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Victor Deupi, Jean-Francois Lejeune Cuban Modernism. Mid-Century Architecture 1940-1970Basilea: Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH., 2021. 334 pp. Hardcover. 48 €ISBN-10‏: ‎ 3035616418ISBN-13: ‎ 978-3035616415

Alessandra Anselmi L’Avana déco. Arte, cultura, societàRoma: Gangemi Editoriale, 2021. 448 pp. Softcover. Languaje: Italian. 76 €ISBN: 8849238606

Tourism architectures represented in the 1960s the ideal working context to deal with the new relationships between built architecture and the site, in short, nature. In this sense, Bonet Castellana was one of the Spanish architects who most significantly faced this scenario throughout his long career. The text brings us first of all to the actions of the architect in La Manga del Mar Menor in Murcia, where the flat condition of the site would determine the implantation strategies and the relationship between architecture and site in each case. This approach allows a better understanding of the attitudes towards the place developed later in Atamaría, which constitutes the main research in this work. Here, Bonet will carry out a series of tests in which the following project strategies will be addressed: architectures that emerge from the terrain, such as Bungalows B which, with their stepped section adapted to the terrain and the use of garden roofs, seem to disappear; architectures on the ground, such as Bungalows A or Apartamentos Mirador that assume the double strategy of plans suspended on a massive plinth adapted to the terrain; and, finally, architectures within the terrain, such as the unfinished Peters House in which, projected to be located at the highest point of the Atamaría mountain, it will be chosen to create an artificial horizontality by dismantling the original terrain.

During the first decades of the nineteenth century in the United States, the house served as an element of both physical and intellectual mediation with a yet-to-be-defined environment in a yet-to-be-defined country. On individual initiative, hundreds of families moved to the urban peripheries giving rise to a particular way of life for the middle class. It did not take long for single-family housing developments to appear on the outskirts of major cities. According to several authors, this form of settlement was modernized when Frederick Law Olmsted planned and built the Riverside neighborhood, on the outskirts of Chicago. Highly praised for combining systematic lot development with landscape aesthetics, this suburb also incorporated common infrastructures only seen before in urban centers. In this article, I argue that Olmsted's contribution to the relationship between house and landscape was not only practical. It also had a rhetorical facet aimed, above all, at the domestication of the United States. To this end, I propose a re-reading of two of his early projects: the Central Park in New York and the never-built College of Berkeley. Their reports show to what extent the idea of home motivated his landscape discourse. Furthermore, this sustains that one of Olmsted most advanced positions was the development of an aesthetic category derived from the home: the aesthetics of the domestic, an understanding of the landscape as an entity that emerged from the house.

Modern landscape architecture has figures such as Roberto Burle Marx or Luis Barragán as relevant references in Latin America. However, the work of women who worked on landscape architecture in the same time and context, such as Mina Klabin, Katarima Kramis or Helen Fowler, has been less approached. Developed at their husbands’ shadows, their works are often presented as a complement to theirs, rather than as a work by itself, thus their contributions has never been fully considered. The understudied gardens designed for the O’Gorman house by painter and botanist Helen Fowler are especially significant. Designed from an exhaustive knowledge of the terrain and the local Mexican flora, which the author studied with perseverance, Fowler’s work proposes an alternative to the way of inhabiting the basaltic landscapes found in El Pedregal de San Ángel, on the outskirts of Ciudad de Mexico. Starting from an organic relationship between home and garden, where the boundaries between the two are dissolved, Fowler’s work aims to go beyond the mere physical continuity. Instead of domesticating the territory through a landscape tailored to humans, the exacerbation of its exuberance, and even its own threatening aggressiveness, is proposed as a method of displacement of experience that, opening the way to new narratives that link the symbolic with the sensible, are able to build a new type of relationship with our environment.

