Alberto Campo Baeza

LARA LÓPEZ RECITES CAMPO BAEZA ON THE RADIO

The wonderful writer and journalist of RNE Lara Lopez, has recited the poem MY HOUSE IN SUMMER IS SHADE by the architect Alberto Campo Baeza, in the program GENTE DESPIERTA, on December 15, 2022.

The nights on the Radio are great and in RNE even more so. In the program Gente Despierta of the last December 15, suddenly the powerful voice of Lara López rose up reciting a wonderful poem by Campo Baeza. She did it in such a way that there was absolute silence, and only the flowing of the tears of her listeners could be heard, things of Radio!

Are you aware that Radio is the most wonderful mechanism in the world? A device that you can put in your bed and curl up to the sweet sound of its sound. And turn it on and off as you please. Isn’t there anything else that can match it? Well, Lara López is one of the Queens of RNE Radio.

Listen here (min. 27:55)

 

MY HOUSE IN SUMMER IS SHADE. 

My house in the summer is shade raised between four walls. Shade which as darkness is transparent from all the light that battles there.

My house in the summer is tranquility, a place where calm has settled, a heaven of peace to which one returns.

My house in the summer is a raft where my shipwrecked friends come to find the word that comforts, to rescue such lost time. Poems of nothingness, perhaps the most beautiful thing in life, are born there.

But, in the final analysis, what is the house and what is it like? It is a simple architecture. Four high walls, white and well designed, arranged with frugal wisdom. With an interior in carefully measured shade that persists, always, against the bold light. A solid floor of stone, as found, as if the earth had emerged to support our bare feet. And there in the background, in the center, a serene pond has been dug, containing an almost still water in silence. A lost seagull bathes there, hardly touching or marking it.  And so it is that the water in this shade is a mirror, an infinite periscope of the skies. And at its four clear cardinal points, piercing the stone to its core, lemon trees blossom, opening their white flowers each morning.

It is my house in summer architecture, in the fullest sense of the word. Enclosed garden, arcadia, paradise. Four walls and a tree and a pond. And light and darkness, in time. And the fresh stone floor that gives joy. Heaven on earth, after all, what else is architecture if not that?

 

On the Gaspar House in Cádiz, by Alberto Campo Baeza