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BARRY BERGDOLL

Meyer Shapiro Professor of Architectural History

Columbia University



THE RATIONALITY OF THE IMPROBABLE

Some notes on Emilio Ambasz’s work in dialogue with an uninhabited spiritual retreat.



How does one feel at home with, or even begin – as an historian – to situate, the work of an architect whose most autobiographical work is a house whose facades house no rooms and whose rooms are almost without facades? What is to be made of a house with an earth-covered series of bedrooms and reception rooms, all removed from the commanding views of an estate of 600 hectares set in the verdant hills of the Sierra Morena outside Seville. Here the outstanding natural setting can be appreciated only from a screened balcony reached by the most precipitous climb via one of the twin, hand railing free, cantilevered staircases anchored in the monumental walls that once inside reveal themselves to be but a staging of the idea of a house? How does one fathom such a non canonic domestic gestalt for an owner/designer who claims never to have slept in his dream house? And how does one explain a house that few have ever seen, but which has been the subject of exhibitions, a lavish monograph, a dedicated web site, and a host of prescient critiques? And to what historical context should we attach a house that helped bring fame to an untried architect when the project won a prestigious Progressive Architecture project award in 1975, even if a spate of interpretation would arise only a quarter century later, when the house was finally constructed hinting at its continued key relevance to its larger architectural philosophy? Yet just what is the meaning of an architect’s house on a remote site in Andalusia when its owner/non-occupant lives primarily between Bologna, Venice, and New York only visiting his Casa de Retiro Espiritual from time to time – and rarely for more than a few hours – even as he continues to add other structures to its grounds? More questions perhaps than answers, these are nonetheless seeming contradictions that suggest possible points of entry into the world of Emilio Ambasz, the door of whose Spanish house first appears to open into a void. His is a world constructed perhaps less by buildings than by fables – as he himself proclaims – even as the published portfolio of his work (built and unbuilt) burgeons further each year with projects that oscillate between technological inventions and fictional devices. This is the dual universe created by both designer and designs, a world of allusion and elusiveness in which logical design choices join up over and over again with unprecedented imagery, unexpected images which nonetheless seem to conjure up a world of archetypes. In the quest for answers, insights often arise as resolution remains elusive. A poetic realism lies at the heart of Ambasz’s work and life, ever provocative, ever hard to pin down.


Like another icon of the 20th century, Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, the Casa de Retiro Espiritual is at once highly site specific and yet a mental construct that leaves powerful afterimages in the mind. Its contradictory forms are so powerful that images of the house alone fuel the imagination, nourish discussion, and transport us quickly beyond the elusive and allusive nature of the specific project to reflections about dwelling, about man and nature, and about architecture in general. Like the Barcelona Pavilion, another “house” that was never occupied and a building inhabited as much through images as experience, the Casa de Retiro Espiritual stands both as a manifesto and an accomplished statement of a body of work, a work at once exceptional in its enigmatic qualities and yet a kind of Rosetta stone for interpreting Ambasz’s extensive practice. And like the huge body of interpretations of the Barcelona Pavilion, each successive interpretation of Ambasz’s house layers further the richness of the work rather than displacing earlier interpretations. The Casa de Retiro Espiritual invites us to a restful mental sojourn without arduous travel, to the quiet contemplation of its contrasts and often irresolvable paradoxes; it serves as the perfect vestibule to an exploration of the real world sites of Ambasz’s built work from Texas to Japan, and of his projected work from the California desert to Monte Carlo.


Like a fable, the house has both a temporal and an atemporal existence. And since a quarter century separates design from construction, the project belongs also to different moments in both Ambasz’s career and in the culture of architecture. It was designed in 1975, even before there was a site for the fantasy of a future habitat, projected for an unspecified couple. Then the young Argentine-born architect had achieved precocious renown in New York with a series of brilliant exhibitions and conferences at the Museum of Modern Art in which he set out to call into question everything from the “domestic landscape” to the philosophical underpinnings of such major institutions of societal reproduction as the museum and the university. Likewise, his own house sets up philosophical conundrums for anyone who encounters it, in reality or via representations, just as the project remains an unfulfilled destination for the designer more than a decade after he has finally rendered a dreamed project literally concrete. The “House of Spiritual Retreat” seems more to be a “memory palace,” a spatial figure in the mind that helps order thoughts, recollections, memories, and forms over time – as it was imagined by the ancients and commemorated in a seminal and influential book by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory of 1966. The House – if indeed it even is a house – seems almost to be a mechanism for rearranging the canonical in such a way as to allow memories to become productive rather than merely retrospective, a device that recalls the work of literary and artistic surrealisms, where archetypes seem to recover not so much lost traditions as lost possibilities.


