Antonio Bonet. Platforms

Abstract

Since ancient times platforms have been built to create suitable horizontal planes for cultivation or to provide support for construction. In this paper, we analyse how Antonio Bonet Castellana (1913-89) took advantage of natural, agricultural and artificial platforms to adapt his projects to the landscapes in which he was working. As an architectural concept, platforms are associated with the earthly, in contrast to the lightness with which their antagonists, the pavilions, are associated. Decomposition of the section for resolving how the building merges with the ground plane is sometimes suggested in the urban development plan. In accordance with the premise inferred by the minimum construction/maximum intervention binomial, in this paper we investigate the intervention strategies used by Bonet to verify the transformative capacity of pavilions and platforms. To unravel the composite principles behind the interplay of contrasts and verify the theoretical foundations and vernacular influences, we analyse a selection of Bonet’s works and conclude that they contain no clear line of distinction between architecture and urban development.