Studio Banana TV interviews Martín Lejarraga, author of a house for a painter and two cats in Cartagena, Spain.
Reality only awaits the desire… Charles Eames
The house where I was born belonged to one of those working class neighborhoods that were built in Spain in the mid forties, almost at the same time as Charles Eames asked “What is a House?” in an essay of the same title.
It was luck that it was designed by one of those sensible professionals who sometimes emerge in the gray life of the province —Lorenzo Ros—, who achieved through a simple layout and reasonable constructions that the neighborhood would continue to be a pleasant place to live in, a place in which to build a history, or where by the alchemy of architecture, my parents’ house —the past— would be turned into something else, in the theater of my life, in a refuge and port of shelter: in my house.
You can study the history of architecture, document yourself with brainy treatises and magazine articles, with pictures of your dream homes, you can criticize and analyze the houses of your friends and your enemies, but commissioning your own house cannot be such an easy matter. You have to know what you need and what is only superficial and a slave to fashion, and try to make it —as Eames says in his cited essay— “modern, lucid and realistic”. And you have to choose well the person who can accommodate your wishes to reality, who can show you what you want to see, even if it means looking in a place you had not thought of.
Martín Lejarraga, of whom I am a friend and admirer for many years, is the only architect I thought of. I chose him especially because of affinity with his creative concepts, because I have seen how he skillfully measures in his projects the distance between the client’s needs and the constructive solutions, illuminating with intelligence the path between the idea and the building.
I wanted a house that would keep traces of my past life in it, which would take advantage of what I think is the privileged direction in which it faces, which would be a comfortable place for my cats, turtles, dreams and odd little habits. And what Martín brought me was a conch shell.
After a time thinking about it —a time that always seems extremely long for clients— my architect brought me a conch shell which he said represented the project, the key with which he thought he had solved the problem. I guess someone else might have looked at him strangely, but I knew that the spark had been lit and that the house was already built somewhere; this is what happens to me with my paintings, and my gallery owner has learned not to panic in front of a group of blank canvases if I say they are already being painted.
After many stories of divorces between architects and clients, from Mies van der Rohe and Farnsworth House to the urban legends of cousins and neighbors, this is a story with a happy ending.
I don’t like to know how the devil magicians pull rabbits out of the hat, so I will leave it to others to talk about the interplay of transparencies and reflections in the façade, the way of opening the living room to the outside, the proportions between hollows and the diversity of textures.
In the short time I have been in it, I know it is the house I wanted, the one that interprets the abstract thoughts and long conversations that led to its creation, that translates into materials, spaces and alignments something as ungraspable as dreams, fears and wishes. I think it will be a good place to laugh, to eat, to sleep, to converse, to love, to create…
If I were a hermit crab and I found a conch shell like this, I would not hesitate in making it my lair, my little castle under the sea.
…Ángel Mateo Charris, painter
