Architecture and Literature:
The Syncretic Work of Rogelio Salmona(1)
by
Ricardo L. Castro
Copyright (c) 1994 by Ricardo L. Castro, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author.
"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez.(2)
Introduction
This paper is an exploration of the recent work of Colombian
architect Rogelio Salmona. Alejo Carpentier's concept of "lo real-maravilloso" (the marvelous-real) is used here to analyze critically
Salmona's Guest House for Illustrious Visitors in Cartagena. It
will be argued that the concept of the marvelous-real, first
conceived as a strategy to describe and explain existing reality,
is also appropriate as a framework in which to construct that reality physically. The paper concludes with a reading of Salmona's Guest House for Illustrious Visitors in Cartagena. In this part some of the many marvelous-real aspects and facets which can be found in the work of Salmona are discussed.
Literature and Architecture
For the North American reader, Alejo Carpentier's novels and
essays, a rich amalgam produced between the mid 1920s, the starting
point of his literary career, and 1980, when he died, has been one
of the most underestimated literary contributions to the current
Latin American narrative. Carpentier arrives at an understanding of
the Latin American reality which is articulated through his
extraordinary oeuvres, a collection rich in themes and covering an
extensive range of cerebral commentaries on music, art, architecture, politics, literature, folklore and even cuisine. This vision is always distinctly associated with his discovery and diffusion of "the marvellousness of Spanish American reality (to which Gabriel Garcia Marquez was to pay tribute in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech) and his obsessive interest in time, which
affects both the content and structure of his novels.(3)
Carpentier's ideas are a source of inspiration in numerous
domains, architectural criticism included: in several of his essays
and novels he often addresses, describes and analyses architecture
in a highly suggestive and imaginative prose. For instance,
Carpentier's architectural reading of Havana in his essay "La
ciudad de las columnas" ("The City of Columns")(4), is a timeless
source of reflection not only on the formal aspects of the Colonial
city but on the many cultural aspects that converge on any
architectural act.
But there are further implications that we can extrapolate
from Carpentier's oeuvres. These deal with universal themes thatare interdisciplinary in scope. One is the notion of the baroque,
"which more than being a period style, is a state of the soul, a
way of being, a spiritual trace, which can appear at any time, in
any place, and consequently within any culture."(5) The baroque, then,
becomes a useful concept to express a Latin American reality. This
theme is operative at numerous levels, for Carpentier's language
itself is baroque in its lexicography, syntax and use of literary
devices. And so is his vision of the world, which incorporates such
themes as enlightenment, fatalism, the labyrinth, circularity,
inconclusiveness, and especially, an extraordinary obsession with
time, change and movement--not to mention his references to the
humorous and the grotesque. Should not all of these be explored in
any attempt to discover the reality of Latin America architecture?
Edmundo O'Gorman has pointed out that Columbus, having set
sail to explore the edge of the known world did not, after all,
discover America.(6) How could he discover something that did not
exist? America was invented. Four hundred and fifty years later,
Carpentier does indeed discover this invented and contradictory
land. In his exploration, instead of nautical means, he uses a
conceptual strategy which the Cuban writer coins as "lo real-maravilloso"< (the marvelous-real).(7) The concept appropriately explains the syncretic reality which seems to exist throughout Latin America.
