BUILT UTOPIAS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE: THE RURAL AND THE MODERN IN FRANCO’S SPAIN Jean-François Lejeune Built Utopias in the Countryside: The Rural and the Modern in Franco’s Spain Dissertation for the purpose of obtaining the degree of doctor at Delft University of Technology by the authority of the Rector Magnificus Prof. Dr. Ir. T.H.J.J. van der Hagen chair of the Board for Doctorates to be defended publicly on 16 May 2019 at 12:30 o’clock by Jean-François LEJEUNE Dipl. Engineer Architect, University of Liège, Belgium born in Verviers, Belgium i This dissertation has been approved by the promotors. Composition of the doctoral committee: Rector Magnificus Chairperson Prof. Dr. Carola Hein Delft University of Technology, promotor Dr. Herman van Bergeijk Delft University of Technology, copromotor Independent members: Prof. Jean-Louis Cohen New York University Prof. Carlos Sambricio ETS Arquitectura Madrid Prof. Hartmut Frank Hafen City University Hamburg Dr. Eric Storm Leiden University Prof. Vincent Nadin Delft University of Technology ii iii For Astrid, with love. iv Propositions of the dissertation by Jean-François Lejeune “Built Utopias in the Countryside. The Rural and the Modern in Franco’s Spain.” 01. The traditionally opposed concepts of Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft — society vs. community / village and small town vs. the metropolis — have contributed together to the definition of modernity and its application in the metropolis and the countryside. 02. The vernacular embodies the concept of type, and it is the very adaptability of the type as defined by Rafael Moneo that makes for the possibility of vernacular modernism. 03. We cannot continue to reserve the label of “modern urbanism” to the theories and practices that have assimilated the libertarian agenda of the open city with a progressive vision of history, and have rejected the street and the square as the indispensable constituents of urban space and life. 04. In spite of its reactionary position and support, the Catholic Church was a major agent of urban and architectural modernity during Franco’s dictatorship. 05. In contrast to the cancer of suburban sprawl that has engulfed the coasts of the Mediterranean since the 1970s, Benidorm is almost all right. 06. Contemporary urban realizations and projects demonstrate that the “picturesque,” or dare I say, the “scenographic,” as epitomized in Camillo Sitte’s principles, has been resurfacing as a formal strategy for twenty-first century avant-garde in urban design. 07. Historians tend to deduce forms and styles from political relationships and understand professional activity as political inventory. I maintain that there is no dictatorial urbanism, only urbanism done by dictatorships. In the case of Spain, the post-1955 capitalist phase of Franco’s regime implied a paradigm shift from v the pre-1945 Beaux-Arts model to the North American automobile-oriented modernist concept of the city. The latter type of urbanism has been characteristic of all post-1945 dictatorships, particularly in Latin America. 08. Following their general collapse during the 20th century, the collective, totalitarian and globalizing utopias are unlikely to return. However, utopias remain more than ever necessary. They will be small, partial, and local, to be implemented within the interstices of the contemporary urban and rural territory. 09. Fifty years after Aldo Rossi and as a logical reaction of a new generation of architects to the globalizing homogenization of real estate, architecture, and urban planning, the emphasis on the real advocated by Maurizio Ferraris’s philosophical Manifesto del Nuovo Realismo (2012) has the potential to bring typology back to the forefront of theory and practice. Beyond typology, the neighborhood, the city, the region and the territory are the contemporary elements of the real that must influence a truly sustainable conception of the architecture of the city and landscape as urbanism. 10. As depopulation continue to affect the livability and survival of the countryside, each school of architecture in Europe and in the United States should adopt an abandoned or declining village, make it a place of learning the vernacular, and restore it with the students and faculty. These propositions are regarded as opposable and defendable, and have been approved as such by the supervisors: Prof. Dr. Herman van Bergeijk Prof. Dr. Carola Hein vi Summary Built Utopias in the Countryside: The Rural and the Modern in Franco’s Spain Anchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural that characterize Spanish modernity, and analyzes the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, as they focused on the importance of vernacular architecture, in particular the Mediterranean one, in the definition of an “other modernity.” This search culminated before 1936 with the “Lessons of Ibiza,” and was revived at the beginning of the 1950s, when architects like Coderch, Fisac, Bohigas, and the cosigners of the Manifiesto de la Alhambra brought back the discourse of the modern vernacular as a politically acceptable form of Spanish modernity, and extended its field of application from the individual house and the rural architecture to the urban conditions, including social and middle-class housing. The core of the dissertation addresses the 20th century phenomenon of the modern agricultural village as built emergence of a rural paradigm of modernity in parallel or alternative to the metropolitan condition. In doing so, it interrogates the question of tradition, modernity, and national identity in urban form between the 1920s and the 1960s. Regarding Spain, it studies the actuation of the two Institutes that were created to implement the Francoist policy of post-war reconstruction and interior colonization—the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. It examines the ideological, political, urban, and architectural principles of Franco’s reconstruction of the devastated countryside, as well as his grand “hydro-social dream” of modernization of the countryside. It analyzes their role in national-building policies in liaison with the early 20th-century Regenerationist Movement of Joaquín Costa, the first works of hydraulic infrastructure under Primo de Rivera, and the aborted agrarian reform of the Second Republic. Inspired by the Zionist colonization of Palestine and Mussolini’s reclaiming of the Pontine Marshes, Falangist planners developed a national strategy of “interior colonization” that, along with the reclamation and irrigation of extensive and unproductive river basins, entailed the construction vii of three hundred modern villages or pueblos between 1940 and 1971. Each village was designed as a “rural utopia,” centered on a plaza mayor and the church, which embodied the political ideal of civil life under the nationalcatholic regime and evolved from a traditional town design in the 1940s to an increasingly abstract and modern vision, anchored on the concept of the “Heart of the City” after 1952. The program was an important catalyst for the development of Spanish modern architecture after the first period of autarchy and an effective incubator for a new generation of architects, including Alejandro de la Sota, José Luis Fernández del Amo, and others. Between tradition and modernity, these architects reinvented the pueblos as platforms of urban and architectonic experimentation in their search for a depurated rural vernacular and a modern urban form. Whereas abstraction was the primary design tool that Fernández del Amo deployed to the limits of the continuity of urban form, de la Sota reversed the fundamental reference to the countryside that characterizes Spanish surrealism to bring surrealism within the process of rural modernization in Franco’s Spain. viii Foreword The very premise of this research and dissertation was a serendipitous discovery in the stacks of the Architecture and Fine Arts Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, sometimes around 2000: fifteen years of the Spanish periodical Reconstrucción, unknown to me until then and that, monthly from 1940 to 1956, documented the ideology, early propaganda, theory and practice of the post-Civil War reconstruction. There I discovered that the city of Guernika, martyr of the Civil War and first air attack of the Nazi German Luftwaffe and the Fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria, had been reconstructed rationally but more or less as it was before the bombing. There I discovered the first plans, models, and renderings of the orthogonal new towns that had replaced the destroyed villages around Madrid, names like Brunete, Villanueva del Pardillo, and further along the Ebro front, Belchite and Gajanejos. A couple of years later, when I had completed my other books, I finally hit the road and embarked on various trips across the Spanish countryside, looking for those reconstructed towns and for that modern village, Vegaviana, whose name and photographs I had frequently encountered. It is on the way to that beautiful place that I realized that it did not exist in geographic and historical isolation and that, every four or five kilometers, a modern campanile in the landscape gave me a clue that another modern village was there to discover on the side of the road. Over the following years I drove hundreds of miles in the Spanish countryside, encountering dozens of modern villages designed and built between 1940 and 1970. And, in spite of their highly contested political history, I fell in love with their plazas, streets, and houses. There is, no doubt, a contradiction in the semantic articulation of the two terms pueblo (village or small town) and moderno (modern). For most of us, including historians, a pueblo is rarely modern. Most often than not it conjures stories and memories of childhood, of family, of tradition, of folklore, of community life that is usually anchored in a historical environment, one that highlights old vernacular architectures and streets. In contrast, those new villages and towns that I visited were modern and functional, with straighter and wider streets, yet, their architecture was vernacular—some better and more abstract than other—and they were all centered on a plaza mayor which concentrated the civil life. To be sure, at that time, my interest in the works of José Luis Sert in Latin America had made me aware of the architecture of Ibiza and its influence on Spanish modernity. It is also through Sert that I was introduced to José Ortega y Gasset and his definition and cultural value of urban space and tradition. ix Methodology Research on this project took a long and contorted trajectory. Like many architects and even historians, my knowledge of 20th century architecture in Spain was quite selective and concentrated on the pre- and post-Civil War periods, with the exception of my admiration for José Antonio Coderch. Hence, I started with the study of the fast-developing secondary material by Spanish historians through books as well as published and on-line editions of various dissertations. Critical was the full consultation of