Jose Antonio Coderch 2G No. 33

architect: Jose Antonio Coderch.
monograph no: 01
title : Jose Antonio Coderch.
publisher: 2G N.33 (for 2G magazine profile and other 2G publication link, click here)
publishing date:
editorial: Oriol Bohigas, Jose Antonio Coderch, Rafael Diez, Kenneth Frampton, Eleas Torres (texts) Rafael Diez (ed.) Jose Hevia (photographs)
language: English, Spanish
pages: 148
file size:  90 mb
ISSN: 1136-9647

reference: arkitextos.blogspot.com

description:



Jose Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat was born in 1913 and died en Barcelona in 1984. These years delimit his life and work. But the great internal coherence of his thinking, distilled within his architecture, goes beyond these temporal limits, his own idiosyncrasy and the reduced geographical framework where it developed, to provide a reflection on architecture from an ethical standpoint. Although, recognised as the most important catalan architect after World War II, this implicit depth is perhaps one of the reasons his work has not been widely disseminated.

This issue of 2G magazine presents a collection of houses constructed by Jos� Antonio Coderch. It includes 11 houses, starting with the Ugalde House, the great work that marks the initiation of his mature phase. In it, not only does Coderch definitely embrace the language of modern architecture, nuanced by his respect for context, but also hones his own spatial conception of the house in nature. It is the experimental prototype for the following houses. In ordering these intuitions, the free lines of the first are not repeated.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introductions:
Homage _ Coderch. Text by Kenneth Frampton
Introduction to the Architecture of an Ethics and 1 + 10 Houses by Jose Antonio Coderch Texts by Rafael Diez

Works and Projects:
Ugalde House, Caldes de Estrac, Barcelona, 1951-1953
Ballve House, Camprod_n, Girona, 1957
Olano House, Comillas, Cantabria, 1957
Biosca House, Igualada, Barcelona, 1961
Luque House, Sant Cugat del Vall_s, Barcelona, 1964-1966
Gili House, Sitges, Barcelona, 1965-1966
Entrecanales House, La Moraleja, Madrid, 1966
Rovira House, Canet de Mar, Barcelona, 1967
Soler-Badia House, Igualada, Barcelona, 1969-1971
Z_bel House, Sotogrande, C_diz, 1970-1972
Guell House, Barcelona, 1971

Biography

Nexus:
It Isn't Geniuses We Need Right Now and Letter to Alison Smithson. Texts by Jose Antonio Coderch
Coderch: Ugalde, Girasol and Trade. Text by Oriol Bohigas
Coderch Lamp (1952). Text by Eleas Torres

Download:
Gigasize.com link
link: CODERCH DOWNLOAD

selected images:

 

 

EXTRACT FROM THE INTRODUCTION:

'Homage Coderch

by Kenneth Frampton

One of the greatest problems for a modern architect is how to make progress compatible with that sense of humanity which old buildings exude. I have always been concerned with the problems raised by the exercise of this profession of ours in this world in which we live, and I must say that contemplating the work of Finnish architects has very often afforded me consolation and reason for hope. I have always felt a great admiration for Finnish architecture, not only for the individual achievements of its most outstanding and best known architects, but for the body of work in its entirety, the product of all. Perhaps, indeed, this latter achievement of such value and such rarity is the most important, revealing as it does the existence in that country of a great number of architects who have a real respect for the essential human values and the values of the world that surrounds us. The acknowledgement of these values is, at least at this point in time, the adoption of the only decent attitude (of ethics rather than aesthetics) in the practice of our profession.

Jose Antonio Coderch


As with other Spanish architects who came to their professional maturity in the mid-40s, Coderchs first domestic works appear to evolve out of the Catalan vernacular and even, at times, literally out of the ground itself. This is particularly evident in Coderchs proposals for the Les Forques development projected for Sitges near Barcelona, a work in which, as in the Ferrer Vidal House (Cala dOr, Majorca, 1946), it is difficult to distinguish between the earthwork and the main body of the house. The indented, roughly T-shaped plan of the single-storey, flat-roofed Ferrer Vidal House was raised throughout on a shallow podium, with all its rooms opening onto terraces of varying depth to every side. Something similar also obtained in the two-storey, mono-pitched P rez Ma anet House, built in Terramar, Sitges in the same year, employing the same basic syntax of whitewashed, roughcast walls and narrow openings let into the load-bearing masonry walls.

While this organic, telluric approach becomes rationalised in the all but symmetrical, concrete-framed, Garriga Nogu-s House realised in Sitges a year later, Coderch_s early domestic manner attains its first truly convincing formulation in the famous Ugalde House (Caldes d_Estrac, Barcelona, 1951). This evocative, dynamically plastic work (as unmatched today as a canonical Mediterranean vacation house as anything that has been built since) is still exceptional for the way in which it opens out, at each step, to a different aspect of the cornice. The house is as organic in its plan as the undulating, pine-studded promontory on which it stands. It is a house that derives much of its spatial form from the rough stone, whitewashed podium on which it sits; a stepped earthwork that is countered and controlled by the knife-edge of a shallow pitched, concrete roof whose wide span is achieved with the aid of a single, free-standing tubular column. This single element, plus a full-height, single-sheet, plate-glass membrane between the podium and roof, jointly serve to animate and frame a series of kaleidoscopic vistas opening onto the oceanic horizon. It is a telling metaphysical touch that Coderch, ever the deft photographer, would furnish the panoramic terrace of the house with a single BKF chair.

