Modernist route: 03. the architecture along calle Triana

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria · Category: Routes · Subcategory: Modernist route

There is a greater ornamental variety in organic forms in eclectic modernism by Laureano Arroyo or on the façades, art nouveau style, by Fernando Navarro. Although these buildings were preferably located in the neighbourhood of Triana and along its commercial street, there was no clear differenciation between commercial and residential use. This was the most modern architecture in the 1910s, and its shapes were dissolved within new housing districts such as Arenales. However, Fernando Navarro carried out three corner building projects with similar designs: street level commercial premises and residential housing on two or three storeys (Obispo Codina-Juan de Quesada; Triana-Arena and Buenos Aires-Viera y Clavijo). All three projects have the same compositive schemes with the corner section vertically articulated and the two sides horizontally positioned. The corners jutted out, flanked by lateral pilasters and capped by a wavy cornucopia, while the side sections were structured horizontally. The pattern of its recesses together with its corresponding decoration and the balcony ledges and its overall finish really enhance this composition. 

From this compositive schematic analysis there are no remarkable differences between this architecture and the previous one, the classist eclecticism which modernism tried to update. However, there are differences between the two architectural styles. In this way, the project at calle Buenos Aires is a good example of art nouveau moving over to an eclectic style, not only for its floral decorative repertoire (in whiplash style in the butterfly genre) but especially because the sculptural decorative finish introduces the fluency of curves and counter curves in an ondulating fashion.

[...] as they were mostly set in the neighbourhood of Triana and along its most prestigious trading street, these projects (1902-1908) were born out of the renewal ornamental ideas and the greater freedom in the types of recesses. In this way, the plant style decoration or the undulating lines of the "whiplash style" meant a greater suitability for "symbolic sympathy" with the trading city that Tomás Morales put into prose (... the city, an ardent hotspot given over to traders...) in "La calle Triana" in Las rosas de Hércules (1919).

The application of the theoretical concept of this "symbolic empathy" to the organic shapes of these façades aimed to round off, on a local level, the commercial function of the "bustle" of the oriental bazars along calle de Triana. The modernist architecture in this city, beyond the European periphery, is nothing more than floral (and passively modernist) and lacking in any theoretical basis. This modernist touch with the commercial activity gained in intensity in some other projects for shop windows which were carried out between 1903 and 1910, or on the canopy of the Hotel Quiney.

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