Although the house seems to call out for some historical situating – if only at the simplest level to relate its forms to the vernacular history of the southern Spanish house whose patios, Islam-derived mosharabi screened balcony, and white washed walls all seem both honored and undermined in the design – it is interesting to recall the context of 1970s New York as a crucible rather than dwelling on the “timeless” vernacular” of Andalucia. In 1975, with the “House of Spiritual Retreat” a 32-year old Argentine curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – having completed an architectural degree at Princeton in record time and captured the discursive limelight at 29 with the landmark exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” (1972) – created a design that could dialogue with architectural masters and debates in multiple arenas. The design was a first episode in a lifelong conversation with Ambasz’s spiritual mentor and first employer, the Argentinean engineer-architect Amancio Williams. The dialogue, begun in maquette, was to be continued in 1990 with an imagined epistolary relationship “Algunas notas sobre una correspondencia mental que mantuve a traves de los ultimos veinticinco anos con Delfina Galvez sobre la obra de Amancio,” a series of letters depicting twenty years but composed at the then-present. At the same time the house was clearly a retrospective response to the theoretic architectural statements emanating from the Italian neo-avant garde exhibited in 1972 in “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,“ such as Superstudio and Archizoom, in whose imagery the possibility of inhabiting the earth had been called into question. Whereas these Italian radicals, deeply tinged with nihilism, projected a future light inhabitation of the surface of an unforgiving planet, Ambasz seemed at once to burrow into the earth and to raise a confident structure in search of redemption. But most importantly, the house took its place squarely amidst vibrant debates then underway in New York at a moment when the city, from the depths of a financial crisis, asserted itself as an intellectual outpost for the renewal of architectural culture and thought. Ambasz strode into the fray, adding a new architectural voice to the somewhat polarized conversation in 1970s New York, centered on the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, with which he was intimately connected from the conception of that now fabled architectural think tank, helping to draft even its foundation documents, even as a few years later he would draw up a philosophical brief for a new kind of university – Universitas – in which design as a way of thinking could restructure the whole tree of knowledge and pursuit from the most practical to the most speculative.


Few at the time could realize the profound roots in the practice of Williams, then little known outside the Rio del Plata. For Williams architecture was always as much a philosophical projection as an act of building. His diverse body of projects, many utopian speculations, presented always a new negotiation of the relationship between the buried and the floating, the territorial and the imaginary, most famously in the house as bridge designed in 1943 for his father at Plata del Mar. Having worked for Williams as a teenager, these were images of architectural possibilities that Ambasz held onto as he encountered new positions in the intense debates of the 1960s emerging between Princeton, where he took two degrees in two years, and New York where he aligned himself with both the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the Museum of Modern Art, in the ambits by Peter Eisenmann and the eminence grise of the post war New York architectural debate, Philip Johnson. By 1975 the debate between the so-called “Whites” and the so-called “Grays” was reaching its climax, when Ambasz responded to the manifesto houses that had been brought together in a series of Museum of Modern Art publications of the beginning with Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1965, which presented his fabled and gabled Mother’s House, a great iconic façade behind which a complex set of design moves and historical references were brought into a taught, but deliberately unresolved dialogue. Houses too dominated the portfolios of the architects brought together in 1972 in Arthur Drexler’s Five Architects, in which the house became the matrix for new encounters between composition, or in the case of Peter Eisenmann an apparent anti-composition, and philosophical hypotheses. Most potent for Ambasz it would seem, if we were to try to align his design for a “House of Spiritual Retreat” with the work produced in that widely influential white book, was the work of John Hajduk, and in particular Hejduk first and second “Wall Houses”. Between these two publications of the very department in which the young Ambasz was appointed curator of design in 1969, were gathered seemingly opposed quests for meanings, one treating architecture as a literary palette of charged symbols, the other as a generative grammar capable of creating new meaning from new forms. As would soon prove characteristic, Ambasz’s design could be seen both as a response to either side of the temporary battlefronts and as a position that at once breached the conflict and yet staked out a completely personal, other territory. And it did so also by entering a life -long debate with another figure with whom Ambasz was to have both real and imagined conversations, Philip Johnson, whose Glass House at New Canaan, the ultimate architect/historian/curator’s autobiographical statement, was equally a conversation with a spiritual mentor (in this case Mies van der Rohe) and with the history of architecture. It is only when these stakes are taken into account that one can begin to understand Ambasz’s continual return to the extensive site of his “estate” outside Seville where he adds periodically new follies, new constructions, and new glosses on his own design, just as Johnson’s New Canaan property – where the curator/architect slept in a closed volume in counterpoint to the transparent box – would serve as a picturesque landscape for the evolution of a design vocabulary and continual self-commentary. But whereas each of Johnson’s projects marked a shift in his design language, material vocabulary, and changing force field of influences, Ambasz’s work continues to develop and expand on the themes, both in dialogue with landscape and building, announced in the Casa itself. Ambasz’s is a kind of allegorical quest for meaning, but one in which forms are often detached from specific referents.

