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

When thinking categorically about Marcel Duchamp's art, one is confronted with an apparent paradox: it simultaneously encourages and resists classification. The characteristic is pervasive. It is a quality found in the individual piece as well as in the collected oeuvre. For, while Duchamp promoted the unique and inventive, while he abhorred routine, eschewed the habitual as taste making and subscribed to a philosophy of indifference, at the same time and more than any other artist he also underscored the cumulative nature of his work. The Large Glass, the Boite-en-valise, the Arensburg Collection itself: all consciously group Duchamp works together and thereby encourage a context –a fabricated, artificial ground– against which the singular piece must be read. In so doing, Duchamp packaged his production. He provided an artificial backdrop that insists on its own artificiality. This paradox is, in a sense, the essence of Duchamp's art.

There is no doubt about the success of Urban Design in the identification and search for urban quality thanks to the use of specific means and practice. However, its acceptance as an independent part of Planning has meant that it has had to abandon those formal aspects which have been an integral part of it since the beginning of English urban legislation: the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1909.

This essay is a study in the cultural role of the corner as seen through the work of one principal building each by two architects: Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). The architectural treatment of the corners in the Altes Museum, Berlin (1824-1830), and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1963-1868) are, this essay proposes, indexes of wider cultural significances regarding transformed attitudes towards knowledge, the understanding of the world, including issues of certainty.

During the nineteen fifties and sixties, Erwin Panofsky enjoyed a pre-eminent standing among art historians. The iconography and iconology studies he made popular later became a true intellectual trend. Such it is, that Panofsky even claimed that when a new edition of Art Bulletin came out, he was always afraid of coming across a parody of his method.

On the 25th and 26th of March 2004 the Fifth International Congress of Contemporary Spanish Architecture took place in Pamplona in the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra, under the title German and Italian models for Spain during the Post War years. A number of diverse researchers took part in the event among them Francesco Dal Co, Carlos Sambricio, Giorgio Muratore, Marco Mulazzani and Hartmut Frank.

There are various institutions related to architecture dedicated to the study of history, nevertheless, public archives aimed at this specific area are scarce. Paradoxically, the scarcity is most profound in the case of the History of Architecture of the 20th Century; and this is due to a number of motives related to personal difficulties within the art and in particular the profound consequences of the positions and debates based around the so-called Modern Movement. However, specific foundations exist aimed at development and cultivation of the documentary legacy of its most prominent protagonists; still, this appears insufficient and leaves the collection and analysis of the necessary information as a task yet to be undertaken for the in-depth understanding of life during the period.

Both the theory of architecture and the architecture of theory can provide numerous examples to back up view that language and architecture have become so intertwined that they seem to be a single indissoluble unity. From example, in Vitruvius' legend about how architecture came into being, the people gathered around the fire to warm themselves discovered both language and building in one act, since the fireplace represents the beginning humankind’s settling in one place and forming social groups; it represents the need for a dwelling place and communication. Thus, for Vitruvius, architecture and language belong to the same stage in humankind's evolution, almost as in Heidegger's rule of three “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, Vitruvius saw the path from the primitive hut as proceeding “by degrees to a knowledge of the other arts and sciences” and thus to humankind's cultivation, its evolution “from a savage to a peaceable, civilized life”. Heidegger's remark that it is impossible to say which is older “sentence structure” or “structure of things” simply expresses in different words the anthropogenetic parallels between building and speaking. People use language to “build” an intellectual house for themselves, to construct their theories and moral codes. For Heidegger, the home of thought was language and essentially comprised “learning to dwell [in it] through use of language”.

Architecture is supported, as a discipline, on the concept of necessity. This might be programmatic, climatic, aesthetic or of another nature. Arbitrariness, on the contrary, is thought as alien and incompatible.

The text aims to show the importance of constructed experience in time and the continuity that patient search provides in creative work in the face of the common tendency for criticism of confusion between operative levels, this being achieved by means of parallel commentary on purely figurative aspects. Based on the joint experience of Oiza and Oteiza in Aránzazu and their constructive process, a new interpretation of the innovative Chapel project on the Camino de Santiago is proposed, which defends both the value of constructed experience in the architectural project faced with the excessively protagonist role conferred on ideological and iconographic aspects such as the constant migration of dense perceptions, views charged with outside elements which are the basis for the architects creative memory, views which are carried from one project to another.