Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Resumen La construcción de la imagen devocional del rey Jaime I tiene su origen en el retrato de la fama que de Jaime I relatan las Crónicas. Esta imagen devocional se va consolidando paulatinamente en los escritos y obras de arte de los siglos XIV al XVIII. En este trabajo se estudia y se analiza cómo se impulsa la apoteosis de su imagen como rey fundador gracias al interés de la orden de la Merced por vincular su origen fundacional con la monarquía, así como por parte de la casa de los Austrias por elevar a los altares a un rey de su linaje.   

Este artículo se centra en la vida de Fray Antonio Sobrino y su estrecha unión con los monarcas Felipe II y Felipe III, quienes siempre estuvieron agradecidos por sus servicios y dedicación, llegando incluso a ayudarle en ciertos momentos de su vida. Generalmente, Sobrino es conocido por pertenecer al ámbito espiritual valenciano del siglo XVII y su intervención en el complicado caso de beatificación de Mosén Simón. Pero también es de destacar la relación que tuvieron la Corte y este fraile, quien a pesar de querer llevar una vida contemplativa, nunca pudo desvincularse del poder y sus proyectos religiosos.Fray Antonio Sobrino, Felipe II, Felipe III, Inquisición, Inmaculada Concepción.

RESUMEN La arquitectura, y el proyecto de arquitectura, se plantea como una disciplina capaz de responder a la transformación coherente del territorio con un ordenado sentido de repetición, una herramienta que otorga la consideración de continuidad del pasaje de bancales de un proceso heredado y en continua evolución, ofreciendo respuestas capaces de integrar el concepto de habitar, cultivar y proyectar en estos territorios. Existe una necesidad de practicar una investigación aplicada sobre la puesta en valor del paisaje, en este caso focalizado en los territorios de bancales, a través de la cual se puedan plantear acciones y estrategias proyectuales precisas como argumentos para la protección, conservación, recuperación, revalorización, renovación, e incluso la incorporación e implementación de nuevas ideas, conceptos usos y actividades respetuosos que atiendan a su vez a las nuevas demandas sociales.SUMMARY Architecture, and architectural design, is a discipline capable of responding to the consistent transformation of the land with an ordered sense of repetition, a tool that considers the terraced landscape to be the continuation of an inherited process that is constantly evolving, offering responses capable of integrating the concepts of inhabiting, cultivating and designing these lands.There is a need for carrying out applied research into showcasing the landscape, in this case focused on terraced land, through which specific design strategies and actions may arise as arguments for the protection, conservation, recovery, revaluation, renewal, and even the incorporation or implementation of respectful ideas, concepts, uses and activities that simultaneously meet the new social demands.