To decode Ambasz’s house with its myriad of associations and recollections held together by the improbable dualistic encounter of a monumental extruded corner of non-enclosing walls with a sunken living quarters tucked under a berm and facing into a sunken patio court, is to enter more into the world of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams than the art historical realm of iconography. Magic realism in South American literature probably has more to offer a guide than the picturesque logic of the English landscape garden of the 18th and 19th centuries with their pavilions and ha-has which are no doubt distant cousins of Ambasz’s work. But whereas these are archaeological exercises de style, Ambasz’s designs brings forth a world of associations from the collective history of architectural imagery and the specialized world of architectural history, images both from shared dreams and those that might only interrupt the sleep of an architect steeped in the most extensive architectural culture. The monumental extruded “spirit” house, detached from its site as an illustration could easily be juxtaposed with the widest variety of photo-sets, from the Andalusian houses of nearby Seville, Grenada, or Cordoba (an early proposed site for the project before it had found an actual residence in the earth), to the work of Luis Barragan whose imagery between poetry and vernacular Ambasz would introduce into the debate and the imagery in 1976 in a highly remarked Museum of Modern Art exhibition – one of his last – to the wall house projects of Hejduk, destined like Ambasz to a long existence as a potent idea before embodied in constructive reality. Indeed if Hejduk and his fellow “Whites” seemed largely to be deriving new sets of manipulations from the language of the European avant-gardes of the 1920s to create a neo-modernist position, Ambasz set out to excavate a language from a much broader and deeper range of inspirations, ranging from Pre-Columbian spaces through the grotto imagery of the Renaissance to Claude Nicholas Ledoux (notably in the fake rustic stone juxtaposed with smooth surfaces of the human hand). If the chain of references passes via Renaissance humanism and the French Enlightenment, these sources among many others are juxtaposed and merged in ways that have more to do with surrealism, in both its pictorial and literary practices, than the more rigorous forms of collage that intrigued a number of other figures around New York’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies.


Once inside the space defined by the great L-shaped wall the theatricality of Ambasz’s architectural vision is clear. Here the spiritual retreat offers a dramatic stage, with a new duality: a set of broad stairs descends towards the sunken patio onto which the principle “rooms” of the house face. Turning our view to the “entry” that has taken us, like Alice, through the looking glass, we discover on the inner face the walls sponsor a twin set of frighteningly narrow stairs anchored on one side into the wall, cantilevered out over the void at the other end. Rare are visitors that have the courage to mount the stairs to pass back through the wall, this time in a veranda suspended high over the landscape. Ambasz himself professes never to have been there. Here in the same years that James Turrell set about his first works framing the sky, Ambasz too created a frame for viewing the cycle of times of the day and changing lighting effects, as his rotated square plan of a house becomes a mechanism for contemplating extracted elements of the adjacent landscape, a stage where a drama is continually unfolding even absent actors and viewers, a theater of memory perhaps more than a memory palace. To travers the two halves of the great square, one half descending majestically and slowly into the ground, the other offering a view of the sky flanked by “ladders” ascending to heaven in a way more inviting to the eye and the spirit than to the feet, is also to experience a series of reversals. Most importantly the oscillation between audience and stage, as though the hypotenuse that the sunken and elevated right angle triangles share is an invisible proscenium, a site of continual exchange between stage and audience. And here for the first time we realize that Ambasz’s work is not only about the duality between abstraction and symbol, but also the theatrical creation of a stage for the performance of rituals and ceremonies, suspended between a lost past and a yet-to-unfold future.


