Territory, Horizon and tobacco. Eternal Ethnographic Architecture in Certain Period of Time

Abstract

Rationality, in itself, is sufficient to erect buildings of recognised beauty and architectural value. Within the unique cultural landscape of the Vega de Granada in Spain, we propose an analysis of the tobacco drying sheds as articulating elements of its identity. Starting from the syntactic and morphological condition of the elemental architecture that these prototypes represent, the semantic connotations of the area of study are revealed. The integrating observation in time seeks, in the architectural restraint of the models analysed, to establish the link between this industrial architecture with local reminiscences and the new social order brought about by modernity and its revolutionary principles. With regard to these houses for curing tobacco, it is possible to embark on a journey through a series of principles of invariance that constitute the essence of a useful, necessary, temporally indefinite architecture that is faithfully and rigorously identified with the territory on which they are built and which, during a period of time that is reliably dated, they conquered and visually subdued. For the development of this approach, to the indivisible duality of space-time, a third condition will be added as a catalyst between the two: geometry. In this context, it is proposed to apply the concepts of geometric chronotope and typological chronotope as guidelines for the methodology linked to the place and the temporal context of the observing agents of these iconic architectural models. The results obtained lead to evocative conclusions about the essential architectural condition of the drying sheds.