Pancho Guedes (1925), the luso-african architect (Witwatersrand University, 1953) active in Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony till the independence in 1975, made in his writings and architectural production a major contribution to the reassessment of architectural modernity, connecting different disciplines and cultures and carrying out affinities with various creators namely with the painter Malangatana Ngwenya ( 1936-2009). His fantastic and magic architecture comes from the stimulus of a large worldwide network of artists and thinkers that he himself put up from different sources such as: the Modern Movement architects, namely the South African contributors as Martiessen or the Brazilian inspiring influence referred to Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer; Frank Lloyd Wright inspiring legacy or the CIAM’s critic contestation movement under the scope of Team 10 which he joined as founder member at CIAM’s Royaumont meeting together with the Smithson’s, Aldo Van Eyck, Candilis and Giancarlo di Carlo; or finally the new African artists which he promoted. Besides being one of Mozambique’s major architects, Pancho had the sagacity to detect talent, to promote creativity, having the ability to establish a network of creative, functioning himself as a sort of mediator between art and architecture. In Lourenço Marques ( currently Maputo) Pancho created a profound complicity with Malangatana, the surrealist painter, whom inventive spirit allowed no limits. Supernatural summoned, Malangatana stimulated Pancho in his will to “ ear the voices speaking from the other side of dream”. In The 50s, in an Africa of Apartheid between Mozambique, Rhodesia and South Africa, Pancho knew that there was the need to found an authentic and raw art, the art for authentic artists”5. Therefore he sought for an Architecture full of significance, carrying a personal dimension based on a research focused on all formal dimensions and on the possibility for architectonical elements to contain and express emotion: “ I claim for architects to have the same rights and freedom painters and poets have for so long”6. Pancho wanted to appropriate the primitive’s universal motifs, mixing them with his own sophisticated architectonical culture, in order to achieve in his buildings the ambience of Chirico’s painting. Pancho knew that Architecture is not perceived as an intellectual experience but as a sensation, an emotion7. Therefore he was interested in the quest for such quality “ long ago lost among architects but able to reach a spontaneous architecture capable of magic intensity”. In the 50s, this search resulted from the desire to create an alternative modernity, different from the mechanical international style growing also in Africa9. Unlike the majority of architects working in Africa forced to draw in dialogue to climate constrains, Pancho assumes the creator’s right to innocence stimulated by the sensuality and drama of the surrounding African culture. The creation and growth of Dori10 and Pancho African art collection, which has been recently exhibited in Lisbon, bears witness to his constant interest in the dialogue with other forms of expression. The objects he collected, as he himself has stated, helped him free himself “ from the dominant Eurocentric point of view of the white man who lives in the land of others”. The will to discover an alternative modernity was the answer to an inner appeal, but also to an Africa dawning to contemporaneity, to a new world which was in a state of ferment13. Pancho witness and acts in a time when Architecture is open to popular culture, when architecture without architects and architecture of fantasy are accepted14. But it is also the time for complexity and multiple solutions opened to the Modern Movement continuity or crises15, the ones Giedion identified as a result from reason and emotion related equation. Pancho gathered the conditions to follow an alternative, original and idiosyncratic path of his own. Besides his huge talent, wide culture, experimentalist and genuine curiosity, he had the term of living in Africa at the time: conditions he managed with cleverness. On one hand being apart from the Eurocentric European culture spreader, living in Africa in an European imperialistic peculiar colony17; on the other hand, living the period of colonial emancipation spreading throughout Africa, where, despite the imperialistic presence “ anything seemed possible”. As Pomar states Pancho “was one of the most inventive of the architects that were building in Africa, as well as one of the three or four recognised white mediators who sought out and promoted contemporary African art in various places on the continent. Lourenço Marques was, at the time ( in the early 1960s and before the surge of arrests that followed the start of the war for independence), a dynamic city and one of Africa’s cultural capitals, due, by and large, to Pancho’s international contacts in areas with quicker communicability with the outside world, such as architecture and the visual arts”.

