Principios de Arquitectura, el bosque, el desierto, la cueva - Félix Ruiz De La Puerta

This book exudes philosophic wisdom, profound science and erudite speculations but at all times knows how to sharpen our understanding in an easy and harmonious way, enchanting us. This is helped by the method used by the author, which consists in supporting the discourse on theories and architectonic buildings as well as on works coming from other artistic disciplines. This book is a tribute to the arts and everything that can be discovered in them. Its Renaissance and universal character reveal us the relationships, close to phenomenology, between architectonic spaces and man.

Amongst the diverse configurations that can be adopted by what surround our being in space, the author has chosen three suggestive possibilities, rich in symbolic, mythic, atavistic and archetypical possibilities: the Wood, the Desert and the Cave. His descriptions recover memories, recollections and emotions with which our ancestors helped to build the collective subconscious of the present man. Amongst these configurations the Cave is perhaps the most primitive, the most primeval because we are all sons of the caveman. The Desert is explained in relation to wind which is the giver of shape; is, therefore, a liquid space, because the sand escapes through our fingers like water. The Wood, dark, deep and unfathomable, through a magical setting of mysterious lights it creates an architecture of the intangible and the ethereal.

Entertaining and clear, but also demanding and daring, the story that the author has been weaving is a humanistic adventure that requires readers with intrepid hearts. What Félix de la Puerta does is to invite us to begin a journey with him that has the objective of reaching a more creative and richer perception of architecture as well as space itself.