Pablo Hernán Dávalos Muirragui
In Ecuador, the adoption and consolidation of international architectural styles has been historically executed within a late period, it has even started to exist, when in the places of their origin these approaches have stopped being active. Particularly in the capital city of Quito, the brutalist movement developed with a ten-year delay. In this period of time it was possible to visualize small or sporadic hints that started to announce its appearance. This tendency, however, became clear in the mid-sixties when monumental structures of concrete started to occupy the city.
Within the two-decade work of architects Oswaldo de la Torre, Milton Barragán and Ovidio Wappenstein it’s possible to see the presence of this architectonic movement represented in the execution of public and private buildings of diverse scales. This work recognizes the existence of representative edifications within the brutalist architectural movement in Quito during a twenty-year period, and tries to assemble a speech about its acceptance in community, its development and end. This work also illustrates, through graphic analysis, the characteristics that give value to such structures and make them part of this expressive category. To develop this investigation, the next series of hypothesis are proposed: •The origin of the brutalist movement in the city of Quito, is exposed through a selected group of buildings designed by architects Oswaldo de la Torre Villacreces, Milton Barragán Dumet and Ovidio Wappenstein.
•The adoption, development and ending of the brutalist movement in Quito is explained in five key moments that are related to historic, economic and political conditions of the city.
• The formal and functional characteristics of the selected works, determine three ways of approximation to brutalism.
• The production of Quito can be faced to the global environment of brutalism; this is because it is conceived upon universal architectonic principles. The work integrates eleven works of multiple scales, programs and representations within the city. The document is based on the analysis of the recompilation or the original blue prints as the primordial way to do its bi dimensional and tri dimensional reconstruction. This selection doesn’t look for the equilibrium in the number of works of each author, it rather evaluates the selection because of their formal, special and material relevance. To structure the development of this movement in the city, this work proposes the aggrupation of the buildings in five temporal moments where they can be associated by the historical situation in Quito and the factors that contribute to their particularity and representation in the media. The study pretends to situate the three characters as the initial exponents of this movement and to recognize that their work promoted posterior interventions in the same line by other professionals.
The descriptive reading of the projects its accompanied by the graphic dissection of the buildings. This action combined, locates the qualities that sustain the edifications within the movement and at the same time it determines the particular way in which each architect intervenes. The unveiled information determines the existence of multiple classes or subcategories inside brutalism in Quito. Therefore, this work illustrates the ways this current is approximated as replicable architectonic principles. Once the specific qualities of the projects are interpreted as logics for design, they are assumed as useful tools for the orientations in essays of the studious in the subject as for the works of designer architects.
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