LIGA 17: Estudio Macías Peredo (Mex). Summoning Stones
Photography: Luis Gallardo
There is no such thing as the blank page. The pencil never embarks on its journey across a desert at random.
The pencil approaches the page bearing the memory of the most recent project, drawing, or text. The discoveries and rejections of the work already accomplished ask to be continued, to be taken up again, to be corrected, to carry on existing. So too do those unrealized projects of one’s own, and the works of our dearest teachers, those seen on journeys, read about in books, heard of in conversations: all these swarm on the blank page that is apparently empty for anyone else but the one designing.
The blank page is the transparent sheet of glass where memory and the present draw, each from their own side, a matching line.
The same occurs with materials. Whether it be colors, or words, or stones, all come bearing their memories. It is the task of the designer to take in and find space for each of them.
Frank Lloyd Wright recalls the start of construction of Taliesin thus:
“There was a stone quarry on another hill a mile away where the yellow sand-limestone uncovered lay in strata like outcropping ledges in the façades of the hills.
The look of it was what I wanted for such masses as would rise from these native slopes. The teams of neighboring farmers soon began hauling the stone over to the hill, doubling the teams to get it to the top. Long cords of this native stone, five hundred or more from first to last, got up there ready to hand, as Father Larson, the old Norse stone mason working in the quarry beyond, blasted and quarried it out in great flakes. The slabs of stone went down for pavements of terraces and courts. Stone was sent along the slopes into great walls. Stone stepped up like ledges on to the hill, and flung long arms in any direction that brought the house to the ground. The ground! My Grandfather’s ground. It was lovingly felt as intimate in all this.” [1]
Architecture is built with stone, but also, and above all, with the memory of stone.
[1] Frank Lloyd Wright. Collected Writings, Volume 2. 1930-1932. New York: Rizzoli 1992, p. 226.
