T Magazine: By Design | Diamond in the Rough

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 09 Mei 2013 | 17.35


The Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao may favor Brutalist forms, but with her signature light touch she's creating her country's most elegant buildings.

If your first thoughts of Mexico are of drug wars and narco-terrorism, you may have missed out on one of the most improbable cultural resurgences of recent memory, one that has touched filmmaking, art and, now, architecture.

Few have gained more from this revival than Tatiana Bilbao, who first attracted the eyes of the architecture world with the completion in 2006 of a hedonistic getaway she helped build for the artist Gabriel Orozco on a remote beach near Puerto Escondido.

In the past several years, the 40-year-old architect has emerged as one of the country's major creative voices, building an eclectic portfolio of work that includes a 10,000-square-foot neo-Brutalist palazzo, the master plan for an art-filled botanical garden and a spiritual refuge in the Jalisco Mountains. The projects vary wildly in attitude and style — and a few suffer from the cutbacks and compromises that plague the career of every young architect.

What elevates her above most of her contemporaries, however, is Bilbao's ability to combine a taste for visually bold forms with an intuitive understanding of when to tread lightly in a world that looks increasingly fragile. Her work is a welcome reminder that sensitive architecture doesn't have to be meek and unimaginative.

Bilbao was born to a family of architects. Both an aunt and an uncle, as well as a dozen or so cousins, have also practiced in the profession. Her grandfather Tomás Bilbao was a minister of urban development for the Spanish Republican government until Francisco Franco installed his fascist dictatorship in 1939, forcing him to flee. Eventually he brought his family to Mexico, which was becoming a safe haven for leftist intellectuals and artists.

"He had more influence on me in politics and as a planner than as an architect," Bilbao said as we sat in her Mexico City office. "My grandfather was the black sheep of the family. Kind of a rebel."

Bilbao's own rebellion amounted to a stint in Milan, where she flirted with industrial design. In less than a year she was back studying architecture in Mexico City, and became infatuated with a group of early South American Modernists that included the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, whose muscular compositions in concrete and glass were imbued with a bright, populist spirit.

"Someone like Bo Bardi was easy to relate to," Bilbao said, pointing out that the Brazilian, who died in 1992, was one of the rare women in architectural history to run her own firm, something that remains an anomaly. "Plus I was not born into a rich family. So you could say I was always closer to populist culture. I was never drawn to the Swiss architecture thing."

Bilbao's first big break came eight years ago, when Orozco asked her to help him build a beach house modeled on an 18th-century observatory he had seen in New Delhi. Orozco pictured the project as a ruin in the making. "I always liked the idea that it could be abandoned someday and swallowed up by the jungle," he explained.

The offer arrived at a turbulent time in Bilbao's life. She was entangled in a messy divorce, and she and Fernando Romero, another rising star in the growing constellation of Mexican architectural talent, had just broken up a five-year partnership to start their own firms. (Romero's Museo Soumaya, which houses the art collection of his father-in-law, the billionaire Carlos Slim, opened in 2011.) Moreover, the site, on a bluff overlooking a remote beach, was a potential nightmare. Its isolation meant that materials would have to be brought in by boat, and because the region was poor, it would be nearly impossible to find skilled labor.

"It is there that I really came in contact for the first time with the quality of hand labor in our country," Bilbao said, still seemingly astonished at the experience. "People there are very illiterate. They eat from the sea; they build their houses with palm branches. So they cannot read a plan." The experience reinforced her belief in an architecture of strong, even bold moves, one whose impact didn't depend on luxurious materials and refined details. "I became even less interested in this kind of preciousness," she said.

Whatever her misgivings at the time, it's hard to imagine a more gorgeous site. To get to it, you clamber up a steep hill and through a tangle of cactuses and mangrove trees before emerging at the top of an outcropping of rocks. From there you look out over the rooftop pool — a hemisphere of pale blue water embedded in the center of a cross-shaped wood deck. The pool's form evokes various symbolic references: it can be read as a reflection of the dome of heaven or as an inverted version of Andrea Palladio's 16th-century Villa Rotonda, with its central dome and Greek cross plan.

The Orozco house put Bilbao on the map. Still, it was essentially the artist's idea, and it wasn't until the completion of more recent works that one could begin to glean a clear picture of who she was as an architect. The most ambitious of these projects was a 10,000-square-foot house built for a wealthy industrial family on a mountainside in Monterrey — the kind of commission that young architects feast on.

