ANTIGONUM TRAVELS SOUTH

I DO not like to drive.  Or being in a car.
The streets, roads, highways are like rush hour constantly, except on Sundays at certain time.

IN my younger days I used to visit between five to ten municipalities in one shot. Yesterday, it was downtown Yauco and Ponce.

Antonio Santaella and his Tablao Flamenco was the reason to take what would become a seven hour round trip. There is no doubt, how much Spain left in our blood over five centuries ago, while watching these students performing. Mr. Santaella is a master singer and dancer with over four decades of teaching in the metro zone.

The pictures show a little nature in the urban, suburbia context. Architecture dominates the scene, with a ugly sculpture monstrosity, that the reader/observer will be able to judge.

One thing is cliche crystal clear. The architects, carpenters, designers from the past, (let me place it arbitrarily: 70 years ago and back), knew about vicinity
style, construction materials and atmosphere, context, scale, proportion, use of space and detail. 

That is the only explanation I have to comprehend my sensations when I get a chance to observe these structures, private residences and else.

In many ancient southern down towns there is no conflict between nature and what men built. In essence there is no vegetation. The way it should be. But let the record show this phenomenon of museum like houses seem to occur only in the dry, hot, south of Puerto Rico. 

I do not mean that it could not be found  in the north, east or west, but apparently wealthy, sophisticated people, with great taste and resources migrated and or lived in those regions in great numbers during the tobacco, coffee and sugar cane eras. You will not find one Ficus for example, in a back yard  in front or any other common place tree dwarfing or lifting the structure with its roots.

Let me finish writing that architects those avaricious idiots sacrificed all that seems important, for their personal profits. That is why they design digitally,  with cardboard, the brutal regtangular concrete match boxes, vertical or horizontal hardscape hell context Puerto Rico has become.