Meeting in Miraflores

Continuing with the publications about the rescue of the Miraflores Municipality building, one of the few architectural monuments of the 20th century, CARETAS interviews Patricia Llosa and Rodolfo Cortegana, two prominent architects who founded the Llosa/Cortegana studio in 2005. They investigate the individual/citizen as the central axis of architecture and how it relates to the environment based on its circumstances. For these architects, each project is a possibility of building people’s reality from the subjectivity of the human being, territorial and climatic conditions, history, cultural manifestations and the discipline itself. His studio is a space for academic and professional reflection, also closely related to the teaching of architecture.

In times of uncertainty, it seems that tangible reality is still one of the pleasant experiences that art and architecture offer us.

Walking through Miraflores we can appreciate the meeting of two experiences, one architectural and the other artistic. On the one hand, a Neo Colonial style building, built in the 1940s and designed by architect Luis Miro Quesada Garland to house the Municipal Palace of the Miraflores district. A building that, like few in the 20th century in our country, has been declared a National Monument, that is, society as a whole grants it heritage values ​​that we have the responsibility to protect.

On the other hand, we find a very complete exhibition of one of the most prolific artists of Peruvian art of the first half of the 20th century, we are referring to Carlos Quizpez Asín. The curatorship carried out by Jorge Bernuy displays an outstanding work, of which we can highlight those dedicated to the murals that were made on public buildings in Peru.

The worrying thing about what should be a happy meeting between these two cultural manifestations is that both lose a lot due to the way in which they are deployed based on the architectural adaptation of the building, and the staging of the artistic exhibition.

There are many examples of interventions in buildings with monumental value, whose adaptations, instead of generating a detriment to their architecture, manage to highlight the architectural values ​​of the building. We can note examples such as the distinguished work in the field of interventions in heritage buildings carried out by Carlo Scarpa. His adaptations not only match the height of the building that houses them, but also highlight the monument itself, amplifying its architectural attributes.

Another closer example, perhaps, is the one carried out by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha in the Pinacoteca of the state of Sao Paulo, an intervention that reveals the value of the building intervened from the skill of the architect who plans it, inserting small actions that adapt precisely the exhibition spaces, the ordering of the flows and circulations in its venues.

The unfortunate thing about an initiative that had the purpose of amplifying the cultural offer in the district is losing the opportunity to do so from a quality intervention project, which highlights the heritage building and can host the various artistic manifestations in a dignified manner.

When we tour the current Quizpez Asín exhibition, we regret that, being such a significant work for Peruvian art, it is made precarious by the way in which it is displayed in terms of an improvised adaptation of the space that houses it. We are, therefore, in front of a work that deserves a container that is at the level of its artist and a building that would deserve an intervention that is at the level of his architecture.

We hope that the Municipality of Miraflores can reverse these actions and continue with an initiative that we all celebrate, but that is overshadowed by the improvised decisions that have been made in the management of this cultural space. As architects we are convinced that public buildings have the responsibility of becoming meeting places, spaces where as individuals we can build our citizenship and the democratic principles that may one day allow us a more just and inclusive society.

A public building is above all a place and it is an ethical responsibility of our authorities to be able to grant it new life cycles through respectful interventions that empower it to continue establishing its presence in the city, even more so when its role is that of cultural dissemination. .

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