brick, the material of Eladio Dieste

from on site 35: the material culture of architecture

developing form within the material culture of architecture

Stephanie White

Eladio Dieste was a Uruguayan engineer who developed reinforced brick shell construction for large span installations such as factories, workshops, storage and agricultural buildings. The Church of Christ the Worker, 1955-60, in Atlántida, with its vertical rippling walls, is almost the only example of his brick work most of us know about, but he worked up until the late 1990s.

Ceramica armada or reinforced masonry was Eladio Dieste’s material, a material arising from the particulars of Uruguay over his lifetime, from 1917-2000. Dieste has lingered on the edges of the discourse of modernism, overshadowed by the Latin American triumphs of Neimeyer in Brazil, Barragan in Mexico. Dieste’s work was grounded in Montevideo and only toward the end of his life did he work outside Uruguay. Hector Abarca, architect and archivist, describes a lecture Dieste gave in Lima in the 1990s — ‘attended by few… it was a lot of maths and old b/w slides. Real archival material not well appreciated in the 1990s.’

There is not a diversity of material to be found on Dieste, however the richly definitive resource is Stanford Anderson’s Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art of 2004, assembled from a symposium Anderson held at MIT in 1999 after he visited both Uruguay and Dieste for the first time in 1998. It includes analyses of his many projects, the technology of ceramica armada, his innovations, historical appraisals, Dieste’s own writings plus technical appendices that explain everything about vaults and reinforced and prestressed brickwork.

Stanford Anderson’s lecture, ‘Eladio Dieste: A Principled Builder’, was published in Seven Structural Engineers: The Felix Candela Lectures, the Museum of Modern Art, 2008, also prohibitively costly if you can find it. There is a copy on the MOMA website.

Julian Palacio, on a 2012 Norden Fund grant, went to Uruguay to visit Dieste’s work. His 2014 lecture, ‘Material tour de force: the work of Eladio Dieste’ is on the Architectural League NY website.

In 2017, Heinz Emigholz made the film Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917- 2000). It was streamed on MUBI in November 2018. The film visited 29 Dieste buildings still standing in 2017, from bus terminals to warehouses, gymnasiums and garages; some churches, a shopping centre, but mostly huge brick arched shells in semi-rural, semi-derelict districts. Emigholz arranges the film as a series of stills: a fixed camera in a number of locations — static and silent except for the wind blowing the trees and grass, dogs wandering in and out of the frame, traffic sounds, children, barking, but very little activity and none of the forced dynamism of a moving hand-held cine-camera.

And oh, how inadequate is that little description for the solitary beauty of these buildings as Emigholz filmed them. They go on and on, one after another, great ribboned caverns, the background to a fruit packing plant, or a big garage full of cars and mechanics, or a wool warehouse stacked with stinking filthy fleeces in great bundles on their way to huge steaming washing vats, overhead conveyer belts, tatty bits of wool falling through the air, men in singlets heaving fat bales around — it is mediaeval, the scene under a Sistine chapel of waving brick. One of the most beautiful scenes in The Buena Vista Social Club was Ruben Gonzalez on an upright piano playing for a class of elegant little Cuban gymnasts in the Ballet School and National Centre for Gymnastics, a stained and crumbling classical building, formerly the Merchants Association on the Paseo del Prado. The building was beautiful – cream and shadowed, arched and colonnaded, a space originally meant for something else but, by necessity and opportunity, a ballet school – colonial architecture, colonised by one of the arts of the revolution, ballet; a colonial art, but revolutionary in its insistence despite blockades, poverty and the passage of time. Dieste’s buildings strike me the same way. Revolutionary design for conventional use. These are not specimen buildings, they are, in Uruguay, fabric. The material culture of mid-century industrial Uruguayan architecture: brick.

