Children take two years to learn to read, and many take a lifetime to have a voice. Especially a writer, who uses such abstract mediums as words, sometimes to inform us, other times to move us, but always to draw us into a special ‘I-me’ from which good voices speak. Linazasoro has that kind of a voice. It is perhaps not a gift, but the fruit of effort in the life of a reader and lover of music, an inquisitive person who works in ‘matters of the spirit.’ In Linazasoro’s case, there are at least two voices. That of an architect who matures early but never stops refining his tastes and fertilizing them with what he sees and likes in others. And that of a writer who turns his book into a projection of himself, in the trail of the first one ever to do such a thing, the Montaigne who wrote the Essays.
Linazasoro, after all, is a consummate writer of essays on architecture; artifacts built upon a very personal view of the discipline, which do not hide preferences and fears, while maintaining a high level of intellectual rigor. Permanencia y arquitectura urbana and El proyecto clásico de arquitectura were early essays, and more recent, no less acclaimed ones are La memoria del orden and La arquitectura del contexto. Now, Las paradojas de Sigurd Lewerentz is a brief but intense work that insightfully presents the powerful but ever cryptic Swedish architect, while providing some fundamentals of the author’s own interests. If any genuine essay reflects a self, more so with Linazasoro, who tackles Lewerentz in an endeavor, perhaps, to understand his own self.
The book’s voice speaks in a serious but personal style, removed from rhetoric and able to clarify very complex matters in few words. Nevertheless, this is an extraordinarily informed text. Although it comes across as detachedfrom the academic work of papers and monographs, Linazasoro is a leading expert on Lewerentz, and this shows in the precision with which he synthesizes a diverse and paradoxical oeuvre, from initial projects like the Resurrection Chapel – with its reinvention of classicism through confirmation of the end of order and the need to work with nods to the work of others – to St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s Churches, masterpieces revealing the virtues of contextual modernity and the powers of atmospheres.
Despite the book’s extreme concision, Linazasoro does not leave out the headquarters of the Riksförsäkringsverket (National Social Insurance Board), a mature example of his wish to be neither ‘ancient’ nor ‘modern,’ or the flower kiosk, where matter becomes symbol. Linazasoro also addresses Lewerentz’s ties to architects like Celsing and Asplund, just as he likens the master’s sensibility to Östberg’s and Tessenow’s. He concludes suggesting reasons for Lewerentz’s lack of currency, which are those that make his oeuvre timeless: the absence of an imposed style, craftsmanship, renouncement of the spectacular, a fragmented, unfinished character, and, above all, a commitment to the idea that architecture can be the place for profound experiences, intimate ones that come into play in the body as much as they require a refined cultural memory.
