El corte vertical y las casas modernas en las laderas de Quito (1960 - 1985)
(English) Modern architecture arrived in Quito through a complex process of assimilation of the lessons and values that emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the early 20th and late 19th centuries. The location of Quito on the Andes mountains required an appropriate way of introducing a...
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| Tipo de documento: | tese |
| Data de publicação: | 2022 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositório: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | espanhol |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/412771 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/412771 https://dx.doi.org/10.5821/dissertation-2117-412771 |
| Access Level: | Acceso aberto |
| Palavra-chave: | Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Arquitectura |
| Resumo: | (English) Modern architecture arrived in Quito through a complex process of assimilation of the lessons and values that emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the early 20th and late 19th centuries. The location of Quito on the Andes mountains required an appropriate way of introducing an architecture that, as Colin Rowe has indicated, focused its attention on the exploration of space as a mainly horizontal condition, beyond any vertical freedom that it had enjoyed for over two thousand years. In response to these challenges a group of architects between 1960 and 1985 designed a series of modern houses that managed to respond to the physical, environmental, technological, and cultural conditions of a city that until the first decades of the 20th century was isolated from more technological developed countries. The location of these houses on the mountainous hills of the city, pushes us to evaluate and question the dependence on the plan as the primary graphic tool used in the analysis or these projects, which today are seen as fundamental for local modern architecture. By shifting the emphasis from the horizontal cut of the plan to the vertical cut of the section, a tectonic dimension is introduced into the design and analytical process, connecting space and form to conditions of load, materiality and sensory perception. In this investigation we will see how the vertical cut, due to its capacity to make evident the material assemblies used in the different elements that come into contact with the ground, as well as those that rise more lightly toward the sky, tend to reveal architectural intentions which are usually hidden behind the finished surface of a project. In these the tectonic objectives used to give character or perceptual value to the different spaces, introducing notions of techné as the ontological essence of architecture. This led to the creation of an architecture that implicitly or explicitly incorporated the horizontal fluidity typical of early 20th century modern space with the vertical openness of the courtyard house. This typological cross between pavilion and courtyard, more than a nostalgic crossbreeding between past and present, arose from an objective response to the external topographic, environmental and phenomenological forces to which the young architects of this period responded. Therefore, the vertical cut of the house, and its placement on one or more platforms located on different levels, altered the idea of the architectural object as an isolated pavilion, where the exterior garden, more than an open and continuous space becomes a series of courtyards with clear physical and dimensional limits, resulting from the displacement of the bearing walls of the tradicional house to the perimeter of the site, generating an ambiguous reading between what is inside and outside. In this sense, the irregular topography of the sloping sites on which the modern houses were built between 1960 and 1985, can be seen not only as a constructive challenge, but as a catalyst that led to spatial, morphological and material solutions of great value. For this reason, independent of the particular strategy of vertical cut used, we find in the section and the horizontal and vertical displacement of certain elements such as slab, wall or roof, an ideal design tool for the investigation of architectural form, materiality, space and sensory perception. In conclusion, despite the fact that the modern movement assigned to the plan or horizontal cut the role of primary design tool, this investigation proposes that the section, rather than a drawing that only emphasizes the technical and material aspects of a building, is one that allows the architect to think of space as directly related to place, where space is intertwined with the sensory conditions of perception and the world as experience by the human body. |
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