The hidden geometry of MUSAC. Field systems as the origin of form in the contemporary project

Abstract

The origin of the contemporary project’s form has become an enigma. The process of drawing up a project ends up being a superimposed, diluted reality, hidden by the narratives constructed by their authors. At some point, in which the process becomes more important than the result itself, a ‘simulated’ story is apparently more conveyable than the process itself. In addition, multiple simultaneous approaches to the form reveal the complexity and diversity that an architect faces when undertaking a project. In this scenario, Luis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón, the architects of the subject of this paper, state that in the face of processes of positivist identification, it is in the project’s requirements ( function, place, technique, budget, ...) that the argument and the formal interpretation of the modern project is born. It is in the oscillation processes, and in its starting mechanisms, determined by open and flexible systems, play rules and diagrams, that an abstract and generic form is generated, the origin of the contemporary project, which is later defined and limited by its contact with reality. The MUSAC’s architecture project is a current example of the work of these architects, where personal interests or private obsessions meet public needs, through field systems formed by local behaviour patterns and context logistics. The MUSAC, a case within the evolution of frames in the genealogy of mat-buildings, finds withing the field systems notion a set of play rules that allows growth, adaptability and transformation, as well as exception and singularity. This research makes a critical analysis of the “visible” geometry of the MUSAC by reconstructing a hypothetical project process, or a narrative constructed by the architects to justify the process, using the drawing as a tool capable of unveiling and decoding the different layers that gave form to the project.