Manuel Piqueras Cotoli

Manuel Celestino Piqueras Cotolí (Lucena, May 17, 1885-Lima, July 26, 1937) was a Spanish architect, sculptor and urban planner.

Biography

He was born in Lucena (Córdoba, Spain), on May 17, 1885. At the age of 14 his father died in the war in Cuba. Shortly after his mother dies. In 1899 he entered the school for orphans "María Cristina" in Toledo. He begins to draw and model sculptures. He was an apprentice to the famous sculptor Miguel Blay while gaining experience at the Codina foundry in Madrid, and a disciple of the Barcelona sculptor Filiberto Montagud. In 1914 he won the post of retired sculptor at the Academy of Spain in Rome, where he stayed for a few years until in 1919 the Peruvian government offered him the position of professor of sculpture at the new School of Fine Arts in Lima. He remained there until 1923, the date on which the Government entrusted him with the construction of the Peruvian pavilion at the Ibero-American Exhibition in Seville in 1929. The coup d'état in 1930 thwarted his return to the School of Fine Arts.

Most of his work was developed for and by Peru. He was one of the most important figures of the so-called Neo-Peruvian movement, whose thesis was to create an autonomous national style based on pre-Columbian art and modernism. Due to this, he is considered to have played a decisive role in the cultural history of modern Peru. He died in Lima on June 26, 1937.

Urbanism

His contribution to the urbanism of Peru is evident in his works and projects, Carlos Raygada (1937) gives us insights regarding the relevance of Plaza San Martín: "intelligent layout of Plaza San Martín, after successive and unsuccessful attempts at Creole empiricism". Wiley Ludeña tells us about the absence of references to Piqueras as an urban planner, to which he intends to find the values and meanings in his urban vision, from to rescue the intrinsic contents in his works. First of all, Ludeña shows that the most important prizes that Piqueras has received were awarded in his capacity as an architect and urban planner. Next, he indicates the influence that his urban works have had on Peruvian urban development:

"Piqueras is not just an accomplished sculptor and architect. He is also an urban planner with a disciplinary and operational conscience. His work registers singular importance: it radically renews many topics of previous Peruvian urbanism, introduces new codes, opens new dimensions in the perception of the city. He decidedly inaugurates a new scale of intervention and urban transformation."

Ludeña supports his proposal by indicating that with Piqueras Cotolí a neo-Baroque spatiality appears for the first time in Lima mediated by a search for the "national spirit", the relevant works due to its influence in Peruvian urbanism they are the San Isidro urbanization, Plaza San Martín and the Ancón boardwalk.

San Isidro Urbanization

The San Isidro Urbanization represents one of the most significant chapters in the urban history of Lima. It is a breakthrough milestone. With it a tradition was born and a different way of building and conceiving the city was established. The picturesque urbanism of the European romantic historicism tradition of the late XIX century and beginning of the XX century appears for the first time in Lima. And, therefore, a complete revolution in the morphological structures of suburban residential urbanism in Lima, which would have an enormous later influence.

Piqueras' approach in this suburban area includes a plot of 77 blocks in various formats and sizes. The land covered by this plot is 840,210 m², of which 359,183 m² corresponds to the apple area, 215,509 m² to the free area for roads, squares or gardens, and 265,518 m² to the forest area. The first urbanization in Lima with percentages of 40% and 60% of the total area for housing and free area respectively, exceeding the standards of the time. Piqueras assumes two basic pre-existences without the possibility of modification: the layout of the current Arequipa Avenue and the land of the olive trees (Moreyra Park) arranged diagonally with respect to the avenue. The idea of the park was intended to be a kind of deliberate Lima evocation of the Bois de Boulogne.

This project begins a new urban tradition in the residential field. The possibility of recreating a new language and an unusual spatiality for Lima opens up, it is a different proposal to address the issues of central city and suburban city.

This proposal contains evidence of an alternative postulated by Camilo Sitte (1889), that of "cities-towns"; an urbanism that is committed to a romantic dramatization of the landscape and the rejection of neo-baroque orthogonality and monumentalization, through the implementation of irregular patterns dotted with open spaces in the form of squares. Introducing for the first time in the Peruvian environment the picturesque program of Sitte; a critical response to the empire of the industrial city.

He influenced the conception of the Chacra Colorada, Ancón, Chacarilla Santa Cruz, and Miramar urbanizations, among others of the same genre. However, his greatest influence is in the fact of founding with this project spatial and figurative structures that allow evocations of picturesque neighborhood-town, which later shaped the Lima landscape of the suburb: Miraflores, Chosica and Chaclacayo of the thirties and forties, and spas like Ancón. In this way, the urban proposal of Piqueras in San Isidro gives the Lima suburb the format and contents of a new way of becoming a city with its own codes, without defining the appropriate scale for its social community.

Piqueras's idea was to project not a simple and anodyne subdivision on the side of a main avenue. He tried to create a sui generis urban space with a defined character, an image of a different city that radically reconsidered the foundations of previous Lima urbanism. For this reason, the urban proposal of this project represents a critical rejection of urbanizations such as Azcona, Risso, Santa Cruz, La Punta and La Victoria, built before the twenties, which are formed as a simple network of roads, a predictable extension of streets, devoid of identity and sense of urban spectacle.

The final result of the urban proposal proposed here: the urbanization is a space that opens up to a public dimension of the consumption of urban space, but at the same time preserves for itself the neighborhood intimacy of a social stratum that aspired to such a privilege.

Acknowledgments

• Gold Medal of the III Pan American Exhibition of Architecture, Construction and Decorative Arts, Buenos Aires, 1927.
• Grand Prize of the Superior Jury of the Ibero-American Exhibition of Seville of 1929, for the work of the pavilion of Peru and its sculptural group The Homeland.

Works

Through his work, monuments, buildings and urban designs from the 1920s, several of the symbols of Lima's modernity can be observed:

• The facade of the School of Fine Arts of Lima, which is decorated with pre-Columbian motifs and which at the same time prints a sense of modernity by leaving the bricks of it in sight.
• The Pavilion of Peru of the Ibero-American Exhibition of Seville, in 1929, for which he received the help of his disciple Ismael Pozo Velit.
• The tomb of the conqueror Francisco Pizarro in Lima Cathedral.
• The statue of the renowned procer of independence and doctor José Hipólito Unanue and Pavón at the University Park inside the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
• The 'Inca Hall' within the Government Palace of Peru.
• The outline and design of Plaza San Martín in the historic centre of Lima, opened in 1921 on the occasion of the centenary of Peru's independence.
• The urban project of the cuatricentenario Parque del Olivar in the district of San Isidro in the city of Lima.
• The monument to Ricardo Palma in the Park of the Exhibition of Lima.

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  Escuela de Bellas Artes de Lima

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  Pavilion of Peru at the Ibero-American Exhibition of Seville (1929)

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  Tomb of Francisco Pizarro

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  Monument to Hipólito Unanue in the University Park, with the German Tower in the background.

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  Plaza San Martín

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  The Olivar