Umbrella

I like the philosophy of the fellow that I am sort of doing a research project on. If I was properly doing the research project I’d be able to tell you exactly what he said, but it goes something like this, “I like to play with a structure until I get all the ugliness out of it, and what is left is elegant.”

I mean, what’s not to like about that? Even if you allow that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and thus, so is ugliness, there is always some reason for anything to be beautiful. Isn’t there? To someone at least. Some things probably require crazy people to behold in order to be beautiful, I guess, but that’s not the kind of stuff I’m talking about. I was talking about shell construction. I think it’s elegant.

The key to elegant shell construction is hyperbolic paraboloids because they are the only shape to which you can construct a large structure out of two inch thick concrete that looks like fabric blowing in the wind. I still find those structures a little difficult to comprehend, especially when I consider that only straight wood was used to form them, and that all the drawings and computations were done by hand.

Imagine being a Spanish jock who trained to be an architect and became one, then went to Germany in the late 1930s to do post grad studies, but while there really wanted to learn higher math, but all the higher math books at the library were in German, so he hand copied pages from the textbooks to take home and translate with his Spanish-German dictionary because teaching yourself physics isn’t hard enough, then taking a break from all of that to join the Spanish resistance to fight Franco’s fascists, get imprisoned and sent to a concentration camp in France-I don’t know why France-then deported in the predictable fascist intellect ejection that seeded Europe and the Americas with brilliant Spaniards-stupid fascists-to Mexico where he started a construction company named Cubierta Ala, Winged Roofs, specifically so that he could build shells. Fascinating.

Everyone dreams in fancy shapes. We can’t help it, they’re everywhere, and fleeting, but I don’t think our minds ever forget a thing, and reels ever run, and the images of memory attach themselves to this thing called beauty, and if you work at it, you can create it. The problem is usually the math, and the fact that most people need other people to do the math, and engineers are difficult to communicate whimsy to, and often don’t seem to appreciate what the shape of your daydream requires in regards to tension and compression stress, because they’re busy.

As is usually the case, I discovered this guy by accident. But was it an accident? I love the philosophy whereby you play with a thing until you get all the ugliness out of it, and it becomes elegant. Isn’t that what we’re all doing here? Don’t we want elegance and beauty over all that is less than we deserve? I think we do. The problem is not even all the ugliness that gets in the way of the beauty inherent in all things, the problem is focusing on it to the exclusion of all else.
I like a good story, they’re full of hardship and courage. And beauty, somehow. We are all builders in one way or another.

“Few people realize that the only way to be an artist in this difficult specialty of building is to become your own contractor. It might be surprising to think of a contractor as an artist, but it is indeed the only way to hold in your hands the whole set of tools or instruments to perform the forgotten art of building to produce works of art.”

-Felix Candela-