Expanding Boundaries: Architecture, Nature, Science, Representation

Diana Agrest

New Horizons

The journey that is this book, exploring the complex questions around the subject of nature, can be traced back to two encounters with vast and almost geologically opposite landscapes. It begins from a love of the big horizons of the Pampa and the silent sections of the ravine in the Quebrada de Humahuaca bordering the Andean Plateau three thousand meters above sea level, from seemingly infinite views of the horizon on the low plains and an elevated plateau whose stratigraphic section traces Earth’s history.

While still a young student I undertook a thousand-mile road trip from Buenos Aires all the way to the northwest of Argentina, traversing extraordinary landscapes ranging from the bucolic plains and long horizons of the Pampas, a vast flat plain of 300,000 square miles, to the dramatic steep climbs along narrow mountain roads all the way to the Altiplano, the Andean Plateau, in the province of Jujuy. I remember crossing brooks, riding through the water current and rough terrain in a beat-up old station wagon, and suddenly being in front of the most extraordinary colors I had ever seen: the stratigraphic register of the Andean mountains appeared as layers of color accumulated over long geological time. It was pure section. When I turned the car motor off there was absolute silence, a sense of suspension in time.

The Pampas is all plan and endless horizon, marked occasionally by tall grasses or the famous Ombu tree, where the eye can extend in any direction without boundary. Seeing it recalled a previous experience, travelling as a child by train for two days through the dry desert region of Patagonia, when the stillness of the flat landscape with its uninterrupted horizon imposed itself over the movement of the train as it framed the landscape in time. This horizon now appears to me as the reified history of architectural representation, a horizontal plane and the line of a horizon which define each other according to the position of the viewer. The line, the line of vision, the lines of construction, the horizontal and vertical planes: plan and section.

This book is about the Earth striated by lines of all kinds in sectionals, accumulations of so many now invisible plans. As a young architect I left New York on a trip to Tunisia, traveling by car all the way from the city of Tunis to the south, reaching the Berber village of Matmata on the edge of the Sahara by a road that probably had not been used since the French Foreign Legion was there, a road dry with deep cracks and so much dust that one had to put wet towels on the car windows. After hours of travel on an already dark road, no village to be seen, a small light became noticeable in the distance. When I reached it, there was only the mouth of a cavernous, narrow space, leading to an open courtyard. Nothing had prepared me for what I saw next as I looked up: the dense starry sky of the Sahara framed by the circular walls of the courtyard; the celestial dome.

These were the dwellings of the Berber people, carved into the desert ground, that in the bright white light of the morning resembled the undulating terrain of a cratered lunar landscape. There was no distinction between architecture and nature. The Quebrada and Matmata were two very different experiences. While one was of an extraordinary dimension and a pure record of Earth’s history, the other was of a symbiosis between the vastness of desert and sky and a human intervention into the natural conditions of the place: the sun, the compacted sand, the dry air. Both were about section, a section cutting from the Earth framing a space that extended to the cosmos. These experiences were atmospheric in a double sense of the word: in the actual physical atmosphere, the dryness, the burning sun, the extreme temperature changes from daytime