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After his death, Evita was embalmed by the doctor Pedro Ara Sarriá (Zaragoza, Spain, 1891 - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1973), who for years perfected the paraffinization technique. Twenty-three years before, he had carried out the same procedure that until today is the summit preparation of the Pedro Ara Anatomical Museum: his " Cabeza de Viejo ". The original method was designed by Leo Frederiq in 1876. Also with this technique Dr. Ara embalmed the body of the musician Manuel de Falla, deceased in the city of Alta Gracia and later repatriated to Spain.
On May 23, 1991, Antoni González Moreno-Navarro, at that time Chief Architect of the Architectural Heritage Service of the Diputación de Barcelona (Spain), gave a master lecture at the Eduardo Torroja Institute of Construction Sciences in Madrid. Most of theirs on the other hand. Coincidentally, I just graduated there. The paper, duly transcribed, was later titled " The Restoration of Monuments to the Doors of the XXI Century" and its entire text, now easily accessible by Internet, was published in the magazine " Reports of Construction" of the same year [1]. That very day, in the first minutes of his speech, Professor González - the person who most influenced my professional career - made a comparison between his method of work and that of the doctor who reconstructed the body of Salvador Dalí:
"... One day I heard on the television that someone was talking about restoration. And although you never know if under the cover of that magic word they will refer to the new work of a great cook, or that of a dentist or even the work of an auditor willing to redeem a forgotten budget item - that today all that Called restoration - the certain thing is that carried of a certain professional deformation, I paid attention to the screen. In fact, it was not a monumental restoration what was said there. The interviewee was not an architect or historian, but a surgeon, but it was a real restoration that he explained. It was the restoration - the doctor himself named it - the corpse of the painter Salvador Dalí, who died a few days before in his native Empordà. Fortunately,
"Because of the disease," he said, "Dalí came to look lamentable, becoming a ruin. As we had to expose him in the burning chapel, before the public, on television, I thought I had to give him an adequate image. Obviously he could not return to his youth, with his mustaches erect and his smile of mockery, not for technical reasons "(I remember the doctor said that he could have done so) but for reasons of credibility.
" "No one would have accepted that image of genius , "Said the doctor," I returned the image I had before his illness, which people could remember with tenderness ", ... The image of a Dalí older but not old, or old but not destroyed.
Reconstruction was possible and legitimate. The limit was only a matter of technique, scientific rigor and, above all, intentionality (only the willingness to show the deceased justified a manipulation that otherwise would have been gratuitous).
Does not the same happen in the monumental restoration? ... "
The example was magnificent and very illustrative, since the monumental restoration is indeed a basically intellectual discipline that can not be considered exclusively from the perspective of the monument as the only architectural piece. We can not extract from the intervention its intentionality (what do we want to restore?) Or exclude other intrinsic values of the building (historical, political, cultural, religious, related to its time and with its environment, documentaries) , Very important also, aesthetic, artistic and / or architectural values.
Since 1991, when I began to intervene in more or less ancient buildings, I was interested in the challenge of intervening on them without giving up our own time. Approaching an old, historic or old building is an exercise that requires, alike, a certain balance between modesty and vanity; A duality that allows us to balance the necessary unconsciousness to intervene on what architects once more gifted than one have proposed and at the same time feel qualified to provide at least the serenity necessary to return an architectural piece to the place Which he should never have stopped occupying.
Many buildings require nothing more than simple repair; Others, a thorough review. Against most of the dogmas included in university and academic texts (necessary, but not sufficient to begin in this specific discipline of the profession), the only thing I am sure of today is the absolute conviction to flee Always of the falsification, that, in my point of view, is appraised in many of the present interventions. Falsifying is rebuilding, reinterpreting, lying. But beware! Counterfeiting is also stopping or freezing senseless. We can not and should not give up our time. Recovering traditional techniques and materials is vital to know and intervene on the built heritage, but this does not oblige you to do so with a timid, decadent or simply vulgar language.
Restoring is not synonymous with dissecting. And when I understood this, in constant struggle with falsification - the greatest sin in which a restorer can fall, since it affects the veracity of the building he gives to society after his intervention -, my restoration workshop of architecture tried to stop exercising The taxidermy.