Arquitectura, Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, Nueva Forma and many other period periodicals like Gran Madrid that allowed me to position the relation of modernity to the countryside and its very modernization within the larger picture of Spanish architecture and urbanism between 1918 and 1975, but also within the larger international context and particularly Mussolini’s città di fondazione that were very familiar to me as they were always part of my teaching itineraries with students in Rome. The analysis of the primary and secondary literature also included a comparative process with non-Spanish examples of modern villages in to understand how similar design strategies and objectives led to very specific formal and typological solutions. Over the years, the research led me to Ministerio de Agricultura (Madrid and San Fernando de Henares), repository of all plans, printed documents, and original photographs produced by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.); to the Archivo General de la Nación (Alcalá de Henares), repository of all plans and original photographs produced by the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (D.G.R.D.); to the Servicio Histórico of the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos Madrid (COAM), and its extensive archives of Spanish architecture and architects; to the archives of various architects involved in the program like the Fundación de la Sota in Madrid. Site visits were fundamental to the development of this research. Given the number of places involved (300 for the I.N.C. and 20 for the D.G.R.D.), it was neither technically nor financially possible to visit physically every site. Consequently, choices and priorities had to be made in order to focus on as representative selection as possible. It included those places that have been the focus of most literature, like Vegaviana, Esquivel, and Brunete, but also many others, less or little discussed, particularly from the late 1950s and the 1960s. Those cases were analyzed urbanistically and architecturally in order to develop my own opinion on their relative value. During the last 18 months, thanks to the complete work of aerial and street photography realized by Google Earth, I did visit every single town and village digitally. I can thus assert that I was able to visit all the villages of the I.N.C. and all reconstructed towns of the D.G.R.D. Likewise, I was able to digitally visit the examples in Portugal and Israel. x Acknowledgments Financial support for travel and research in Spain came from a variety of sources. In 2005-2006, Cristiano Rosponi, director of the Agenzia per la città and the Romebased Fondazione C.E.S.A.R., supported the initial step of my research with a small grant and the publication Agorà a cielo scoperto: città di fondazione in Spagna (2006) and the subsequent “Spagna: Città di Fondazione 1944-1969” for the Città di pietra catalogue (Biennale of Venice 2006). In 2010, I received funding from the Center for Transect Studies in Miami, directed by Andres Duany, and its generous support allowed me to start my yearly itineraries throughout the Spanish countryside. In 2010, along with my friend and colleague Michelangelo Sabatino, we published Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean (Routledge, 2010) for which the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Arts gave initial funding. This publication resulted from the conference The Other Modern that I organized at Villa Malaparte in Capri in March 1998 and which was the very first step in my interest in the relationship between the Vernacular and the Modern. However, it is from my own institution, the University of Miami, that I received the definitive support to embark on this dissertation and its future publication. In 20142015 and in 2016-2017 I got the Provost’s Award for Summer Research, and a yearlong sabbatical in between. Finally, in 2015, thanks to Rosa Cervera, Professor and friend, I received a Giner de los Rios Research Fellowship from the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares at the Escuela de Arquitectura. Visiting positions have also helped me advance my theses and test it with colleagues and students. In 2010, thanks to my old friend from DoCOMOMO-Brazil, Professor Carlos Eduardo Comas, I taught a Ph.D. seminar at the Universidade do Rio Grande del Sur focused on Vernacular Modernism under the title “The Modernity of the Informal.” Four years later, on the invitation of Professor Giuseppe Strappa, I was a Visiting Professor at Università La Sapienza in Rome where I taught a semester-long seminar in the Ph.D. Program in “Architecture and Construction – Space and Society.” Selected material of the research in progress was presented at and published following a series of conferences as well as in invited lectures in various countries: Oriental-Occidental (ACSA, Istanbul, 2001), Planned Cities (ISUF, Bari, 2003), Pamplona Metropolis 1930 Modernidad y Futuro (Pamplona, 2006), Fresh Air (ACSA, Philadelphia, 2007), The Venice Charter Revisited (INTBAU, London, 2009), IASTE Conference (Beyrouth, 2010), Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2012), UNESCO Conference (Hondarribia, Spain, 2015), Escuela de Arquitectura Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (2015), ETSAM in Madrid (2015), Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (2015), IHPS Conference (TU Delft, 2016), Bauhaus Universität Weimar (2016), Auburn University School of Architecture (2018), EAHN Fifth Conference (Tallinn, 2018), Modernism, Modernization and the Rural Landscape (MODSCAPES, Tartu, 2018), xi In spite of many opportunities to share and discuss ideas, the making of this dissertation was a relatively solitary endeavor while teaching full time at the University of Miami School of Architecture. I would have liked to spend more time at the School of Architecture and the Environment at the Delft Technical University, but the help I received from my promoter and co-promoter, Carola Hein and Herman van Bergeijk, was invaluable. I thank them for their generosity, their advices, and their patience in seeing me complete the task. I also thank the independent members of the dissertation committee, Professors Hartmut Frank, Jean-Louis Cohen, Eric Storm, Carlos Sambricio, and Vincent Nadin. Next, I want to express my warmest gratitude to Jean-Louis Cohen, colleague and friend for more than thirty years. I will never forget that Jean-Louis gave me my first opportunity to participate, and be published in the proceedings of, an international academic conference at the Ministère de la Recherche in Paris, to speak about Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier in the Americas (1990). Our paths have crossed many times during all those years, and it is him who encouraged me to pursue the route to a doctorate degree. For a short time, he was my promotor at the EHESS in Paris, before he recommended me to apply to TU Delft, where I had the opportunity to reconnect with Carola Hein with whom I worked in Brussels in the 1980s before seeing each other for lectures in Miami and Philadelphia. Jean-Louis Cohen, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Barry Bergdoll, Stanislaus von Moos, and Gwendolyn Wright wrote letters of recommendation and support, which were instrumental in obtaining financial help. Harald Bodenschatz and Piero Sassi in Berlin gave me other unique opportunities to develop and discuss my research by integrating me in the TU Berlin/Bauhaus Universität Weimar research on Franco’s and Salazar’s urbanism. In Spain, first I have to thank the Biblioteca del Colegio de Arquitectos de Madrid (COAM) for the many months that I have spent there researching, photographing, reading, and scanning material, a lot of which did not make it in this dissertation but in what I hope will be its following venture; in particular I need to recognize José Luis Alcalde Morejudo, who was a genuine mentor within the stacks of the library; Alberto Sánz, director of the Servicio Histórico and his colleague María Carolina Hernández Martínez; María Cristina García Pérez, and María Jesús Gracia Montalbán—all of them mastering the art of making you feel welcome. I also thank the library staff at the Centro Museo Reina Sofía, at the Escuela Técnica de Arquitectura Madrid (ETSAM), and at the Escuela de Arquitectura, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Furthermore, for their friendship and the critical conversations, I show gratitude to Teresa Couceiro and Alejandro de la Sota, who opened generously the doors of the Fundación Alejandro de la Sota; to Rafael Fernández del Amo, and his help with his father’s archives; and to Carlos Sambricio (ETSAM), David Rivera Gómez (ETSAM), Alejandro García Hermida (Universidad Alfonso X el Sabio de Madrid), Carlos xii Clemente and Rosa Cervera (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares), and Alejandro Borja (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha). In Miami, additional thanks go to the former and current Dean of the School of Architecture, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Rodolphe el-Khoury; Charles Bohl, Director of the Master in Real Estate and Urbanism with whom I published Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis (Routledge, 2009); to my colleagues Carie Penabad and Allan Shulman, respectively director of undergraduate and graduate studies, for their help in accommodating my tight schedule during these last two years; the Paul Buisson School of Architecture Library, its director Gilda Santana and its former manager Elisiene Jean for their help, support, patience, and letting me expand my personal area; the rest of the staff and the entire Interlibrary Loan Department at the University of Miami Libraries for their diligent and impeccable work. Finally, I would like to thank my companion, partner, and wife, Astrid Rotemberg, for her constant encouragement, patience, optimism, and keen critical eye on text and images. She has made the development and completion of this work a true labor of love, not only for our two persons but for the villages, towns, and landscapes that make the subject of this research. xiii xiv Contents Propositions .................................................................................................................................v Summary ................................................................................................................................... vii Foreword .................................................................................................................................... ix 0: Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 Background and Positions North-South: Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean .................................................. 2 Positing Vernacular Modernism and Typology.................................................................... 6 Camillo Sitte: Modernity and National Identity in Urban Form .............................................. 9 The Rural Paradigm of Modernity .................................................................................... 