealed to be as such. [ 22 ] [ 23 ]

Worker's Kindergarden Illusion
24

Worker's Kindergarden Illusion

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Entrance Wall. Photo by Nader Tehrani
25

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Entrance Wall. Photo by Nader Tehrani

THE OPTICS OF TECTONICS: A Worker’s Kindergarten Illusion

Lucio Cac­eres, a for­mer stu­dent of Dieste, caps the book with a final essay as a trib­ute to his men­tor. Its mes­sage is a gen­er­ous one, reflect­ing on Dieste as a man, an engi­neer and cre­ator. It speaks of the har­mo­nious rela­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and engi­neer­ing in the vast body of work that Dieste leaves behind. Much is to be appre­ci­at­ed in this appraisal, and yet the insin­u­at­ed har­mo­ny helps to cam­ou­flage some of the more hereti­cal delights that I argue are the cen­tral plea­sures of this work. 

In one of Dieste’s most artic­u­late archi­tec­tur­al feats, he sep­a­rates the front façade of the Atlanti­da Church from its side­walls, such that one can wit­ness their struc­tur­al inde­pen­dence through a reveal that allows a stream of light to enter from the north. As such, he iden­ti­fies how the undu­la­tions of the side­walls con­nect to the roof as a pinned frame, a pure man­i­fes­ta­tion of a moment dia­gram. The front façade then, is con­ceived as a deep mon­u­men­tal por­tal that is spanned by a mason­ry screen wall com­posed of an aggre­ga­tion of small­er stacked diag­o­nal walls. The diag­o­nals dis­al­low views into the church while ensur­ing the pas­sage of light. In turn, the diag­o­nals pro­duce depth, as each lay­er stacks in the oppo­site direc­tion of the lay­er above and below it, pro­duc­ing a cof­fer­ing that func­tions vir­tu­al­ly like a truss. From a visu­al point of view, this screen wall appears to undu­late, cre­at­ed by an opti­cal effect that is com­mon­ly known as a kinder­garten illusion”—also known as a café wall or chess­board illusion—the off­set pat­tern­ing of an opti­cal illu­sion cit­ed first in 1898 as a graph­ic device. Here, this graph­ic device takes on a charged role, as the two media come into direct con­fronta­tion: a struc­ture embody­ing sta­bil­i­ty is faced with its own image as some­thing kinet­ic, vul­ner­a­ble and unsta­ble. From the inside, the beau­ty of this wall can only be described in opti­cal terms, as the pat­tern of light obfus­cates the fig­ure-ground rela­tion­ship between solids and voids. Since the eye is not per­mit­ted to see the actu­al win­dows, one can only intu­it the depth of the wall through the cadence of light, a stark reminder that the cer­tain­ty of struc­tur­al rea­son is in the ser­vice of a tran­scen­dent qual­i­ty of illu­mi­na­tion and illu­sion, and one that under­lines the crafty way in which tec­ton­ics cre­ates an alliance with optics over actu­al­i­ty. With this, the laws of physics and optics come into and improb­a­ble alliance—not nat­ur­al, nor har­mo­nious or obvious—but a mas­ter­ful aplomb of arti­fice to wit­ness. [ 24 ] [ 26 ]

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Interior View Towards Entrance Wall. Photo by Nader Tehrani
26

Church of Christ the Worker, Atlántida, Interior View Towards Entrance Wall. Photo by Nader Tehrani

I too obey the laws of physics.”9 Stan­ford Ander­son quotes Dieste, who towards the end of his life was suf­fer­ing from ill­ness and had reck­oned with the immi­nence of his pass­ing. That he did; he fore­cast­ed struc­tures through an impec­ca­ble under­stand­ing of physics as much as his body would suc­cumb to a degen­er­a­tive dis­ease that he, him­self under­stood to be his yield point. But beyond that, he dis­obeyed a myr­i­ad of oth­er laws requir­ing a sophis­ti­ca­tion of mind to bridge the art of rhetoric, optics and per­cep­tion to over­come the very laws of physics at work, draw­ing out the archi­tec­ture con­tained with­in the structure.

  1. 1

    The Col­lec­tive Inven­tion by René Magritte and Exquis­ite Corpse with André Bre­ton by Steve Wolfe, Ash­ley Bick­er­ton and Jan Hashey.

