by Luisa Ferro

Alberto Kalach, Miquel Adrià, Ediciones G. Gili, Naucalpan-Barcellona-Amadora 2004 (pp. 168, s.i.p.)

After building his house, the young Mexican architect Alberto Kalach realised he wanted to be a gardener. Yes, a gardener, “jardinero”. But this apparently innocent statement is actually a declaration of belonging to a “hot line” that links him to the work of Luis Barragan (1902-1988). It was a kind of ideal affinity for the great Mexican master’s experimentation, when in the Twenties and Thirties he built house-gardens, which Barragan realised “introducing a bit of garden into the rooms”. Merging interior and exterior derived from an idea of the garden as a place of peace and contemplation, the necessary completion of a house able to guarantee the “physical and mental well being” of its inhabitants. But it also came from the idea that the garden is itself a house: “Intimacy and a sense of dwelling must be present in gardens.

To this end proportional and well-partitioned gardens must be constructed. One must beware of open gardens that can be discovered at first glance. I think with fondness to the beautiful oriental gardens partitioned by archways and hedges forming enchanting gardens, which make the most of spaces and transform nature into a real house” (Guadalajara 1931). To alienate oneself from the things “that claim to be the foundation of everyday life”, there is waiting and listening. But a prerequisite of listening is silence: the greater the desire to listen, the more perfect the silence must be. Silence seemed to be the key that opens to incommensurable and supreme truth, the means that allowed him to liberate himself from reality and express himself. Barragan thus created silent spaces and volumes. They were not isolated and protected from the exterior to satisfy the material desires of who lived there but to make their spirits flourish and urge them into meditation and thought. The rejection of the open is a constant in Mexican art.

By favouring the enclosures and intimacy guaranteed by solid walls it was possible to combine local tradition with Spanish tradition. It is often said that Mexico has a ritual population that behaves and governs itself on the basis of formulas and ceremonies, and loves form. The Mexican searches for the silence of closed worlds and only dares to be himself in solitude. So Kalach, like Barragan, works with light, shade and half shade (which provides freshness) and plays on the element of surprise. But the orthodoxy, formal clarity and perfect fixedness of Barragan’s works dissolve into an infinite range of fragments that change according to the viewpoint.

By combining with nature the constructions are composed in asymmetry and the boundaries between interior and exterior become ambiguous. A series of spatial devices (fragments of cement, stone and glass walls) create a multiple boundary between the exterior and the building. Temporal metamorphosis is added to the spatial transformation: the garden changes as the hours and seasons pass by. As is described in this book’s introductory text, the designs come about through the combination of solid, single and distinct volumes. These are then emptied bit by bit, piercing the surfaces and immediately revealing the materials without concealing them. Kalach works with “living materials” like plants. He works with “inert materials”: minerals and rocks become supports, a kind of uninhabitable boundary generator of spaces. Finally he lets the garden become part of the narration.

“Secret gardens – writes the young Mexican architect – where the materials live, grow, transpire, change smell, colour and shape; the game with the senses increases and the ‘palette’ of materials expands in dozens of alternatives that change with the seasons and the days”. In the various histories of the modern and the different narrative concatenations and structures, Kalach (of the Mexican and American school) follows Louis Kahn’s lesson: “geometry and dynamism”, composition with light, but also the heaviness, the substance of things and the weight of the materials.

The large walls are composed with nature but they do not get confused with it, instead they stand out from it. They are like the monumental pre-Colombian constructions, the gigantic stone archaeological ruins that look to the sky, but they are firmly anchored to the ground. In working with the material (and the volumes) Kalach immediately points out that it is composed of an indeterminate number of fragments. Consequentially the heaviness is at the same time reminiscent of the dissolving of the walls and the fragmentation of the volumes. The physical substance of visible concrete is reminiscent of the void which is just as important and real as the solid volumes.

At the time of establishing the rigorous geometric rules that hold the composition together, unexpected deviations from the straight line guarantee freedom as much to the materials as to the human beings who live in the buildings, through the poetry of infinite and unexpected potentiality. Kalach is a “pencil and paper” architect and this book shows his most recent works giving particular space to the first reflections on the design and sketches. This is the moment when the architectural element is already sensed in the overall logic and expression: a distinctive moment with rapidly fleeting ideas.

You haven’t worked on them and you haven’t made any connections, but you know that they are right. Next to the sketches this monograph then puts the hyper-real renderings, the conclusion to a landscape from the conception to execution, from reasoned technical adjustment to the material. The book goes through Kalach’s activity and works subdividing them by themes: single houses, house typologies, early buildings and inhabitable structures.

The attention is drawn to the typological experiments where the tower house and stairways are reminiscent of the large pre-Colombian constructions or the spiral communication trenches (the tower of Babel is mentioned in the text). But in these vertical cities, where the stairways are the streets and the towers a mark on the landscape, the world is composed of broken and oblique lines. It has segments that tend to project out from the corners of every suspended garden, like the agaves on the edge or the vertical lines of palms. The houses are made through the aggregation of base elements. Precise geometric shapes define the domestic spaces as well as the boundaries between interior and exterior, following infinite variations and combinations.

In the design for the Punta Ixtapa towers Kahn’s lesson on the hierarchy of served spaces and servant spaces along with the application of geometric rigour is as evident as the reference to Barragan’s Satélite towers (1957). But here everything merges into the varied tropical vegetation. It is like in Ovid’s mythological tales where all the diversities are none other than tenuous enclosures of a common substance that, if stirred with deep passion, can turn into something radically different: a woman turns into a shrub, her feet remain fixed to the ground, soft bark climbs bit by bit and clasps her sides and the hands slowly fill out with leaves. Finally, among the designs classified as “early buildings”, Kalach applied himself to extreme constructions such as the well-known Hotel in the Caribbean. It is an immense rectilinear footprint and early founding act cutting into the fossil stone of the desert rocks.

Luisa Ferro Professor of architectural design at Milano Bovisa Polytechnic