VERNACULAR DESIGN - BERDUN HUESCA

© DAVID CARR-SMITH 2005 : all images & text are copyrighted - please accredit text quotes - image reproduction must be negotiated via dave@artinst.entadsl.com

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DAVID CARR-SMITH - IMPROVISATION / DESIGN / ART / KITSCH / CHANCE

VERNACULAR PRAGMATISM & STYLE

BERDUN VILLAGE ... in process

INDEX
IMPROVISED-ARCH IN A'DAM SQUATS & COLLECTIVES
IMPROVISATION - PUBLIC & LEGAL : ALLOTMENTS
IMPROVISED VILLAGES - p1
IMPROVISED VILLAGES - p2
VERNACULAR & STYLE - BERDUN
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE - FRANK'S CAFE - p1
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE - FRANK'S CAFE - p2 - DRAWINGS
TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE - SOUTHWARK LIDO p1 ... pending
"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS

VERNACULAR PRAGMATISM EITHER EXPANDS ITS SCOPE OR TRANSMUTES INTO STYLISTIC EXPRESSION

RE REIN TXT____ GENRALIZE !!! :::: a place which, though it openly expressed its artificiality: the sawn timbers, the bolting together ... evoked the sense of a natural place, not only in its unintended illustrational references, but in the directness of its structural logic and acts of assembly; and even more fundamentally, in its integration.

This extraordinary, environment however may well have become claustrophobic: too strong an 'image' to live in - like a zoo-cage diorama. Around early 1993 Rein began to work on it again; simplified the structure (eg: removed the window-crossing component of the gallery, opening the room to the outside) and whitened walls ... so-far so-good ... however, he also began to replace its ad hoc (thus integral) improvisations with 'properly-made' 'finalised' objects (eg: the steps to the desk) - the difficulty of constructively changing something already so complete is often diverted into such piecemeal 'improvements' which dismember its coherent invention. I've seen an analogous thing happen to a vernacular Spanish village grown from river-stones and iron-studded wood - which acquired money, TV's, and a workshop selling cement and wrought-iron window-grills - whose existing structures were subjected to piecemeal 'stylisation', multiplying painful lesions.

EG: BERDUN VILLAGE, PROVINCE OF HUESCA, SPAIN - IN LATE 1970's and 2004
[NB: Some photos show distorted colour due to film-aging.] [All written 2007]

In the 1970s this hill-top village began to display the results of a rather sudden increase of wealth. This effected the farm buildings and the village houses differently.

The farm buildings continued as they always had, to espouse only pragmatism, even though this new wealth changed their means of construction. The farm storage-buildings had always been adapted and enlarged by grafting extensions onto originals, at first using the local building material of river-pebbles and hand-formed ceramic tiles, more recently using industrial products like lightweight air-bricks and breeze-blocks. With sufficient money and larger scale cultivation this finicky work was bypassed and entirely new and much larger volume storage-buildings were made of industrial mass-materials assembled via increasingly industrial types of organisation. However even in this latter phase of factory-like efficiency, acquisition and fabrication, there is a persistance of individualistic craft and local bias, amusingly displayed in the ' final 'finishing'' of some of the buildings: patches of hand-applied cement-render, graffiti-like 'play' with paint, uncompleted tasks. However (unlike the treatments the village homes received) these 'personal quirks' are never concerned with applying 'meaningful-motifs', they are always a direct expression of activity (or its termination), and thus (with the usual proviso that human activity is per se imperfect/discontinuous, lacking, at least in its physical expression, the evolving continuity of nature) result in forms/patterns that harmonise with and are complementary to the products and results of natural 'chance' [this is most clearly shown in the last barn picture below].

The village houses however increasingly exhibited symptoms of 'design-disease'. The facades of many of these ancient buildings, exemplars of vernacular stone/wood building crafts and economic restrictions - severely practical except for their windows' white painted superstition-required surrounds and their huge arched stone street-entries displaying the arms of the local lord - were rendered (like hoardings) flat and squared, and adorned with a melange of style quotes and newly acquired 'modern' practicalities: a muddle of clean rectangles, kitsch motifs, and 'home-improvement' objects, all competing to convey their owner's taste, means, modernity, originality, and even 'excess'.