My doubts had materialized a few years before, more or less in my professional equator, the day he reviewed and revisited, in the company of young students a work in which he had participated in a still not too distant past. As I spoke to those future companions, the images of the virgin monument returned to my mind. I automatically fell silent, ashamed and horrified, at the evidence that our restoration had falsified, irreversibly and by reconstructive excess, the monument received.
What happened between the project and the final result? Are we absolutely responsible for its outcome? And speaking of restoration, what about falsification, false historical or reproductions?
Some answers to these questions I found on the eve of what is now my new Argentine life, while I was walking through an exhibition titled Yves Saint Laurent [2] . I remember getting up there driven by the interview published days ago in a Sunday supplement [3] . Pierre Bergé, for 40 years as a partner and partner of the designer, responded to a question by the journalist.
It is important for visitors to know that what they are going to see are the original dresses. We have preserved the prototypes since 1965. What will be seen in Madrid is exactly the model Saint Laurent created. It is not a reproduction, nor a suit adapted to a client. We are the only house that has a similar file of originals. I do not want to say anything against Dior or Chanel, but an exhibition of yours is different because they do not have the prototypes. We do. It is the precise color in the exact material and with the right proportion. Often, the shopper decided to change the fabric or put on a longer sleeve. The dress that was taken home was not necessarily the one the designer had devised. We were very poor at the beginning and we had to make balances and sell as much as we could. But in spite of that, we never got rid of prototypes.
The analogy between the world of haute couture and that of architecture seemed obvious to me: the important, the truly authentic, was in prototypes. In any case, this matter serves to turn my eyes towards France.
Yes, historically the second year of the French Revolution is remembered as the legislative origin of the conservation of monuments in an attempt to stop the revolutionary vandalism that destroyed, in whole or in part, a multitude of French monuments (among them, the abbey of Cluny, the cathedrals of Cambrai and Chartres, the church of Saint Jean-des-Vignes in Soisson, the Sainte-Chapelle of Dijon, the palace of Versailles or the Parisian fortress of the Bastille).
"Barbarians and slaves hate science and destroy art monuments, free men love and preserve them." (French National Assembly, 1794).
This modest and brief decree, repeated in most of the texts and historical studies on conservation and restoration, is the basis of the protection of the architectural heritage and of the later and much more recent awareness of the necessity of guardianship by the states. It is also the beginning of a young discipline that has barely reached 218 years of history: the restoration of monuments. Not always what was received was preserved, for although there were always very interesting restorations (the partial transformation of the mosque of Cordoba, in Spain, as a Christian cathedral, for example), the demolition and denial of the past was the norm.
But it would not be France but Italy who would become more aware, beyond the simple rule of protection that prevents the continuance of vandalism, the need to intervene on important constructions of yesterday to stop its slow but irreversible path towards disappearance or collapse .
In this sense, the teacher, architect and restoration historian Susana Mora (co-author with the architect Salvador Pérez Arroyo of the masterful restoration of the Monastery of Carracedo in León, Spain) recalls in his texts and lectures that the first written theoretical norm was not Written by experts or architects, but by Pope Leo XIII (1823-1829) who on the subject of the reconstruction of St. Peter of Rome orders that "no innovation should be introduced either in forms or proportions or in the ornaments of the building Resulting, if not to exclude those elements that at a time after its construction were introduced at the whim of the following period", Advocating a unity of style that eludes confronting the irrefutable fact that a monument is not, in most cases, the fruit of a single historical, artistic and / or stylistic moment.
The spirit of the words of Leo XIII intuitively influenced the architects of the time beyond the apparent unity of style they advocated and began to take shape in Italy an embryonic way of intervening that today we call the archaeological restoration , which now still enjoys Certain validity by reducing the restoration to a criterion of minimum intervention of consolidation based on the previous and deep knowledge of the monument. This way of positioning, while avoiding the reestablishment of the architectural and spatial unity of an architectural work, is no less certain that it avoids very accurately the fantastic reproduction of disappeared forms, decorations and volumes.
Or, what is the same, you can not falsify what you do not want to rebuild. This principle goes into a profound collision with the statements made not many years later by Prospero Merimée when he was appointed Inspector General of Monuments of France in 1835: "When the traces of the old building have disappeared, Judicious is that analogous motifs should be copied from a building from the same period or from the same province. " To assume these last words, now fortunate and mostly denounced, would mean accepting that a copy made faithfully acquires automatically the same values as the original from which it comes.