15 Research Questions Reciprocal Influences ...................................................................................................... 21 Ortega y Gasset and Spanish Circumstances .................................................................. 22 Urbanize the Countryside, Ruralize the Urban Life ........................................................... 26 Utopia of Nostalgia .......................................................................................................... 28 State of the Question and the Absence of Spain ............................................................... 31 Summary of Contents ........................................................................................................ 36 1: The Modern and the Vernacular, 1898-1936: ..................................................................... 43 The Lesson of Ibiza 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 1.6. 1.7. 1.8. From National to Regional ...................................................................................... 47 Vernacular and Workers’ Housing ........................................................................... 56 García Mercadal in Madrid ...................................................................................... 60 Nationalism and Noucentisme in Catalonia .............................................................. 64 Benjamin and the Lessons of Ibiza .......................................................................... 72 The Plan Macía and the Casa Bloc: Mediterranean Modernism in Barcelona ............ 82 Zuazo & Jansen’s Masterplan for Madrid and the Casa de las Flores ....................... 87 The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris 1937 World’s Fair ................................................ 92 2: The Modern Village: .........................................................................................................113 Spain and the International Context 2.1. Regenerationism and the Modernization of Spain ................................................114 2.1.1. New Villages to Regional Planning................................................................117 2.1.2. Kropotkin, Spain, and the City-Region...........................................................120 2.1.3. The World’s Fair in Ghent and the Village Moderne .......................................124 2.1.4. Primo de Rivera and the Confederaciones Geográficas .................................129 2.1.5. The Second Republic and the Competition of 1932 .......................................131 2.2. Italy: The Metaphysical and the Postwar Vernacular ............................................137 2.2.1. Foundations and the Reclamation of the Pontine Marshes.............................141 2.2.2. Postwar Villages ..........................................................................................145 2.3. Le Corbusier’s Radiant Village or the Other City of Tomorrow.............................152 2.4. The Zionist Colonization of Palestine....................................................................158 2.4.1. Richard Kauffmann and the Planning of the New Palestine............................161 2.4.2. The Arab Question and Ariel Sharon’s Regional Planning..............................166 2.5. The Failed Portuguese Colonization .....................................................................170 xv 3: The Ordered Town: ...........................................................................................................191 The Reconstruction of the Devastated Regions 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 The Countryside as Locus of Modernization.........................................................194 The Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (D.G.R.D.) .................................198 The First Exhibition of the Reconstruction...............................................................199 Theorizing the Reconstruction ................................................................................204 Trazados genuinamente españoles ........................................................................210 The Reconstructed Towns: Grid and Plaza Mayor ..................................................220 National or Foreign Influences................................................................................228 Typology and style.................................................................................................231 The Village in the City: The Case of Almería ...........................................................239 Reconstruction around Madrid ...............................................................................246 Reconstruction in the North (Guadalajara and Lérida) .............................................255 Reconstruction in the South (Andalusia) .................................................................262 4: The Modern and the Vernacular:.......................................................................................305 Postwar Continuities 4.1. Coderch: from Rural to Urban Vernacular .................................................................307 4.2. Modernity in Madrid .................................................................................................312 4.3. The Feria del Campo: Bringing the Countryside to the City .......................................316 4.4. The Manifiesto de la Alhambra (1953) ......................................................................322 4.5. In Praise of the Shanty ............................................................................................329 4.6. Villages in the City ...................................................................................................335 4.7. Diffusion, Dissemination, Expansion.........................................................................339 4.8. A Mediterranean Epilogue .......................................................................................346 5: Rural Utopia and Modernity: ............................................................................................369 The pueblos de colonización, 1939-1971 5.1. Ideology, Legislation, Structure and Architects of Colonization 5.1.1. Franco’s Hydro-Social Dream .......................................................................370 5.1.2. The Instituto Nacional de Colonización, the Legislation, and the Program ......373 5.1.3. The regional plans: Plan Badajoz (1952) and Plan Jaén (1953) .....................377 5.1.4. The Last Decade..........................................................................................380 5.1.5. The Architects of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.) ....................381 5.2. Principles, Debates, and Regulations 5,2,1. “The Urbanistic Process of our Interior Colonization” .....................................385 5.2.2. The Modern Rural Dwelling and the Street as Project ....................................392 5.3. Three Decades of Colonization: Tradition and Modernity 5.3.1. The 1940s: The Monocentric Model or the Plaza as Urban Void ....................395 5.3.2. The 1950s: Modernization and Diversification ...............................................399 5.3.3. The 1960s: Toward a more Mechanistic Modernity ........................................410 5.4. The Heart of the Town: from Plaza Mayor to Civic Center 5.4.1. Sources and Influences ................................................................................414 5.4.2. The Heart of the Town: the Modern Civic Center ...........................................424 5.4.3. Cinematic Epilogue ......................................................................................437 6: Five Modern Villages by Alejandro de la Sota: ................................................................473 Vernacular and Surrealist Modernity 6.1. Five pueblos............................................................................................................474 6.2. Popular Architecture and Urban Space.....................................................................488 6.3. Modernizing the Churches .......................................................................................491 6.4. The Countryside in Surrealism .................................................................................494 6.5. Surrealism in the Countryside ..................................................................................498 6.6. Bringing Modernity from the Countryside ..................................................................504 xvi 7: Landscape and Abstraction: ............................................................................................537 Twelve Villages by José Luis Fernández del Amo 7.1. The pueblo as Landscape .......................................................................................539 7.2. Abstract Art and the Escuela de Altamira..................................................................548 7.3. Abstraction and Urban Form ....................................................................................552 7.4. The Photographer’s Eye: Revealing the Abstract ......................................................556 7.5. Religious Appropriation: Mural Paintings and the Plastic Arts ....................................562 8: Morphology and the Evolution of Town Design ...............................................................587 8.1 Criteria of Classification .........................................................................................588 8.2 The Monocentric and Polycentric Model 8.2.1. José Borobio Ojeda: from Tradition to Gentle Modernity ................................591 8.2.2. Valdelacalzada: Founding Symbol of the Plan Badajoz..................................600 8.2.3. Torre de la Reina: The Director’s Town .........................................................602 8.2.4. Carlos Sobrini Marín: The Metaphysical ........................................................604 8.2.5. Solanillo or Antonioni’s Choice......................................................................606 8.2.6. The Linear Villages: Gévora and Algallarín....................................................608 8.2.7. The Village as Super-Block: Setefilla and Sacramento...................................611 8.3 The Modern Civic Center 8.3.1. Displacing the Center ...................................................................................616 8.3.2. Modernist Civic Centers and the Village as Machine......................................619 8.3.3. St. Dié in the Countryside .............................................................................626 8.3.4. Civic Centers and City Crowns .....................................................................628 Annex: Pueblos de colonización: Chronology and Morphology .................................677 Epilogue .................................................................................................................................687 Bibliography ...........................................................................................................................693 xvii 0: Introduction The history of contemporary urban planning does not at all coincide with the history of avant-garde hypotheses. On the contrary, as certain recent philological investigations have been able to ascertain, the tradition of urban planning rests on foundations constructed outside of any avant-garde experience: on the médicalisation de la ville so intrinsic to physiocratic thought; on the late-eighteenth-century taxonomy of service spaces; on the nineteenth-century theories of Baumeister, Stiibben, Eberstadt; on the practice of the American Park Movement; and on French and English regionalism. This necessitates a radical reexamination of the interrelationship between the history of urban planning and the parallel history of the ideologies of the Modern Movement. If this method is followed, many myths are destined to crumble.1 Two large building fields are presented to us, when we observe the historical development of architecture. One field concerns the construction that is simply for life, while the other is strictly connected to completely specific spiritual atmospheres, which we perceive as precise cultures. The buildings of the first type are in all respects linked to the land on which they arise: these and only these are truly genuine. They are formed from the primary material of the landscape. They have not been invented but are, in the truest sense, developed from the needs of their inhabitants, and reflect the rhythm and character of the landscape in which they are inserted. These characteristics are typical of all the farmhouses, at any point on the earth.2 1 Manfredo Tafuri, “The Historical Project,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth – Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, pp. 18. 2 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Conferenza del 1926, in Fritz Neumeyer, Mies van der Rohe. Le architetture e gli scritti, Milano: Skira, 1996, pp. 267-68: “Due grandi campi edilizi si presentano a noi, quando osserviamo lo sviluppo storico dell’architettura. Un campo riguarda il costruire semplicemente per la vita, l’altro invece è strettamente connesso ad atmosfere spirituali del tutto specifiche, che percepiamo come culture ben precise. Gli edifici del primo tipo sono in tutto e per tutto legati al terreno sul quale sorgono: questi e soltanto questi sono veramente genuini. Essi sono formati dal materiale primario del paesaggio. Non sono stati inventati ma si sono, nel senso più vero, sviluppati a partire dai bisogni dei loro abitanti, e riflettono il ritmo e il carattere del paesaggio nel quale sono inseriti. Queste caratteristiche sono tipiche di tutte le case coloniche, in qualsiasi punto della terra si trovino.” 1 BACKGROUND AND POSITIONS North-South: Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean In its traditional sense vernacular architecture can be seen “as the repository of a timeless way of building, marrying practicality and economy with unselfconscious artistic effect, using local materials and responsive to local needs and climate.” 3 Etymologically, the word ‘vernacular’ is derived from the Latin verna, meaning a slave born in the house of his or her master. By extension, the adjective vernacular came to mean association with the place of birth, or as a noun, a native, usually a peasant or dependent. More generally, the term refers to the domestic realm in contrast with the public sphere. The word is often identified with a local or village society and implied a way of life devoted to work—usually farm work—and to family. Renewed interest in the vernacular originated in England during in the 1800s. The first Industrial revolution had a traumatic impact on the development and quality of life of cities and on the conditions of workers’ housing, thus engaging architects, social scientists, and artists in attempting a return to the sources. In England, and later in France and Germany, the medieval gothic vernacular and the structural principles of gothic construction became the sources of inspiration for a new architecture that defined itself in opposition to the neoPalladian principles that dominated the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Values of Christian life and faith, adequacy of form and construction, as well as the nationalistic overtones of the gothic style sustained the development of the new school of English theory initiated by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52). His followers John Ruskin (1819-1900) and William Morris (1834-1896) were the progenitors of the Arts & Craft Movement and the spiritual inspirers of the Garden City, two deeply interconnected movements which were to spread across Europe and the United States at the turn of the century. In Germany, Herman Muthesius’s (1861-1927) book Das englische Haus of 1904 pioneered the new spirit. Talking about the English house and its new functionalist design inspired by farmhouses and other English vernacular elements, he wrote that “these houses are foundation stones of a new architecture (…) they are modern in the best sense of the word, because they are built reasonably and built for the middle class.”4 From the Arts and Crafts Movement he opened the way to the Werkbund but also to the vernacular-inspired works of Paul Schmitthenner, Paul Mebes, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and Bruno Taut. 3 For this section on the vernacular and its influence on modern architecture I am deeply indebted to Richard A. Etlin’s chapter “A Modern Vernacular Architecture,” Modernism in Italian Architecture, 18901940, Cambridge-London: The MIT Press, 1991, pp. 129-161. The definition of the vernacular is on page 129. Also see J. B. Jackson, “Vernacular”, American Architecture: Tradition and Innovation, New York: Rizzoli, 1986, p. 144. 4 Herman Muthesius, Das englische Haus: Entwicklung, Bedingungen, Anlage, Aufbau, Einrichtung und Innenraum, Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1904. Quoted from Julius Posener, From Schinkel to the Bauhaus, New York: George Wittenborn, Inc., p. 18. In English, see Hermann Muthesius, The English House, Dennis Sharp (ed.), New York: Rizzoli, 1987. 2 Mebes’s book Um 1800 (1908) made the vernacular references and building types accessible to architects who, to some extent, modernized them in the 1920s.5 The program of the Staatliche Bauhaus that opened in Weimar in 1919 relied on two apparently contradicting influences, the Deutscher Werkbund of pre-1914 and the Expressionist medievalism epitomized by Taut, Mendelsohn, and Poelzig. Yet, both movements were—at least partially—related to the concept of vernacular. Within the Werkbund, Fritz Schumacher and Peter Behrens attempted to bridge the gap between craft and industry by advocating full-fledged artistic collaboration. In the debate of July 1914, Muthesius defended the idea of “standard” or “type” and hinted early at the idea of a standardized machine-made aesthetic, whereas Henri van de Velde argued that the individuality of the artist had to prevail. At the same time, Walter Gropius’ medievalism akin to the Arts and Crafts was unequivocally suggested in the program for the Bauhaus: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all return to handicraft.”6 During Gropius’s, Mies van der Rohe’s, and Hannes Meyer’s tenure at the helm of the Bauhaus in Dessau, the post-war craft-oriented pessimism led way to a machine-oriented sophisticated aesthetic and to the apology of industrialization as the ultimate form of vernacular. While most of the scholarly interest has focused on Northern Europe, the Mediterranean exercised, from the early 1800s, a concomitant and perhaps even major influence on western architecture and art. Long overlooked, the discovery of the Mediterranean vernacular by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and later Hans Olbrich, Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann was eventually brought forth by Eduard Sekler, Benedetto Gravagnuolo, and other historians studying the connection in countries to the north and south of Europe.7 As Barry Bergdoll wrote, “a radical reappraisal of the most influential thinkers and form givers of the architecture of the modern movement, and their relationship to both the classical and the vernacular centered on the 5 Many paragraphs under this heading “North-South” are selections from Jean-François Lejeune’s essay, “The Other Modern: Between the Machine and the Mediterranean,” in Jean-François Lejeune and Allan Shulman, The Making of Miami Beach 1933-1942 – The Architecture of Lawrence Murray Dixon, New York: Rizzoli, 2000, pp. 200-224. 6 See Julius Posener, op. cit. for this section and p. 47, from Walter Gropius, “Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimer,” in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 2002, pp. 49-53. Also see Frederic Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996; Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), 100 Jahre Deutscher Werkbund 1907/2007, München: TU München, 2007; Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919-1933: Worshops for Modernity, New York: MOMA, 2009. 7 For a discussion of the historiography of the influence of the Mediterranean, see Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, “North versus South,” Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 1-12. Also see the Italian translation, Nord-Sud: L’architettura moderna e il Mediterraneo, Trento: Listlab, 2016, which contains an additional essay on Portugal by Pedro Baia, “Il vernacolare del ‘Habitat Rural’ al programma SAAL. La recenzione portoghese del Team X.” Also see Panayotis Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1999; Maria Luisa Scalvini e Maria Grazia Seri, L’immagine storiografica dell’architettura contemporanea da Platz a Giedion, Roma, Officina, 1984; Eduard Sekler, Josef Hoffmann: the Architectural Work, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985; Benedetto Gravagnuolo (ed.), Le Corbusier e l’antico – Viaggi nel Mediterraneo, Napoli: Electa Napoli, 1997, and “From Schinkel to Le Corbusier: the Myth of the Mediterranean in Modern Architecture,” in Lejeune and Sabatino, pp. 15-41. 