Emotions captured. Gili House Coderch through his photographic record

Abstract

Since the discovery of the “camera lucida”, the use of photography as a narrative support for architecture has become more and more inevitable, although not without its controversy. And despite that the limitations of the images in representing a spatial experience, in all its complexity, have often been highlighted, it is usually not recognised that the architect, as a researcher and designer at the same time, has the capacity to overcome these important shortcomings, nor has been this topic examined in depth. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of the visual record in reconstructing the spatial and emotional experience that a work of architecture could generate in its day. To this aim, the example of Gili House, by the Architect José Antonio Coderch, is examined. This architecture has undergone such a drastic modification that it can almost be considered missing. The collection of images that document the initial state of the house serves as the support of an analysis in which the researcher’s sensitive and systematic gaze allows a phenomenological analysis to be dealt with, in order to unravel the aesthetic emotions that, in another time, could have been brought about through its observation, its experience and/or its habitation.