001-102.qxp
27/10/09
13:11
Página 87
The sculptures by Cristina Iglesias are also like perforated rooms: constructions of openwork walls and ceilings that create a visited architecture, mysterious rooms, using very different materials, such as concrete, iron and terracotta. Beyond the gate of the Palace of the Marqués de Salamanca in Madrid, one finds her sculpture Untitled (Lattice X) 2006: The garden extended to one side of the large avenue, between the palace and the street. A large gate separated the garden from the walkway where passersby strolled. The wisteria vine climbed and latched onto the gate giving everything an intense mauve color. The trees and bushes together with a stray sculpture created a romantic garden. The rose bushes grew in a curve that surrounded a well. To one side of it, in the grove, rose a semi-translucent construction. The walls defined places where one could get glimpses of the garden. The geometric drawings of the blinds formed the letters of a text that described all of that. Upon piercing the lattice work, the light projected shadows on the ground.1 The need for an open atrium facing a garden was also the point of departure for the perforated room that precedes the Palau lobby. Like a woven pattern of light and shade, it draws a line in the air, planes of assembled ceramics that envelope an open room like fictitious walls independent of the building. The will to connect the interior of the building to the park and to the open space determined the construction of the ceramic atrium. A transition between the garden and the interior space, it is the architectural piece that materializes this accord. The lattice blind, at once interior and exterior space, drenched by the air, is the anteroom to the building before the lobby itself and allows the garden to penetrate to the building’s doors. In the Mediterranean climate of the location, this arrangement that regulates the lobby’s temperature is configured as an open plaza, a meeting place and a piece that constructs the access to the Palau.
The threshold: intermediate spaces The relationship of the building to the site was decisive in determining the design that would in the end up constituting a new public space. A Mediterranean setting, with a mild climate and intense light. The access to the Palau slightly raised in relation to the garden seeks to be open to the city, the entrance to the building but also an open and public space. The organic ceramic walls of the umbráculo function thanks to the light that pierces the spaces between the ceramic pieces as in an independent atrium, an intermediate space between interior and exterior. The Mediterranean house is not the closed and protected refuge of its inhabitants against the harshness of the climate, to withdraw into for long months, protected from an inclement nature. The Mediterranean house is the place we have chosen to enjoy our lives, like a happy possession of the beauty that our earth and our sky delight us with during the long seasons. In the Mediterranean house there are no great differences between the architecture of the interior and of the exterior: in other places I have seen a clear separation of forms and materials: for us, outdoor architecture enters inside and the use of stone or other materials doesn’t change from exterior to interior: it enters the halls and the galleries, the rooms and stairs, it constructs arches, niches and columns, it organizes the atmospheres of our life with spacious measure. The interior of the Mediterranean house opens to the outdoors with arcades, atriums, and terraces, with pergolas and verandas, with loggias and balconies, with courtyards and belvederes, comfortable inventions to inhabit serenely and so Italian that in other languages these intermediate spaces are also called by the same names…2 Patio, belvedere, loggia, atrium… Words that we read in Vitruvius and that sound the same in other languages, spaces that are used now as they were two thousand years ago that allow us to enjoy the architecture, the interior and
87_ Ángela García de Paredes e Ignacio Pedrosa Ceramics in the Palau de Peñíscola Conference Center