By Prof. María E. Yuguero
Draft translation by Arch. Edward Allen, 16 February 2001

     Ours is an age of great, grandiloquent paradoxes. The qualitative measuring stick of recent history has nullified every distinction between real human values and the rhetorical formulas enunciated by the media, dissolving into a homogeneous pulp of creativity and stupidity, individual and group, life and survival. Nevertheless, the media reiterate incessantly the privilege of enjoying our time and are witnesses and actors in this scenario of a world where everyone carries out an equally relevant role. The general reaction of contemporary man to this phenomenon is that of the "absent-minded stare," seduced by attractive appearance (form, color, dimension, the phenomenon of "what seems to be, is,") a criterion that, carried to the plane of culture, is reflected in the passive ingestion of intellectual products packaged in mass-produced form, re-elaboration in successive instances of tendencies that burst on the western scene starting in the 19th century.
     Eladio Dieste was born in Uruguay in 1917, a time in which still reigned (and would reign for decades) the patterns of old-fashioned architectural eclecticism. These patterns, imported from 19th-century Europe, defined formally a nostalgic, outdated picture of the mother continent, which was actually by that time the enthusiast of a modernism in full expansion. This was also the period in which Le Corbusier was gestating the ideas that would blossom in his urbanistic project of 1922, "A Contemporary City for 3 Million Inhabitants" (skyscrapers with glass curtain walls), whose principles constituted the repertoire of urbanists for the next 30 years; and in which the first generation of architects produced by Uruguay, graduating in 1900, took a step toward modernism, absorbing happily the informative architectural journals of Europe and North America (which are still very influential.) In this period also, the internationally famous Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres García* wrote, "We don't want a borrowed life; we must refuse everything that others give to us; in the end, we must reveal an infinity of beauty that our eyes don't yet know how to discover. But all this must be ordered in an ideal sphere, within the empire of reason."
     Dieste graduated from the Faculty of Engineering in 1943 and, avoiding the dictates of a professionalism that imitated foreign paradigms to the letter, started his search for an appropriate architecture for Uruguay. This intention eventually made him into one of those exceptional figures in the western milieu who brings together in perceptible form architecture and engineering, concern for both the individual building and the urban environment, beauty and functionality, tradition and contemporaneity, and, fundamentally, who grants to mankind a creative role in the making and use of habitable spaces. Dieste wrote, "Productivity and efficiency are not ends in themselves. The full realization of mankind, yes....I believe that we can agree that we should establish as a shared goal the happiness of mankind....Power doesn't matter to me, what matters in mankind."
     Dieste was an outdoor thinker in the manner of twentieth-century Mexican poet and author Octavio Paz. He was a reflexive imaginer of rational harmony, a humble observer of anonymous-cosmic wisdom. He created works in both the local and international contexts, as well as both theoretical and practical reflections in these works, all of which legitimize him as an authentic artist.
     Dieste was aided by the analytical methods of industrial technology, the existence of a local tradition of hand craft, the availability of vernacular materials, and the economy of sufficiency within the limits set out by the real world. His work was characterized by a natural expressiveness that can be enjoyed directly by the user.
     He conceived a method of reinforcing brick masonry so that it is able to take the form of vaults of single or double curvature with a notably harmonious aesthetic effect. In reinforced masonry, moreover, he conjugates a sculptural concept of form and a clear, ordered handling of space, proportion, and texture, all modeled by means of a magical handling of natural light. The most basic fundamentals of his work, respect for mankind and love of the work, tie him closely to maestro Torres García.
     A functional and aesthetic appreciation of his works and an attentive reading of his written thoughts will help us to reflect on the various facets of his thinking, the unifying coherence of his conclusions, and how he put them into practice.