However there is also (only) one example of a house [see below: HOMES... pic-4] that displays a radical improvement whose construction is a practical improvisational response to a need and the availability of its means. This is a marvellously economic and completely useful addition of a huge terrace (facing the magnificence of the then unspoiled peace of the Aragon valley). This was made at some time before 1929 - well before the plague-like spread of a desire for the social endorsement of mass-marketed taste - when local vernacular builders were still constrained by pragmatism but evidently had wider resources than local stone and wood, in this case access to (scrapped?) industrial metal structural units. This is an improvised result with no style but the presence of a free-seeing intelligence, and no meaning beyond its usefullness.


BERDUN VILLAGE IN THE ARAGON VALLEY (pic 1978 / to E)	BERDUN VILLAGE (pic 1978 / to NW) [film has colour-bias]	BERDUN VILLAGE (pic 1978 / to WWN) [film has colour-bias]

FARM BUILDINGS REMAINED PRAGMATIC THROUGHOUT MATERIAL CHANGES

VERNACULAR BARN (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (S FIELD)

(pic 1979)

RIVER-STONES, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY

This is the product of a building craft developed in reciprocation with locally abundent (natural) materials and local workshop-based manufactures. In this case river pebbles (the village is sited between two shallow rivers in the wide flat mountain-fringed Aragon valley), timber (mainly from small local trees), and clay. The walls are dry-laid, the timber is minimally shaped, the fired-clay tiles were probably of local workshop manufacture. Such a building is the last manifestation of what must surely be an ancient craft lineage.

This 'simplist-practical-shape' persists even through enlargement and change of construction-material [see below].

VERNACULAR BARN (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 8-1980) [film has colour-bias]

RIVER-STONES, CEMENT-RENDER, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY

This marvellously perfect pattern of objects includes straw-stalks and pebbles, litter, temporarily placed things-in-frequent-use, movable parts of the building, render-patterns and roof-tiles, and the shapes of the composites of these. The harmony also extends off-picture including other local structures and traces of use.

This ('Arcadian') type of unreproducable beauty is only attainable via 'innocence' - via activities empty of any intention beyond immediate practicality, which result in instantly-experiencable and temporarily present 'patterns-of-use'.

HAY-STACK ETC - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 8-1980) [film has colour-bias]

The wonderfully harmonious patterns, that result from human activities ranging from mere physically convenient placing to the 'random' discarding of litter, can be so perfect and so complex that they resemble and are almost a continuity with the harmonious complexities of nature.

VERNACULAR BARN (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD)

(pic 1978)

Here is another example of exquisitely precise yet fortuitous patterning.

The rounded triangle of straw-waste perfectly underpins, like an embryo growing to an adult, the hard and sharpened barn (even sharing a slight asymmetry and leftward motion).

To its left - framed in a forestage of beam bits like a broken sketch of the barn's angles - a wooden oblong counterpoints the heap's roundness, (imports a white triangle from the right end), divides the space between heap and pole-shadow, to which it is corner-joined by a brown diagonal which accelerates the heap's right incline up to its antithetical form, the grey pole (which apotheosises the barn's angle via its soaring wire).

Meanwhile, the white village, raised to the sky like a vision, scatters white fragments of its cubic forms among the foreground litter of the barn.

This set of objects perform a precise visual drama that in its formal perfection, contrapuntal complexity, depth of participating detail, is impossible to manufacture (let alone verbalise) except via 'innocent' activities akin to natural processes.

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (S FIELD)

(pic 1979)

RIVER-STONES, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY

This barn once resembled the first example. The progenitor is still discernable, encased in the end-wall. Like several in this locale it was heightened by moving the apex of its pitch towards one side.

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (S FIELD)

(pic 1978)

RIVER-STONES, INDUSTRIAL AIR-BRICKS, CEMENT, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY

Like the former example, an old river-stone barn was enlarged by moving its apex, however this more recent addition uses cheap lightweight industrial air-bricks, (new roof tiles are presumably still mass-produced by semi-craft methods (?))