The marvelous-real is essentially a strategy, a technique
which is... "designed to sharpen our awareness of the astonishing
richness of observable reality."(8) Carpentier explicitly documents
the moment at which the awareness of the idea first struck him, as
he was visiting Haiti in 1943.(9) Carpentier's sudden epiphany is the
result of an architectural encounter, nourished and informed by his
own intellectual and social perspective. It is necessary to point
out here that the writer had previously studied architecture, but
was forced to discontinue his studies later when his father, an
architect himself, abandoned his family and left the domestic
financial burden on the shoulders of the writer©to©be. The
epiphanic moment is succinctly explained by Donald L. Shaw:
What the trip to Haiti seems to have done was to stimulate suddenly
once more in Carpentier a realization that "in [Latin] America
surrealism is an everyday, commonplace, habitual thing." Not only,
`as he had perceived in his descriptions of naniguismo and
magical beliefs in earlier works, was there to be found the
marvellousness of the present, but also the marvellousness of the
past, which was revealed to him in the ruins of Henri Cristophe's
palace of Sans Souci and the astounding citadel of La Ferriere.(10)
It follows that the concept of the marvelous-real, firstconceived as a strategy to describe existing reality, would alsoseem appropriate to construct it. Having acknowledged this, care must be taken, however, to distinguish between this concept and both "surrealism" and "magic realism," two similar generative paradigms. Magic realism, so much in vogue today, is used to describe the work of several significant Latin American writers.(11) Although distinct, the three concepts do share a common denominator: the aspect of the marvelous. Their difference is in the origins of the marvelous.(12)
I would argue here that the strategy of the real-marvelous is often implicit in the current work of several Latin American architects and particularly in the work of Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona.
Syncretism, The Marvelous-Real, Architecture
The reading which follows, focusing on one of the recent works
of Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona, attempts to discern, in a
subtle manner, some of its many marvelous-real qualities.
Rogelio Salmona is still one of the architects at the interstice of contemporary architectural history despite a long career as a very prolific architect.(13) Among his most significant projects of the 1980s is the Presidents' Guest House in Cartagena, completed in 1982.(14)
Fig. 1. "Las Torres del Parque" Complex, Bogota, 1963-1971.
(Photo: R. Castro, Not to be reproduced for profit.)
Salmona, like Carpentier, mines the American past. His search,
however, takes him to the pre-Columbian Mayan temples and complexes
which provide many design lessons, especially those in which the
body appears related to architecture. That he was a good pupil is
in evidence in his own works. Like an ancient Mayan quadrangle, it
is the Guest House which builds the site. It sits behind the old
Spanish fort of El Manzanillo at the tip of a peninsula that forms
the narrow entrance to the interior Bay of Cartagena.
The site occupied by the Guest House and its gardens is part
of the grounds of the Colombian Naval Academy. The existing fort,
built in the mid-seventeenth century, is the major topographical
feature of the peninsula. It was restored by German Tellez,(15) and
became an integral part of the Guest House project.
Salmona's Guest House is a careful albeit distinct
intervention in its geographical context. While respecting and
enhancing the silhouette of El Manzanillo Fort it creates a new
landscape where previously there was only barren land occupied by
the ruins. To accomplish his architectural project Salmona has used
those simple and pragmatic planning lessons derived from the pre™Hispanic and the Spanish©Moorish tradition. Commonplace, mundane, almost banal, the techniques become the basis of the creation of a
new enchanted world. As Salmona points out in a recent interview:(16)
I learned (these lessons) by observing Pre-hispanic architectures.
Uxmal has a deep influence on the Guest House...it can be
attributed to a trip I took when I was working on the Guest House,
but ultimately it comes from a much earlier time. Without
denigrating the importance of, let's say Clunician, Western
architecture, in everything that it offers whether its treatment of the patios or the promenade through galleries (all of this is
architectural culture from which I cannot detach myself), the
perception of Pre-hispanic architectures, to which one never enters
frontally but always on the side--penetrating and discovering the
space as one proceeds inside--is more magic and so is the
relationship between architecture and its users as when one enters
Uxmal. This is how we see it today. I do not know how it was then,
however. But when one makes contact in the twentieth century with
this architecture, the first thing that one notices is the great
diversity of its spaces which lead, although not in an obvious
manner, to the heart of the building. One has to make a mental and
perceptual effort to enter, to discover, and to begin to understand
the place in which one stands. This is something which has only
been understood in the last fifty years. It is a new concept,
coming from this continent. In Uxmal, one finds surprising aspects
at every turn, as one strolls, even though one does not understand
what happens at that very moment. What one feels is the way in
which the body vibrates as it enters, as it passes from one place
to another.
The Guest House is a compound comprising seven courtyards.
