Prob­a­ble Archi­tec­tures of Improb­a­ble Reason

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 20^th 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 ]

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. 

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 ]

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, 20^th 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.

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.

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. 

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 ]

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.

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 ]

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 ]

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 ]

“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.