Consequently, all the theories or forms of intervention that developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were languishing in some aspect and, thus, the Italian tradition is excessively archeological, the French excessively stylistic, the English excessively romantic and its Later, excessively scientific variants, and therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, detrimental. Perhaps that is why restoration has often been carried out by architects or architectural studies who have reneged on their own time or who have been protected by general laws that have fostered reconstruction and, by extension, false historicism. The relationship of monuments that seem one thing and are mere fakes is endless. We will not relate them here. What is done, after all, is done.
Where then is the architectural talent of the authors of restoration projects? If we accept that the monument has a double value, as an architectural piece and as a document, the current intervention should not be exclusively self-censorship, but rather should accept the non-destructive or mutilating superposition of new layers or nuances that also contribute To the coming generations testimonies on the present day. A time that, with the inexorable run of time, will be in the future also historical. Let us look at any important monuments: all of them were becoming more and more accentuated over the years, with the passing of decades, with the passage of centuries.
What is restore? In that lecture, the architect Antoni Gonzalez raised questions that even today, more than 20 years later, still resonate in me: is restoration a way of observing - according to pre-established rules - an architecture that, because it deserves protection, has Is it a determined way - also with its rules - to understand how to act on an architecture of irremediable permanent evolution? Or perhaps it is only the heterogeneous set of attitudes and actions - without any rule - that they have As the protagonist of pre-existing architecture?
In my years of teaching, I used to close my reflections on architectural restoration with two images that showed, simultaneously, the before and after an elderly woman passing by the table of a known plastic surgeon. Imagine that an old building is, in a way, like our most beloved grandmother. One day, our grandmother breaks, let's say, a hip. And taking advantage of the postoperative, the doctor decides to begin to tempt it with operations of false rejuvenation. I say false because grandmother, after all, has the years she has.
Something similar happens when we are commissioned, for example, to repair an old roof and, taking advantage of the scaffolding, we unhappily remove the patinas from their facades, consolidate ashlars, reconstruct forms and volumes or reinterpret interior spaces. Total, since we are there ...
One day, the doctor of our grandmother calls us to communicate the medical discharge and we can go through the hospital to pick it up. When we arrive at the reception, we do not recognize our grandmother because the woman there awaits us, looks extraordinarily like our mother, or worse, her granddaughter.
In those years of professional youth, our restoration effort erased signs of antiquity of the building. Today we understand that "restoring" is to restore functionality, dignity and not a misunderstood building. Monuments, like grandparents, are, by definition, much older than us.
The ruin and the spoils that the passage of time leaves on the work of man and, especially, on the architecture provoke in me a magnetic attraction. It is now an indispensable rule of my workshop to show the consolidated remains of their wounds in the old buildings, conceptually integrating their scars into the restoration projects we generate. Sharing present life with degraded but authentic remains seems to us much more interesting than hiding them under new coatings.
From this perception of the old building and agreeing on the basics, but not in its entirety, with the methods or theories of historical restoration and the most important documents of the discipline, we have designed an intervention methodology based on three phases Consecutive, compatible and complete in themselves. Each one of them allows us to deliver the building in better disposition to be lived and understood. Sometimes only one is enough. In some occasions we face the complete program.
We call these three phases: " restoration by subtraction or deconstruction "; " Of objective restoration " and, finally, whenever the promoter admits it and understands it, " of creative restoration ".
The buildings, throughout their biography, accumulate things. In most cases, additions with or without foundation, tackle, improvised repairs, incoherent distributions, additions, deaf witnesses of their occupants, stumps, scratches, stories. To eliminate this disorder is what we call " restore by subtraction " and, for that, we take an interest in one of the most consensual meanings of the word "restore": to recover, to recover, to put a thing back in the state or estimate that it had before.
Is there really an " original state "? How is it possible to fulfill the mandate, so often intended by the public bodies responsible for the protection of cultural heritage, to return the monument to its original state? At what point does a piece of architecture cease to be " original " to be an irreversibly " manipulated " building? The term " restoration " is a changing concept. It was always so, because in its essence implies an intellectual approach to the concept that in each present moment has the past.