3 Mediterranean basin, has been a key force in a revised cartography of the architectural modernism.”8 Published in 2010, Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (Routledge, 2010), edited jointly by Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, presented a comprehensive and pan-regional analysis of the debt twentieth-century modernist architects owe to the vernacular building traditions of the Mediterranean region.9 Although a renewed interest in classicism spurred by political and aesthetic motivations helped shape modernism in the Mediterranean and beyond during the early twentieth century, this was only one side of the story. Equally implicated in the history of modernism was a parallel appropriation of the forms, materials, and colors of vernacular buildings throughout the region. By exploring the impact of the Southern vernacular in the rise and diffusion of modernism, the essays focused on the moment when professionally trained architects began to look beyond the academic references for inspiration, and projected modern values onto anonymous building traditions that flourished for millennia among the pre-industrial cultures of the Mediterranean basin. From the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1960s and beyond, architects working in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and North Africa began to discover in the built forms of simple villages and settlements an antidote to the style-driven attitudes of nineteenth-century historicism; this was taken as an opportunity to deeply engage elements of the local context such as climate: The avant-garde break with academic conventions, rules and historicist structures of thought and practice, was now provocatively linked with the supposed naivety, naturalness, and non-self-reflexive invention and problem solving of the indigenous builder. For the next century it might be said that the vernacular would continually oscillate between its role as modernism’s other and its foundational myth.10 Organized in two sections, the first group of essays (“South”) discussed the works of architects who lived and worked in Mediterranean countries; it examined how they addressed and negotiated the complex politics of identity as a constituent of a multilateral vision of modernity against the prevailing ‘machine age’ discourse. The second group (“North”), which included Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, Gunnar Asplund, Bernard Rudofsky, Aldo van Eyck, and others, mapped the contribution of architects from non-Mediterranean countries who traveled and occasionally practiced in the Mediterranean region; these outsiders often appropriated a tradition that, although foreign, resonated in their attempt to establish their modernist identity. 8 Barry Bergdoll, “Foreword,” in Lejeune and Sabatino, p. xviii. Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, London: Routledge, 2010. Also see the Italian translation, Nord-Sud: L’architettura moderna e il Mediterraneo, Trento: Listlab, 2016, which contains an additional essay on Portugal by Pedro Baia, “Il vernacolare del ‘Habitat Rural’ al programma SAAL. La recenzione portoghese del Team X.” 10 Bergdoll, p. xviii. 9 Jean-François 4 Without a doubt, the complex positioning of Le Corbusier, more than any other modernist interested in the Mediterranean and vernacular environment, represented a serious provocation to the Anglo-German axis and, as a result, his influence was very strong in some southern countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent in Greece. The epistemological gap of Le Corbusier from the beginning of the Arts and Crafts in Chaux-deFonds and his mechanical-centric modernism of 1920 to the southern version where the Mediterranean vernacular replaced the discursive role played by the machine was also a direct response to a series of global and personal events, which put his initial position in crisis. Let us mention the Great Depression and the critique of industrial capitalism in the 1930s, the growth of German right-wing parties and the rise of nationalist socialism that made modernist Nordic criticism dangerously ambiguous, and finally the intellectual consequence of having lost the competition for the Palace of Nations in Geneva. The impact of these events coincided with the first meeting with Josep Lluís Sert in Barcelona and the subsequent trip aboard the Patris II ship from Marseilles to Athens as locus of the CIAM 4 meeting where the avant-garde German architects were conspicuously absent. Freed from the most nationalist references after World War II, including in Spain where it was positioned against the classical image of the regime, the vernacular continued to frame the discourse of modernity across the European continent. Prewar architects like Gio Ponti, Adalberto Libera, Luigi Figini, Luigi Moretti, of even more so Ernesto Nathan Rogers kept the North-South debate alive and expanded the discussion to urban form. New figures emerged like Aldo Van Eyck, Hans Van der Laan, Fernando Távora, Miguel Fisac, Oriol Bohigas, Aris Konstantidinis, Costantinos Doxiadis, Fernand Pouillon, Ludovico Quaroni, and Aldo Rossi. Beyond the question of architectural language, which had been the focus of the pre-war discussion, it was the morphological and typological discovery of the urban South—the Italian hill towns, the Survey of Portuguese Architecture, the travel and writings of Aldo Van Eyck about Africa—that not only expanded the field of inquiry and research but contributed strongly to the creation of Team X and the demise of the CIAM.11 My own essay in this anthology, titled “The Modern, the Vernacular, and the Mediterranean in Spain,” charted the way in which José Luis Sert and the newly founded GATPAC embraced a Spanish vision of modern architecture, rooted within the realm of Ibiza and the Mediterranean shores. I argued that, far from being an avant-garde experiment interrupted by the Civil War and Franco’s regime, this aspiration returned in the 1950-1960s in the works of José Antonio Coderch, Grup R, and Oriol Bohigas. Likewise, I asserted that pro-Franco Catholic-oriented architects based in Madrid—Alejandro de la Sota, Fernández del Amo and many others— were equally engaged in the search for a modern architecture anchored in the vernacular, and particularly the Mediterranean. The Spanish Pavilion for the IX Milano Triennale (1951) and the Manifiesto de la Alhambra (1953) provided the major impulse and the cultural alibi not only for adopting a stripped-down vernacular as a politically acceptable form of Spanish 11 See Lejeune and Sabatino, op. cit. 5 modernity, but also to set up a less rigid relational system between buildings and their environments. Positing Vernacular Modernism and Typology In the prologue to their book Vernacular Modernism, Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, Bernd Hüppauf and Maiken Umbach introduced the concept of “vernacular modernism” to reflect, on the one hand, the deconstruction of the hegemonic status of the ‘heroic modernism’ broadly labeled as International Style; on the other hand, to position the vernacular as an expression of place and the values of difference, whether cultural, tectonic, climatic, and beyond. For them, vernacular modernism was best understood in terms of praxis, and its significance best captured by examining its role in those cultural fields that participate in the construction and performance of space and place. In their own words, The individual, the emotional, and the regional are, it transpires, constitute parts of the political and cultural project of “modernity” in ways that we are only just beginning to recognize. As much as the theories of the postmodern lay claim to thinking diversity, rupture, the non-identical and the non-rational, this “other” side of modernity has been part of its history from the beginning.12 For the authors, this ‘other’ side of modernity was largely excluded from modernist theory, and generally “less visible than the teleological optimism and triumphalist narratives of time, progress, and emancipation” epitomized by the works of Nicholaus Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, and the likes.13 Likewise, they argued that the vernacular modernism was not an extension of reactionary politics, but rather a mode of engagement with the local man-made and natural environment. In that sense, “the vernacular was an integral part of the history of the modern.” 14 Moreover, the vernacular helps elucidate how the local and the regional are constructed within—rather than against—the context of the modern: “It is, rather, the negotiation between, and the interdependence of, the regional and the global, concrete locality and border-devouring abstraction, that can generate a new and more complex narrative of the modern.”15 This intellectual process brings to mind Marc-Antoine Laugier’s discussion of the primitive hut in his Essay on Architecture published in 1753. According to Alan Colquhoun, Laugier was not particularly interested in the vernacular world of architecture, but was in fact looking for the historical roots and the ‘de-stylization’ of classical architecture: “This process entailed, not the discovery of vernacular building, but the re- 12 Bernd Hüppauf and Maiken Umbach, Vernacular Modernism, Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 8. 13 Ibidem. See Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius, Londra, Faber & Faber, 1936; Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture – The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1941. 14 Hüppauf and Umbach, p. 11. 15 Hüppauf and Umbach, p. 2. 6 “vernacularization” of classicism with which to substantiate a myth of origins.”16 Among many case studies, Francisco Passanti’s essay “The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier” demonstrated the significance of vernacular influences on Le Corbusier’s high modernism of the 1920s.17 Likewise, Mardges Bacon highlighted how the Museum of Modern Art had, in the years immediately following the International Style exhibition, forged across a series of new exhibitions “a new alliance of modernism and the vernacular.”18 While Pevsner and other authors like Giedion emphasized the role of the northern vernacular as springboard in the development of modern architecture and the purification in the question of styles, they eventually reduced it to a transitory agent, which, for them, ceased to be relevant as soon as the International Style was born.19 Moreover, they completely neglected the influences from the southern vernacular that Schinkel, Hoffmann and Loos had put forth. Let us recall that Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement barely acknowledged Le Corbusier and that Giedion made only a rare concession to the classical tradition in his discussion of Garnier’s Cité industrielle.20 To the contrary, and in agreement with Umbach, I have sustained, along with my co-editor Sabatino, that the influence of the vernacular (both northern and southern) could not be limited to that original phase, but that it has remained a fundamental component of modernity. Unlike the first histories of modernism, which stressed the internationalist aspects of modern architecture, the scholarship developed during the last two decades has attempted to clarify the delicate balance achieved by architects working in a modernist idiom who maintained, nonetheless, a strong allegiance to their cultural roots.21 As they have shown, a significant post-WWII impetus to changing perceptions among nonMediterranean countries about the constructive role that vernacular buildings of the South 16 Alan Colquhoun, “Vernacular Classicism,” Modernity and the Classical Tradition–Architectural Essays 1980-1987, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 30. 