Eladio Dieste is a lesson to us all.

An engineer of mathematical and scientific precision, a deeply religious socialist, a quiet, unassuming professional with a strong set of principles regarding purity, weight, and appropriateness.  A man who would find little distinction between structure and architecture, particularly where the ambition of the project satisfied his religious and social beliefs.

I am in Uruguay and find his work caught up in the country’s politics, building social institutions at a time of economic downturn, inventing rational, low-cost building solutions that  add to the architectural merit and then, with the arrival of the junta in 1973, turning his hand more frequently to the design and construction of various long span and structurally efficient commercial sheds.

The church is clearly close to his heart, and he comes to these projects with a personal understanding of the ambience of religious space in its varied purposes.

His Nuestra Sra. de Fátima parish church is multi-purpose, catering to and raising awareness of the variety of local beliefs through the distribution of five distinct foci in one triptych space.  His Cristo Obrero parish church at Atlantida is soft, engaging, a community space in which to come together, the facade a stage set to the forecourt, the door inviting, the confessionals concealed. Ten years later the main church in the heart of Durazno is austere, column-free, and undecorated, focused on worship, a modern and axial response to a retained frontage that is historic, formal, and foreboding.

Here are forms, light and detail derived from the best of European architectural modernism in which Dieste was immersed early in his career, but this reference does not detract, it is skillfully employed and combined, and much enhanced by the strength of Uruguayan sunlight.  

Coloured glass, translucent marble, form-separating daylight are all used to raise ecclesiastical emotion. Unsupported straight and graciously curving walls lean in to embrace the congregation, light emerges from below, enters from behind and shafts from above and beside with heavenly theatricality.

Each church is stripped bare of all but the essentials, while the unique play of light and space reflects a distinct difference in the reverential demands placed upon their congregation.

At all times his structure is sculpture, stripped back, balanced, daring and elegantly lit, but also appropriate to the requirements and the means, being fundamentally local and crafted.
 
The vaulting roofs are clever, practical and tolerant. The double curvature enabled by small component local materials is employed to generate economy and texture, to enable strength from minimum depth, and to permit occasional daylight. Dieste employs Uruguayan brick and a local workforce where the international default of reinforced concrete is both heavier and, in the cash-strapped Argentina of the 70’s, less available. There is repetition because he is both a modest engineer and the contractor, and because it is appropriate, it works and there is little need for change.

But then there is the Montevideo Shopping Centre, and I am dubious.

In 1985 Eladio is in his late 60’s and his work is well regarded. We have the first building with a strictly retail purpose and a commercial architect in the lead.

We have arch forms that are too small for the efficiency of the Dieste method, concrete shells doing the bigger, concealed spans, and walls over-tightly curved for their brick dimension, constructed in stepped verticals rather than directly addressing angled paths of compression.

Nothing I have seen and read from Dieste feels true to this building. Instead, it very much appears that this is typological adoption for its visual style, employing wallpapered gravitas rather than a seamless interweaving of structure and architecture to provide efficiency and character.

I leave quickly and buy a book of Eladio’s writings; to refresh my enjoyment in the originality and purpose of his work, and in the beliefs in which his designs are founded.
 

"I remember being present with very humble country people at the moment when a very complex and bold structure was liberated from scaffolding: bold but serene.

It was not important in terms of size or cost, but one could feel the tension of the effort that made it possible. And this is exactly what a fellow countryman said, that it was not easy to do. The audacity did not make him distrustful or just surprised, but happy; he distinguished very well the difference between what is important because of its size and cost and that which touches us deeply because it is expressed without the effort that made it possible.

I then saw clearly, once again, that for something to really reach the simple people it must have a lightness, a mysterious ease, an utter simplicity, a kind of effortless dance.

They are not satisfied, and rightly so, that a difficulty should be solved by blind force or money; they want rather that it should be overcome with the same ease with which hawks are held aloft, or with which every flower is held in the air, or with which every flower of the field is, when we really see it, the mysterious centre of the landscape.

"And even Solomon himself, in all his glory, was not so clothed as one of them".

To perceive such a thing shows a perceptiveness as fine as the gentleness which the roughest hands acquire when they caress the head of a child."
 
Eladio Dieste (1917-2000)