**Eladio Dieste, Horizontal Silo, CADYL Agricultural Cooperative Limited 1976- 1978 Young, Rio Negro, Uruguay.**
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , D 2017, 95 min

**Span 28.5m, length 120m, height 15m, area 3420 m2. Capacity 30000 tonnes of grain.**
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , D 2017, 95 min

This grain silo is located in an area of extensive agrarian production. The work was left unfinished for economic reasons, but was adapted to operate partially, without full capacity or the installation of the mechanized loading and unloading system. The roof is formed by a set of double curved vaults resting on a reinforced concrete edge beam founded with vertical and inclined perforated piles filled at the site. The vaults are made of hollow ceramic bricks (vaults 25x15x15) joined with sand mortar and portland, finished superficially with a layer of mortar of 3 cm painted white to reflect the solar radiation. Filling the silo was to be by a bucket elevator and conveyor belt hung from the top of the vault. The floor of the silo was designed as a triangular hopper buried at a height of -12.37m with the slope of its sides sufficient to discharge the grain by gravity to a lower tunnel, located at -14.10 m. This explanation from www.fadu.edu.uy/ eladio-dieste/obras/young/

The Stanford Anderson book (Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art) has drawings of the cross section and foundation details on p110. The fifth image down (left) shows the top of the hopper, but a concrete floor was poured when the project was curtailed by economic circumstance.

It is easy to get completely transfixed by Dieste’s engineering feats: they are magical and paradoxicallly practical. However, we are thinking about material culture, and this horizontal silo, forty years on, is still full of grain, still a silo. Emigholz’s film, which is without dialogue, just printed building names and dates, puts this silo into a peaceable landscape where agricultural rhythms pass days full of birds, wind, trucks and dogs, men with shovels and ladders, weight and angles of repose of grain.

Brick. Julian Palacio, in his 2012 Norden Fund lecture, puts Dieste’s use of brick in the context of both a Latin American tradition of adobe block, and a ‘push back against the Modern Movement’s machine aesthetic and use of industrial materials such as concrete, steel and glass’. Dieste was influenced by Joaquin Torres Garcia and his universal constructivism movement to develop ‘a modern Latin American language that would permeate all of the creative arts’. This is the language of de-colonisation twice over: the development of an architecture that was not colonial Spanish, but also not international modernism, itself, allegedly, a de-colonising architecture. Thus structure not decoration; brick not concrete.

It is interesting to consider the economic conditions of Uruguay during the arc of Dieste’s career. The Batlle era, 1903-33 used a collective leadership model based on the Swiss Federal Council: a presidency (ministries of foreign affairs, the interior and defence) that shared power and responsibility with a national council of administration (education, finance, economy and health). It seems prodigiously progressive: social welfare, nationalisation of foreign-owned businesses, taxes waived for low incomes, a national telephone network, unemployment benefits, an 8-hour work day, all of this before 1915. The split executive model lasted until a military coup in 1933, a fallout of the Depression. Uruguay’s subsequent prosperity increased through its role supplying beef, wool and leather to the Allied forces in WWII –Allied, because nineteenth century Britain was briefly involved with Uruguay in conjunction with its role in Argentina; Britain’s WWII debt to Uruguay was paid off by nationalising long-established British-owned rail and water companies. The end of WWII and the loss of such a lucrative market plunged Uruguay into inflation and civil unrest. The collective executive model was briefly reintroduced, but Uruguay never recovered its enviable status of a prosperous Switzerland of the South: it struggled through the 1950s under increasingly repressive military rule, then in the early 1960s came the Tupamaros insurgency, a direct response to the poverty many Uruguayans found themselves in. The US Office of Public Safety began to operate in Uruguay in 1965, teaching ‘security’ protocols of intimidation and torture.

It is tragic reading this history, the 1970s and 80s were a violent period of military rule that mirrored neighbouring Argentina, including a cessation of civil rights and, inevitably, desaparacidos. This was Dieste’s time. His first work was in the mid-1940s, his last in 1994. He started out in a prosperous era which subsequently collapsed: Atlántida, was built in 1955, by which time there clearly wasn’t the money to build in anything other than the most available, least expensive building material. It happened to be brick, augmented with tiny amounts of steel, and the thinnest of concrete coatings.

