DELAYED MONUMENT “ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES IN THE AGE OF SCIENTIFICISM”

For decades now, in a rather underground fashion, Paco Alonso has been trying to reach the most transcendental dimension of architecture in an attempt to grasp the deepest mysteries of the human condition. His architecture is something in between poetry and science, which results in a kind of intimate monumentality.
A tower that starts as a square at the base and ends as an octagon at the top, where there is a public plaza; a cylindrical 200-meter-diameter building that rotates and closes a cycle once a month to evenly distribute views and sunlight; the design of the towers, the bells and even the music, to then cover an entire town with that melody: Alonso’s projects are operations that defy any reference or current consensus. They are an exploration of geometric figures that do not yet exist but that seem to have been there forever. A radical quest/research with an archaic originality that tunes in to culminating moments of the history of architecture in which civilizations synthesized poetry and science in monumental operations: a pyramid, a Doric temple.
Why invite someone like this to a Biennale that seeks to identify design strategies that can improve our built environment? His work plays with forces that the laws of the market stopped considering a long time ago. Alonso constitutes a moral reserve for architecture, a kind of lost link that reminds us of the density that we should expect from the discipline. Without doubt, this is a valuable contribution to the notion of quality in the built environment.