La obra de Xosé Bar Bóoobjetividad y dimensión colectiva

Abstract

The study of Xosé Bar Bóo work (1922-1994), has started from two postulates that have become established by different authors: on the one hand, it is considered a paradigm of professional ethics and, on the other hand, the assessment of his legacy has positioned him as one of the most outstanding architects in the whole Spanish architecture, from the second half of the 20th century,granting him a protagonist role in the Galicia modemity recovery. The research starts with a selection of texts from difierent authors and the architect, that make up a theoretical corpus of required keys to enter the analysis with the intention to test the consistency between thinking and doing. These writings contextualise the leading figure and work of Bar Bóo, and allow to investigate his links with modernity, his multifaceted humanistic approach, and his particular definition of architecture, running a path from ethics to aesthetics, through reason. In the analylical approach to the work, that deals with collective and domestic space, a reverse process off project is carried out by establishing an understanding from a first descriptive level, which breaks down the project in its various logical formal operations, to an analogous level that interprets how poetic function processes information provided by life, site and technique. The work comprises a complex universe that has been inadequately studied and often interpreted under his own personality, so that, after a superficial appraisal, leads to thinking about the difficulty that his achievements can be transmissible. Nonetheless, in a perfectly intelligible speech, Bar Bóo insisted to underline the most transmissible dimensions of his work, in the conviction that the use of rationality has a fundamental role in the project activities. This Thesis starts from that speech to investigate how the architect puts at the disposal of the collectivity his subjective potential to dissolve it in a work that aspires to the impersonal, the main feature of any tradition. The confirmation of this aspiration turns upside down the "original" sense characterization of this architect to access, from the particular of each work, to the exemplary and transferable. Thus, the main conjecture consists in considering that professional ethics, in coincidence with other prominent architects of his generation, places the architect in an objective position with regards to the project task, wich transforms an attitude in a way of projecting. This stance, required him to be equipped with a deep anthropological knowledge and how man needs are met, the environment in which he plays, his native Galicia, in which he developed almost all of his work, and the materials and techniques of architectural discipline. Objectivity necessarily leads to an intense personal search in which the total release of formal prejudices, and intense and corroborated approach to the definition and resolution of the architectural problem, move him away from any stylistic conventionalism. In this way, formal vocabulary is not cause but effect, synthesis of the resolution of the most varied problems that interact in a process that will test his intuition, in a search for a coincident ethical and aesthetic result, as it happens in architecture without style and architect. This way he ends up identifying himself with the core objective of tradition, and the collective dimension emerges, issues that discover the cornerstone that make Bar Bóo work and speech a complex and genuine territory while unitary and exemplary.