The Character of the Architect. Vicente Verdú

Activity

The architect's desk 2

Library

General public, Professionals

28 April 2016

Luis Fernández Galiano, Director of the magazine Arquitectura viva, comments in an article regarding Vicente Verdú's book "Household Items":

"Author of an extensive body of work that moves from the intimate to the public, writer and journalist Vicente Verdú has also practiced architecture criticism and, for some time now, painting, as evidenced by the canvas that illustrates the cover of his latest book. Doctor in Social Sciences from the Sorbonne, chief editor of Cuadernos para el Diálogo and member of the founding team of the newspaper El País, where he was Head of Opinion and Head of Culture, Verdú is an intellectual who conceals the generous breadth of his knowledge behind a dazzling literary skill that feigns to be merely the product of an exacerbated sensibility…………………."

The Vicente Verdú that many admire for his penetrating analyses of the contemporary world... is also a keen observer of the closest things, and both his macro lens and his micro optics reveal with visual wisdom and literary tremor architectural universes."

To illustrate this commentary, we extract some paragraphs that Vicente Verdú himself writes in an article, following an architects' congress, published in El País in June 2010, in his column "Currents and Reliefs," titled "Architectures and 'Vuvuzelas'":

"But the economic and cultural crisis into which we have suddenly plunged has oriented thought toward resources and ideologies that place real life before effectivism, peaceful austerity before the war of magnificence and functionality before juggling.

…….

Is the architect a philosopher, a moralist? And a sociologist and a politician, and three or four things more.... the continuous sound of his theoretical vuvuzelas corresponded well with those that, from one end of the world to the other, announce the passage from an architectural fanfare to a simple architecture of honesty. Or in other words: the substitution of the less photogenic by the honest genetics of the more."

Information

Opening hours: 7:00 PM
Duration: 90 minutes
Type of activity: Design and Architecture
Modality: At the museum

Related activities

Program to which it belongs

The architecture table

General public ... , 29.01.2015 - 17.12.2026

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante whose collections are formed by works created fundamentally in the twentieth century. They range from the so-called avant-gardes to all the approaches and artistic manifestations that took place in the decades of the second half of the past century. They are expressed on different supports and materials, with diverse dimensions and techniques. In turn, the temporary exhibitions are related to these collections and allow for expanding or deepening some aspects of contemporary chronology. However, contemporary architecture is absent from both the permanent collections and those temporary manifestations.The architecture of the MACA itself, a project created and directed by the Sancho Madridejos Studio, is a beautiful building of great functional efficiency. The syncopated projection of horizontal and vertical spaces establishes a formal order based on the geometry and texture of the materials used in construction, while revealing a kind of tension resolved by the overhead passage of light, a kind of "felt" spirituality more emotional than real.The MACA proposes in a conversational format, meetings around art and architecture around the architect's table. In the MACA Library, the last Thursdays of each month, from January to May 2015.This first cycle will consist of different manifestations. The first and fundamental one will show works by an architect related through his vital and professional activity to the province of Alicante. The selection criterion will be conditioned by the modernity of the proposals, understanding that modernity, first of all, in a chronological sense, attending to those architectures and architects who were protagonists and participants in the advent of contemporaneity. The exhibition of some models will allow for offering three-dimensional models, reclaiming the model as such, as the authors of the Renaissance defended. And to illustrate the complete work process, sketches and preliminary drawings will be shown alongside the project plans and notes developed during the construction process. All of this with the ultimate aim of understanding and grasping in some way the constructed space.The architect's table, a table from 1912, real and present (deposited in the MACA by its owner Alfonso Navarro Guzmán), serves as an ideological foundation to link the exhibitions and will serve as the material support for the models so that we can traverse, while dreaming, the imagined space.

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