Around them, the president's and guests' quarters, semipublic areas
such as dining-room, living-room, library and meeting rooms plus
service spaces are carefully orchestrated.
The tapestry of courtyards which characterize Salmona's projects whether a house, a museum or another institutional building characterizes the true geometry of de©tour which has sources in both the Hispanic, Islamic and the pre-Columbian past. The architect tells us:
There is a relationship of vision based on orthogonality but there
is also one based on skewing. This is something that impressed me
profoundly when I visited the Mayan area. There--and in all Pre-hispanic architecture--one enters on the side. It is not frontal:
one enters on the side and finds the axis. One does not enter along
it. When one enters on the side there is an arrival to the space
but there is also a skewed view by which the visual continuity to
another space is maintained. All this geometry, all these volumes
are in the making, forcing the body to attempt to penetrate, to
understand the space. It is not obvious. It is not simply an
arrival. This is what has interested me.
We approach the Guest House through a ceremonial plaza, which
opens into a courtyard enclosed by a brick wall. Once inside the
entrance courtyard we are welcomed by an aedicular entrance in
which water, light, vegetation, stone and brick address our senses.
These are local materials elevated to a new level of architectural
expression. The stone used throughout is coral, the same type that
was used in the construction of Cartagenas's fortifications and
buildings. The vegetation is lush and indigenous. As he points
out:"...nature itself is so exuberant that it enters into
architecture." And later he adds:
This is a characteristic, unselfconscious in some, self-conscious
in others, of Colombian architecture in general. Here geography
plays a transcendental role. Here, you always take into account the
landscape, the view as we say, the relationship with the outside,
the contact with natural elements. There is hardly a Colombian
house--a patio--which does not have a direct relationship with
planting, which, in turn, becomes part of the architecture.
Fig. 2. Entrance patio, Guest House, Cartagena.
(Photo: R. Castro, Not to be reproduced for profit.)
A cascade of tropical ferns, terracing from the roof to the
entrance lobby, greets the visitor. Here, water is introduced
visually and acoustically. It will be present, as in the Alhambra,
throughout the whole project.
After crossing the entrance lobby the visitor is welcomed by a patio surrounded by galleries. The feeling of enclosure is now definite. Like a fort, the house acts as a defensive realm, protecting us from the climate and from visual intrusion.
Figs. 3, 4. Gallery surrounding the Patio of the Water, Guest House,
Cartagena.
(Photo: R. Castro, Not to be reproduced for profit.)
From the reception patio, a network of six additional
courtyards, galleries and chambers, some more private than others,
starts to unfold as the visitor moves through the house. In each
courtyard there exists the possibility of interacting with nature,
as trees and water are always present. In each courtyard water
spouts from mid©level of one or two of the walls and flows through
geometrical channels carved in the floors, its presence
continuously reiterated, its function as the vehicle conveying the
marvelous, heightened. The direction of the canals serves as a
device of orientation as one moves with or against the flow of
water. As Salmona explains:
It is also refreshing to hear the water, to see it flowing. I use
water as company. The path and the sound seem very important to me.
In the Guest House, in the patios flows of water meet. In the
Alhambra water flows and remains in the ponds, then goes out and
falls. I try to have water flows meet, even to have them form
filigree, to go out, to be heard, to be seen and to be accessible
to the touch.
Fig. 5. The Patio of the Water, Guest House, Cartagena.
(Photo: R. Castro, Not to be reproduced for profit.)
Colour has not been deliberately to the design but results
rather from various luminous conditions. In the brick architecture
of Salmona, colour exists, appears and changes in subtle ways.
Wetness and light transform the material and its colour. Salmona's
architecture celebrates wetness, local colour and light. For him, his work:
...is not painted architecture, yet colour exists in all its hues
because this architecture is closely related to the sky and the
geography, and colour is always part of it of all this. It is a
spatial architecture. Colour is part of life. I do not know why,
when there are references to colour in architecture, it is assumed
that this means painted architecture...In the Guest House, for
instance, colour is one of the most important elements. Think of
the deep blue which one suddenly finds in a hollow wall cut by the
red of bougainvillaea, and there in the back there is the blue line
of the sea and the sky. Colour is there. Furthermore, it is
changing colour. It changes with the weather and it changes with
the day....