**Solsire Salt Silo (1992-94), Montevideo**
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min

Solsire Salt Silo (1992-94), Montevideo. One of several horizontal silos. The lenses are set at the peak of each section of vault, the point of zero stress because although the roof acts as a longitudinal vault, each lateral section is an independent structural element. All stresses are carried to the side footings, allowing the end tympanum walls to be completely glazed, as below.

A viable brick industry depends on geology; not everywhere has clay. Uruguay is a triangle between two rivers, Rio Plat and Rio Uruguay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Much is flat grazing land, and at the inland point of the triangle is higher, volcanic ground: the north margin of the Patagonian micro-plate where it meets the South American continental plate. A collision in the Permian age laid down a deep layer of volcanic ash and calcite in coastal marine swamps and lagoons, which under subsequent pressure resulted in a deep clay deposit. This has made for both a fertile grassland ecology for cattle and sheep, and an endless supply of brick-making material.

Reinforced brick: this is how it works, after all the engineering calculations of course. Moveable formwork, a Dieste innovation, supports one full arch at a time. The surface of the formwork has on it a wooden grid that places each brick. In the spaces between each brick a steel grid is laid and then mortared in. The formwork drops away below, leaving 3-4” brick/reinforcing/mortar fabric with a thin screed of concrete weather protection on the outside.

There are a wide range of arch and folded plate configurations. The arches generally spring from a horizontal edge beam datum, increasing their lateral and longitudinal radii to the centre, and then subsiding to a parallel edge beam on the other side of the space. Calculating the greatest and least points of compression allows a variety of profiles providing clerestory lighting – it is so interesting how stress is in constant flux across the surface — not in motion, but in calculation.

**Deposito per la lana ADF, Juanicó. Canelones, 1992-94**
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min

The arches themselves are either pre-stressed or held by tie-rods, not Dieste’s ideal. His ongoing project was the most minimal and integrated solution to the roofing of space with the most economical of means. As each site, each function and each orientation is different, each site was an opportunity to do yet another magical structure. Sometimes the longitudinal walls are absent and the whole structure is supported by short end plenums, other times the ends are open, or glassed, and the roof spans the short dimension. There are a number of shelters that butterfly off a single column. Purely vertical walls are laid conventionally, however within this construct of the vertical wall, they ripple and lean – this the how the Atlántida church was done: the walls start as a straight line which then expands to a deeply waved wall which nonetheless maintains its centre of gravity along the original baseline.

As an engineer it was the engineering that was the project; brick was the material of default, rather than choice. But he made a virtue of that default, exploiting brick and the way it was laid, shaped, mortared, coursed; its internal strengths and weaknesses, the precise optimal size of a brick related to its shear values. He calculated the optimal size of reinforcement, the strength and dimensions of the mortar, the way to pre-stress a fabric, not just a beam, and the precise points where there is zero tension in a curved structure which allows a lens that can be filled with glass.

Given the economics of Uruguay over Dieste’s career, the use of brick was perhaps not a choice, but a given. Brick was the material culture of the region, and what Dieste consequently did with it is rooted in this fact. His focus was not diverted by a plethora of building materials giving endless choices and variations.

The influence of the straitened economics of postwar Uruguay comes up in almost every essay on Eladio Dieste along with that modernist virtue of an economy of means. It is possible that straitened economies are the enablers of a kind of genius, which, when paired with a sense of place and material produce truly unique architecture.

The material culture of architecture is based on an economic and political culture responsible for the supply of materials. While institutions of the state appear to have been given a generic, and for Uruguay, an expensive international style, Dieste was building factories, garages, churches, gyms. Brick was his, and their, material.

**Municipal Bus Terminal, Salto 1971-74**
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min

**from the top: Service Station, Salto 1976**
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min

**Camino de los Estudiantes, Alcalá de Henares, Spain 1996-98**
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min

Stephanie White has been the editor of On Site review since its beginning in 1999, and its publisher since 2000. On Site review is conceived of as a place to think about things, slowly.

brick, the material of Eladio Dieste

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on site 35: the material culture of architecture