“This book is not recommended for the so-called «divines» in Architecture Schools (a disease which, to all appearances, hits exclusively male human beings), as if they read and think about these austere, technique pages, in the appropriate doses and persevere in its simple prescriptions, individuals suffering from divinity see how the source of their formal inventions wilts.” Professor Alfonso Jiménez, of the Sevillian Academy of Sciences, has written in the prologue of this book that “it should not be read by certain especially sensitive persons.” And he adds: “as a prologue writer I must seriously advise those persons whose artistic expression capacity inevitably leads them to treat monuments as buildings sites where their creativity, a nineteenth-century virus which muted in Bauhaus, must always express themselves with the frivolity they show in their speeches and writings, usually beginning with a quotation by Italo Calvino, not to read this book”.
One of the objectives of the book published by the UGR is providing students with a theoretical corpus of the subject Building Construction imparted at the School of Architecture of Granada and collecting, in a succinct way, the different subjects taught in the course, according to Professor Antonio Almagro Gorbea. In 300 pages, he reports numerous examples of constructions and representation models of buildings which have been the object of teaching practices in different cities.
According to Professor Antonio Almagro Gorbea, “although originally all the drawings started as practical works of students of different training programs, all of them have been the object of a profound validation, correction and homogenization work of representation criteria.”
The volume, written by Professor Antonio Almagro Gorbea is, according to Alfonso Jiménez, of the Sevillian Academy of Sciences, “the austere fruit of long years of experience of reserved, sullen architect, who only flies off the handles when something moves him to indignation and who perhaps would not have developed any teaching work if he had not loved drawing so much.”
“Architectonic construction” deals with the way of drawing in a rigorous, exact way, to reveal, as if they were radiographies, important data about the buildings represented, applying the now systematized and fashionable proceedings used by construction workers, master builders and architects, avant la lettre and from time immemorial, now pompously called «Architecture Archaeology», says Alfonso Jiménez, who adds: “Architects insist, from almost a century, on redeeming mankind by projecting on our works the subtle miasma of our inexhaustible ability to interpret reality, a capacity we acquire in the more and more literary classrooms of our umpteen thousand Architecture schools”.
“It does not matter –according to Professor Jiménez—that the client had a different pretension, that the resources are insufficient or that the original situation was more valuable that our contrasted experience. Nothing matters, except the fact that our explication capacity is equal to our economic, creative and propaganda ambitions.”
This publication also aspires to present in public the result of the works developed in the different training programs which have also been conceived under utility teaching criteria and to provide society with knowledge of the architectonic heritage. The activity developed in the subject of Architectonic construction acquires a fully university standing, as it joins teaching and research work, a subject of interest to students in a process of knowledge generation.
Reference: Prof Antonio Almagro Gorbea.
Dpto. of Graphic Expression on Architecture and Engineering.
University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 246108 – 242870.