This article studies the threshold space that the German architect Egon Eiermann designed for his own house in Baden-Baden, that he built between 1959 and 1962. The research is developed from the original documentation of the time, the photographs and data taken in situ, the redrawn plans and an exhaustive bibliography. The text is divided into four sections: the first describes the project and talks about the conformation of the intermediate space as part of a serial work in Eiermann's architecture; in the second section, the influence of the traditional Japanese house is studied -with special attention to its engawa- and it is reflected on the relationship of the house with the garden and on the degrees of intimacy of the proposal; the third talks about the response that the house envelope offers to climatic problems; finally, in the fourth section, the components of this technological mask are analyzed one by one. Everything, described here, serves to explain the value that this threshold gives to the project, its ability to transform the space and the change of character caused in the building thanks to the lightness of this enriching perimeter element.

This article addresses a relationship between architecture, territory and nature, through apparently distant and heterogeneous projects and works: on the one hand, the model of society that Wright proposed for Broadacre City and, on the other, the interventions that Schinkel and Lenné carried out in Charlottenhof. The aim is to observe architecture's ability to create situations in harmony with the territory and nature. This combined analysis of projects and works reveals the value of large-scale urban models, despite their difficulty in realising them, and the potential of small architectures, capable of controlling the open space and transferring to the garden, as the first anthropised nature, the ideals and expectations conceived and designed on a territorial scale. Analysed through drawing, the projects and works of Wright and Schinkel show the symbiosis achieved between architecture, territory and nature and find in the infrastructures, geometric order and geographical conditions, the arguments that sustain the validity of the spaces generated between architecture and nature.

In traditional Japanese culture, the house cannot be understood without its connection with nature. That fact qualifies the configuration of the house as well as the symbolic value of certain construction elements. This is reflected, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the writings of some Western authors who visited the country, as well as in other Japanese authors, contrasting these highly appreciated qualities of the traditional house with the rapid and substantial changes that were taking place in Japanese culture and architecture. Throughout the 20th century, the adoption of Western techniques and languages ​​and the search for a language of its own, led to the interest in the house and its relationship with nature to move away from the main architectural focus of attention. It will not be until the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st that the importance of this relationship is once again claimed by various authors, who will place it at the center of the design concerns of some of their works. Somewhat, these attitudes may be influenced by the ideals present in tradition, but without an imitation of the referent. It will be through the generation of new project mechanisms, three of which we will collect in this text, that this search for a rapprochement between nature and architecture will be resumed.

For 15 years, the American landscape architect Garrett Eckbo designed and lived in the garden of his modern house in the hills of Los Angeles. The experience in the thoughtful and time-consuming construction of his outdoor room reflects not only the arguments that interested him and help to stimulate the imagery of the Californian domestic garden but also his considerations about the form of the space of this room: the existence of constructions that extended life outside, the exploration of the possibilities of modern art in the garden or the presence of the water in the swimming pool. This garden, and the house, testifies the domesticity of an artificial nature that pursues the renewal of the idea of intimacy in the face of inherited history. The article describes this project and thinks of it from its leaved contribution as a continuous outdoor space construction made of living and inert matter that improves the house. This reflection frames in a speculations on the city of Los Angeles in order to suggest that Eckbo's small Edenic garden, in terms of its particular radical production of a private nature, could be the ember of a latent ecology that helps us in the humanization of the modern city.

The house in which Klas Anshelm lived and worked all his life was apparently one among others of the houses on the east side of Kävlingevägen Avenue. It occupied a narrow, elongated plot of land that stretched out into the dense vegetation of the Lund cemetery. Anshelm had bought the house in 1955. It was originally a small, old and poorly preserved object, somehow disconnected from the surrounding landscape. In the following years until the mid-1960s the house grew, lush and natural, like a tree. It was transformed and extended into the garden, even beyond the boundaries of its plot, towards the neighbouring houses. The garden also extended towards the house, composing a landscape built by architecture and nature at the same time. The documentation found in his personal archive allows us to recall this process by which his architecture, geometric, direct and precise, deeply reconnected that place with the urban and cultural landscape, with tradition, and with the nearby nature from which it took over time its same wild, simple and primitive appearance. In the meantime, the city grew. The traffic on the avenue increased considerably. In 1965 the City Council decided to widen the road. The widening of the avenue exposed that continuous landscape and, somehow, it vanished. And Anshelm began to look for another place to live.