The Spanish historian Dr. Javier Rivera, one of the greatest experts in the history of Iberian restoration, argues that, generally, " restoring " consists of " repristinar (from" pristine ", an adjective that comes from the Latin" pristinus"Would mean ancient, first, primitive or original) an architectural product, a work of art or a human achievement, by any possible intervention." The real complexity of this definition arises from the fact that "architecture", as we have already advanced, has a multitude of intrinsic and therefore all aesthetic, religious and / or liturgical, historical, political, documentary, Artistic, functional, or all of them at once), sometimes in a clearly contradictory way, are susceptible of being restored.
Restoring implies, invariably, destroying a part of the received. Therefore, before erasing forever something that existed there, we simply prefer to " eliminate the disorder ", immediately revising and again the initial proposal.
The " objective restoration ", 2nd phase of our method, is inherited from the theory promulgated by Antoni González and his team. It is based on two fundamental principles: to consider that the generic objective of restoration is to protect the triple character (architectural, documentary and significant) of the monument and, secondly, to try to maintain the inheritance both of the original creator of the monument and of society In which it emerged, but without renouncing its own architectural language and contemporary and, when necessary, carry out readaptations to new uses. The essential phases of this method are four: knowledge of the complex nature of the monument and its surroundings; the reflection In which to set forth the objectives, purposes and criteria that will guide the action; the intervention and maintenance subsequent permanent.
And finally, the will to achieve a " creative restoration ", in a way, in a way, of the interventions of the teacher Carlo Scarpa on existing buildings and that could be included within a supposed (by no means) theoretical movement that we denominate and Which would enable the pre-existent to be subtly and sensitively transformed to reintroduce it into the modern architectural debate. Thus, if we review the restoration of the wing rooms of the old fortress of Verona to make it the headquarters of the Museo di Castelvecchio (Archaeological, stylistic or scientific) and a clear position in favor of showing the constructive (even historical) evolution of the monument, making the biography of the building visible to the visitor through The orderly exhibition of the different times that made it possible.
In the loneliness of his operating table, Dr. Aza, in front of Evita's corpse, would inevitably think about the myth's face to give to society: the patient prematurely aged and devastated by cancer, pain and agony of her last days?; The young actress who fell in love with the general ?, or the woman who marked a milestone in the history of the Argentine people?
In 2011, the last three jobs that our architecture workshop started in Spain were inaugurated. At first glance, none of those restorations was completely finished. Many things had not been restored. We had left them, by the way, like this.
On November 22, 1955, during the Argentine military dictatorship that overthrew President Juan Perón, a command of Lieutenant Colonel Carlos de Moori Koenig kidnapped the body of Evita. The remains of Eva Perón, partially disfigured were recovered in 1971. A second restoration was necessary.
How to face, in the circus way, the most difficult yet? The restoration of a work already manipulated: the restoration of a building previously restored (well or poorly restored). Coherently, this article remains unfinished as well.
Meanwhile, we can always entertain with the re-reading of " That woman ", the well-known tale of Rodolfo Walsh that has as an argument excuse that rocambolesco kidnapping.
Buenos Aires, July 30, 2012
Initial image of the article: a frame of "the skin that inhabits" (2011).
In the film, the skin that Vera (Elena Anaya) inhabits is not her own. His body was mutilated, transformed and finally recreated by Dr. Ledgard (Antonio Banderas). So far the last film of the director Manchego, was released on September 2, 2011. A couple of days before, Pedro Almodóvar presented his second film on Spanish public television (La2). The 36-minute interview was held at the Spanish Historical Heritage Institute (IPHE), a magnificent building by the architects Fernando Higueras and Antonio Miró, now curiously home to the guardianship body under the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Spain . " The skin I inhabitI could not have done it before now. It is a film that can be made beyond the forty (years), a film for which you need to live a few decades and have made (with successes and failures) 17 feature films previously. That is something that has to do with maturity "(Pedro Almodóvar, for rtve, August 31, 2011).
[1] Construction Report, Vol. 43, number 413, May / June 1991, pp. 5 a 20, Antoni González Moreno-Navarro.
[2] The exhibition "Yves Saint Laurent", at the Institute of Culture of the Mapfre Foundation of Madrid (Paseo de la Castellana, 23), could be seen from the October 6, 2011 to January 8, 2012.
[3] The interview cited was published in El País Semanal (EXTRA number, October 2, 2011, Eugenia de la Torriente, pages 28 to 36) I have read it several times, for the similarity that transcends the world of fashion and The one of the architecture. Or at least, it seems to me.
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