Fig. 6., Detail of one of the fountains, Patio of the Water, Guest House, Cartagena.
(Photo: R. Castro, Not to be reproduced for profit.)
Each of the courtyards has been named after a natural feature
which differentiates it from the others: patio de entrada (entrance
courtyard), patio del agua (courtyard of the water), patio de los
helechos (courtyard of the ferns), patio del caucho (courtyard of
the rubber tree), patio del roble morado (courtyard of the purple
oak), patio de las Bouganvilias (courtyard of the bougainvillaea)
and patio de la fuente (courtyard of the fountain). Even in the
naming of these spaces of the complex, Salmona's pervasive urge to
relate and integrate nature with architecture, landscape with
building, manifests an expressive reverberation. From the roof,
the various open spaces reinforce the concert of open and void
which the architect orchestrates at various scales using the
physicality of stone and brick and the transparency, viscosity and
lightness of plants and that precious element, water. Ultimately,
as Salmona himself explains "the patios and spatial routes are
constantly modified by light's incidence, by the flow of water, by
the sound of a given moment."
Fig. 7. Detail of the basin, Patio of the Water, Guest House, Cartagena.
(Photo: R. Castro, Not to be reproduced for profit.)
Roofs, themselves, are terraces in the Guest House, and to
amble through them is to have the opportunity to view each of the
courts from an entirely different perspective: this experience
reinforces the notion that while each of the patios is distinct, it
nevertheless shares a common unity with the others. Moreover,
Salmona has effectively managed to add another dimension to the
experience of walking through the roof terraces, since to do so is
to simulate a promenade over the ramparts that form part of the
defensive network of Cartagena. Clearly, this is a skilful
manipulation by an architect of a planning principle so pervasive
in vernacular architecture. And it is that manipulation which
transforms the ordinary real into the marvelous-real. Salmona is
interested in the act of moving through architecture--el deambular--the opportunity of moving, promenading, so intrinsic to the
terraces of pre-Columbian complexes, the walls of Spanish Colonial cities, the domestic upper levels of Caribbean mansions in cities
such as La Havana or Cartagena which account for the coining of the
term "cities of balconies", and recently in his own work. In all
these instances, "below" and "above" acquire definite presence and
significance. Suffice it to say that it is only on top of the
building that a true appropriation of the horizon becomes possible,
a process which in the case of Salmona's architecture has been
democratized. He tells us:
Definitely there are people who are not interested in this aspect
of the problem. They are interested in the volume of what they see
and that is all. For me the ability to circulate on the roofs
of...the Guest House, as well as to circulate below, is part of the
same challenge. I see no difference. I am circulating on the top
part of the Guest House, the sky of the house. This is a notion,
very poetic, of the Mayas and the Incas. They did not go to the sky
above, but the sky was the roof of the house. They climbed to the
sky (heaven) or they descended from it. This is a metaphor, useful
as a basis of comparison. In one case, as in the other, it seemed
to me necessary to double the usable surface of architecture so one
could walk, circulate, find ramps, climb down stairs, look out in
one direction, look out in another, that is, to provide
architecture with more richness, to explore it and to discover it.
The more one discovers it, the more it is beautiful. This must not
be too apparent. Someone said that architecture is more beautiful
when it allows the opportunity to discovery than when it imposes.
I would like to say that monumental architecture, in the most
pejorative sense of the word, can be seen once, and afterward it
becomes boring. Architecture is much more beautiful, one loves it
more, when it unveils itself little by little....
The Guest House speaks clearly of sobriety and becomes a
lesson in a sort of alchemical use of materials which combined with
water contribute, nonetheless, to generate a magical and memorable
piece of architecture which, like a pre-Hispanic ruin, is
discretely disguised in the tropical landscape.
