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Ricardo Alcaide

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A Place to Hide/ A place to hide.

 

 

The title that Ricardo Alcaide has chosen for his  exhibition at the Blanca Soto gallery in Madrid reveals how unconventional his view of architecture is.  And I say of architecture, because it is what all of the works  reunidas  in this  are ultimately about, although each one shows He does it in his own way and although the series that lends its title to all of them, has as a reference, as an argument, as a motive, what could be judged as the most radical possible denial of architecture: the ephemeral refuge of the homeless. Alcaide doubts, however, that this mutual exclusion is so radical and it is very remarkable that he is not completely alone in his doubt.  Before him -and at the dawn of modernity-_cc781905- 5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ Father Laugier and the architect Gastón Ledoux led a debate of enormous importance for architectural culture, whose motive was precisely the cabin in the woods. The most elementary and primitive possible: the cabin imagined by Laugier as a simple roof supported by four rustic wooden posts with which - according to him -  men carried out for the first time the impulse that many Centuries later, he would raise to heaven temples and palaces of dazzling complexity and refinement. But the abbe, rather than trying to establish the origin of architecture in a powerful image, intended  to defend with the example of the cabin the unquestionable right of man to respond to the challenges of nature using only his understanding and ingenuity and counting only on the resources that - like the trees of the forest -  nature offered him spontaneously. Ledoux responded to this paradigmatic and at the same time naive vision of modern individualism, with a sour cartoon titled Shelter for the poor, in which a stunted tree, rooted in a stony islet and lost in the middle of an infinite ocean, is the only shelter for a naked and trembling individual, who raises his hands in supplication towards an assembly gathered among the clouds of Olympian gods and  muses of the arts, among which the muse of architecture stands out strongly. The man -comes to say Ledoux-  is hardly anything if he lacks the lights that the gods and wise men generously dispense.

Carlos Jiménez - Writer and art critic. Professor of Aesthetics at the European University of Madrid.    

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