Interview to Marcos Amadeo - Delving into poetics

Just as the emotion and beauty of music are made with the notes, the Poetics of Architecture is an immaterial that is built with iron, glass, tons of concrete, and the work of men and machines. Heavy stuff for a mysterious genesis.

We inaugurate here -on the enigma of this genesis- a new thematic Interview Series: Deepening in the Poetics. A new approach that tries to define with greater depth what is the Poetics of Architecture. How the architects think it; how they analyze it, intuit it, perceive it in models, plans and drawings; how they approach it in concrete, practical, constructive decisions, for the gestation of a work that is perceived as its own.

Marcos Amadeo opens the series, addressing - in an exemplary interview - the central areas of the phenomenon. Taking, as an example of maximum subtlety, the Iberé Camargo Museum in Porto Alegre, Brazil; work of the architect Álvaro Siza.

For Amadeo, Poetics is an effect, a charm, a sensibility that is outside the work itself, outside the general decisions of a project. Because the Poetics of Architecture is -says- something rather intangible. Since it is very difficult to imagine, from a plane, how a built work will affect us. And it is hardly tangible also from the conceptual. It is difficult to perceive it, to know where it is. It is elusive, ungraspable.

Amadeo's approaches are around intellectual abstraction, lyricism, fine intuition, poetic metaphor, but also forcefulness if one wants brutal of the concrete. As when he relates his obsession - and that of his partners - for the concrete of the MAR Museum in Mar del Plata (Argentina), for the completion of the concrete walls, in a chapter that deserves to be called, as a metaphor of the will, The battle for concrete .

That concrete as smooth as could be done, the most smooth, without makeup, without retouching afterwards, reflects, lights up and is in shadows in fantastic ways. And it was a real discovery. An intuitive search for the museum to replicate the conditions of the light of the sea, which fluctuates with the life of the landscape and the tones of the ocean. Does that have to do with beauty? I do not know. And yet there was a certainty that on the surface of that concrete was played a lot of the building.

That is, the mystery of how Poetics is developed. That mark, that imprint or that pregnant aura that makes an unforgettable building, which makes iconic a work of architecture, which gives, even, sometimes, the stature of a symbol.