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD)

(pic 1978)

RIVER-STONES, INDUSTRIAL AIR-BRICKS, CEMENT, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY

Unike the former example, what remains of this old river-stone barn is overwhelmed beneath a vertical extension of lightweight air-bricks. A 'canvas' for a dramatically active, bizarrely chaotic, 'painterly' rendering - a performance of traditional 'tachiste' technique of thrown wet cement!

Note again: because it has no aesthetic//Design aim, this behaviour, though (seemingly) indulgently 'individualistic', is as naturally dramatic as sudden weather.

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD)

(pic 1978)

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED & RE-ROOFED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD)

(pic 1978)

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (BACK) (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 1978)

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (FRONT) (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 1978)

The entry front of this old barn reveals a complex reconditioning and extending in progress.

VERNACULAR BARN (BACK) PLUS NEW ADDITION - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 8-1980) [ film has colour-bias]

Two years after the last picture a huge new barn - either an extension of the old or a replacement has begun. A concrete base has been laid and the first steel former erected (displaying 'the shape that represents all barns').

VERNACULAR BARN (1970s) - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 1978)

BREEZE-BLOCKS, CEMENT (LATE 1970s)

Rather than enlarging the stone barns, they are now being replaced with large industrially enabled sheds. These are products of a building craft based on manufactured (not locally gathered) construction materials: breeze or cement-blocks, cement morter and render, and roofing-panels probably fabricated in a light-industrial workshop, most likely on the nearest town's (Jaca) relatively recent 'industrial-estate'.

Land clearance and wheat growing (a change in agricultural scale and technology) powered such scale-changes. However, unlike the village houses' stylised facades, these barns simply represent a new phase of practical vernacular craft, but reciprocating with a wider catchment of transport and materials.

VERNACULAR BARN (FRONT) (1970s) - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 1979)

BREEZE-BLOCKS, CEMENT, PAINT, STEEL (LATE 1970s)

VERNACULAR BARN (BACK) (1970s) - BERDUN (NE FIELD)

(pic 1979)

BREEZE-BLOCKS, CEMENT, PAINT, STEEL (LATE 1970s)

An industrial 'Primative Hut'! Though the whole form of this most-simple enclosed volume confronts nature, the forms of its components increasingly approach and blend with natural events. Firstly the slightly irregular stains of its rows of wall-blocks submerged beneath variously sized and coloured rectangles of cement render, each patch a single unit of work performed and walked away from. Surmounting this, an inexplicable intrusion of gestural paint like a freize of hyperactive clouds is brushed, splattered and dribbles, as if 'demonstrating' a collusion of chance and gravity; mimicking the gestures of a shadow-tree while contrasting its direct act with that secondary effect. As this paint skys its crown, so the barn's base is grounded in a gravity-graduated stripe of blown orange soil-dust and a tight scarf of sun-bleached grass trimmed straight by passing vehicles, that adds its bristling foreground actuality to the dusty sunset, springing shadow bush, and dancing clouds.

Thus this intrusive object - apparantly so violantly discontinuous with nature - because made without meanings and sharing its practicality, blends and by degrees allows and cooperates with the actions of natural law and chance.

HOMES WERE RENDERED 'CIVILISED' AND 'MEANINGFUL' WITH STYLED CLOTHING

VERNACULAR HOUSE (W-FACADE) - LONGAS VILLAGE, CENTRE SQUARE

(pic 1978) [film has colour-bias]

Longas was a Huesca village a few miles south of Berdun, semi abandoned and isolated at the end of a miles-long dirt-track. I include a Longas building as an example of the uncorrupted local vernacular.

VERNACULAR HOUSE (REAR FACADE) - BERDUN VILLAGE, N-EDGE ROAD

(pic 1979)

RIVER-PEBBLES & RENDER, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY (DATE UNKNOWN)

The disposition of openings and reinforcing structures is entirely pragmatic; uncorrupted by style and snobbery the proportions, positions, rhythms are inevitably analogues of beautiful natural forms.

