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Related encyclopedias say that this word comes from the terms crowns and ends. With a profile that suggests something similar to a horn, the cornice is the molding that constitutes the intermediate and superior projection of a wall. In its iconoclastic crusade throughout 20th century, the architecture of modernity left this component behind, as well as many other ones. One came off of the window sill and the socle, the vestibule and the porch, the pilaster and the capital, the gable and the single wall bell tower, and so many others that were expelled from the constructive dictionary. The architecture of concrete cubes, naked walls and window rows does not need such components. In Santiago of Chile, Agustinas is a street of cornices that dramatizes, more than any other, the east/west unevenness across which the city has been settled. Several of its buildings have an eastern element that imposes an horizontal order to the facade and an integration of the linear set which arises for that very reason. Today’s style is a baker’s style. Buildings arise as if they were some sort of cake, each floor equal to the other and thus until the roof. The cornice, however, marks in the facade the nature and hierarchy of the different floors and imposes a differentiated treatment to the vertical lines, which explains why this element can no longer be considered just as decoration, a matter about which Louis H. Sullivan -with the Guaranty Building of Buffalo N.Y.-, Daniel H. Burnham -with the Fuller or Flatiron Building de New York-, and Adolf Loos -with the Goldman & Salatsch Building of Vienna- already knew largely. |
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In the history of architecture there are plenty tragic facts regarding the character of the cornice. One of them happened in Venice, more properly in San Marcos’s square. The buildings of the Library and the Zecca (house of the currency), located one next to the other and both designed by the same architect, observe an unforgivable fact, unforgivable for such a reputed professional like Jacobo Sansovino: the cornices of both buldings do not match, neither in height nor in projection. This failure affects the integration of these buildings which, along with the Ducal Palace and the Royal Gardens, constitute the lacustrine facade of the famous square. But there is a much more tragic and worrying loosening of the cornice, which must be solved in order to preserve pedestrians’s physical integrity. The seismic phenomena, and time itself, weaken the structure of a facade’s salient |
elements. Most of the cornices that still persist in the residential buildings of low height, are in a pitiful condition and could fall over people’s heads at any minute. In the western section of the Alameda B. O´Higgins avenue, in the very core of Estación Central district (Santiago of Chile), some of the buildings cornices have been left to decay, as if they were waiting for a greater accident to happen. A huge part of the early cinema finds in the cornice a support for comedians and furtive lovers’s pirouettes, causing the laughter and thrill of the spectators. Back to the architecture, cities of the deepest roots lay their identity in their attics, verandas, bridges, balconies, etc. On this matter, the architectonic expression for Santiago of Chile could have been the cornice. Sadly, the lack of identity irremediably condemns us to anonymity. Written by Jonás Figueroa as an homage to Manuel Moreno, architect. 10.05.2002 |
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