TRADITION AND IDENTITY

     Since the time of the conquest, Latin America has been the radius of expansion of foreign cultures, from the prevailing Hispanic that was explicitly imposed, to the French that was diffused by those of aesthetic-elitist character, the German and the constructivist for those with a modernist urge, and the North American culture artificially imposed by the media. "One's attitude becomes one of infantile bewilderment when confronted by the strength and efficiency of today's powerful nations...But I know, by having worked with them, what is behind these grand organizations, I know of their scandalous inefficiency and laziness, of their very low technical level, of unthinkable squandering of human labor, of sad work, routine and boring, that is created by what they make. They don't fool me: Their strength lies in the accumulation of capital that they maintain, not in their actual effectiveness....The South American ingenuity that all of us have believes that real efficiency lies beyond the mere accumulation of capital."
     It's a fact that international architecture has imposed itself as a style, consecrating itself in a ne plus ultra aesthetic that is mediocre in any light, monotonous, insipid. Structuralist principles have been used gratuitously and indiscriminately, ignoring any cultural reference, and the Uruguayan vernacular has been sacrificed on the altars of industry and technology, trivial standardization and regurgitation of formal tricks. Symbolic space, eclipsed by the imposition of the signified, has become insignificant in Uruguay because of an absence of real content, to be replaced by the empty shell of absurd, rigid megastructures that falsely identify economy with power. [These are]"Houses with animal comfort, but they lack even a single sign of having been made for men destined to talk with the stars. All of the modern city is an insult to the destiny of mankind....[again and again] we turn to ask: Is it desirable, this pattern of development with its associated costs of sordidness and sadness? Do we feel that we must fall into errors such as these?"
     The Uruguayan identity has long been viewed as atypical of Latin America, given the almost total absence in Uruguay of indigenous peoples and considering the fundamentally European origins of the country. Nevertheless, an identity does not conform in the strict sense with aseptically genetic factors unless it is constructed on a cultural vision of the world, as a function of social, economic, geographic, and climatic factors that arise from the insertion of a specific human group into a landscape. Ours is a short tradition, only 300 years, but it shows itself with clarity when compared to the experience of that which is alien to it. "In the old parts of the city, one feels an intense happiness: It is because of the space, this inexpensive thing that has been treated wisely and humanely....We feel furthermore, a profound gratitude: He who made these spaces was thinking of us....he thought of something dense, complex, profound, ungraspable like man, not in schematics that were formulated in fifteen minutes, and leaving out what is imported from abroad."
     Architecture is not only a visible cultural manifestation of realities that make up the underlying form of any society, but also of the especially notable incident that carries with it a capacity both contradictory and paradoxical: the capacity to build or destroy, according to the work of which one speaks. Legitimacy and respect for the surroundings as a component context, for a public art that has lost its character as such in function of false rhetoric. "The architecture that we call modern originated in countries with social, cultural, and above all, industrial development completely different from ours. Its reply to the problems of these societies seems to me almost always incomplete; it is based on a more adequate understanding from the technological point of view, but adequate for them, not always for us."
     There are certain characteristics that make an architecture identifiable: structural adaptation to the climate, the terrain, the ground; relationship with the landscape; the incidence of factors relating to economy, cultural patrons, the material and constructional systems used, conservation of the historic urban zones, new zones well integrated with the old. "Our constructional methods have much to do with traditional methods and the requirements of a material, but traditional methods have to be observed without being copied. This is the way to be faithful to the deep thread of verdant tradition, always the source of evolution, in this and in everything."
     This happy coexistence between the traditional and the technical avant-garde will cause architectural identity to be conserved, without being sacrificed on altars of false progress or confounded with the desire for the new, whether it is different, good or bad, useful or not, but inadequately foreign. We must maintain this precarious equilibrium without falling into pigeonholes, or into chauvinism.
     "He who knows the so-called developed countries, even if superficially, knows how much of this development is pure vacuity and nonsense, given that nothing in it has to do with the happiness or abundance of mankind....it is to correct these shortcomings that human effort must be directed, not to satisfy the appetite for comfort without feeling, at the lowest level, that they want to fill with these foolish things an empty space that cannot be filled. This is not, therefore, development, even if it increases per capita productivity."
     Identity results from authenticity, which implies that selection criteria be applied to the indiscriminate and chaotic entry of information, avoiding local caricature, the fakery of historic styles, or the superficial makeup of the decorative. Creativity and imagination, without fixed rules, but with adequate interpretation of the circumstances and necessities, can form ensembles of adequate, beautiful buildings that are well integrated, not chaotic, and not an invasion of inhuman absurdities. "We can't take as a given that art, science, and technology should come to us from abroad....Whoever invents them commands them. It isn't morally licit to hide ourselves from life in any field."

