The «cut» as an operative concept of permanence in art, architecture and built heritage. Light, space, matter and memory

Abstract

Artistic and architectural ideation is, to a large extent, configured from a concept or metaphor that rules over our designs as a synthesis of our thinking and which later is confronted with the place, thereby creating a certain tension between landscape and intervention of the project.

This article explores Sverre Fehn’s concept of the “cut”, taken as a symbolic element of resistance linked to time, place, and memory as a generative idea, based on conceptual analogies applied in his projects.

Thus, a simple gesture, a crack, a cleft, or even a void in the ground is taken as a memory that somehow configures the idea of the place we travel through with our gaze, and refers us to the testimony of another time as we experience it in permanent dialogue with the landscape in which it is inscribed, creating an intense relationship between light, space, matter, and memory, with the landscape horizon as the limit of the work.

This article takes a tour through different artistic, architectural and even heritage works. Their common denominator is the concept of “cut”, an element of permanence that facilitates an integrating reading from the project, in an attempt to cross and even link the language used between disciplines in order to dilute borders, cross boundaries, recover memory and establish, as Rosalind Krauss (1985) would say, a new “expanded territory”.