Las valijas de Vilamajó

Deals with the contents of two old travel bags. In its interior a series of original documents were found, belonging to architect Julio Agustín Vilamajó Echaniz, who was born in Montevideo in 1894 and died at the age of 53, after a recognized and rich professional and teaching career. Highlighted and admired in his country, Vilamajó achieved international prestige after having been appointed to the design consultant team of the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York. The contents of his suitcases-legacy delivered to the Faculty of Architecture 63 years after his death-constitutes the primary source of this research and the main reason for it: the thesis will try to understand its instrumental value as a representation of practice project of Vilamajó, and of the man-architect himself. The records found in the Valijas are intimate, and at the same time they constitute a heritage that is transmitted to our generations: they show a prolific and complex project practice, which will allow us to perceive procedures intrinsic to the discipline. To investigate, to search with anxiety and curiosity inside this closed and dispersed field of information, puts us in unbeatable conditions to make findings: drawings, letters, photographs or annotations that stand out from the rest, stand out from the whole and claim to be put in a place of privilege for research. These findings are considered as triggers in the sense of their quality of surprise event; As such, each one becomes the trigger of a partial research line within the framework of the thesis. The surprise is generated by anomaly or by novelty, and determines the doubt about a known event or about a collective belief related to Vilamajó. This doubt should be appeased through the observation and investigation of associated elements -internal or external to the Valijas-, seeking to find a possible explanation that responds to the uncertainty generated. The lines of research triggered by the detonators refer to projects, works or events in the life of Vilamajó, and its outcome will allow us to reach new knowledge about the architect's thinking and design practice: the Warehouse Annex to the La Americana Confectionery; his preliminary draft for the contest of the Legislative Palace of Quito; the study grant to Europe for obtaining the Grand Prize and the influence of Spain; the works in Villa Serrana; his participation in the consultative group for the project of the United Nations Headquarters in New York; the influences of Le Corbusier; the joint work with the sculptor Antonio Pena; his foray into prefabrication technology; the project for your own home; the urban studies for Punta del Este; the reproductions of their imaginary spaces; and his fondness for cartoons. After carrying out a process of grouping the information in chapters related to the triggers, and incorporating the findings to the existing knowledge of project practices and the work of Vilamajó, we will be building a new synthetic context, and proceeding to compose, from the roads developed projects, a new whole: the renewed figure of Vilamajó. This process will make it possible to understand more exactly what were the procedures that guided Vilamajó in its design practice, on what ideological and theoretical support it was based at the moment of making architecture, and finally, as a synthesis, to deepen the way of operating a project. architect of the early twentieth century. From each of the inquiries detonated by the surprise documents we can reach some explanations that incorporate new knowledge or new readings to what is already known, in the manner of paths that lead us - in the first place - to recognize and highlight partial aspects of the project's production. Vilamajó, and - at the same time - to perceive frameworks of an activity of complex condition. Vilamajó acted in a historical moment that passed between the practice of composition as a way to access a unitary product and the modern project as a way to a much better reality for the human being. The architect Vilamajó leaves us his vision of the procedure in the discipline, becoming a true story of architectural practice, where the prefiguration of spaces and forms is both specific and universal. The Valijas are thus constituted in their legacy, received at a moment of the discipline where everything expands, extends, becomes more complex and at the same time more attractive and uncertain, and where the certainties seem to have vanished.