THE LANGUAGE OF INTUITION: A COSMIC ECONOMY

     Dieste noted that form is a language, and as such, must be intelligible to us. Language is a mode of communication and, naturally, of expression. He felt that secrecy, a common currency today in areas of artistic expression, can only bring us to lack of communication, to the emptiness caused by inertia that has contaminated modern society. "If expressiveness of the integrity of the human being is extended to everything that we see, it will enrich life and give it incomparably greater quality. Art will not be confined to the museums, it will live in the street."
     Such a concept, implicating the coherent reconciliation of form and function, would produce as a consequence sculptural architectures that carry out a role that is both functional and aesthetic: It might not be a conscious experience, but it would be enjoyable. "The so-called superfluous, made up of expression and grace, that responds to deeply felt human desires, always filters into our lives..."
     Dieste's works are moving and attractive for their confluence of audacity, respect for their surroundings, scale, and rationality. They have the mystery of beauty that is intuited by man as good, related and not hostile, and that, to paraphrase Baudelaire, "is observed with familiar looks." It is the expressiveness of the uncomplicated person, the spontaneous producer of things that are rational, beautiful, and give intuitive pleasure of the sort that is created by these models. "To anybody who thinks that an insistence on precision of form and dimensions [in my structures] is an obsessive quirk and that these errors are not perceived by those who must use the work, he should remember the marvel of the rightness, precision, and expressiveness of old agricultural tools, and the spontaneous constructions that were made by simple people, with a taste not perverted by the pseudoculture with which the mass media daze us."
     Simplicity and lightness, "...a dance without effort and without fatigue...", is the ideal of Dieste, an aspiration that, paradoxically, also has reigned for all of modernity and that has been translated into concrete megastructures, glass facades, artificial illumination, and air conditioning; slickness and fashion, mental sloth and snobbism. True lightness is bought at the cost of great intellectual effort that produces an anguished simplicity, a "...mysterious facility...", and low economic cost. "In order for this to happen, there must be nothing gratuitous or careless, on the contrary, our spirit must perceive in a building a subtle adaptation of the constructed to the laws that govern material in equilibrium, which assumes an attitude of respect and reverence in the presence of the real. Nothing of carelessness or of shabbiness; only in this way can one come to follow that which we call economy in the cosmic sense, economy that supposes accord with this ungraspable mystery that is the universe."
     The forms that we see in Dieste's work are the products of the utilization, imaginative but without stridency, of modern technology, of natural space and local habitat, conceived creatively but without eccentricity . It isn't a matter of ignoring technology or of returning to emblematic historical masks or quotations, but rather of bringing together the advantages of technological advances with local characteristics and requirements, local sources of materials, and the hand of the worker. A coherent narrative and a permanent development must be the keys with which mechanization and tradition are united into a necessary duality.
     "A healthy architecture cannot be produced without a rational and economical use of the materials of construction. It is precisely a rational employment of human strength and an avoidance of the waste of material, behind which, finally, there is also human strength. The contrary is simply a lack of adequacy of that which is planned to the total reality of the country, a lack of modesty and of seriousness in the face of its problems. That which we would make must have something that we can call cosmic economy, to be in agreement with the profound order of the world, and only therefore will it be able to have this authority that surprises us when it confronts us in the great works of the past."
     Eladio Dieste established ties with Joaquin Torres García, in whom he discovered a common substratum, a universalistic humanism, a concept of cosmic man that dates from both the great tradition and the beginnings of human civilization, but that refers to the local man.
     Torres García wrote, "If a man does not reintegrate himself with Man (with the universal man), from whom he came, he will have to remain a child and his life will be in vain, because to exist, in reality, is to exist in that which is universal. Then if I preach today's art, concrete and functional, pure, existing for its own sake, it is because I must believe that, within its form, it is possible to realize that which is so very grand: the cosmos, creation...
     "A street like this, with its high doorways with fanlights above, with its trees, with its cheap tavern or other place of business, and with such men and women as these, cannot be anyplace but in Montevideo...and this character does not come from the mate, nor the poncho, nor the song; it is something more subtle that saturates everything and that has the same clarity, the same white light as the city.
     "Neither in Buenos Aires nor in Montevideo can one imagine himself to be in Europe. The light, that mysterious thing, gives it away immediately: another shade of color. Also the architectural structure and a thousand objects and costumes. And this South American, especially because he lives where he likes, remains what he is. I mean to say that we South Americans have a personality."
     The utilization of the land for agriculture dates from no more than 6,000 years ago. Pliny the Elder, in the first century, described procedures that even today are still utilized by many different cultures, including those of some villages in Spain, makers of handmade bricks of adobe and constructors of dwellings that furnish the essential requirements of natural light and climatic protection by means of appropriate forms and spaces, dwellings that are beautiful and integrated with the landscape, dwellings that possess "intimate congruence" and a "fresh appetite for the values of the world," as Dieste says.
     The brick and indigenous hand labor are part of our cultural legacy: economical material and semiskilled labor are the ingredients necessary for the construction of the work of Dieste, who adds to them the sensible and intelligent use of another economic element, as mentioned earlier:"In the old parts of the city, one feels an intense happiness: It is because of the space, this inexpensive thing that has been treated wisely and humanely...."

