Books
Animal (Animated) Architecture
It seems a tall order to classify José Joaquín Parra Bañón, a rare bird who delights in classifications. In his taxonomic endeavor, JJPB takes from the Warburg of black velvet panels, the Godard of compulsive montages, and the Benjamin of thinking images, just as he recognizes himself in reflections of Baroque mirrors, where mottos and allegories rule, where words fuse with icons, science with art, as in Kircher’s impossible treatises on the magical variety of the world. Now, the above references are joined by compilers of zoological minutiae (Lucretius, Pliny, Saint Isidore, Beatus of Liébana...) and the result is a book which, while ostensibly dealing with “animal architecture,” really addresses “animated architecture” and quietly proposes a whole vision of architecture.
It is hard to sum up the references used by the author and the iconographic repertoire that enlivens this volume, just as it is hard to explain his highly personal prose. Don’t expect to find a plea for animal architecture in the manner of Pallasmaa or English functionalists, nor an account of the architecture-animal bond in the manner of an ecologist, a Marxist, or both. The title’s snails, flies, and goats are not so much animals as emblems, rhetorical figures, metaphors of architecture that are less ‘animal’ than ‘animated.’ An architecture which, in the thread of the snail, fly, and goat, the author wants airy, kinetic, changeable, linked to the humus it comes from, and zoological because alive... If the argument is peculiar, be ready to take it just as JJPB tells it with the mastery of the rare.