The promenade through the Guest House terminates at the tip of the peninsula marked by the restored fort. From here one can contemplate, far away to the North, the old city of Cartagena. Closer, the hig-rise buildings of Bocagrande, the Miami Beach of Colombia, loom on the Northwest horizon. Fortunately, the urban expansion and recent tourist developments have taken place in this stretch of land, away from the old city, saving it from
destruction.
Fig. 8. The tip of the peninsula, Cartagena in the background.
(Photo: R. Castro, Not to be reproduced for profit.)
Contemplating the President's Guest House we cannot help but
recall those themes which characterize that marvelous world of
Carpentier's novels and essays which by a mysterious conjuring
seem to acquire presence in the Guest House. These are but a few
of the themes which endow Salmona's work with its syncretic
character. They transform his architecture into a part of that
marvelous reality so pervasive, yet elusive, which makes dwelling
possible.
Salmona like Carpentier is a sort of sorcerer, an
architectural conjurer, who in saturating the simple ingredients of
building with heady essences and a deep knowledge of the landscape,
of colour, of light, of forms, of history, of local culture, is
able to enchant a place. Here, in times of great disillusionment
with the current architectural status quo, resides the significant
aspect of his work.
Ricardo L. Castro
NOTES
1. I would like to acknowledge here the stimulating comments
and editorial assistance provided by Rhona Kenneally for the
elaboration of this essay.
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude (New
York: Avon Books, 1970), p. 2.
3. Donald L. Shaw, Alejo Carpentier (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1985), Preface.
4. Alejo Carpentier, Tientos y Diferencias (Groupings
and Disagreements),(Montevideo:
Editorial Arca, 1967), pp. 58-70.
5. Alexis Marquez Rodriguez, Lo barroco y lo rea-maravilloso
en la obra de Alejo Carpentier (Mexico: siglo xxi editores, 1982),
p. 146.
6. Edmundo O'Gorman, The Idea of the Discovery of America
(Mexico, 1951) cited in Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre, trans.
Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas, 1973), pp. 271-272.
7. There are innumerable books on this subject. A comprehensive analysis is found in Alexis Marquez Rodriguez, Lo barroco, pp. 29-178.
8. Shaw, Alejo Carpentier, p. 22.
9. In the prologue of El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of
this World, trans. Harriet de Onis (New York: The Noonday Press,
1989), Carpentier's second novel, the writer has already sketched
out the constitutive elements of the concept of the marvelous-real.
They are further elaborated in his Tientos y Diferencias, 1964.
10. Shaw, Alejo Carpentier, p. 27.
11. uffice it to mention Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Nobel Prize
1982), Isabel Allende, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and Mario
Vargas Llosa.
12. Carpentier himself elucidated this issue eloquently in his
lecture, "Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso". See Marquez
Rodriguez, Lo barroco, pp. 185-193.
13. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture and the Critical
Present (London: Garden House Press, 1982), p. 82.
14. Other Salmona's significant buildings are: Headquarters,
Society of Colombian Architects (with Luis E. Torres), Bogota,
1961-73; Residential Complex "Las Torres del Parque," Bogota, 1963-1971; Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, 1971-1988; Guesthouse for
Illustrious Visitors, Cartagena (with German Tellez), 1978-1981;
Quimbaya Culture Museum, Armenia, Quindio, 1983-85; National
Archive of Colombia, Bogota, 1988-1992.
15. German Tellez is an architect, historian, photographer and one of the most articulate Colombian architectural critics. His
latest book, Rogelio Salmona: Arquitectura y Poetica del Lugar(Bogota: Coleccion Somosur, 1991) is the most comprehensive analysis published to date on the work of Salmona.
16. All the citations from Rogelio Salmona form part of the Entretiens included in my forthcoming book entitled "The Marvelous-Real and the Architecture of Rogelio Salmona." These conversations with Salmona took place in his Bogota studio during the months of February and March 1990.
This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, ACSA, (Washington DC: ACSA Press, 1994), pp. 255-260.