When you come towards the end of the winding road that leads you from the highway to the water, you look down and see a turnaround where buses and cars are parked and people are standing on stone walls taking snapshots of the ocean for their scrapbooks.
I am looking for a white pueblo styled house, ” Casa Pueblo” built somewhere on this peninsula.
Not seeing it, I backtrack and ask a lady with her daughter where the Casa Pueblo is? The woman points and moves her hand a little to the right, pointing over a hill I can’t see through.
I walk back down the winding road, go further than I had before, and spy a smaller road cutting away to the right from this main road. A few more steps and I see white adobe style walls that can only be the famous Casa Pueblo built on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
There are vehicles parked along both sides of the narrow road leading up to its entry and people are trekking towards the National Monument like ants following a jungle trail.
Casa Pueblo is home and studio of Carlos Paez Vilaro, Uruguay’s most famous artist.
Whereas art can be done quickly, building takes more time. There are engineering problems, aesthetic questions, debates about whether concrete and wood can do the things you are asking them to do. In New Mexico, as well as here, materials are touched by hands. Cement is mixed and poured by the wheelbarrow load. Walls are plastered with hand tools and left uneven and undulating.
Wandering up and down stairs through the home and studio and gift shop and hotel and museo, inside and out, there are unexpected turns and twists.
For the longest time it is very comfortable for me just to sit on the back observation deck and look at the water below me change colors. I can stand at the deck railing and look at hotel guests in bikinis trying to get brown when the sun is behind a cloud.
Men’s minds are not all made the same way but if my house was built to fit my mind’s interior it would look a lot like this.
Most of us have castles in our minds, but we just can’t afford to buy them, or build them.
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