Years before Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen characterized the current geological period on earth as the “Anthropocene Era” due to the transformative domination of the planet by humans, designer Olt Aicher –the founder of the legendary Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany– had already coined the term “ The World as Design”. Although these concepts might seem to be a unique response to the conditions that currently prevail on our “ Small Planet” ( Richard Rogers), the fact is that they are not new at all. The modern vanguards were noted for their attempts to develop an allencompassing, comprehensive architecture, arousing early suspicion of a totalitarian element. By the advent of postmodernism, if not earlier, the modern quest for a Gesamtkunstwerk in which coordinated industrial production would ensure the continuity and unity of the world of “good forms” seemed to have become irretrievably obsolete. However, environmental urgencies once again demanded a full understanding of the increasingly artificial physical surroundings, thereby reviving a modern conception of the entire world as an artifact. This article aims to make a contribution to a history of planetary visions and environmental approaches that is worthy of study. For this purpose, it addresses the critical position defined by Argentine born design-theorist Tomás Maldonado between 1966 and 1972. In those years new scientific approaches such as cybernetics, ecology, semiotics, and system theories triggered an epistemological turn in the expanding design disciplines, offering a rational common base for the interdisciplinary methodology of a comprehensive “environmental design”. In his analysis of design disciplines in regard to their approaches towards the human environment Maldonado also included political and social concerns, as evidenced in his book Design, Nature and Revolution. Toward a Critical Ecology ( New York 1972, first published in 1970 in Italy as La speranza progettuale). The article focusses on the connections between the various contexts that originated this book, written in Ulm, Princeton, and Milan, in order to gain deeper knowledge of Maldonado’s design philosophy within the international debates on “ environmental design” and “ existing landscapes”. Maldonado’s notions of human condition and human environment are certainly still relevant to a world increasingly designed and determined simultaneously by scarcity of resources as well as by expanding globalization and digitalization.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of Aarhus Town Hall has just taken place. Aarhus is the second most important city in Denmark and in the 1930s it had a population of around 120,000. The building that housed its Council was about eighty years old at that time and was located next to St. Clemens Cathedral, in a building that currently houses the Women's Museum. The existing building was becoming a little small and the increasing activity in the city and its significant growth in population were more than sufficient reason to propose a new construction that would bring together all the municipal functions under one roof. In 1937 a national competition was held and its winners were Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller. The council asked them to include a tower in the winning project. The structural analysis of that tower allows us to look at how architects understand this as a decorative element. This fact would have an impact on the attitude adopted by future projects and their most significant elements.

   

Oskar Hansen’s proposal for the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz renounced to have an immutable shape, both because of the interaction it claimed from the visitor and the effect of the passage of time. Devoid of a focus for commemoration and surrounded by remnants of the camp that were meant to acquire a romantic outlook in the future, it proclaimed its inability to depict the horror provoked by the war, let alone to explain it. Its transgressor character aroused the suspicion of the victims, who did not feel themselves represented on Hansen’s empty pedestal. Its novelty was based on shifting the burden of memory from the object ( the traditional monument) to the subject ( the viewer), as Postmodernism would do later, and stimulating critical thinking about the past. But above all, and because of its reluctance to ‘ talk’, it aspired to remain a valid space for remembrance, regardless of the transformations that postwar society’s relationship with the architectural heritage of Nazism went through. This relationship has been swinging like a pendulum over the years, first ignoring or underplaying the symbolic power of these buildings. Later on, when German society felt ready to ‘ come to terms with the past’, almost every trace of Nazism was deemed worthy of preservation, and the birth of the countermonument ( many of which literally replicated the mechanisms that Hansen put in place in Auschwitz) helped to shape a critical review of this period. And finally, it seems that the excess of memory during the last decades of the twentieth century is giving way to the normalization of this legacy as just one more element in the urban landscape. Given the changing nature of these attitudes, rather than a specific response, what Hansen really intended to monumentalize was the debate that should be fostered on the surface of his monument, as an antidote to oblivion.

The celebration last April of a new edition, the fifth edition of the BAL2017 Biennial of Latin American Architecture, brought together in Pamplona a selection of fifteen teams of young Latin American architects from seven countries. With the inclusion of the works sent by biennialists of previous editions, there were a total of thirty-two teams and eight countries represented, making Pamplona in a showcase of the best emerging Latin American architecture for a few days. The Biennial, which also offers its programs in Madrid and Barcelona, has two parts: one in which a guest country, Colombia in this case, stars in the conferences and debates that this time focused almost thematically on the well-known social achievements achieved in Medellín and Bogotá with the strategic use of architecture as an effective tool of social action, and a second where the selected teams presented their work. What has been seen has been a set of proposals of great interest and quality, with programs as small as single-family housing to as large as an intermodal center or a government building; with environments that range from the urban periphery, the historic center or the lush landscape. A set that conveys a feeling of optimism before an architecture with commitment, with reflection, with an ethical attitude in the proportion between the means and the ends pursued, with a constructive emphasis in the approaches. An architecture with a preferential option for the most with less that has a lot of common sense and a lot of ambition and intensity in the contents and that developed in an environment lacking the suffocating European regulations produces results that seen from this periphery are enviable.