17 Also see my essay, Jean-François Lejeune, “Al di là del Mediterraneo: Le Corbusier, Costa, Niemeyer e il ‘vernacolare moderno’ in Brasile,” in Paolo Carlotti, Dina Nencini and Pisana Posocco (eds.), Mediterranei Traduzioni Della Modernità, Milano: Francoangeli, 2015, pp. 46-69. There I extend the discourse on Le Corbusier’s encounter with the vernacular to his discovery of Latin America, including the emerging favelas, as well as its influence on the first phase of Brazilian modernism in the works of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer 18 Mardges Bacon, “Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Hüppauf and Umbach pp. 35-52. 19 Hüppauf and Umbach, pp. 13-14. 20 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture – The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1941, p. 693. 21 For a more complete assessment of the literature, see Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, op. cit. Also see Alberto Sartoris, Encyclopédie de l’Architecture Nouvelle, Milan: Hoepli, Vol. 1 (Ordre et climat méditerranéen), 1948, Vol. 2 (Ordre et climat nordiques), 1957, Vol. 3 (Ordre et climat américains), 1954; Jean-Louis Cohen e Monique Eleb, Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures, New York, Monacelli Press, 2002; Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Le Corbusier e l’antico: Viaggi nel mediterraneo, Napoli, Electa Napoli, 1997; Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Die Architektur, die Tradition und der Ort – Regionalismen in der europäischen Stadt, Ludwigsburg: Wüstenrot Stiftung, 2000; Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutynski e Anne Dymond, eds., Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean, Toronto, Buffalo, The University of Toronto Press, 2007; Jan K. Birksted, Modernism and the Mediterranean: The Maeght Foundation, Aldershot, Burlington, Ashgate, 2004; Jean-Paul Bonillo, Domus Mare Nostrum: Habiter le mythe méditerranéen, Toulon: Centre d’art, 2014; Barbara Miller Lane, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (2000); Michelangelo Sabatino, Pride in Modesty – Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 7 could play in shaping postwar modernism came with Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 exhibition Architecture Without Architects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Myron Goldfinger’s 1969 publication Villages in the Sun: Mediterranean Community Architecture both of which stressed how Mediterranean vernacular builders prefigured the "efficiency" of industrially produced housing without the monotony of contemporary examples that reflected no connection to a specific locale or site. The issue of “repetition without monotony,” implying type and serial production in the studies of Goldfinger and Rudofsky, was key to designers whose identity as architects was heavily invested in Mediterranean modernism.22 For them, the vernacular types were first and foremost the essential components and the scientific and rational keys to understand the formation of the urban fabric, from the Andalusian pueblo to the complexity of the Medina to the European city itself. Here it is important to refer to Rafael Moneo, for whom type and typology have been of critical importance. In his seminal essay of 1978, “On Typology,” he further theorized these arguments. He set up the various interpretations of the concept, and summarizes typology as “the act of thinking in groups.”23 Far for being an impediment to creativity and invention, he saw type as “the frame within which change operates.”24 Yet he stated that during the first decades of the twentieth century, the new idea of type put forth by Muthesius, the Werkbund, and later Le Corbusier, deviated toward the concept of prefabrication. As a result, “the singularity of the architectural object that in the nineteenth century had permitted adaptability to site and flexibility for use within the framework of a structure was violently denied by the new architecture, committed to architecture as mass production.”25 Indeed, for Moneo, type was not only a formal concept, but it was strongly related to construction. It is the combination of form and construction that makes the type. Finally, he suggested that “the old definitions must be modified to accommodate an idea of type that can incorporate even the present state, where, in fact, subtle mechanisms of relationship are observable and suggest typological explanations.” 26 The disconnection of the type from the context of the city constituted a major theoretical and practical problem, which spurred the development of a new theory, usually known as Urban Morphology, which would rationally explain the formal and structural continuity of towns and cities. 27 For the primary actors of this discipline, including Saverio Muratori (1910-1973) and Giancarlo Caniggia (1933-1987) on the Italian side, architecture was to be considered, neither as a single and individualistic creative event nor as the industrially produced object, but as a “process,” in time, of building from the single 22 See Lejeune and Sabatino, pp. 6-8. Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13, Summer 1978, pp. 23. 24 Ibidem. 25 Moneo, “On Typology,” p. 33. 26 Moneo, “On Typology,” p. 44. 27 Moneo, pp. 35-36. Urban morphology is the study of the form of human settlements and the process of their formation and transformation. The study seeks to understand the spatial structure and character of a metropolitan area, city, town or village by examining the patterns of its component parts and the ownership or control and occupation. 23 8 dwelling to the city as whole.28 For Muratori, types were the generators of urban form, from the village to the city, and in particular the constituents of urban space (streets, calli, campi, and corti of the Venetian context for instance). In that sense, one can argue that the vernacular relied on the concept of type, and that the very adaptability of the type was inherently responsible for the possibility of vernacular modernism. Camillo Sitte: Modernity and National Identity in Urban Form Beyond the revision of the concept of ‘modern’ and its relation to the vernacular, a fundamental question of this dissertation can be expressed using the paraphrase of a question posed by historian Jean-Louis Cohen within the 1996 Dictionnaire de l’architecture du vingtième siècle: Can we continue to reserve the label of ‘modern’ to those {urbanists} who simultaneously worked on the renovation of forms, the transformation of uses and technological development, while embracing radical political points of view?29 In the same manner that the history of twentieth-century modern architecture has been politically and ideologically oriented towards the myth of the machine, functionalism, and new technologies and materials, the history of twentieth-century urbanism and urban planning has been systematically directed toward a linear and progressive positivism that tends to equate the notion of progress with radical changes in the technological vision of the city and thus in the formal organization of urban and suburban spaces. As a result, any formal organization that puts into question or rejects the hegemony of the street as basic organizing principle of urban space has been systematically assimilated within a progressive vision of history and a libertarian agenda of the so-called open city and the end of the street.30 Le Corbusier’s attack on the rue-corridor—in part understandable within the framework of the overcrowded industrial city—was used as a universalist motto against any type of street, contributing to the widespread elimination of the urban street, square and block fabric of the city in history in favor of superblocks, highways, “streets in the sky,” and monumental public spaces unfriendly to pedestrians. The complete rejection of the urban street neglected Le Corbusier’s own 28 For an introduction on Muratori and Caniggia, see Cataldi, Giancarlo, Gian Luigi Maffei, and Paolo Vaccaro. "Saverio Muratori and the Italian School of Planning Typology,” Urban Morphology 6, nº 1, 2002, pp. 3-14. See Saverio Muratori, Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia, Roma: Instituto poligrafico dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1960; Anna Bruna Menghini; Valerio Palmieri, Saverio Muratori: didattica della composizione architettonica nella Facoltà di Architettura di Roma, 1954-1973, Bari: Politba, 2009; Gianfranco Caniggia; Gian Luigi Maffei, Architectural Composition and Building Typology: Interpreting Basic Building, Firenze: Alinea, 2001, and Gianfranco Caniggia: architetto Roma (1933-1987): disegni, progetti, opere, Firenze: Alinea, 2003. 29 Jean-Louis Cohen, “Mouvement moderne,” Dictionnaire de l’architecture du XXième siècle, Paris, Hazan/Institut français d’architecture, 1996, p. 630. 30 Significant parts from this section of the Introduction are taken from Jean-François Lejeune and Charles Bohl, “The Never-Ending Debate,” in Jean-François Lejeune and Charles Bohl (eds.), Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis: Modern Civic Art and International Exchanges, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. xiv-xix. 9 interest in more vernacular types of streets, whether in Venice, Buenos Aires, or Salvador de Bahía, and conceded the functional classification and design of streets and highways to traffic engineers. Although the generalized model of the functional city would become endemic in architecture, planning and engineering, modernist principles of city planning had already been put into crisis as early as the 1950s by the emergence of Team X, the writings of Gordon Cullen, Jane Jacobs, Bernard Rudofsky, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to name of few.31 The negative answer that is implied in Cohen’s question clearly refers to the major changes that have occurred in the historiography of modern architecture within the last two decades and have significantly rebalanced the orthodox and canonical explanation of modernism. In matters of urbanism and urban design, a field that has remained even more politicized than architecture during the twentieth century, the historiography has changed more slowly, but one can argue that the critical revision of the modern urban project has progressed dramatically with the works of Jean-Louis Cohen, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Hartmut Frank, Harald Bodenschatz, or Wolfgang Sonne.32 Their works have focused on the ‘other urbanists’—such as Theodor Fischer, Henri Prost, Donat Alfred Agache, Patrick Geddes, Fritz Schumacher, Tony Garnier, or Eliel Saarinen—who planned, designed, and built modern cities, neighborhoods and towns, that adapted the traditional city form and its typologies to the current conditions of life and society. Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Miami Beach, Asmara, the Parioli in Rome, Copacabana, and Sabaudia were some of those ‘other modern’ cities, founded or developed in the twentieth century. In all of them, the street pattern was delineated and maintained as the fundamental organizing principle of urban space. The deep anchoring of the traditional urban structures—particularly as they relate to the Mediterranean—and the pragmatic realities of a small, incremental, and plot-based real estate prevailed and enticed the modern-oriented architects to mediate between the urban scale and the individual expression. 