Table Of ContentThe Architectural Project i
Foreword
Number Six:
Studies in Architecture and Culture
Malcolm Quantrill, General Editor
The Architectural Project
By Alfonso Corona-Martínez
Edited by Malcolm Quantrill
Translated by Alfonso Corona-Martínez and Malcolm Quantrill
Texas A&M University Press
College Station
Copyright © by
(Center for Advancement of Studies in Architecture)
Manufactured in the United States of America
All rights reserved
First edition
The Studies in Latin American Architecture series of CASA’s
Studies in Architecture and Culture is published with supporting
grants from the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of
Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, and the Office of the Vice
President for Research and the College of Architecture, Texas
A&M University.
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, .-.
Binding materials have been chosen for durability.
For a complete listing of books in this series, see the back of the book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Corona Martínez, Alfonso.
The architectural project / Alfonso Corona-Martínez ; edited by
Malcolm Quantrill ; translated by Alfonso Corona-Martínez and
Malcolm Quantrill.
p. cm.—(Studies in architecture and culture ; no. )
Includes bibliographical references.
--- (alk. paper)
. Architectural design. . Architectural design—Study and
teaching. I. Quantrill, Malcolm, – II. Title. III. Series.
.
—dc
Contents
Foreword, by Marco Frascari vii
Preface xiii
Introduction 3
. Design Processes 7
. Description Generation 25
. Design Education 41
. The Two Faces of Functionalism 60
. Typology 79
. Development of the Project: The Elements of Architecture 99
. Elements of Composition 124
. Changes in Design Method: The Future in the Present 164
Notes 187
Index 199
Foreword
Lege feliciter
Unhappy thoughts have dominated most contemporary architectural
thinking, and this has forced the basic components of the architectural
discipline to separate out in the same way that the oil and the egg-yolk
break apart when a mayonnaise curdles. My grandmother, who was an
astonishingly good cook, had a secret method for saving the situation
when that happened. Meanwhile, my job was to continue whisking the
eggs and oil. I will try to convert her time-honored method into an ana-
logical tool by pointing out that this essay by Alfonso Corona-Martínez
introduces a powerful recipe for overcoming the present curdling ten-
dency in both the practice and teaching of architecture. Corona-
Martínez’s own “secret method” succeeds by explaining the material
nature of architectural imagination.
The crucial question raised by this extraordinary book is: “What does
the author mean by “an essay on the architectural project” (from the
Spanish title Ensayo sobre el Proyecto, or An Essay Concerning the Project)?
Corona-Martínez’s book is certainly not an essay about architecture—
our bookshelves are already full of such architectural essays. Instead he
has written something quite different. His essay is rather concerned with
what goes on within architecture, or, to be more precise, in the use of
architectural composition. At the deep level of description, the processes
of architectural composition are universal; the elaborations of a few simple
structural values and principles result in a great variety within the scope
of the architectural imagination, which can cut all the way through
temporal, spatial, and cultural divisions. If our quest is to understand
architecture by thinking within architecture rather than thinking about
architecture we have to understand the workings of the mechanism that
drives compositional thinking. Otherwise, we will be condemned to watch
in despair as the architectural world created in the past continues to slip
further and further away from our awareness and intellectual perceptions.
Modern architects do not make buildings as such, rather they compose
them in drawings. Two processes of “essential polar intelligence” characterize
architectural drawings. These are the categorical and inferential processes.
Thus drawing might be considered as a form of “predicament decipher-
ing” in which some of the input happens to come in part through the
senses and in part through needs, expectations, and beliefs, and in which
the output is the category of the building being perceived. There is no
distinction between drawing and thought. Because of this, drawings are
the main expression of architectural theory, and this expression takes
place through the process Corona-Martínez refers to as “composition.”
In the real project of architecture, drawings and buildings exemplify and
suggest rather than determine or impose, integrating the art of composing
well with the art of living well. Reflective architects should always concern
viii themselves with the art of composition.
