Daniel Wentzlaff THE WOODEN HAND – SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ARCHITEC TURE OF JUAN NAVARRO BALDEWEG
A window, beautifully proportioned with delicate metal profiles, the leaves of a tree in the Spanish sun, on the table piles of paper and on the shelf a wooden hand, or rather a four-pronged fork faintly reminiscent of a wooden hand, sawn from a tree trunk, cracked but sturdy. We are sitting in Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s studio in Madrid on the second floor of a residential house built in the style of classical modernity. The whole afternoon I’ve been gazing at his desk and on the shelf this amazingly worked piece of wood among many other prototypes and sculptures. When I asked him about it Juan Navarro Baldeweg showed me some catalogues with his sculptures. Simple geometric forms made of wood and metal, some of them poised in an unexpected, physically sheer impossible balance. When we look at a metal ring we expect it to have the same weight all around. But here it is not suspended from its midpoint: what we perceive is not what we expected to see. With the help of this moment of irritation, Baldeweg shows that, in terms of perception, our notion of reality and reality itself cannot be detached from one another. In everyday life we rarely waste a thought about this connection. We don’t perceive the dining room anew each time we come home, instead we visualize the room as we know it, or at least believe we know it. The consciousness of the brain’s complementary effort – imagination – plays a major role in Baldeweg’s work. According to his understanding of architecture, the real impact lies in the perception of the space and not in the space itself. Baldeweg likes to explain the importance of context for our perception with the help of Marcel Duchamp’s Urinoir, an object that acquired a new meaning when it was exhibited in a museum. At the same time, he stresses that this phenomenon is not a twentieth-century invention. In the history of architecture one often finds that existing building components acquired new functions and meanings, for example, when fragments of old Corinthian-Roman columns were used for the construction of Byzantine churches which, after all, were peopled by Christians. For Baldeweg, material and form only acquire meaning when they are placed in a context. In architecture, a naturalstone curtain façade is a priori neither wrong nor right. Symmetry, a taboo in classical modernity, has the same validity for him as asymmetry. In our discussions, he often just sits there listening, absorbing what others have to say. In these moments I often think that he’s pondering the technical issues we’re discussing, checking them against his imagination, his vision of the building: can it be realized and can it develop the power it needs to convince people visiting the building? Discussions about style or the truth in construction occasionally even annoy him. In an interview in 2013 he answered the question whether a person felt more at home in a medieval home or a modern house as follows: “In that sense I am completely nihilist. I mean I don’t think there is one thing better than the other as long as you allude to or connect with the things that are more essential or that are, as we said, antecedent.” (1) In his role as a painter, sculptor and architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg follows aims beyond the material world, in other words, in the realm in which the aesthetic experience of space is established. He doesn’t want people to merely recognize their own dining room, he wants them to discover something more, something that links their inner being, their imagination, to the world around them, or, as he put it: “And every type of art has something in common in its strive which is to create a signal, even if it’s only a moment in the continuity – for lack of a better term – of your mind, of your reflection when you feel your ties to the rest of the world, the world as a whole. These minimum states of ecstasy, the sensation of being both, in and out, is to me the principal purpose of art” (2) However, let there be no misunderstanding: physical reality is important to Baldeweg. His sculptures are made of wood and metal; in the years of working together we have often spoken about materials, about the way marble catches the light at its edges, about proportions and joint widths. He knows all about the materials’ technical properties, and the way they react to light is essential to him. In his view, brightly anodized aluminium and marble, for example, complement each other perfectly since the one reflects and the other gathers light, absorbing it. The people we have spoken to as yet have all reacted positively to the rooms of the new office building. The users 20
appreciate the building’s special personality and presence; it allows them to find themselves and makes them feel