Architecture of essences: the revealing abstraction of the tobacco landscape

Abstract

The architecture targeted by this study, born to shelter and allow the process of organic transformation of the harvested tobacco leaf, is unequivocally identified with a defined chronology and territory. The tobacco drying sheds of the Vega of Granada have shaped, for more than sixty years and until today, the landscape framework of a region that has historically played a decisive role in this large area that is home to a total of forty-one municipalities. Based on the scientific procedure that guides the systematic organisation of landscape studies, we establish a comparative analysis using the so-called morphological method of synthesis; a characteristic empirical practice that allows the enforcement of an inductive analytical procedure for an exact approximation to the landscape, to the time and to the permanence of form as an indispensable requirement of identity. As for the architecture of models and prototypes, we conclude with the architectural characterization of one of the three reference complexes in the province, constituted by one of the most representative models of industrial architecture that is configured on the basis of the essential or invariant in time and space. Geometry acquires prominence, and the material condition of the prototypes loses its relevance in benefit of the relationships that become important as formal configurators of the architectural process.