VERNACULAR HOUSE (REAR FACADE: BUTRESS & BALCONY) - BERDUN VILLAGE, N-EDGE ROAD

(pic 1978)

VERNACULAR HOUSE WITH IMPROVISED TERRACE - BERDUN VILLAGE: S-EDGE ROAD

(pic c1978) [film has colour-bias]

Free improvisational architecture unconstrained by 'how buildings should be realised'. The vernacular building's given form plus locally available and/or reusable materials (including a long steel pipe), enabled a clearly visualised need to be actualised with extraordinary economy and flair.

The terrace must have been added before 1929. It is the village's only obvious house example of the Medieval stone and wood vernacular transiting, without compromising its severe pragmatism, into the industrial age.

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 1 CALLE MAJOR

(pic 1978)

Around the mid 1970s, with the onset of relative prosperity resulting from the cultivation of wheat, a scramble to improve homes and display the advances of wealth began. A visual disease spread through the village: ancient vernacular river-pebble houses were crudely encased in cement render, squared-off and adorned with motifs from renaissance architecture and deco-modernism (rectangles, rustication, visual-clarity, etc), and 'improved' with 'convenience-products' and services.

The door and window positions (which originated in unity with the facades) were usually retained (though windows were often widened) and now appear awkwardly arbitary within the rigid visual geometry, their dramatic rhythmical gestures constrained and 'neurotic'.

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 10 (?)CALLE MAJOR

(pic 1980) [film has colour-bias]

Perhaps the most frugal of all the re-faced houses.

Its allegiance to a 'style' of rectlinear 'modernity', without any sense of visual harmony or the redeeming order of pragmatic necessity, has resulted in an ugly clash of crucially disjoined forms. However, we should be grateful that this type of blind-pretension at least affords a special type of object, one that is impossible to achieve from any other type of motivation - one that displays an acute disorder in painful conflict with an exhibited intention to achieve a formal clarity, and which, because 'innocently' actualised, is (like similarly 'innocent' pragmatic forms) experienced not as 'illustration' but as immediately affective event!

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 15 CALLE MAJOR

(pic 1980)

A monster of blankness!

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED (STREET ENTRY) - BERDUN VILLAGE, 15 CALLE MAJOR

(pic 1980)

It seems that the dread emptiness of their new front was sensed by its makers, who having buried the vitality of a vernacular facade and bypassed an opportunity to realise more complex and fulfilling domestic provisions than that had allowed, attempted to revive their corpse by edging its orifces with a 'personal' version of a traditional framing-motif, and justify its 'imposing monumentality' with a 'wealthy manor-owner's door'.

That habit ("tradition") is their only guide and precision their only aesthetic (the latter represents modernity and wealth), is exemplified in the problem/solution of the tile-frame corners: an exquisite if pointless fiat larded with a smug sense of 'Ive solved it!' - the top tile line marches boldly beyond its 'supporting' facade-hole and finds itself coyly saved by the side-stacks and a coincidence of the tile-maker's craft: the tiles are proportioned 3:1.

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED (STREET ENTRY) - BERDUN VILLAGE, 27 CALLE MAJOR

(pic 1980)

This replacement street doorway (which perhaps cost the destruction of one of the village's magnificent cut-stone entries and iron-studded doors) is at least more practical and relaxed than the last example. The unpretentious practicality of its mix of off-the-shelf moderne door and metal sheeting infill (a left-over from a new industrial barn?) is emphasised by the flanking oil-can geranium pots, propped on random stone-shards.

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 16 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO

(pic 1980)

This large refaced house obsessively displays a decor-theme of 'rustication' (or what the british call 'crazy-paving') - presenting examples like paintings in a gallery!

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED (FACADE MOTIF) - BERDUN VILLAGE, 16 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO

(pic 1980)

VERNACULAR HOUSE: REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 19 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO

(pic 1980) [film has colour-bias]

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 38 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO

(pic 1980) [film has colour-bias]

VERNACULAR HOUSE: RENDERED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 30 CALLE MAJOR

(pic 1978)

VERNACULAR HOUSE: RENDERED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 32 CALLE MAJOR

(pic 1978)

RURAL DISTRICT'S COUNCIL OFFICES & HEALTH-CENTRE (THE GUARDIA CIVIL HOUSE & 30 CALLE MAJOR): REBUILT & RENOVATED - BERDUN VILLAGE (c1997)

(pic: © John Boucher 7-2004)

Starting about 20 years ago the most recent fashion in 'renovation' began: to 'restore' buildings 'back to their original appearence'. In this case all but the arched entry has been rebuilt 'in the style of' the vernacular.

