Luis Peña Ganchegui: The Architect as Place

In this monograph the author, Mario Sangalli Uggeri, collects the keys that allow to unveil the work of Luis Peña Ganchegui from a novel perspective. The thesis, read in the ETSA San Sebastian in 2013 and edited in 2015 by the COAVN Delegación de guipuzkoa, does not think so much in making a critical journey throughout his career, but rather to expose how his life converges with his work to discover the Reasons that led him to make decisions about the projects. A line of research that perfectly fits Luis Peña Ganchegui's ley motiv: The project as thesis, under which he channeled his teaching activity and which used as an argument for his professional research. An attitude that placed him in syntony with the paradigm with which modernity conceived the creator, a subject who forges his own identity combining life and work.

For Luis Peña Ganchegui (Oñati, 1926 - Donostia, 2009), the work of Architecture consisted precisely in turning the sites into places, taking the sense of site as 'non-particularised space' and that of place as 'space endowed with meaning'; Transcending from site to place by interpreting its Genius Loci.

It is a question of logically unraveling, through his work but singularly through his training as an individual and architect, the aspects that determined his conception of the place. The thesis is based on the hypothesis that, since Luis Peña was an integral creator, he did not borrow any concept without first internalizing it, assimilating it into his own. And that each spatial formulation included in his proposals finds its reference in a repertoire of resources elaborated thanks to his personal collection of knowledge and experiences.

The different vectors that, through his life, contributed in the formation of the concept that Luis Peña had of 'place', and the range of resources that he deployed for its attainment, following its wake through his extensive work. To accompany the author of the Tennis Square (Donostia, 1975) in the itinerary that leads from his childhood to the formulation of this public space (considered his work summit), the thesis traces a journey through his life and work, Developed in the form of a continuous narrative, guided by the environments, experiences and readings that helped him to internalize his own idea of ​​place, following the time line that marks the dates of conception of his projects, analyzed from that perspective. It is, in short, to analyze the architecture of the place in the work of Peña Ganchegui from the study of Luis Peña himself; The architect as a place.

In this sense, the book does not intend to cover all his work, but only that period in which the architect is formed, until he reaches the point where he consolidates his professional maturity with the Tennis Square. A project that synthesizes all the experience accumulated by Luis Peña on one of the preferred themes in his work, the contrast of the concepts site and place, and that mentions the subtitle of the book: The architect as a place.