Author: Javier Manterola Armisén
Publisher: Laetoli-Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad
Collection: Arquitectura y Sociedad
Date published: Autumn 2009

While no one questions architecture’s aesthetic and artistic component and dimension, engineering remains confined to concepts of efficiency, resolution of structural problems, and resistance, and conditioned by a certain form of methodological  Cartesianism. So much that very often, the artistic aspect of an engineering work is appreciated only when it has been designed by an architect, leaving engineers in the silent shadow of works assumed to be founded on purely scientific parameters.

Javier Manterola Armisén, a trustee of the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad, is one of a number of Spanish engineers who have managed to break the barrier between art work and engineering work. His long track record, his membership in the Fine Arts Academy of San Fernando, and the many awards acknowledging his work testify to this. In the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad’s debut as a publisher, titled La obra de ingenieria como obra de arte (The Work of Engineering as a Work of Art), Manterola analyzes and settles the engineering vs. art conflict through conferences, articles, conversations, and illustrative images that confirm the existence of close ties and possibilities for connivance between a reservoir and the land art of Christo or the sculptures of Richard Serra.

“It is important that the art of engineers, with its history and evolution and its imaginative, inventive, creative language, be included in the field of general culture.  As I have always said, it is of no great importance to engineering whether  this reservoir or that stretch of highway is considered an art work, but to culture, it is.”