Like Domingo Fontán, the mathematician and cartographer who in the nineteenth century and over the years took the measurements of Galicia until he managed to capture them in his geometric chart,
Perea calibrated and measured Eisenman's capolavoro, transferring to the construction of the reliefs and misty landscapes of his project for the Compostela hill. Eisenman had created a choral work of six independent buildings that developed the same leitmotiv, but which at the same time connected the gentle slope of the hill of Santiago with the baroque of the monumental center of the city.
It is precisely from that knowledge and deep respect for the work of his American colleague that this new building emerges, occupying the space without stridency or dissonance, without losing the polyphonic dialogue established with the adjacent buildings.
Enlargement of Sergas building by Andrés Perea. Santiago de Compostela, 2005.
Public library in Santiago by Andrés Perea. Santiago de Compostela, 2008.
Perhaps
Perea,
Suárez, and
Torrelo are merely creating tropes of the New York architect's project; tropes like those found in the Codex Calixtinus in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela: scores that germinated and branched out from previous pieces, and which we can only understand as an accumulation of musical strata deposited over decades.
On this hill, the first image we saw rising on the Compostela horizon, more than twenty years ago, was
John Hejduk's posthumous opus. These two stylized silhouettes, originally intended for a few hundred meters down the slope of the Gaiás, were the first construction to suture Eisenman's artificial excavation; the slowing down and paralyzation of the New Yorker's project turned this place into a work of land art in progress. Paradoxes of fate, Eisenman's architecture, which aspired to make visible the traces of his construction process, ended up becoming a stopped image of a journey interrupted before reaching its goal.
Thus, this
Fontán building creates a closure to the choral work that gradually built up this cultural citadel. In the topography of this hill, we can already trace the vital traces of creators who in a certain way culminated artistic pilgrimages in this place. Like the mirrors of Manolo Paz, which from the top of this hill frame and reflect the great monuments of Compostela's legacy, Hejduk, Eisenman, and Perea also condense their work of decades and the architecture of the city of which they are witnesses.
In the building team, Andrés Perea is a confessed admirer of J.S. Bach: as in his fugues, which Perea interprets with his guitar, the complexity of the counterpoint becomes a clear and transparent surface. The different planes that articulate the work converge in a calm and luminous impression. One can be carried away by the inertia and emotion of a fugue without noticing the appearance of each melody. The perfection and calibration of detail can be overlooked as one senses the euphony of the overall result. All the elements seem to have emerged naturally without having encountered any obstacles or difficulties in their planning.
From another point of view, a Bachian fugue is also a vivid image of the essence of this project: it is surely one of the musical procedures where one of the greatest economies of means is achieved from the austerity of the germinal elements of the work. The whole score must be assembled from relatively simple components, which must be developed with enormous intelligence to achieve the organicity of the whole. Perhaps Perea only confirmed this when his teacher, the architect
Fernando Higueras, an accomplished guitarist, invited him to play Bach on the guitar at one of their first meetings.
Perhaps in the future new creators will come to continue reconstructing the silhouette of the topography of this Compostela hill. Perhaps even the audacity to build a performing arts center that Galicia could dream of will be taken up again. But the indelible mark of the pilgrimage of the architects of this building to the top of the Gaiás is already part of our cultural identity and from now on it is one more voice in the polyphony of our emotional landscape.