As irregularly spread-eagled in its plan as the Uglade House but with each wall being straight rather than curved, the fragmented volumetric character of the all but single-storey Coderch House (1955), also built in Caldes d_Estrac, depends for its unity on out-riding walls and, above all, on a broad all embracing, shallow-pitched, tiled roof. At this moment one already senses the tension that will animate his work throughout his career; on the one hand, an engagement with the liberative space-form of the avant-garde, on the other, a profound respect for the role of tradition in architectural culture. Beyond the confines of Catalonia, Italy appears to have been the primary influence on the development of Coderch_s domestic syntax, in particular the postwar work of Ignazio Gardella as we find this in, say, his Borsalino Apartments (Alessandria, Italy, 1951), for which Coderch displays an affinity in his Instituto Social de la Marina eight-storey apartment block in La Barceloneta of virtually the same date; above all one is struck by the use of very similar narrow floor-to-ceiling windows with adjustable wooden shutters and a comparable thin slab overhang at the eaves.

The sliding, louvered, external floor to ceiling screens of Coderch_s Catas_s House (Sitges, Barcelona, 1956) is patently an elegant variation on this detailed repertoire in a house that is otherwise influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright_s Usonian paradigm of the late 30s, and thus also by Richard Neutra_s Kaufmann House (Palm Springs, California, 1946), not to mention the free-standing planar walls which by virtue of extending beyond the mass of the house, which appear to make a subtle reference to Dutch Neoplasticism.

The serene horizontality of this single-storey house emphasised on it southwestern face by a thin cantilevered flat roof, shading the swimming pool terrace at high noon, would accord its forty-four year-old architect instant international recognition. It was a spatial and typological tour de force that would prove difficult to repeat in the traditionally inflected Ballv_ House completed at Comprodon (Girona) a year later. In this instance the mandatory pool, lying directly adjacent to the bedroom wing, is ornamental in character rather than hedonistically luxurious, and a similar rather conservative atmosphere permeates the entirety of this single-storey dwelling with its pitched roofs and deep eaves and its ample but excessively shaded living space.

Coderch will amplify and even transcend the brilliance of the Catas_s House in four successive rather large, luxurious, single-storey, flat-roofed dwellings completed during the first half of the 60s; namely the Uriach House (L_Ametlla del Vall_s, Barcelona, 1961); the Roz_s House (Roses, Girona, 1962); the Luque House (Sant Cugat del Vall_s, Barcelona, 1965); and the Gili House (Sitges, Barcelona, 1965). Each of these rather ample houses will employ the full-height louvered fenestration of the Catas_s House, countered as before by blank single-storey masses and otherwise inflected by a staggered geometrical progression as one passes from the living to the sleeping spaces, with the latter assuming, at times, the form of independent wings as in the Uriach House and the Roz_s House, while at other times they will inflect jointly towards the swimming pools that in two of the houses from the mid-60s appear almost as addenda to the stepped concatenation of space around a central patio.

It is apparent that in each instance the compositional strategy adopted was largely determined by the orientation and topographic context, so much so that only one of these houses would still remain discernibly influenced by the Usonian paradigm. (...)

Apart from his brilliance as a designer of free-standing, middle-class residences, Coderch was equally adept at the designing of medium-density multiple dwellings. Since such dense forms of human habitation are of necessity inseparable from the fabric of the city, Coderch regarded low- to medium-rise, high-density housing as being the basic ethical-cum-spiritual challenge facing the architect in the second half of the century. Like other members of Team 10, with which he was briefly associated, he realised that the modern project as it had been formulated by the architectural avant-garde of the interwar period was, for all its radical aspirations, incapable of responding in real terms to the emerging megalopolitan apocalypse. He was one of the first of his generation to see that the rupture with traditional land settlement patterns, be they urban or rural, was nothing less than disastrous, particularly when combined with the constantly escalating process of urbanisation.

Unlike most of his colleagues in Team 10 who, albeit critically, still adopted a quasi-avant-gardist stance towards late-modern, proto-consumerist society, Coderch strove to devise modest yet ingenious paradigms that sought to answer both the physical needs and the psychological propensities of his largely middle-class clients. From the mid- 60s on, Coderch and his partner Manuel Valls i Verg_s were able to realise a number of medium-rise apartment buildings in and around Barcelona. In the course of a decade they were able to project two works which even today may be seen as exemplary type-forms; the low-rise, high-density housing that they projected for a heavily wooded site on the Costa Brava, their Torre Valentina development (Sant Antoni de Calonge, Girona, 1959) and the medium-rise urban quarter known by the name of Las Cocheras (1968), built in the Sarri_ district of Barcelona. (...)

Three aspects merit our attention as we shift from the configuration of the block to the spatial articulation of the apartments: first, the ergonomic manner in which the internal space unfolds as one passes from the entrance foyer to the living/dining sequence and to a concatenation of bedrooms on the block that steps out in a castellated sequence towards the street; second, the fact that each bedroom is provided with its own balcony for the cultivation of plants; and third, and most crucial from the point of view of its social accessibility, the cladding of the entire surface in precision brickwork. All these attributes testify to the continued viability of Coderch_s pastoral approach amid all the vain and spectacular confusions that attend our contemporary scene.'