The conception, let alone the perception, that an illustration conveys a completely different experience than an original, was not included in their (or our) education! The original included a myriad sub-noticable facts; its 're-creation', apart from a total lack of (or at least a completely different) necessity driving every action of making, remembers almost nothing of the context of its origin, or ageing of its being.
We cannot be transported back - we have to accept the accumulations of aging.

.

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VERNACULAR BARN (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (S FIELD) (pic 1979) RIVER-STONES, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY This is the product of a building craft developed in reciprocation with locally abundent (natural) materials and local workshop-based manufactures. In this case river pebbles (the village is sited between two shallow rivers in the wide flat mountain-fringed Aragon valley), timber (mainly from small local trees), and clay. The walls are dry-laid, the timber is minimally shaped, the fired-clay tiles were probably of local workshop manufacture. Such a building is the last manifestation of what must surely be an ancient craft lineage. This 'simplist-practical-shape' persists even through enlargement and change of construction-material [see below].	VERNACULAR BARN (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 8-1980) [film has colour-bias] RIVER-STONES, CEMENT-RENDER, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY This marvellously perfect pattern of objects includes straw-stalks and pebbles, litter, temporarily placed things-in-frequent-use, movable parts of the building, render-patterns and roof-tiles, and the shapes of the composites of these. The harmony also extends off-picture including other local structures and traces of use. This ('Arcadian') type of unreproducable beauty is only attainable via 'innocence' - via activities empty of any intention beyond immediate practicality, which result in instantly-experiencable and temporarily present 'patterns-of-use'.	HAY-STACK ETC - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 8-1980) [film has colour-bias] The wonderfully harmonious patterns, that result from human activities ranging from mere physically convenient placing to the 'random' discarding of litter, can be so perfect and so complex that they resemble and are almost a continuity with the harmonious complexities of nature.

VERNACULAR BARN (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD) (pic 1978) Here is another example of exquisitely precise yet fortuitous patterning. The rounded triangle of straw-waste perfectly underpins, like an embryo growing to an adult, the hard and sharpened barn (even sharing a slight asymmetry and leftward motion). To its left - framed in a forestage of beam bits like a broken sketch of the barn's angles - a wooden oblong counterpoints the heap's roundness, (imports a white triangle from the right end), divides the space between heap and pole-shadow, to which it is corner-joined by a brown diagonal which accelerates the heap's right incline up to its antithetical form, the grey pole (which apotheosises the barn's angle via its soaring wire). Meanwhile, the white village, raised to the sky like a vision, scatters white fragments of its cubic forms among the foreground litter of the barn. This set of objects perform a precise visual drama that in its formal perfection, contrapuntal complexity, depth of participating detail, is impossible to manufacture (let alone verbalise) except via 'innocent' activities akin to natural processes.	VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (S FIELD) (pic 1979) RIVER-STONES, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY This barn once resembled the first example. The progenitor is still discernable, encased in the end-wall. Like several in this locale it was heightened by moving the apex of its pitch towards one side.	VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (S FIELD) (pic 1978) RIVER-STONES, INDUSTRIAL AIR-BRICKS, CEMENT, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY Like the former example, an old river-stone barn was enlarged by moving its apex, however this more recent addition uses cheap lightweight industrial air-bricks, (new roof tiles are presumably still mass-produced by semi-craft methods (?))

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD) (pic 1978) RIVER-STONES, INDUSTRIAL AIR-BRICKS, CEMENT, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY Unike the former example, what remains of this old river-stone barn is overwhelmed beneath a vertical extension of lightweight air-bricks. A 'canvas' for a dramatically active, bizarrely chaotic, 'painterly' rendering - a performance of traditional 'tachiste' technique of thrown wet cement! Note again: because it has no aesthetic//Design aim, this behaviour, though (seemingly) indulgently 'individualistic', is as naturally dramatic as sudden weather.	VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD) (pic 1978)	VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED & RE-ROOFED (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (E FIELD) (pic 1978)

VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (BACK) (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 1978)	VERNACULAR BARN ENLARGED (FRONT) (DATE UNKNOWN) - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 1978) The entry front of this old barn reveals a complex reconditioning and extending in progress.	VERNACULAR BARN (BACK) PLUS NEW ADDITION - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 8-1980) [ film has colour-bias] Two years after the last picture a huge new barn - either an extension of the old or a replacement has begun. A concrete base has been laid and the first steel former erected (displaying 'the shape that represents all barns').

