Topografías arquitectónicas en el paisaje contemporáneo. Plataformas, vacíos y horizontes artificiales

Abstract

This research explores the strategies for intervention in the landscape by means of the transformation and construction of architectural topographies, anthropic actions long linked to human settlements: artificial mountains, acropolis, platforms and plateaus and monumental avenues. In the first section, we analyze a series of paradigmatic study cases of large-scale topographic landscapes, which take place during the second half of the 20th century and revolve around the city and the construction of the urban landscape, addressed from very diverse perspectives and using hybrid mechanisms, archaeological, sculptural, material and temporal ones, which work at all times as architectural instruments. The structure of the thesis entails a round trip, through which the influences that archeology and the ancient city had on architecture, and in particular with the building of large urban landscapes such as cities of new plant of Chandigarh and Brasilia, projected respectively by the architects Le Corbusier and Lucio Costa, but also on other experiments with artificial topography in invented cities such as City, the work of Michael Heizer and the Moerenuma Park of Isamu Noguchi, are returned as design tools in the archaeological landscape of Tiermes. This magnificent example of a Roman city, whose natural terraced topography is deeply transformed by Roman architecture into a true acropolis, stands today in the middle of one of the most unpopulated landscapes in Europe. Explaining the anthropic nature of this unique topographic landscape has been the subject of intense research and architectural intervention by the group LABPAP -University of Valladolid- and this author for more than 10 years, what makes Tiermes a true research laboratory on topography, landscape and archeology, in which the afore-mentioned contemporary experiences are superimposed onto the archaeological remains of a real city. The project opens the way to new contemporary interpretations, which add to and enrich what has been learned from previous cases in terms of perception, construction of perspective and new topographic horizons for man. In this way we understand and try to explain the implementation of the city, following a logic based on the previous models, which oscillates and seeks a balance between the artificial and the natural, between topography and construction and in the case of Tiermes, between the rock and the void. The landscape of the void is the only thing that resists the passage of time in Tiermes, its trenches and excavations are the key to inhabit the topography, to try to understand and explain the architecture from the constructive logic, down to the perception of the contemporary observer. Thus, architecture and design stand as the only instruments capable of constructing parallel times in which the landscape of the ancient city coexists with the memory of the present, concurrent times that imagine the lines of the absent city based on the traces of the landscape and reconstruct its true memory through the void.