Foreword The appropriate use of composition is indispensable both to the dis-
ciplinary relationship between theory and practice and to the profes-
sional relationships between architects, builders, and clients. Represent-
ing clients, users or any other conglomerate that generates a request for
construction, the architect cannot be the builder. Instead, his task is to
control the making of buildings by means of well-constructed graphic
compositions. These mediate between those powers which govern every
design; namely, the client, the contractor, and the building concept. A
building can be designed only through a continuous creative, intellec-
tual mediation between the imagination and imagining, and both these
mediations are performed by means of well-tempered compositions. The
idea of architectural composition implies, if not demands, this perfor-
mance.
Virtually any form of drawing is a kind of composition, and any form
of drawing is a type of performance. Drawing is an intensely physical
art, one that activates several senses at once. In visual societies drawing
has traditionally been accompanied by facial movement, gesture, ma-
nipulation of symbolic objects, the wearing of costumes, and so on—all
of which, in a tribal context, are part of a cultural vocabulary. Composi-
tion is a physical talent using multiple senses: the body as a whole.
Drawings make use of a particular sensory conjunction—that be-
tween touching and seeing. By looking at and feeling the surface of a
drawing, designers are in contact respectively with the outward appear-
ances and finish of edifices and the interior inauguration and sturdiness
of their constructions. The chasm between the two senses makes the de-
signers aware of the complex interplay between the inside and the out-
side by providing a new locus of architecture, since to draw is to enter
into participation with the inscriptions and compositional essays that
mark the surface of the drawing. However, in the mainstream culture of
the western world, during the twentieth century, architectural drawing
and consequently composition has become an ever more ephemeral,
dephysicalized act. At the same time contemporary drawings work against
this tendency, rediscovering drawing methods from other cultures and
other periods, while discovering new ones of their own. Though for most
people drawing becomes more and more a system of simple data trans-
ference, architects attempt to find alternative notations and to expand
the range of their performance.
For Corona-Martínez, the mystery of architecture is all in the
divinatory nature of the mirroring metaphors that rule the acts of com-
position. The composition of buildings in drawings (a recollection), and
the composition of drawings in buildings (a foretelling), is a speculative
chiasma, a hypogean structure, on which the project of architecture must ix
be erected. This project recognizes and confirms architecture as a trade Foreword
with an intellectual tradition. Composition is the locus of the transmu-
tation of recollection in foretelling intelligence: it generates the quasi-
architecture of the dream, the Heraclitean idios kosmos that undercuts
empirical discernment by refusing the scientific separation of past,
present, and future. To compose means to recognize or guess at what has
instituted an imagined state into a composition.
This involves instituting an interpretation. A translation is the result
of the univocallity of the interpretative scheme and the ambiguity of
composing. The architect who is composing a building in a drawing or a
drawing in a building proceeds by alternating schemes and corrections.
These translations are not abstractions but steps in the process of suc-
cessive definitions: they constitute an architectural project. Embodied in
the drawings, architectural imagery acts as the generator of architectural
expression, which is the beginning of any architectural composition.
In the practice of architecture, the most ingenious segment of the
process by which our constructed world comes about has always involved
a characteristic act of composition. Unfortunately, now, this intriguing
and desirable projectile operation has been disguised beyond recogni-
tion within the meanderings in the back rooms of professional practice.
This critical segment of the art of architecture has been reduced to a
prosaic activity.
The problem with its negative connotation begins within the edu-
cational realm, and Corona-Martínez clearly indicates how the distrust
and the destruction of the power of architectural virtues are predicated
not upon ideas of design value, which unfittingly always becomes “value-
design,” but on a sense of wonder made real through elegant design
principles embodied in compositions elaborated by knowledgeable ar-
chitects. These are the practitioners who are respectful of the edifying
and beatific measures of human dwelling. The quasi-doctrine of com-
position in the architectural project is the fundamental and necessary