VERNACULAR BARN (1970s) - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 1978) BREEZE-BLOCKS, CEMENT (LATE 1970s) Rather than enlarging the stone barns, they are now being replaced with large industrially enabled sheds. These are products of a building craft based on manufactured (not locally gathered) construction materials: breeze or cement-blocks, cement morter and render, and roofing-panels probably fabricated in a light-industrial workshop, most likely on the nearest town's (Jaca) relatively recent 'industrial-estate'. Land clearance and wheat growing (a change in agricultural scale and technology) powered such scale-changes. However, unlike the village houses' stylised facades, these barns simply represent a new phase of practical vernacular craft, but reciprocating with a wider catchment of transport and materials.	VERNACULAR BARN (FRONT) (1970s) - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 1979) BREEZE-BLOCKS, CEMENT, PAINT, STEEL (LATE 1970s)	VERNACULAR BARN (BACK) (1970s) - BERDUN (NE FIELD) (pic 1979) BREEZE-BLOCKS, CEMENT, PAINT, STEEL (LATE 1970s) An industrial 'Primative Hut'! Though the whole form of this most-simple enclosed volume confronts nature, the forms of its components increasingly approach and blend with natural events. Firstly the slightly irregular stains of its rows of wall-blocks submerged beneath variously sized and coloured rectangles of cement render, each patch a single unit of work performed and walked away from. Surmounting this, an inexplicable intrusion of gestural paint like a freize of hyperactive clouds is brushed, splattered and dribbles, as if 'demonstrating' a collusion of chance and gravity; mimicking the gestures of a shadow-tree while contrasting its direct act with that secondary effect. As this paint skys its crown, so the barn's base is grounded in a gravity-graduated stripe of blown orange soil-dust and a tight scarf of sun-bleached grass trimmed straight by passing vehicles, that adds its bristling foreground actuality to the dusty sunset, springing shadow bush, and dancing clouds. Thus this intrusive object - apparantly so violantly discontinuous with nature - because made without meanings and sharing its practicality, blends and by degrees allows and cooperates with the actions of natural law and chance.


VERNACULAR HOUSE (W-FACADE) - LONGAS VILLAGE, CENTRE SQUARE (pic 1978) [film has colour-bias] Longas was a Huesca village a few miles south of Berdun, semi abandoned and isolated at the end of a miles-long dirt-track. I include a Longas building as an example of the uncorrupted local vernacular.	VERNACULAR HOUSE (REAR FACADE) - BERDUN VILLAGE, N-EDGE ROAD (pic 1979) RIVER-PEBBLES & RENDER, TIMBER, FIRED-CLAY (DATE UNKNOWN) The disposition of openings and reinforcing structures is entirely pragmatic; uncorrupted by style and snobbery the proportions, positions, rhythms are inevitably analogues of beautiful natural forms.	VERNACULAR HOUSE (REAR FACADE: BUTRESS & BALCONY) - BERDUN VILLAGE, N-EDGE ROAD (pic 1978)

