Description

For this retreat house on the beach, architect Tatiana Bilbao collaborated with artist Gabriel Orozco. The project is almost a complete replica of the Jantar Mantar astronomical observatory built in Delhi in 1724. Indeed, on a superficial level, the idea of an observatory fits the purpose of the retreat house that Bilbao designed with and for Orozco: a house which is, also, a platform to “observe” the sea, the coast line, the country landscape and, of course, the sky. The implications of such a translation, however, are more complex. Bilbao argues that such a cultural, historical and geographical displacement is related to the artist‘s tradition of linking and mixing unusual and often forgotten elements – both in his art and architectural projects.

Also, a question arises here regarding the architectural implications of appropriating forms and images from other cultures. To be sure, the entire history of Latin American architecture has been written in “comparative mode” or in relation to European (and North American) references which set the rule against which all architectural production is continually judged. This method of architectural historicisation presents non-western architectures always as transformations of European and North American forms, techniques and ideas. What is interesting in this case is the fact that Bilbao and Orozco are appropriating from Indian architecture rather than from Europe and North America. This issue is particularly important because it reveals a dynamics of cultural interaction between previously colonised countries – so-called peripheries or the “Global South” – which, to some extent, bypasses the control of empire (outside the axiality of the binary division between colonised and coloniser).

The Observatory House is situated on a remote beach approximately 150 kilometres south of Oaxaca. At the centre of its cruciform plan, in place of the concave observatory (in the original), there is a swimming pool. The four sides of the cruciform plan are built up and the remaining four are not. This creates four spaces adjacent to the sides of the swimming pool: two bedrooms, the living room and the kitchen. The roofs of these four spaces form terraces around the swimming pool. The four remaining uribuilt spaces are open-air terraces at ground level. As in the original building, a series of stairwells permit uninterrupted movement through all areas and levels of the building. Unlike the original observatory, which stands above the ground, the beach house is sunk in the rooks where it seems to disappear.

 

---

Originally published in: Felipe Hernández, Beyond Modernist Masters. Contemporary Architecture in Latin America, Birkhäuser, 2009.