Forme di Sintesi : l'invenzione americana nei progetti di Javier Corvalan

Contemporary Paraguayan architecture attracted international interest for the ability of some of its authors to showcase how cultural peripheries can be places where to reinvent the principles of modernity. The specific condition of Paraguay, on the margins of the American periphery, highlights the continuity of America's problems as a continent of shared identity, but also the particular circumstances of each individual province or nation being the center of a precise system of cultural relations. Architecture and urban planning became the concretization of the processes of translation of different cultural systems that crossed this territories, fostering the idea of ​a heterogeneous American culture, given by the continuity with which over time designs belonging to other worlds have passed in an exogenous phenomena. America is heterogeneous, due to the complex crucible produced by various forms of cultural dependences; Paraguay's capital, Asunción, where the objects of this research are located, is the geographic support to begin the definition of a system of precise relationships that have given sense to the designs. To understand the designs it was important to enter the ambiguous territory where it is located, Asunción, aware that there can not be a Paraguayan identity without a relation to other cultures. The continuing political-economic crises force an ethnic-cultural promiscuity among European immigrants and indigenous peoples. Language coexistence becomes the symbol of the conquest of indigenous people, but also of a particular alliance that manifests in the forms of urban dwelling the permanence of a rural condition. The research focuses on four projects by architect Javier Corvalàn: the Experimental Theater of the Cultural Center "Manzana de la Rivera" (1994-1996), the restoration of the Cultural Center "CPES" (1996-2000), the Surubi'i House (2004-2005) and the Chapel of San Miguel Arcángel (2002-2011). The aim of this analysis is to give greater weight to Paraguay and to an experience where many authors are involved in the definition of the design process, while being also closely related to the geographic support. Forms of synthesis investigates the ability of Corvalán's project to positively relate within this heterogeneous culture. The research, by recalling the history of those four architectures, defines the set of relationships that the architect identifies and then organizes throughout the project. The culture of Paraguay, that is brought to light trough the design, has always been ambiguous, due to the fact that is open to different interpretations, and impure because it includes heterogeneous elements. Projects reveal a natural way of being heterogeneous, through which both urban and rural conditions simultaneously work in defining the anthropic space.  Corvalán’s works stretch themselves among the issues posed by the specific context of each single project, beginning a process that looks for a synthesis of the possible actions. Through the example of these architectures the evolution of an attitude is discussed. This attitude, that has synthesis as its inspiration, finds in structural intuition the way for an economy of actions that is also figurative.   By relocating the sense of the actions and of the context we can highlight the affinity of each project to its natural and cultural geographies, to distinguish its architectural experiment from other Latin Americans experiences, but also avoid relapsing in folklore or modernist mannerism. Corvalán's work tells of the need of understanding the contemporary architectural design through a series of multiple relationships, which are very wide but equally precise. Paraguayan experience is rooted in an America that can be considered as the expression of a pre-global condition, the artifact is the model that is used in order to verify the means in which a local experience manifests its way of being universal.