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| All photos © JesúsGranada |
In the July 14th issue of Bauwelt I write about a
minimalist restoration job in Sevilla, the consolidation of the ruined 16th century
Convent of Santa María de los Reyes.
"Rem Koolhaas has contemplated
the concept of the restoration project as a semi-ruin in an exhibit at the 2005
Venice Biennial, in relation to his work at the Hermitage Museum. He asks,
"Can a certain amount of inaction, a certain resistance to change,
actually be instrumental in maintaining a degree of the authenticity so frequently erased during
the process of modernization?" (1) "
"At another extreme,
the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, chain saw in hand, appropriated abandoned New
York buildings in the 1970s as a free field of transgressive action. For him, a
ruined building was an inert corpse that he could redeem and transform, like a
pioneer in a wasteland, forging a new utopian community of fellow artists in
action."
"With their
intervention at Santa Maria de los Reyes, Morales and De Giles fall somewhere
between these approaches. The building's long abandon has resulted in a degree
of deterioration that, one senses, has become a state in its own right, as far
from an "authentic" window into the past as it is from a false
resurrection. In their intervention in the garden, the architects assume some of
the liberty of Matta-Clark – in this sense, their reference to his contemporary
Michael Heizer is no coincidence. In the building itself, however, they allow
the "bare bones" of the structure to speak for themselves: the traditional
sequence of spaces, seen in similar historic structures in Seville, from the
narrow confines of the medieval street to the private realm of the
Restaurieren am
Nullpunkt
"Restoration
Degree Zero"
Consolidation of
the Convent of Santa María de los Reyes, Sevilla, by José Morales and Sara de
Giles of MGM
Bauwelt 17.2017, July 14, 2017, pages 40 - 45
(Sorry, article not available on the web)