31 See Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1961; Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961; Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città, Padova, 1966; Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1972. Among those actors, it is important to point to Bernard Rudofsky, another Viennese architect, and the his work toward the architectural and urban vernacular. See his books Architecture without Architects (New York, Doubleday, 1964), later followed by Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969). 32 Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (ed.), Die Architektur, die Tradition und der Ort: Regionalismen in der europäischen Stadt, Ludwigsburg: Wüstenrot Stiftung, 2000; Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (ed.), Die Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert – Visionen, Entwürfe, Gebautes, Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2011; Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Romana Schneider, Moderne Architektur in Deutschland 1900– 1950: Reform und Tradition, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1992; Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb, Casablanca – Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2002; Wolfgang Sonne, Urbanity and Density in 20th-Century Urban Design, Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2017; Harald Bodenschatz and Daniela Spiegel, Städtebau für Mussolini : auf der Suche nach der neuen Stadt im faschistischen Italien, Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2011. 10 Many of these studies have highlighted the importance of Camillo Sitte’s treatise Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätze.33 Four hundred years after the invention of the straight and perspectival street during the Renaissance, Sitte’s observations were revolutionary as, for the first time, it was advocated that there was another model possible—a move as revolutionary as Ruskin’s discussion of The Stones of Venice. Yet, it is obvious that the importance of the debate of ‘straight or crooked streets’ has been greatly exaggerated, in part because of Le Corbusier’s famous line about the donkey path—repeatedly taken out of context and without consideration of the intellectual evolution of its author.34 What is thus modern in Sitte’s theory and urbanism? How is his work on the city and public spaces related to the emerging movement of modern architecture that, influenced by Ruskin, Muthesius and the nascent romantic movements of national architecture, was based upon the rejection of the Beaux-Arts principles, on asymmetry, on the organization of masses rather than facades, and on the functional issues? Aren’t Sitte’s principles very similar to these issues, to which we can add the development of the touristic “gaze”? Once freed from the ‘hygienic grid’ and placed within a more artistic context, the vistas, the special points of views, the articulation of public spaces clearly helped architects to develop an architecturally simpler language that achieved strong impact through its insertion in a more complex, let us dare say ‘picturesque’, urban layout. Architect-urbanists like Ernst May, Bruno Taut, Hendrik Berlage, Eliel Saarinen, J.P. Oud have expressed their debt to Sitte; the Berlin Siedlungen of Taut and Wagner, the Italian fascist new towns, the Viennese Höfe, and after the War the Townscape movement were clearly influenced by Sitte’s principles. Likewise, the 1950s INA-Casa social neighborhoods of Rome—Tiburtino and Tuscolana as the most exemplary—as well as La Martella in Matera (1952-1954) deployed a modernized vernacular architecture coupled with Camillo Sitte-based urban design tenets.35 Their organic design and rural references and techniques demonstrated—in the words of Carlo Aymonino—“an accentuated pursuit of the ‘picturesque.’” Facades, roofs, exterior balconies and stairs “reinforce their character of being constructions that have risen spontaneously at successive moments in time.”36 Why is it then that these very principles were more often than not considered retrograde, “culturalist” and not modern, in contrast with the new criteria of urban modernity of the 1920s based upon a 33 Camillo Sitte, Der Städte-Bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen. Ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien, Wien, Verlag von Carl Graeser, 1889. Reedited in fac-simile under the same title by Böhlau (Wien) in 2003. In English, see Christiane Crasemann Collins, Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning, New York, Rizzoli, 1986 34 David Frisby, "Straight or Crooked Streets? The Contested Rational Spirit of the Metropolis," in Iain Boyd Whyte, ed., Modernism and the Spirit of the City, London, Routledge, 2003, pp. 57-84. 35 See Stephanie Zeier Pilat, Reconstructing Italy: the INA-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era, London: Ashgate, 2014. Also see Mario Ridolfi, Manuale dell’architetto (1945-46), which illustrated traditional and vernacular techniques for modern construction; Jean-François Lejeune, “From Hellerau to the Bauhaus: Memory and Modernity of the German Garden City,” in Jean-François Lejeune (ed.), The New City 3 (Modern Cities), New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, pp. 51-69. 36 Carlo Aymonino, “Storia e cronaca del Quartiere Tiburtino,” Casabella-continuità 215 (April–May 1957), p. 20, quoted by Bruno Reichlin, “Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture (Part 1), Grey Room 05, Fall 2001, p.85. 11 rational and geometric model that, in the case of Le Corbusier, was in fact a return to a modern interpretation of Baroque urbanism?37 Daniel Wieczorek’s work of 1981 titled Camillo Sitte et les débuts de l’urbanisme moderne? and George and Christiane Collins’s Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning were the first to attempt an unbiased critical analysis, putting in evidence the importance of the urban vernacular and the phenomenological approach in Sitte’s theory or urban space. In 2003, the Technische Universität in Vienna organized a major conference at the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Sitte’s death, whose proceedings were published in 2005 as Kunst des Städtebaus: neue Perspektiven auf Camillo Sitte. In 2009, Charles Bohl and JeanFrançois Lejeune published Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis: Modern Civic Art and International Exchanges, the result of a conference on Werner Hegemann held at the University of Miami in 2002. 38 In the first part of the book, titled “Camillo Sitte and the Picturesque: Precedents and Perspectives”39 the eight authors discussed a century of urban design theory and ideas, effectively stripping away the misrepresentation of Sitte as simply a purveyor of the medieval, the picturesque, and irregular town planning. Following Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani’s introduction to Vienna fin-de-siècle and to the terms of the classic debate between Sitte and Otto Wagner, Ruth Hanisch examined Sitte’s interpretation and adaptation of Semper’s thought and concluded that Sitte’s “very material-technical determinism…could be found in almost every rucksack on which the avant-garde fed” and that “on theoretical grounds… Sitte was in truth a modernist, even if each and every one of the later modernists would disavow it.”40 Both Hanisch and Lampugnani made clear that, seen from our contemporary point of view and in light of what we have learned about the making and the un-making of the city, the positions of Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner were not so distant: they both saw the city as a work of art even though their concept of what art should be in the future diverged quite dramatically. Jean-François Lejeune’s essay focused on Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Sitte, and Adolf Loos, linking them through the discussion of the “body in the visible.” Wolfgang Sonne adroitly debated the political subtext of picturesque urban design as used, abused and rehabilitated. In his footsteps, both Bernhard Langer’s discussion of Junk Space and Ákos Moravánsky’s dissection of the “picturesque” from the 37 Werner Hegemann was one of the first scholars to go beyond the controversy and to read Sitte with more open eyes and less prejudice. One can safely assume that it is his American experience—not limited to the iconic skyscraper and the Chicago style but with a deeper understanding of the colonial roots and the heart of the country—that allowed him to re-read Sitte and understand the Viennese’s fascination with more “Roman” forms of planning such as Gottfried Semper’s forum projects for Vienna and Dresden. 38 Daniel Wieczorek, Camillo Sitte et les débuts de l’urbanisme moderne, Bruxelles, Mardaga, 1981; George Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins, Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning, New York, Rizzoli, 1986; Jean-François Lejeune and Charles Bohl (eds.), op. cit.; Klaus Semsroth, Kari Jormakka, and Bernhard Langer (eds.), Kunst des Städtebaus: Neue Perspektiven auf Camillo Sitte, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2005. 39 Four of the papers were presented at the occasion of the international conference in Vienna Camillo Sitte (November 2003) while four other authors were asked to contribute to the theme and complete the section. 40 Ruth Hanisch, “Camillo Sitte as ‘Semperian,’" in Lejeune and Bohl (eds.), p. 51. 12 “painterly” conjured up a shared frame of reference between Sitte and Rem Koolhaas. Finally, Stanford Anderson’s discussion of Behrens and Brinckmann’s reactions to Sitte’s concepts as well as Alan Plattus’s scrutiny of the hidden and/or unacknowledged presence of Sitte in modern urbanism remind us of the never-ending debate between irregularity and regularity that has persisted for more than two centuries.41 Within this context, it is critical to posit Camillo Sitte’s foundational text Der Städtebau and its influence on the development of European urban form. In particular—and this dissertation as a demonstration for a particular experience of Spanish urbanism between 1940 and 1970— it is indubitable that the theories of Sitte played for modern European town planning a role comparable role to Ruskin, Morris, Muthesius, and the likes in the development of modern architecture. In particular, it is Sitte’s theory that has eventually determined the national forms of adaptation to international theories like Howard’s Garden City. The historical success of Der Städtebau can thus be analyzed at the meeting point with the movements "arts and crafts,” the emerging issue of historical heritage, and the birth of a new consciousness of history. Far from seeing in these forms and investigations a reactionary or regressive trend, I argue that urban progress is not only linked to the machine concept and technology development, but is equally strongly linked to the rediscovery and reassessment of the vernacular in search of a national/regional identity in opposition to a globalizing technocratic vision of the city. George Collins and Christiane Collins wrote in their introduction to Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning: Sitte was involved in abstracting principles from works that had been created anonymously, one could even say unconsciously, which would then guide individual artisans. So, it was the vernacular whose secret he was trying to unravel: the vernacular in objects of daily use, in the building of simple structures, and in building towns intimately responsive to the functions of daily life.42 As Daniel Wieczorek also wrote, Sitte appears now as a precursor of that modern architecture which he fought in his articles against the Secession. By integrating the spectator into the space, and by considering the latter as a place that one must occupy and inhabit, Sitte suppressed the distance between subject and object that underlies the reality of classical architecture. Likewise, with his attacks against the system of modern, compact and static urban blocks to which he opposed the differential relationship between 41 Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, “Vienna Fin-de-siècle: Between Artistic City Planning and Unlimited Metropolis, pp. 25-37; Jean-François Lejeune, “Schinkel, Sitte, and Loos: The ‘Body in the Visible,’’ pp. 69-97; Wolfgang Sonne, “Political Connotations of the Picturesque,” pp. 123-139; Alan J. Plattus, “The Pack Donkey’s Revenge: Sitte and Modernist Urbanism, pp. 141-147; Ákos Moravanszky, “Forced Spontaneities: Camillo Sitte and the Paradox of the Picturesque,” pp. 109-121. 