Matter of Material Labor: Eladio Dieste and Ruled Surfaces

In his essay, Architecture and Construction,Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste recalls a conversation in which a former colleague dismissed the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí stating that “Gaudi’s work has nothing do with us — in fact, I wouldn’t know how to draw one of his buildings”.2 This statement highlights what Dieste called the “tyranny of the drawing board” and the resulting technological dominance of planar geometries inmost modern and contemporary architecture.This dominance has had an effect on the separation between material knowledge and the conditions that shape the relationship among geometry, material, and labor.