The Bald Beauty of Nefertiti

In the latest issue of his mimi-magazine Circo, Emilio Tuñón remembers Alejandro de la Sota, quoting in turn José Antonio Coderch on "The Bald Beauty of Nefertiti."

 "Coderch referred to "bald beauty" as the beauty that is the result of extracting each and every hair on the head of the queen, pointing out that this extraction was undergone 'in pain'. For architecture that would share the beauty of Nefertiti, formal renunciation implies the rejection of the unnecessary, even though the unnecessary is not necessarily without interest."

"In a certain sense, when Coderch talks about pain in relation to beauty, he appears to be talking about the renunciation of many things that he was sincerely interested in, in favor of the search for a beauty that was essentially out of reach."

"And it is precisely for this reason that bald beauty represented, for many Spanish architects of the second half of the 20th century, a melancholy renunciation of what might have been but wasn't to be, accompanied by a painful rejection of anything that wasn't really essential. A rejection, with an aroma of radical, aristocratic imposture, accompanied by a certain poetic air of feigned pain."

Emilio Tuñón
"I would prefer not to"
Circo 194. 2014

Photo
Head of a Meritaton Princess
Amarna Period
Egyptian Museum, Cairo 
From Antikforever.com

Translation: DC