History as Optics: La cruz de la calle Cruz
Author: Jorge Rigau, FAIA
Collaborator: José L. Lorenzo Torres, AIT/ Guillermo J. Marrero, AIT/Roberto Sánchez, LAIPIT
Location: Bastión las Aminas, San Juan Puerto Rico
Client: Institute of Puerto Rican Culture
Contractor: Roberto Sánchez
Design: 2011
Built: September, 2011
Installed: October 20, 2011
Removed: November 20, 2011
Budget: $2,897
Photos: Guillermo Marrero
This temporary installation constitutes an attempt at re-signifying space as place, as well as contrasting old and new against the landscape.
The project commemorates a wooden cross that, during Spanish colonial times, used to stand in the so-called Bastión de las Ánimas, next to the city’s fortified walls. Locals would gather around it to wait for ships, news, food, and relatives arriving from Europe and the Americas. Often full of people, the space was, simultaneously, a meeting spot and a place for longing. Long gone, the cross constitutes a symbol of hope and trust in a better future. The spot marks a place where, throughout centuries, local expectations regarding a better future consolidated.
The installation provided spectators the opportunity to “see” the cross, without relying in any imitation, for there is no record of what it originally looked like. History, after all, has a lot to do with perception, an aspect underlined by the minimalist lines of the installation, as well as the fact that the cross itself can only be perceived from fixed points in space.
Sixteen sculptural elements in wood (and painted) were strategically located to suggest the shape of a cross that can be perceived as such from five different locations around the bastion, including “calle de la cruz” – the street running south from this site – named precisely in commemoration of the original cross. Floor graphics on the sidewalk – in Spanish and English – urged passersby to engage in the “optics”. The National Park Service and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture supported this project.