As the doors to the various guest rooms in the vaults of the subterranean house remain closed in the “official” photography of the house – provided by Michele Alassio for the lavish monographic documentation of the house published in 2005 to accompany an exhibit of the house at MoMA – we are left dreaming of the dialogues that might take place on that stage. Given the archetype simplicity of the houses component parts we might project any number of scenarios that belong to the world of fables that so intrigues Ambasz. The architect or architectural historian will continually detect conversations between the absent designer, Ambasz, and a host of imagined guests: from the designers of ancient Greek theaters, via Bramante in his projecting of the Vatican Belvedere, a series of terraced gardens inside high walls, to Alvar Aalto in the play between columns and undulating walls in the buried house with a free plan set behind an echo of the Iberian patio, to name but a few that come to mind as we traverse the memory palace in photographs. If Robert Venturi had introduced the world of “both/and” in his early writings that were plumed by all in the years Ambasz was speeding through Princeton, here we are in a world in which the stratigraphy of associations goes beyond the apparently duality the house sets up in the aerial view of its model.


For Ambasz’s project in architecture is to be found as much in what doesn’t meet the eye as in the intriguing reversal of the monumentally scaled house corner that turns out to be an L-shaped theater proscenium as in the ancient Roman theaters of antique Spain. For it is the nip and tuck strategy of embedding the spaces for living, dining, and sleeping in a berm that completes the raised knoll on which the house is set that was to provide a point of departure for Ambasz’s development of an architecture which could seek to reconcile nature and culture in a world of advanced technology. Here Ambasz reveals himself to be as much a child of Earth Day, first celebrated in April 1970, as he was of the debating societies of Princeton and the IAUS in Manhattan. If we are to turn our technological archaeology to the layers of information imbedded in the World Wide Web rather than in the layers of cultural residue of the landscape we can unearth, we are quickly led to the discovery that Ambasz himself has recently planted a clue. Invited to add his voice to the growing set of book lists on a web site “Designers and Books”, Ambasz offers only five titles that have “all influenced me profoundly.” He notes there “How can I extricate them from my memory? They are now substantially part of me.” After surveying a world of literary favorites from Aristophanes via Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, to Cervantes and Shakespeare, Ambasz reveals an influence one always feels in his contrarian spirit, his taste for the rationality of the absurd or the absurdity of rationality, Jorge Luis Borges, and he quotes J. M. Coetzee speaking of Borges: “He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.” Ambasz himself continues “a stylist of great fabulist imagination, superb elegance, and economy of means.” Given his own claims for himself as the fabulist of architecture, this is an influence that demand to be taken seriously and explored in greater depth. This I must leave to a person versed in Borges’s world, although it is clear that Ambasz too is after the construction of worlds, and not simply of buildings. But he leaves us two clues in the list of but five titles offered on a web site where few contributors stop at fewer than fifteen. Not the least of these is Lucretius, as Ambasz explains:


“On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) is a first-century B.C epic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. It deals with the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The poem grandly proclaims the reality of our role in a universe that is ruled by chance, with no interference from gods. It is a statement of personal responsibility in a world in which everyone is driven by hungers and passions with which they were born and do not understand.”


This is a quote that is interesting to juxtapose with a philosophical position offered to clients and researchers on Ambasz’s own website when he declares:


We are beginning to understand that, like the ancient people of non-Greek cultures, we should see humanity not in contrast to, but as an integral part of both, the natural and the man-made milieus. Man should not see himself as a separate entity, detached from nature, but should accept his existence as part of it. Similarly, the artifacts we create should not be proud aliens, but rather should be designed as carefully and intricately woven extensions of the larger natural and man-made domains surrounding us.”