ART: FORMAL POETRY AND RIGOROUS HARMONY

     "I have noticed that functioning machinery has some of the qualities of abstract sculpture. Does this mean anything or not? I think that it does, and if I feel this meaning unconsciously as I build the machine, the worker feels it also as he uses it."
     If the definition of art is one of the most problematic points of the globalized culture today, sometimes it is useful to proceed in the manner of Dieste, partisan of the "jump into the void," of "adventuring oneself," and to take a stand by hypothesizing the elements that are essential to artistic creativity, the metaphor that transcends mere functionality, or of mimesis and expressiveness. In Dieste, form and intent come together magically in the sensibility of creator and maker. "A building can't be profound as art without serious and subtle fidelity to the laws of the material; only by means of the reverence that this fidelity supposes will we be able to make our works serious, enduring, worthy companions of our contemplative thinking....The building or the buildings in which we will achieve such difficult goals will have an exemplary virtue in the city. In them, people will feel expressions of truth, will recognize surprises that overcome their weariness. Architecture thus felt is poetry; not everybody is able to create it, but everybody needs it."
     This artist, Eladio Dieste, maker of inhabitable sculpture, creates a poetry of form with an almost mystical vision of man, of man's creation and his intuition for beauty. His is an art of today's person who doesn't ignore history, but aspires to capture the values of the past, and of people both universal and local. He pours these values into the mold of a present-day language, so that the communication is real. "In the Atlantida church, the force of a single space, enhanced by the structure, the walls of the presbytery, and the use of light, expresses this communitarian unity....The coherence within shows us the form and the constructed reality: the coherence makes it intelligible to us."
     Beauty lives in truth and simplicity. When Dieste links ethics and aesthetics, he distances himself from the pragmatic professionalism of the builders who"just build according to the plan," and also from the euphemism called "estheticization of contemporary life," which refers to empty images, decorative masks, inhibitors of pathetic realities.
     Designer and builder of works destined for both public and private use, Eladio Dieste found his best mode of expression in liturgical space, perhaps because of his cosmic-religious conception of man and the world. These worship spaces, in their distribution of volumes, constructional simplicity, aesthetic expressiveness, economic sobriety, order and proportion, and magical play of light, evoke the mysterious feeling of the ruins of Romanesque cathedrals, a feeling that places the believer in the middle of space and time, disconnected from external reality. Dieste refers to"...those cases in which the soul stays in suspension, transported by the wind of beauty of the great constructions of the past or of the present. These works move us and attract us not only by their size, their audacity, or their refinement of construction, but because they are mysteriously expressive and seem to open to us a happy, unending path of comprehension and communion with the world."
     We conclude with a paragraph that delineates the thought and poetic humanism of this modest Uruguayan giant. We listen to Eladio Dieste, and trying to avoid the trite, circumstantially ephemeral formulas of conventional homage, consider that a change in the conceptual and formal orientation of our architecture will be, no matter how we look at it, very healthy and necessary.
     "What uncovers in us the struggle and the anxiety to do our work well is that there is a profound agreement between the truly rational and efficient, and beauty, or at least that they are the first and indispensable steps to achieve beauty, and beauty is the message with which the mystery of the universe is manifested to us, suddenly when it comes alive in a starry sky, in an immense sea, in the flight of a bird....and also in the work of man, when it becomes art. And that is when, all at once, as in a lightning flash of vision, we discover the communion of our being with the mystery of the world and are able to unleash the true act of love, the feeling that communion gives us, so lovely and unexpected as when, lifting up our eyes one clear night, we feel that we are made of the faraway flesh of the stars."

* Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949) was a Uruguayan painter and theoretician of international renown. He was a founding member of the "Cercle et Carré" in Paris (1930), and later the creator of "Constructive Universalism," the school of thought that joined the "Great Constructive Tradition" with the indo-american tradition of geometrization as expression of a culture in "cosmic harmony," thus joining modernity with national identity.