Bilbao conceived the design as a cluster of hexagon-shaped rooms — like a human beehive — some of which step down to a pool and a small garden while others project out from the side of the mountain. These simple concrete shapes were then modified to fit the existing mountain terrain and the needs of the family. A hexagon that houses the dining room was shaved off on one side to make room for a tree that the architect wanted to preserve; an informal living area was pinched at one end to accommodate a staircase.

Think of it as eco-Brutalism: an architecture of primitive forms that has been forced to bend to its surroundings. It's a strategy that reflects a trend popular among a number of young architects today, who are drawn to the raw, sometimes brutal styles of 1960s and '70s architecture as a way to escape the increasingly slick computer-driven excesses of the past years.

Recently, Bilbao has veered toward more severe architectural forms, especially when faced with a less sympathetic client. In Culiacán, she was invited to design a research building for a technical university that was looking to build something on the cheap: big flexible floor plans for scientific research, or that could be rented out to companies. The site, on a piece of leftover land that overlooked a busy thoroughfare, was susceptible to flooding.

Bilbao set the building on a big mound of grass and then stacked the floors, several at a time, in alternating bands of green, blue and bronze glass, some on a north-south axis, others facing east-west, so that their ends jut out in four directions.

The effect is both visually striking and makes sense functionally. The deep overhangs provide shade, cooling interiors and cutting down on energy costs in a city where temperatures regularly approach 100 degrees. The colored glass, which is darker on the upper floors, cuts out glare where the sun is harshest. Best, the roofs of the cantilevered slabs act as partially covered balconies where employees and students can take a break. It's an example of how a few bold, carefully calculated moves can overcome the kind of bottom-line thinking that would have killed a more refined design.

The best evidence of Bilbao's growing maturity, however, is her willingness to use a light touch when the commission demands it — a trait that is visible in two civic projects that she began several years ago, one in Culiacán, the other outside Guadalajara. In Culiacán, for a project to upgrade the city's botanical gardens with art installations — by the likes of Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell — Bilbao laid out paths and added amenities like an orientation center, an auditorium and public bathrooms. Additional buildings are still being constructed — 16 in all — one of which will house research facilities. The plan weaves a series of roads and pathways into a loose, informal narrative — one that embraces nature, art and architecture.

Bilbao demonstrates a similar restraint in her master plan for the 72-mile-long pilgrimage route through the Jalisco mountains near Guadalajara. Designed in collaboration with Derek Dellekamp, and financed by the ministry of tourism, the project was conceived as a way to revive a series of sleepy, impoverished towns scattered along the way. The plan includes a series of small interventions — a chapel, viewing platforms, public bathrooms and informal shelters — laid out along the same dirt path that pilgrims had followed for two centuries. The tallest of these structures would act as visual markers, helping orient pilgrims as they make their way through the mountains.

Bilbao and Dellekamp invited an international group of architects, including some friends from Mexico City as well as the artist Ai Weiwei, to design most of the individual structures. Bilbao and Dellekamp's main contribution was a small open-air chapel set in a patchy field and surrounded by a low stone wall. It is nothing more than four slender white concrete slabs, 80 feet high, that mark the four points of an imaginary cross.

The first thing you notice as you enter it is the contrast between the starkness of the white slabs and the rough, uneven surface of the earth. Later in the day, when the sun beats down on the site, the southernmost slab casts a shadow over the center of the chapel, creating a momentary refuge. A small steel plate is impaled in the upper portion of the slab — Bilbao said that it is intended to rust over time, leaving a stain that will spread down from the puncture, an interpretation of Christ's wound.

This hardly seems like architecture at all, of course. It doesn't provide shelter; there's no plumbing or electricity. But the chapel evokes a strain of architecture that extends back to the Mayans. It's a hard-core work, spiritual yet unsentimental, and it gets to the heart of Bilbao's art. At a time when architecture seems to be in a state of limbo, struggling to find a way forward, Bilbao seems to be searching for something primitive and lasting, yet of her own time.


Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

T Magazine: By Design | Diamond in the Rough

Dengan url

http://travelwisatawan.blogspot.com/2013/05/t-magazine-by-design-diamond-in-rough.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

T Magazine: By Design | Diamond in the Rough

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

T Magazine: By Design | Diamond in the Rough

sebagai sumbernya

0 komentar:

Posting Komentar

techieblogger.com Techie Blogger Techie Blogger