But to these erudite references, Ambasz adds two unexpected masters of architecture, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, figures long represented as in a dialogue that for many is irreconcilable but which might also illuminate something of the juxtaposition of opposites in the monumental presences and buried absences in Ambasz’s architecture. In addition to Henry Russell Hitchcock’s monograph on the American master, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, Ambasz offers Wright’s own The Natural House, first published in 1954. One has the sense then that Ambasz’s own project, ever since his 1975 house design, has been to effect a dialogue not only between the machine imagery of Le Corbusier and the natural imagery of Wright, but between the philosophical projects of the Roman philosopher Lucretius and the organic strain in modernism. As Ambasz recalls touchingly of a book that shaped his views just as he was on the verge of encountering the work of Amancio Williams: “This book is one of several Wright wrote to proselytize for his notion of organic architecture. I read it when I was 14 years old. Stylistically abominable, it is nevertheless a very influential text. Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture that promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches so sympathetic and well integrated with the site that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified, interrelated composition.” From the first this was no mere formal challenge but a project that could variously engage a political potential, one perhaps clearer in Ambasz’s earlier work than in some of his most recent structures.


And it is with the example of Wright that we might begin to think about Ambasz’s strategy of layering a building into the earth, with a combination of incisions and berms, in a set of techniques where the practicality of thermal protection – either from the extreme heat of the south of Spain or the often severe cold of the Northeast of the United States – meets the poetry of an architecture of landworks. Here Ambasz conjugates meanings, references and techniques, that take him historically from the earth works of earlier civilizations to the half buried architecture of Wright, most famously in the second Jacobs House of 1944 where from one side the house appears to merge with the earth. Here he demonstrates that a ritual, for what Fulvio Irace has aptly called “a technological arcadia,” could be developed as much from a monumental ceremonial of landforms as one of built symbols. Rural and urban appear at first to stand in conflict. In the countryside Ambasz likes to tuck and fold, gently inserting his building into a landscape in such a way that they generally seem at once in harmony with their natural setting and to subtly reorder it, almost like the ancient architects of Monte Alban outside Oaxaca, where monumental engineering seems but a working with the found landscape. From the first this strategy is more than ecological, engaging also literally or poetically, a social project. Nowhere was this more dramatic than in one of his early works – and critics rightly underscore the extent to which the clarity of a social position has become increasingly obscured as the techniques of Ambasz’s architecture have become transferable from project to project, country to country – the 1976 project for a Cooperative of Mexican-American Grapegrowers designed at the height of Cesar Chavez’s campaign for the rights of farm workers and particularly of the Latino community in the American south west, many of whom were involved in the grape growing industry of Southern California. Here, in a rare literal engagement with current events, Ambasz created a landscape in which a much more humane vision of the back-breaking labor of cultivating grapes derived a poetic civic agrarianism out of a solution to both the practical and spiritual problems of a huge community of Mexican Americans, all of it imagined for a site near a border that today is a site of conflict and the violent encounters of two different economic regimes. A troubling social reality became the raw material for reconfiguring a landscape productive of a better climate and better social relations, of dignity and poetry, even from the stark realities of modern emigrant agriculture life. Like so much of Ambasz’s work it seems in retrospect remarkably anticipatory of the dilemmas of the 21st century.


But it is in his intervention in urban landscapes that Ambasz offers a third way, creating an artificial nature for daily urban life with no pretenses to restoring ecology as found. In the late 1970s Ambasz had declared already – decades before the strategies of current landscape urbanism – that an architect’s tools, and his palette, could extend beyond traditional building materials to plants, to water, and to light. These themes had been approached somewhat formulaically in the work of Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, notably in the Ford Foundation completed in 1968, and in the series of hotel interiors developed by Atlanta architect John Portman in those same years. But Ambasz was afraid neither to seize their techniques not to develop a type of populist model for his renderings that seemed almost designed to offend the taste culture of his fellow intellectual architects in the New York of nascent post-modernism. But out of these strategies that Portman in particular had used for added commercial value, Ambasz began to craft a new vernacular of a landscape civic life that embraced artificiality, even as it harnessed the environmental and thermal properties of plants in the crafting not of scenery but of environments. While New York was debating the relevance of the Beaux-Arts tradition provocatively displayed by Arthur Drexler in a landmark, but for many enigmatic, show of grand drawings, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975, a display which coincided with the battle to preserve such American masterpieces of civic monuments in the Beaux-Art styles, notably Grand Central Station in New York, Ambasz proposed a revitalization of a Beaux-Arts building for the Grand Rapids, Michigan Museum of Art, in which the building would literally be invaded by a huge green house. Ambasz took the type of glass conservatoires that 19th century French architects often hid behind their perfectly ordered facades and transposing it to the public front of the revitalized museum to become a major motif, an almost surreal other to the masonry frame. This was a strategy developed further in two seminal projects of the 1980s: the 1982 project for recasting Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor by the excavation of a multi-story grotto at its center, and the 1986 project for revitalizing Kansas’s City’s 1914 Union Station. Just as the ethos of historic preservation was taking shape in which new commercial activities could reanimate partly abandoned civic structures in troubled American downtowns, Ambasz put worth the provocative gesture of grafting nature and culture, even framing the environmental benefits of bringing greenery into cities. Not surprisingly these projects that must be read historically as critical of the emerging commercial paradigms, so it must be recognized that they contain ideas with an astounding early twenty first century actually.

