Ud24_T06_"Ines-table" / Smiljan Radic

UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA

udd

24

federico soriano Textos 2018-2019

06 INES-TABLE. 2017

RADIC, Smiljan. In Cada tanto aparece un perro que habla. Puente Editores.

Barcelona. 2018.

I bought my first architecture magazine at the end of 1987 in a bookstore located at the side entrance of a strange building called dos Caracoles, in Santiago de Chile. In it, two spiral ramps reproduced a commercial and complicated version of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It was number 30 of the magazine El Croquis (August / October 1987), dedicated to the emerging work of Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós. At that time, the Dos Caracoles building was occupied by shoe stores, hairdressers, cheap restaurants and a series of retail outlets, among which, for a matter of commercial dignity, this small bookshop should not be. To tell the truth, at that time when books were scarce in Chile and our effort to find something cool paradoxically was concentrated in the bookstores of old man, to meet in passing with El Croquis in that showcase had something of a miracle.

I bought the monograph attracted by its gray and white 1

cover and by the dislocated lines of the interior planimetry.

Then I did not understand those lines. I was not sure if they were a new version of the so-called “drawn architecture� or, on the contrary, they were just Architecture. I remember the deep enchantment that those scattered lines on the white, floating out of place, produced in me. An enthusiasm similar to that I felt for the bosses of the German fashion magazine Burda that my mother used to draw often to make dresses.

In them, hundreds of red and green lines overlapped by drawing a flattened code in two dimensions, a code that was deciphered following simple instructions of use, which allowed to make complex three-dimensional models: a dress, a skirt, a pair of pants.

The light and dry lines of Miralles’ planimetry seem to wander half drunk, barely propped up by their peers on the white of the leaf. In its constructions, the particular elements of the architecture that those lines describe -columna, knots, doors, stairs or ramps-, obsessively designed differently again and again by Miralles, lines that move in space in the same way: pointing at each other just before falling, like the juggler who takes the hands of his partner when he begins to describe the descent curve left in the air that surrounds him.

Thus, the nodes of Miralles architecture appear dislocated, distorted; Like the hands of the juggler, they seek to fix the disparate directions that come together in moments of grace.

The important thing is that these nodes allow to describe and dismember planimetrically, as if it were an animal, by pieces, not by parts, the building that jumps continuously without ever stopping, unstable from one event to another.

The table Ines-table (1993) can be understood as a kind of compressed capsule, an air pump of the total of the work of Enric Miralles. The table has been compared many times with Saint Jerome in his study (1456) by Antonello da 2

Exposición Ines-table. Enric Miralles hecho en Chile, Galería D21/Fundación Arquitectura Frágil, Santiago de Chile, Chile, 2017

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Messina, a painting in which the humanist saint appears sitting in a kind of open cupboard, or unveiled, with the doors open. Under the light of the Renaissance arch that frames the scene, all the secret objects that staged the life of the saint have escaped from him, all of them portrayed in profile, like the saint, as if he and his objects were one, one life , for the painter.

Ines-table is a great name. When we see it extended and completely horizontal, in which we would suppose that it is its calmest position, it seems a field of game of unknown rules, also a piece of ground extended about to turn around.

This feeling is due to the extension of its large overhangs and its out of scale mantle. Its dimensions allow to see, the other player on the other side, far and full body.

When the table is folded on itself it reminds us of a grand piano, and that’s when the architect’s studio appears.

A sheltered corner that, to distract the stranger who has been left out of that small kingdom folded on itself, shamelessly shows its moving parts and constructively more fascinating, those that until recently remained hidden under the skirts of the large surface of the roof plainly extended. It appears the drawing of the structure of flat ribs of perimeter reinforcement in the rear of its boards, its elegant “kneeling” legs and the hanging volume of its secret drawers. I must assume that Ines-table plays the same role that Josep Quetglas refers to when he talks about a pool table that Miralles installed in the lobby of his office in the 1990s. According to Quetglas, that pool table deprived the visitor of his custom, promoted a subversion of space and reedited the word ‘game’ in architecture1.

We produced Ines-table with the support of the Enric Miralles Foundation, based on a digital model obtained from the original planimetry that we compare with the two 4

existing Ines-table tables, the one in his studio and the one in the architect’s house. As always, some differences appeared between planimetry and construction. The model also records the minor changes that we thought necessary to make to ensure some resistance of the study table over time. For example, we redesigned the hinges and included four bronze per fold to allow easy movement of the large panels of the roof, thus avoiding stress on the wood at the three cutting points proposed by the initial project. We put hidden metal topero 2 mm high in the arrival of the legs to the ground to absorb irregularities of the pavements and to isolate the wood from the humidity of the floor, as they did formerly the bases of glass on the legs of the pianos of tail. We also subtracted 8 cm depth to the deepest central drawer, to let the leg rotate under it freely until reaching the reinforcement arranged for it under the cover, taking up the proportion of the drawer proposed by the original planimetry.

Finally, following the spirit of the previous decisions, we use dark walnut wood, different from the wood of the original versions, all of them we understand different from each other2.

See the Josep Quetglas conference at: fundacionenricmiralles.com/fem/conferencia-josep-quetglas visited: June 18, 2017) [N. of the Ed.].

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I must thank the Enric Miralles Foundation, and in a very special way its president, Benedetta Tagliabue, for allowing us to produce this edition of Ines-table. I must thank Alejandro Luer, because without the certainty of his carpentry work, I would never have dared to request the production permits for this beloved table. Without further ado, we must thank Enric Miralles.

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