CONVERSATIONS IN THE TROPIC. THE ARCHITECTURAL DIALOGUE BETWEEN FERNANDO HIGUERAS AND CÉSAR MANRIQUE

Abstract

The starting point for this article is the friendship, shared concerns and professional collaborations maintained for 25 years by Fernando Higueras and César Manrique. Both creators establish a fruitful conversation around friendship, art, architecture and landscape with numerous common interests and places. Since they met in the sixties of the last century, a complicity forged in a similar way of seeing life, a passionate, hedonistic and committed stance, based on a special sensitivity to the environment and a concern for creating for people and not for criticism. Iconoclastic and contradictory, they will recreate the dream of an alternative way of inhabiting the world linked to the tradition of anonymous architecture, to nature and to the landscape with a wild force. This almost ancestral position brings them closer to animals and their essential ways of building a shelter, attentive to the conditions of the place and the climate, while at the same time distancing themselves from the elitist intellectual discourse to find the essence of their discourse in space and construction technique. The objective of this article is to reveal the most determining aspects of this conversation, taking the island of Lanzarote as the setting, delving into some of their residential architectures, their incursions into the design of tourist accommodation and the development of the most intimate spaces of the house. In this motivation to reveal alternatives to industrial and alienated production, in the work of Higueras and Manrique we recognise characteristics of the “artisan”, a term defined by the sociologist Richard Sennett as a figure of resistance to capitalist dynamics, placing them in a position of manifest contemporaneity.