Nowhere is this prescience more striking than in one of Ambasz’s finest designs, his 1975 proposal for a Center for Applied Computer Research for Mexico City. Not only did this project accurately predict the extent to which in a short period of years the computer would radically change the ways in which we inhabit the land, structure our days and relate to one another, it also provided a model for the symbiotic ways in which advanced technology and ecology could leverage the capacities of each to restore a place for man in a heavily damaged planet. As Ambasz himself later described the project, “Behind the design of this environment is the premise that nobody should have to work. At worst, one would work at home and not need a large building but rather a small one to simply house a computer and receive messages. The building has been conceived, therefore as a set of elements to the ways in which can be progressively reconfigured and recombined as the needs of the office vary over time.” Not only does this prediction correspond precisely to the ways in which the computer is reordering space and social relations at every scale from the desk to the city, but the radical proposal to create the whole as a series of floating units in a restored lake landscape of Mexico City’s long lost ecology not out of landscape nostalgia but out of vital necessity to keep the city from sinking due to the gradual undermining of its foundations and to reintroduce the vital humidity of the natural aqueous ecology. Just this past year London’s AA staged a summer school in the Mexican capital called “Recovering Waterscapes,” focused on the type of urbanism that would result rom the restoration of a long last natural resource in a country with ever greater catastrophic water shortages.


If I have dwelt at length on a series of projects from the first five years of Ambasz’s architectural career – the house of Spiritual Retreat, the Project for Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the Mexico City office landscape – it is because in a very short period of time with these projects Ambasz crafted a typology of concerns that would define a project in architecture that has continued with remarkable consistency for more than three decades since. Little of his vast catalogue of work has been realized, but each new project explores the further applicability of a set of inventions – for in the end as architect as well as industrial designer Ambasz is first and foremost an inventor in which the most improbably seems ripe to merit a patent, like the modelling of a chair back on a vertebra. If his architectural models, beginning with a house for Barbie, embrace a self-consciously populism bordering on kitsch, the deliberate declaration of artifice in fact carries over into the built work, which in no way claims to restore something that was once whole and is now lost, be it in landscape or in the increasingly prominent visions of a lost small town life that have permeated everything from the imagery of the shopping mall to New Urbanist projects for crafting an urbanity of the future. Ambasz refuses such nostalgia and impossible wholeness even as he crafts populist imagery. Recent built projects like the Banca degli Occhi in Mestre of 2009, no less than the remarkable Fukuoka Prefectural Internal Hall in Japan of two decades earlier, bring gardens into dense landscapes of modern commercial reality without any attempt to suggest the restoration of a lost arcadia. Rather then revel in the very artificiality of terraces, trees planted in boxes and piled in grids, or stepped facades of greenery are more reminiscent of the ancient tales of Baylon or the fabled dreams of Kubla Kahn.


As much as Ambasz has developed over decades a poetry of architecture, he was also prescient in exploring a way in which the techniques of an environmental architecture could dovetail with an architecture that supported a renewal of ceremonies and aura, of ritual and significance, however elusive. In a world in which buildings are awarded numeric ratings on environmental accomplishments, so called LEED ratings, Ambasz’s collected work is a powerful reminder that a meaningful architecture of ecological inhabitation of a increasingly imperiled planet is not a challenge for technology alone, nor for practicality. It is often the blatant improbability -- in which architecture and nature seem at once reminiscent of something lost and projective of something never before seen – which brings new visions for the possible.




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