Dieste [Uruguay]

Eladio Dieste

Eladio Dieste was born in Artigas, Uruguay in 1917. In 1943, he graduated as a construction engineer from the University of Montevideo. He and his wife Elizabeth Friedheim, a German-Jewish immigrant, had twelve children. Starting in 1945, he taught at the Department of Engineering at the University of Montevideo. He gathered practical experience in bridge building and as an architect for various companies. In 1946, Dieste built the first reinforced brick shell for the architect Antoni Bonet in Maldonado. A spectacular load test proved that reinforced, double-curved brick shells are stronger than reinforced concrete. In 1956, Dieste and his former fellow student Eugenio Montañez founded a company that further developed this construction method and used it for most of his constructions. He led a group of masons, concrete workers, and ceramicists whose great craftsmanship made it possible to carry out this new construction technique. Eladio Dieste’s innovations and alternative construction methods were more efficient than conventional methods for a long time and made it possible to build large spans in a manner never seen before. Today he is regarded as an outstanding construction-engineering artist comparable to Eugène Freyssinet, Robert Maillart and Heinz Isler. His writings on architecture and construction and his ideas on creating form and on the relationship between architecture and art establish him as a profound thinker on social architectonic practice. Dieste died in 2000 in Montevideo.

The opposite of negligence

In order for something to truly reach modest people it must have a lightness, a mysterious ease, a concise simplicity, something like dance without effort or fatigue. It does not satisfy them, and they are right not to be satisfied, when a difficulty is resolved using blind force or money. They want the problem to be solved with the same effortlessness with which the sparrow hawk stays aloft and each flower in the field, when we really see them, is the center of a mysterious landscape and “not even Solomon, in all his glory, was dressed like one of them” (Matthäus 6:28,29). To perceive something in this way shows a penetration that is as delicate as the sweetness that the coarsest hands acquire when they caress the head of a child.
For those who are suspicious of anything that has an emotional charge, I want to clarify something. Like all human deeds that are dense with emotional force, what I have depicted above comes at the end of a rationally well-anchored chain of events. Behind the resolution of a problem that employs blind force and money, there is always the negligence, and behind the negligence there is the disdain or thoughtlessness and superficiality (which are other forms of disdain) of he who does not examine himself. This disdain is definetely contempt for human effort or of mankind itself; here, I think we have touched a common basis, something that we all agree on – the value of mankind. The grace that we demand from art is a flower of effort and energy, which is the opposite of negligence.

(Eladio Dieste: “Art, People. Technocracy”, in Stanford Anderson (ed.): Eladio Dieste: Innovation in Structural Art, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004, 194-198)