VERNACULAR HOUSE WITH IMPROVISED TERRACE - BERDUN VILLAGE: S-EDGE ROAD (pic c1978) [film has colour-bias] Free improvisational architecture unconstrained by 'how buildings should be realised'. The vernacular building's given form plus locally available and/or reusable materials (including a long steel pipe), enabled a clearly visualised need to be actualised with extraordinary economy and flair. The terrace must have been added before 1929. It is the village's only obvious house example of the Medieval stone and wood vernacular transiting, without compromising its severe pragmatism, into the industrial age.	VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 1 CALLE MAJOR (pic 1978) Around the mid 1970s, with the onset of relative prosperity resulting from the cultivation of wheat, a scramble to improve homes and display the advances of wealth began. A visual disease spread through the village: ancient vernacular river-pebble houses were crudely encased in cement render, squared-off and adorned with motifs from renaissance architecture and deco-modernism (rectangles, rustication, visual-clarity, etc), and 'improved' with 'convenience-products' and services. The door and window positions (which originated in unity with the facades) were usually retained (though windows were often widened) and now appear awkwardly arbitary within the rigid visual geometry, their dramatic rhythmical gestures constrained and 'neurotic'.	VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 10 (?)CALLE MAJOR (pic 1980) [film has colour-bias] Perhaps the most frugal of all the re-faced houses. Its allegiance to a 'style' of rectlinear 'modernity', without any sense of visual harmony or the redeeming order of pragmatic necessity, has resulted in an ugly clash of crucially disjoined forms. However, we should be grateful that this type of blind-pretension at least affords a special type of object, one that is impossible to achieve from any other type of motivation - one that displays an acute disorder in painful conflict with an exhibited intention to achieve a formal clarity, and which, because 'innocently' actualised, is (like similarly 'innocent' pragmatic forms) experienced not as 'illustration' but as immediately affective event!

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 15 CALLE MAJOR (pic 1980) A monster of blankness!	VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED (STREET ENTRY) - BERDUN VILLAGE, 15 CALLE MAJOR (pic 1980) It seems that the dread emptiness of their new front was sensed by its makers, who having buried the vitality of a vernacular facade and bypassed an opportunity to realise more complex and fulfilling domestic provisions than that had allowed, attempted to revive their corpse by edging its orifces with a 'personal' version of a traditional framing-motif, and justify its 'imposing monumentality' with a 'wealthy manor-owner's door'. That habit ("tradition") is their only guide and precision their only aesthetic (the latter represents modernity and wealth), is exemplified in the problem/solution of the tile-frame corners: an exquisite if pointless fiat larded with a smug sense of 'Ive solved it!' - the top tile line marches boldly beyond its 'supporting' facade-hole and finds itself coyly saved by the side-stacks and a coincidence of the tile-maker's craft: the tiles are proportioned 3:1.	VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED (STREET ENTRY) - BERDUN VILLAGE, 27 CALLE MAJOR (pic 1980) This replacement street doorway (which perhaps cost the destruction of one of the village's magnificent cut-stone entries and iron-studded doors) is at least more practical and relaxed than the last example. The unpretentious practicality of its mix of off-the-shelf moderne door and metal sheeting infill (a left-over from a new industrial barn?) is emphasised by the flanking oil-can geranium pots, propped on random stone-shards.

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 16 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO (pic 1980) This large refaced house obsessively displays a decor-theme of 'rustication' (or what the british call 'crazy-paving') - presenting examples like paintings in a gallery!	VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED (FACADE MOTIF) - BERDUN VILLAGE, 16 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO (pic 1980)	VERNACULAR HOUSE: REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 19 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO (pic 1980) [film has colour-bias]

VERNACULAR HOUSE REFACED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 38 CALLE GENERAL FRANCO (pic 1980) [film has colour-bias]	VERNACULAR HOUSE: RENDERED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 30 CALLE MAJOR (pic 1978)	VERNACULAR HOUSE: RENDERED - BERDUN VILLAGE, 32 CALLE MAJOR (pic 1978)

RURAL DISTRICT'S COUNCIL OFFICES & HEALTH-CENTRE (THE GUARDIA CIVIL HOUSE & 30 CALLE MAJOR): REBUILT & RENOVATED - BERDUN VILLAGE (c1997) (pic: © John Boucher 7-2004) Starting about 20 years ago the most recent fashion in 'renovation' began: to 'restore' buildings 'back to their original appearence'. In this case all but the arched entry has been rebuilt 'in the style of' the vernacular. The conception, let alone the perception, that an illustration conveys a completely different experience than an original, was not included in their (or our) education! The original included a myriad sub-noticable facts; its 're-creation', apart from a total lack of (or at least a completely different) necessity driving every action of making, remembers almost nothing of the context of its origin, or ageing of its being.	We cannot be transported back - we have to accept the accumulations of aging.