Presentation of the work of Juan Guardiola Gaya. Justo Oliva

Activity

The architect's desk 2

Library

General public, Professionals

26 November 2015

MACA opens its doors to the study and analysis of contemporary architecture through the most sensitive material: drawings, plans, models… the world of ideas. The Architect's Table is a cycle of encounters around art and architecture around a table where many projects have been drawn. A board, a paper, the tension: strokes and lines, inks that belong to its memory that are now revealed to bring us closer to the creators of spaces. Their architectures, their influences, their origins, the backstage of their souls so that the architect's table continues drawing... and we, learning. As a deep connoisseur, architect Justo Oliva will present the work of Juan Guardiola Gaya, the protagonist of the city's tourist architecture.

Guardiola was born in Reus in 1927 and graduated in 1957 from the School of Architecture in Barcelona. In 1959 he arrives in Alicante, where he practices his profession. He then carries out the planning of the First Polygon of San Juan beach, his first relevant Alicantine work that confirms the important urban planning training acquired both in Barcelona and Madrid.

Guardiola imports the balance of volumes characteristic of Dutch urban planning proposals from the 1950s and becomes the fundamental architect for understanding the constructions of San Juan beach, developing a modern architecture that wants to forget the autarkic period.

The Catalan ascendancy is strongly nuanced by the architect's personality and a neoplastic air softens the rationalism and realism of the facades. As the master Mitjans affectionately told him: each one of the floors of those years "looks like a Mondrian painting", acquiring a character that goes beyond its technical function.

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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