Precedent Matters

“Away from tradition there is no true originality. Everything that is not tradition, is plagiarism.”

Architecture may be the only major discipline and profession in the world today that, in its current dominant practice, categorically rejects the formative influence of all form-precedent.

For a few generations now, most architects have been educated to think that detaching architecture from any design rules deemed traditional is not only a silent obligation, but an active crusade. In practice, this has produced a self-inflicted and self-limiting detachment from the foundational values and principles of all architecture, not only classical and vernacular, but also early modernist. Unconditioned by the lessons of history, not only ancient but also recent ones, most contemporary projects are ever more detached from the central purpose of architecture: to produce shelter, beauty, and meaning on a constant basis, while striving to remain connected to its ideological beginnings. Instead, many contemporary buildings are shamelessly invariable, abstract, bland, indecipherable, and ultimately meaningless. Those buildings most extreme in their disconnection from past design principles and protocols are celebrated; it seems the more unexpected and brilliantly unprecedented a building’s form, the better.

Unfortunately, an inherent characteristic of all architectural form is that anything excessively idiosyncratic is not easy to emulate. Similarly, anything excessively normative is not worth emulating. As a result, architectural ideas that cannot be naturally adapted to new projects or contexts, physical or cultural, cannot be simply propagated. It is not surprising, therefore, that contemporary architecture as a whole has become barren and incapable of contributing to the continuing evolution of received models of design. By rejecting precedent, architects are producing disconnected and indecipherable works for everywhere and for everyone. The result is a long cycle of projects with reference to fashion and consumption, but not dependence on ideas. The traditional culture of architecture remains broken, and the consequences are truly epic. Along with urban sprawl, buildings of a ubiquitous, ugly, and disposable form, devoid of emotional or spiritual content, continue to erode the urban character and quality of life of most great cities and landscapes around the globe. At the same time, they have become key contributors to our climate change crisis.

Before 1945, architecture had advanced from generation to generation by means of a relay of type-centered ideas, generally communicated in drawings, models, and built form. Always searching for first principles, architects had sought to engage in design on a conceptual foundation that reflected the wisdom and knowledge of the ages. While the concept of type has had various definitions over the centuries, it has always been understood as the embodiment of the form-essence of objects. And there is no more intellectually appropriate manner to discern this essence than the guidance offered by the authority of precedents.

The design process should begin as a search for a parti: an appropriate seed of an idea that allows the development of a project from the whole to the parts; and not from the parts to whole. The study of precedents is essential at this point, for it guides the architect to partis that can deliver responses to the programmatic, technical, and symbolic challenges of any project into mature form. But the power of precedents is more extensive than this. As the design process extends into examining the character of buildings, drawn or built precedents can offer direction regarding siting and town form, massing relative to other ranking buildings, the surrounding fabric and the public realm, and the scale and proportions of principal architectural components and climate-specific responses to environmental forces. At the third and last stage of design, when architects establish the nature of their personal imprint on a building, precedents can be mined to establish a range of material, ornament, color, and dimensional detail design options to be used in anticipation of finishing buildings in a form that eventually would be intimately experienced by others. Architecture practiced in this way is fecund: each project becoming a link connecting past and future, a new potential precedent-bearing form that enriches the DNA of architectural ideas going forward.

Little more than a hundred years ago, in the 1910s and 1920s, American architects engaged in a most extraordinary discussion regarding the purposes that their work would then serve. Under the patronage of a booming American industrial economy and an unprecedented effort to develop the American West, they directed their architecture to embody and symbolize both the spirit of their time and the unique cultural and environmental attributes of the places that this work was to grace. There was a novel scholarly method attached to the ambitions of this generation. Encouraged by the unprecedented boom in travel during this time, they sought to gather and document the kinds of cultural and environmental evidence around our country and the world that would eventually be used to inform and justify their projects. When they found that evidence, they recorded, published and shared it with their colleagues. When, for whatever reason, it was not available or visible to them, they imagined it, by supposing what may or should have been. The result was the first-ever period of high-quality, focused research on architectural design in the United States. Using this sophisticated knowledge, architects embarked upon the task of developing classical and vernacular projects of a form appropriate and emblematic to each of the regions of our country. Their combination of unusual depth of insight with artful drawing and manual skills, and the availability of new industrial methods that accelerated and refined the process of construction, allowed them, in the 1920s and 1930s, to deliver some of the most accomplished buildings, building ensembles, and places ever built in our country. It was part of this amazing track record of architectural and urbanist excellence that the emergence of a new architecture in the parts of the United States that were founded under the influence of Spanish and later Latin culture became possible. It is this extraordinary process of continuing cultural exchange and transformation that is captured in this issue of ANTA.

Beginning in 1929, the effects of the Great Depression, and then the shift in industrial emphasis to prefabrication and mass production during World War II, had a deep effect on American architecture. The traditional methods of education, design, and construction that had fueled the heroic architectural boom of the previous decades were weakened and eventually rejected. The search for speed, fashion, fame, and fast profit morphed into a mad drive for perpetual invention, a formalism without a basis in ideas. In the postwar period architecture went off the rails. Divorced from precedent, it has reached our day in an increasingly fragmented and perishable state. It is high time that the contemporary culture of architecture and culture at large reconsider the importance of precedence in form. It is only through this way of learning and practicing that architecture can deliver the cultural diversity, physical improvement, and spiritual enrichment that our country and the world so sorely need.

STEFANOS POLYZOIDES Professor and Dean

The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture

ESSAY

Fernando Vela Cossío page 8

Lander Uncilla Cortaberria page 18

Jean-François Lejeune page 26

Javier Cenicacelaya page 36

Alejandro García Hermida page 44

PROJECTS espinósfernándezcid page 52

Oronoz & Iparraguirre page 64

Jiménez & Linares page 78

César Portela page 90

RESTORATION

Javier Rivera page 96

Sergi Bastidas page 102

Juan de Dios de la Hoz page 106

Leopoldo Gil Cornet page 118