  2. 2

    Ela­dio Dieste was not a reg­is­tered archi­tect, so my argu­ment does not dwell on his pro­fes­sion­al sta­tus, but rather on his dis­ci­pli­nary insight, which most often out-mer­its the great­est of architects.

  3. 3

    John A. Ochsendorf, Ela­dio Dieste as Struc­tur­al Artist, Prince­ton Archi­tec­tur­al Press, 94–105.

  4. 4

    Agustin Dieste explains the struc­tur­al log­ic of this beam with con­cep­tu­al ease, bind­ing its form to its performance

  5. 5

    It is impor­tant to dis­tin­guish Dieste’s tell-tale detail from that of Car­lo Scarpa, as artic­u­lat­ed by Mar­co Fras­cari. Scarpa’s details do indeed tell a sto­ry, but each an essay onto their own, draw­ing in his arcane use of mate­ri­als, crafts and sin­gu­lar moments, the sum of which rarely tells the sto­ry of the build­ing at large. In con­trast, Dieste’s details oper­at­ed as the genet­ic code of a con­struct, with­out which the build­ing is not pos­si­ble as an organ­ic whole. For Scarpa, the detail was the excep­tion­al moment of artistry, for Dieste it was the rule-set and inven­tive code.

  6. 6

    It should be men­tioned that over his career, Dieste enjoyed a long and fruit­ful rela­tion­ship with artist Joaquin Tor­res Gar­cia, whose work spoke to some of the same pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of aggre­ga­tion” and assem­blage” that is evi­dent in Dieste’s own work, espe­cial­ly in his more abstract paint­ings where latent read­ings of mason­ry impress them­selves onto the sur­face of the canvas.

  7. 7

    Agustin Dieste notes that a sim­i­lar stag­ger­ing of the hor­i­zon­tal links between ver­ti­cal sec­tions is seen in the Mal­don­a­do TV Tow­er. Here the scale is much larg­er, and thus not deter­mined by the dimen­sion of steps. Instead, they serve the pur­pose of sup­port­ing work­ing plat­forms, as it was built with­out scaf­fold­ing, while short­en­ing the con­tin­u­ous span of the ver­ti­cal wall/column ele­ments, to avoid buckling. 

  8. 8

    Julian Pala­cio notes that the plan lay­out of Atlanti­da rede­fined the litur­gi­cal pro­to­cols at a time ahead of the changes intro­duced by the Vat­i­can Coun­cil II, mak­ing the com­mu­ni­ty par­tic­i­pant in the mass celebration.

  9. 9

    Stan­ford Ander­son, Ela­dio Dieste: Inno­va­tion in Struc­tur­al Art, op.cit., 32.

I would like to thank Fer­nan­do Amen and Marce­lo Payss. for my invi­ta­tion to Uruguay, plan­ning every moment of the vis­it with itin­er­aries revolv­ing around Dieste, and a lec­ture at the Fac­ul­tad de Arqui­tec­tura, Diseno y Urban­is­mo; in turn, I would also like to thank Lucia Caldeiro for her metic­u­lous trans­la­tion of the lec­ture. Behind all this, it was my friend and col­league Julian Pala­cio, whose own research on Dieste and trips to Uruguay helped to launch this trip. I would like to thank Steven Hilly­er not only for the metic­u­lous edit­ing of this text, but a dis­ci­plined com­mit­ment for over four years of col­lab­o­ra­tion, between writ­ing, exhi­bi­tions and lec­tures; his efforts have far exceed­ed his title as the Direc­tor of the Archives at the Coop­er Union, in ser­vice of an inti­mate read­ing of my many texts, none of which would have been pos­si­ble with­out his close inspec­tion. I would like to offer a spe­cial thanks for Este­ban Dieste for the gen­eros­i­ty of his time and intel­lect, as well as his patience as he men­tored me through var­i­ous build­ings. Equal­ly impor­tant­ly, I would like to acknowl­edge Agustin Dieste, whose direct cri­tique and con­ver­sa­tion around this arti­cle gave it new per­spec­tives at every turn. Last, but not least, I would like to acknowl­edge the late Stan­ford Ander­son, whose book on Ela­dio Dieste serves as the roadmap for this reflec­tion, not to men­tion his many years of intel­lec­tu­al lead­er­ship at MIT, where under his tute­lage, I was able to flour­ish as fac­ul­ty member.