Eladio Dieste 1917-2000 A cura di Mercedes Daguerre Electa, Milano 2003 (pp. 310, € 100,00)
Why should an architect build a life-size facsimile of one of his works 30 years later and 10,000 kilometres away? This clue may serve as an entrée to an examination of the production of Eladio Dieste (1917-2000), whom it would be simplifying to call an architect or engineer. He was, rather, a builder or ‘master’ in the medieval sense of the word, with its connections to stonemasons’ guilds and its implied dedication to the transformation of this material.
For this contemporary architect, with his affinity for the construction site, building was an innate gesture blending art, society and life. This would explain why he erected the church of San Pedro in the Durazno countryside in 1967 and, without the entrance atrium, in Mejorada del Campo, Spain, in 1996. Why not repeat a typology, architecture or building site addressing similar social and geographic conditions? The gesture reveals that a community’s spirit of construction is privileged over any personal poetic.
In the second half of the 20th century, Dieste was careful to carve out moral space between scientific progress and ‘highbrow’ architectural culture. He facilitated the construction of mega-structural inventions that would otherwise have demanded resources Uruguay lacks. (Some have called the country ‘a cotton flock between two panes of glass – Argentina and Brazil’).
Dieste was born in Uruguay and had distant Spanish ancestors. His background was reinforced concrete, so he was perfectly cognizant of its dynamic behaviour and the most detailed construction techniques. But he soon took another tack, moving into autochthonous plywood, making it possible to construct tall structures economically without massive investment, frequently experimenting or undertaking DIY-style projects. The idea of ‘reinforced’ ceramic is more than structural; it also embraces an ad hoc framework suited for ‘that building world’.
It suggested to Dieste the possibility of transmuting reinforced concrete into brick, mortar and steel. The utilization of one of the Romans’ primary materials, brick, for large spans led him to grapple with the technical side of two central issues. He exploited brick in small sections of double-curvature roofs by eliminating the tympanums and substituting original vault solutions near the supports. He also reinvented assembly procedures, removing vault frameworks where the curing times of fresh mortar can be inconsistent.
Engineering in Uruguay could only have been like this: direct the low-cost labour in order to achieve some artisanal enhancement. It was as if the in-situ casting of concrete was converted into a stage performance or a collective rite. Dieste’s brilliant plywood concepts do not seem to go beyond this large-scale do-it-yourself approach; he even designed machinery to mechanize all possible stages. One was the pre-stressing of vault shells, as Uruguay did not sell powerful jacks; he invented a truck jack linked to a tie-rod system.
Another example was a drill for constructing foundation piles in situ at 45-degree angles, to be employed in special instances. Thus Dieste made it possible to enliven the dull Uruguayan skyline thanks to the double curvature brick vaults of the Caputto (1972) and Massaro (1980) agro-industrial plants. His projects also include the Young grain silo and the Trinidad wool-washing factory (1965-89). Above all, his buildings created ‘warm’ interiors for the workers, thanks to the narrow spacing of the brick walls and the dramatic lighting from the shed roofs.
In each of these buildings, the roof above seems to be the fruit of a highly articulated path, nearly religiously inspired. But piers appear to be Dieste’s weakness, leading him back to conventional plywood layouts or redundant expressionist-style solutions. It was as if architecture only carried him so far, making him a cathedral builder above and an engineer at ground level.
Manolo De Giorgi, Architect