The hidden geometry of MUSAC. Field systems as the origin of form in the contemporary project

Abstract

With number 218 begins the tenth and last series of CIRCO, titled “Los límites de lo urbano”. An essay published in 2016 under the title “MUSAC, seis pasajes”, written jointly by Luis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón and signed by them in 2010, a reminder that it was published in the first issue of the journal Cuadernos de Proyectos Arquitectónicos2. The text is a reflection, written a decade later, on the methodological process of one of the most important built projects of their career, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León (MUSAC), winner of the Mies van der Rohe award in 2007. The article is structured in three parts: “life as transformation”, “transformation as a project technique”, and “the unexpected as recognition of life”. It runs through a diagram-map3 of six research territories, with discontinuous limits, around three concentric circles (selection, transformation, and project). Each territory starts up paths of exploration, crossing the concentric circles, using selected concepts and transformation tools. The existence of these approaches – the personal, the intellectual, the geometric and material, the historical, the artistic and social, and the natural4 – makes it possible to address the process of project creation from a methodology and variables other than the assumptions of modernity (function, context, technique). The article runs through the threads that weave the narrative, built by the architects to justify the project, transcending the concrete reality of the museum itself, to delve into theoretical and technical reflections on the origin of the architectural form, using critical analysis of the MUSAC’s visible geometry and comparing it with a selection of relatable past, present and future projects, in an effort to reveal a hidden realhypothetical real process5.