Resonant Architecture: The Situated Poetics of Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas

Abstract

There are architectures that, more than others, seem to exist for their nature of atmospheric, resonant bodies: they are shells that enclose, protect, and reverberate the internal landscape of our sensibility. These architectures, in being diaphragms designed to regulate external factors, such as daylight, breeze, and temperature, function above all as a source of emotional priming and contagion. They sway our first impressions (bodily resonance) and modulate our affective involvement (attunement). Two projects by the Andalusian architect Antonio Jiménez Torrecillas describe his extraordinary ability to shape the atmospheric vocation of architectural experience, staging affectively situated events. The journey inside the Nasrid Wall in Upper Albaicín, the Moorish quarter of the city of Granada, (2002-2008) and the seaside house in Rota designed for a famous couple of writers, Luis García Montero and Almudena Grandes, (2012-2015) is an homage to Antonio, master of atmospheres.

Oz 44, Essence of Discipline
Edited by Haneen Abu-Sherbi and Matthew Cox 

Increasingly the discipline of architecture assumes the demands posed by a rapidly changing society, responding to issues in an evolving world. These shape how architecture is practiced and perceived. With ever-expanding expectations to contend with a multitude of urgencies, something at architecture's core—perhaps even an underlying idealistic concept of the architect—may be diluted or lost. Oz 44 asked: how might the architect of the twenty-first century define the agency of architecture beyond the realm of the expected standards? What underlying principles—what core passions—must remain in architectural practice and theory?