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Alejandro García Faerna´s portfolio
This blog is made to expose the work realized by its author for the architectural projects subject of taller 5. Its use is merely academic and nonprofit.
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Sunday, 2 June 2013
Five proposals for five locations
From 20’s to 50’s, the worldwide architecture was influenced
by the modern movement and its ideas about internationalization of architecture.
These postulates were defended and promulgate by C.I.A.M. congress around the world.
But day by day, the society began to realize the real problems of these modern approaches.
However, between 1954 and 1956, a new generation
of young and aware architects promoted the tenth C.I.A.M. congress. For that,
architects like Aldo Van Eyck, Georges Candilis and Alison and Peter Smithson proposed a
new way to understand architecture focused in guaranteeing social
relationships, a correct growth of cities, and relationships between buildings
and its environments.
Alison and Peter Smithson were the most implied couple. They
took part in the writing of the” Doorn Manifesto”, and they made two
presentations for the last C.I.A.M. congress. One was a scroll which illustrated
their ideas about the concepts of identity, association, cluster and mobility.
They illustrated these ideas thinking about the different patterns of growth
for city and scales of human associations: House, Street, District and City.
The first case answers to the
isolated house. A & P Smithson presented “Borrows Lea Farm”, an earlier
project of 1953. They use it as an example of design related with its
surrounding environment.
The second case corresponds to the
Hamlet, and this design was called the “Village unite”. It is a clear-cut architectural
unity of five dwellings. Here, they understood this archetype as an alternative
to the standardized suburban houses which ignore the location and the
community. It is important to remark the setup of its gardens and the way these
open onto main roads and fields.
For the third case, the village,
appear the “Fold Houses”. These houses, which may be built in different
configurations, are characterised for its massive walls, tow storey high, which
serves as a windbreak.
At the next level up, we found the
Town. For that, the Smithson couple designed the “Close Houses”. These houses
provide a covered passage only for pedestrians based in the distribution in
parallel of the different sorts of houses. If they implemented it on a longer
scale, they could form a distinct continuous network.
Finally, the “South Facing Terraced
Houses” were designed for the city level. These are a twelve-storey residential
building which contains one hundred and eighty dwellings. Their typical curved
form tries to catch the sun exposure and reduce the shape of the building in
the city.
In this way, Alison and Peter Smithson offered a new opposite point of view to the modern movement. Instead of continue the internationalization in architecture, they propose a seriously care about the problems of each location and its environment.
Sources:
Team 10: 1953-81: in search of a utopia of the present
Author: Heuvel,Dirk Van Den
Tuesday, 28 May 2013
Walden 7, una comunidad de ideas formalizadas en
el espacio.

Pero, ¿Cómo conseguir
estos objetivos a una escala tan grande?
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Con esta estructura, el
Walden 7 nace y se llena de vida, y 40 años después, podemos apreciar, que
gracias sus generosos pasillos, puentes y pasajes, y gracias a su gran
cubierta, se ha conseguido un ambiente de vecindad propio solo del pueblo. Aqui sus miembros se apoderan del espacio público para vivir en
comunidad.
Mediante todo este
proceso, una utopía se convierte en realidad y una arquitectura de
investigación, típica del ámbito académico, se convierte en una arquitectura de
consumo y no de servicio. Así, la idea proyectual inicial prevalece a los
intereses de los grupos de presión que la dominan y para los que trabaja, y por
una vez, la comunidad gana a la individualidad.
Saturday, 9 March 2013
The Villa Mairea By Alvar Aalto
When you have got the bus off, you are nervous, you are looking
everywhere, but you only can see forest. Then, you start the march and you can
intuit a particular shape behind the mist of wood. It‘s a special moment and
you are too excited to understand what you are contemplating. When you want to
react, it’s late, you have crossed the hall, and you are inside but you don’t
know it until the guide Sais you: you can’t take photos.
The house was bought between 1936 and 1939 in a clearing in the woods of
Noormarkku. It was designed by Alvar Aalto for a couple of wealthy friends who
managed a wood company. The clients gave
Alvar Aalto total freedom to design their new house, and he and
his wife Aino Alto make the villa Mairea up.
The house is shaped by the addition of four volumes: one for the
servants and the kitchen, another one for the dining room (some authors
relation this room with the core of the house) other for the library, the
living space and the winter garden, and finally, the volume which contains the
main hall. The bedrooms are upstairs and there is a study above the winter
garden. Outside we could find the swimming pool and the sauna connected to the
house by a covered terrace.
Certainly, the layout of the villa Mairea is organic, but Alvar Aalto
never took any decision deliberately. To find support to the distribution of
the volumes and spaces, he resorted to the grid of squares, playing with the
halves, thirds and quarters. However, this theory is established by Simon
Unwin. In fact, when the reporters ask Alvar Aalto, he said that his module
was a millimeter.
Another fact that we could remark of the house attached by the forest is
the entrance. It’s for Alvar Aalto, the most important space in the house, as
he explains in his writing titled: “from the threshold to the living room”. He
explains that the hall has to be the expression of the house, but after all, it
must be the connector “in-between” the inside and the outside. The dwelling
can’t begin in the hall, because it has to begin in the courtyard. So, the house and the garden, have to be in a
continual relationship. In this house, the halls are caring with these premises
out, suddenly we can find an organic porch, a covered terrace or maybe the transition
doesn’t exist because the whole house is the transition by itself.
Also, it is true that the rectangular shape of the two storey house is a
rough split between inside and outside, but I think that Alvar Aalto used the
overlapping shapes of the in and out spaces to melt it with the natural shapes
of wood. I’m referring to the swimming pool, the porch of the main entrance,
the expansive volume of the study and the changes in the levels of the plot.
But, adaptation not only consist of organic distributions and crazy
shapes, in my opinion are the leaves scattered around the courtyard, the clouds
reflected on the water of the pool, the mud in the stairs of the
winter garden, the moss over the stones in the terrace and even the transparence
of the sliding glass wall, the facts that melt the villa Mairea into the
forest.
Summing up, we could describe the villa Mairea like a whole of overlapping
layers, where the edge between human and nature is blur ,where nature tries to
come in the house layer by layer, and where someone could lose the sense of
time, and confuse a quarter with one hour of visit, like me.
Sources:
Twenty
buildings every architect should understand. Simon Unwin. Ed: routledge.2010.
Alvar
Aalto. Richard Weston. Ed: Phaidon. 2011.
Villa Mairea. Noormarkku. Alvar Aalto- Museo,
Jyvaskyla
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