La Idea d'espai a l'arquitectura de Martienssenla casa Martienssen a Greenside

Resumen

The PhD is a two-sided lecture of the work of Rex Martienssen (1905-1942). The first lecture is about his written production and the second about his built production. The former follows the well known book of Martienssen, The Idea of Space in Greek Architecture, first published in 1956; and the latter the house that he built for his wife and himself at Greenside, Johannesburg in 1941. This is the reason why the primary sources included in the Annex of the present PhD can be classified in two parts: on the one hand the writings of Martienssen, and on the other the drawings and specifications that he uses to build the house at Greenside. The PhD hypothesis is that the writings of Martienssen -his work on architecture criticism- show the only possible way to understand modernity in architecture and that this approach is valid both for ancient and modern architecture. Therefore, we can explain the Greenside house following his Martienssen¿s modern thesis on Greek Architecture. The PhD follows the structure of Martienssen¿s book and according to it, it presents three types of different architectonic criticism. The first critic concerns the objective data of architecture, base on its measurable aspects. This is the way how Martienssen and this PhD, choose to write about the city, the measurable aspects of the house and the types of construction: the city of Johannesburg on the 30¿s, the project of the house and his archaeology, and the building materials. The second critic is based on the relationship between the architecture and its surroundings. The relation of the Greenside house with the buildings that surround it, from the material and cultural point of view. This chapter examine the facade of the house in close relation to the idea of the city and to the British architectonic tradition of the 30¿s. At this point the PhD discusses the formal aspects of the house that are related with the modernity overseas ¿Terragni, Lubetkin and Léger- and to the architectonic tradition of the Renaissance facade. The third critic is based on architecture as a humanist discipline, on architecture as a discipline that puts the man in the centre of decision. There are two chapters pursuing this idea: the first is dedicated to the new constructivist idiom which focusses on the relation of the spectator with several new elements such as the concrete balcony, the material combination between modernity and tradition, the entrance canopy, the V-Pole, the par pilar-beam, and the fênetre longueur. The second is dedicated to the perception of the spectator as a moving entity in the area of the Greenside house. In this chapter, the sources that Martienssen uses to conceptualize his Temple and Temenos are discussed. The PhD reports not only Martienssen¿s classical sources but also the modern ones. It also analyses the relation of Martienssen with the architecture of his precessors: Choisy, Le Corbusier, Duiker, Rietveld, etc. Finally, it also analyses a successor of the same way of understanding architecture: the architecture of the Smithson¿s. The PhD concludes that Martienssen¿s architecture -both his built production and critisicm- can only be understood when the spectator is placed in the centre of the architectural problem. The idea of space is constructed by the spectator looking at the mental and material relations established between the constructed area and the human body. From this analysis it can be extrapolated that the criticism of data and the criticism of the relationship of architecture and its surroundings are useful to describe the built work but the only criticism capable of making us understand the purposes of modern architecture is the humanist one. This criticism is related to the spectator and to the ideas of the architect disposing the volumes, this criticism is the only one based on the specific object of architecture: space.