Diario las Américas Newspaper, February 24, 1957, Page 25

' gion became fashionable; Parisian- style boulevards were laid out, lin- ed with tile-roofed and guttered houses, The first English-style cot- tages appeared, and mud, quincha, and paint had a field day with the free and improbable forms of the art of Munich. _ In 1914 the Panam& Canal was opened and Word War 1 began. New materials and fresh inspira- tions came our way — steel and reinforced concrete, progress, com- fort, U. S. and English models of cottages and villas, foreign technic- al magazines, skyscrapers, futurism, cubism . Crowning this came the prosperity of the early twenties, the awakening of a new economic and social era for Pert, the desire for progress, and the architects’ lack of training. These were years of real yet productive disorder in building. On the one hand, it pro- duced absurdity and caprice, and, on the other, it reached to the very roots of the country’s traditional architecture, which had been sleep- ing silently for a century. This great artistic heritage, pro- fundly faithful to the environment and to the materials employed, showed up the artificiality of any foreign architecture that did not respect its spirit or that used its age-old clay as a disguise. The re- birth of what we can call a Peru- vian architecture came around 19- 30, with the construction of many buildings in a neocolonial style. The architects understood that what was Spanish and whatewas na- tive in Peruvian colonial architect- ure were one and the same; that its forms, rhythms, and coloring were those of the Peruvian land- scape, climate, race, and sky. In its antiquated and mestizo baroque, that architecture - kept alive the spirit of unity of the Peruvians — united ethnically and in their sense of propotion, of relief, of plastic- Adobe walls and enclosed wooden balconies with Moorish flavor relief and the color born of the Tand of the native workman’s hand, land, of the native workman’s hand, with the local environment. From approximately 1930 to 19- 45 the traditional pattern was en- riched with mestizo and Indian regional contributions, but at the same time all this was stylized, al- tered, or fragmented by the irres- istible tide of modern architecture — rational functional architecture that had stemmed from the war of 1914 but had hitherto been either unknown or ignored here. At the beginning of this period the “Neo- Peruvian School” — an attempt to fuse the native and the Spanish with the modern — achieved some isolated work of interest. Then came the so-called “Andean style,” which has produced a number of attractive houses with regional co- lor. This attempt at synthesis has survived in some architects down to the present day, but greater breadth and flexibility have come to mark its applications. The sty- lizations are more subtle; the pic- turesque and the ornamental are only occasionally stressed; there is a strong tendency to use broad, smooth surfaces, neat and strong volumes, large glassed areas, clear and luminous coloring. The new architecture. has absorbed the plasticity of the old and made it transparent, more accessible, more responsive to the needs and tech- niques of building, of comfort, of today’s life, achieving buildings and houses of charm and charact- er. Since about 1945, as was to be expected, functional architecture has been winning ever greater au- thority. The School] of Engineers not long ago started teaching this kind of architecture, and recent graduating classes of young archi- tects spread it and strive to prae- are characteristic of early colonial architecture in Lima, ity, and of structure. One could not have asked then for a fuller expression of truth in architecture. Now many Peruvian architects, conscious of the treasure they pos- sessed, with better technical pre- paration, and with their sensitivity developed through the discovery of architectural riches all over the country, began to create Peruvian architectural, types. It was not a question of merely copying the ar- chitecture of the past, but of in- terpreting it, suggesting it through the new materials and the demands of the modern architecture then being introduced. The result was exaggerated, deformed, but some- times a fresh solution emerged, without violence and full of charm. The spirit of that traditional archi- tecture penetrated deep. It was ar- chitecture that felt at home, re- born on its own soil. This spirit was manifested in many private hou- ses and in apartment buildings, churches, provincial hotels and some public buildings, In the houses that turned out best, the first thing that attracts the eye is the plastic play of the masses. They captured thoroughly the traditional and physical. char- acteristics of the indigenous and colonial architecture, which never made a fetish of structural form but was essentially modeled. The significant elements were ‘the . tice it with doctrinaire ‘devotion. This movement, which should have started ten or fifteen years ago, brings us up to date. But with this functionalism “to death,” what happens to the tra- ditional style that made its way from the Andean valleys to us by way of the leafy world of the naro- que? Does it disappear? No. Something very natural hap- pens. Centuries of life, art, and culture cannot be wiped out; they fuse into the new in one of two ways — one categorically func- tional and one basically evolution- ary. The first solution, considered the only authentic and possible gne by the purists of contemporary archi- tecture, is based on the idea that if a building truly suits its function, if it is made in the place, for the place, with local materials. and, better yet, by a local architect, it will automatically express the tra- itional pattern. Following this line of thought, we have seen some very interesting efforts that reveal the baroque quality of our environ- ment and forms, transfigured into contemporary design. The second approach entails in- corporating the new into the es- tablished environment by adapta- tion, stylization, communion, The functional abandons strict logie and enters little by little into the customary pattern, which, in turn, yields ever more to its demands. Tradition, shaped to function, is used deliberately to make the work express the environment within the new concepts. There is nothing: au- tomatic here, but an intentional process of harmonizing often con- trary forms. Examples of this in widely varying degrees, are numer- ous. We see modern houses, strong- ly influenced by the new spirit of architecture — at least so far as their exterior is concerned, and that is what the public sees — charmingly affected by rhythms, volumes, colors, and even explicit motifs from our authentic art. They have character and grace. But others artificially superimpose iso- lated, useless bits of functionalism on traditional forms, or inversely, manage to produce only confusion and archaism with their little pears, volutes, or colonial doorways directly reproduced from the past and without contemporary signi- ficance.It is entirely possible for a modern, functional house to be much more Peruvian than a house with Peruvian ornaments. It is a question of sensitivity, of art, of knowledge.The result could be an- alogous to what Gropius achieved } with the Chinese architect L. M. Pei in the Museum of Art in Shan- ghai — a work of art unmistakably Chinese, but without dragons, bells, or pagodas, and just as unmistak- ably modern. Our problem is similar, not be- cause we are Chinese but because we too are of a race and civiliza- tion that are very old and homo. geneous. We have had to go from the ancient Indian culture to the latest thing of today by way of the complexities of the baroque — which molded the Peruvian sensi- bility and way of thinking for three centuries. ; In any case, a road has been opened for Peruvian modern archi- tecture, with very pleasant pros- pects. The coloring and even the in- teriors and patios reveal trans- parently the spirit of the authentie and familiar houses of the past. Something similar is happening in each of our American lands, For they are fertile lands, each indivi- dual, yet all linked through an enormous wealth of color and forms. y Another protruding balcony, but in a modern design, in Countey A pre-Columbian wall in the Palace of Puruchuco, near, Lima. Adobe remained chief building material after Spanish conquest, Compare this balcony and subtle use of wood in contemporary home by architects Alfredo Dammert and Gerardo Lecca, Modern version of compact traditional wall appears in house designed by the outhor, built about 1945, Club distriet, Fernando de Osma, architect. Walls make familiar pattern in new architecture of San Gabriel suburb. José Garcia Bryce, architect, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1957 HEMISPHERE { ‘age 1}