42 Collins and Crasemann Collins, p. 15. 13 buildings and voids of the medieval syntax, Sitte put into question all the dogmas of the architecture of his time.43 The primacy given by Camillo Sitte to the modern experience of vision also puts him as a precursor of the 20th century field of phenomenology and its importance in the evaluation of modernity. Space (Raum) did not appear in architectural treatises as an essential concept until the second half of the 19th century, when Gottfried Semper introduced the three spatial moments of aesthetic perception linked to the human body: height, breadth, and depth. From these extensions, he derived symmetry, proportion, and direction.44 At the same time Semper emphasized the role of architectural enclosure, the wall, along with the roof, the platform earthwork, and the hearth. Art historian August Schmarsow developed Semper’s ideas, explicitly linking the idea of space to architecture in his inaugural address to the University of Leipzig in 1893, “The Essence of Architectural Creation.”45 Based on perceptual empiricism, Schwarsow’s essay argued that bodily movement through space rather than the stationary perception of form was the essence of architecture. For Schmarsow, space exists because we have a body. Although he alluded to uncovered spaces such as those contained in a courtyard or an enclosed urban space, he did not have the city as focus. It is Sitte who, shortly before him, translated Semper’s theme of spatial enclosure from architecture into exterior space. As he relied on a majority of Italian and German examples of medieval and Renaissance periods, it means that, most of the times, the movement of the body was necessary to understand the space and its wealth of effects and perspectives. This emphasis on the ‘body’ was a radical departure from the dominant architectural features of late Antiquity that had emphasized order, axial sequences and traditional symmetry—features that would re-emerge to dominate Baroque architecture. It is what Riegl defined as the passage of tactile or haptic vision (antiquity-medieval) to optical vision (late Roman-Baroque period).46 43 Wieczorek, p. 159. For this entire section, see Tonkao Panin, Space-Art: the Dialectic between the Concepts of Raum and Bekleidung, Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2003. 45 See Mitchell Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung,” in Assemblage 15, 1991, pp. 49-61; August Schmarsow, “Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung,” first given as a lecture in 1893 and published one year later by Karl Hiesermann, Leipzig. 46 Alois Riegl, Spätromische Kunstindustrie, nach den Funden in Östereisch-Ungarn, Wien, Hof- und Staatdruckerei, 1901-1923. 44 14 The Rural Paradigm of Modernity Et maintenant où s’étageaient les maisons claires, Et les vergers et les arbres allumés d’or, On aperçoit, à l’infini, du sud au nord, La noire immensité des usines rectangulaires.47 In reaction to the universalistic claims of rationalization and abstraction put forth by the Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement discovered the countryside and the vernacular with all their values of place, identity, and subjectivity, sparking the rise in various reinterpretations of the styles in neo-nationalist visions. The countryside thus became a locus of resistance to the socio-cultural transformations put in motion by industrialization and rapid urbanization and concentration of population within the cities. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the literature but also the visual arts reflected the growth of a European movement increasingly interested into the figure of the peasant/farmer, the landscape, and the rural world. Realist painters like Courbet, Delacroix in Morocco, Impressionists, post-Impressionists like Cézanne and Gauguin, all increasingly used the countryside, the village, and the Mediterranean as recurrent themes where the process of modernization and abstraction could find an ideal object. Faced with the dislocation of previous certainties such as the Spanish disaster of 1898 that marked the end of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Philippines, by the disconcerting emergence of the masses, and the transmutation of societal values generated by industrialization and urbanization, the European elites of the late nineteenth century turned their gaze towards more peaceful and orderly landscapes. In this search for more stable environments in the political and moral order, the reference to the land and the rural space was a paradoxical but eventually logical one in a world thrown into turmoil by technical progress and rapid industrialization.48 The democratization of travel, including the frequent excursions across the rural landscape and its villages and towns increased the awareness of the rural world within the urban intellectual and educated circles in Spain and all European countries. Landscapes, local customs and costumes, music, dance traditions, dialects were increasingly studied and catalogued in an ethnographic way, with the objective of maintaining the Volksgeist and compensate for their progressive disappearance or transformation under the impact of urban culture and commercialism 47 Émile Verhaeren’s growing concern for social problems inspired two collections in 1895: Les Villages illusoires (“The Illusory Villages”) and Les Villes tentaculaires (“The Tentacular Cities”). 48 Gustavo Alares López, “Ruralismo, fascismo y regeneración. Italia y España en perspectiva comparada." Ayer: Revista de Historia Contemporánea, nº 83, 2011, pp. 127-47 [128]; Gustavo Alares López, “El vivero eterno de la esencia española. Colonización y discurso agrarista en la España de Franco,” in Alberto Sabio Alcutén (ed.), Colonos, territorio y estado. Los pueblos del agua de Bardenas, Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico (C.S.I.C.), 2010, pp. 57-80 [57]. 15 The rediscovery of the farmhouse and its simple beauty and functionality was a universal phenomenon that has been intensely studied during the last years.49 As Âkos Moravanszky wrote in the introduction to his book Das entfernte Dorf, “the fascination provoked by a newly discovered culture, that was encountered in one's own country but nevertheless appeared foreign and distant, was a common experience of many artists in Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.” 50 The culture of the village and the vernacular house of the countryside—whether an isolated farmhouse or a village house—became progressively an organic element of national identity, often to be confronted with the reality of the modern city. To be sure, as I have already alluded to in the preceding pages, it is in England that this discovery of the vernacular and its urban expression, the picturesque, first took place, and where it led to the very first modern village of Milton Abbas and to the radical revolution in the design of private and public parks.51 In parallel with the intense process of industrialization, the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris spurred the emergence of a new rural and small town paradigm, which was later synthetized by Ebenezer Howard in his proposal of the Garden City. At the turn of the twentieth century, this inward-looking process of discovery had reached all European countries from Scandinavia to Spain and from France to Hungary. The house of the farmer epitomized more and more the roots and the continuity of humankind. In the words of Oswald Spengler, He who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to alter Nature … Hostile nature becomes the friend; earth becomes Mother Earth … A new devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man. And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere the symbolic shape of the farmhouse, which in the disposition of the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhabitants. The peasant's dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its ‘own’ soil.52 The peasant dwelling is, as compared with the tempo of all art-history, something constant and ‘eternal’ like the peasant himself. It stands outside the Culture and therefore outside the higher history of man; it recognizes neither the temporal nor the 49 Among the many historians who have studied these trends, lt is important to cite, among others, Stanford Anderson and Moravanszky for Central Europe; Brian McLaren, Richard Etlin, Cesare De Seta, Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Michelangelo Sabatino, and Mia Füller for Italy; Hartmut Frank, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Romana Schneider, Harald Bodenschatz, Kai Gutschow for Germany; Tom Avermaete and Bruno Notteboom for Belgium and the Netherlands; and Carlos Sambricio, Flores Soto, Antonio Pizza, Domenèch Girbau, and Carlos Flores, for Spain. 50 Ákos Moravánszky, “Vorwort: Künstler als Ethnographen,” in Ákos Moravánszky (ed.), Das entfernte Dorf – Moderne Kunst und ethnischer Artefakt, Vienna: Böhlau, 2002, pp. 7-19 [7]: “Die Faszination einer neu entdeckten Kultur, der man im eigenen Land begegnet, die aber trotzdem als fremd und entfernt erscheint, war eine gemeinsame Erfahrung vieler mitteleuropaischer Künstler am Ende des neunzehnten jahrhunderts.” 51 The village was the work of William Chambers and Capability Brown from the 1780s. It actually involved the destruction of an existing village to be replaced by a park. 52 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926, Volume 2, pp. 89-90. The work was first published in German in 1918 under the title Der Untergang des Abendlandes. 16 spatial limits of this history and it maintains itself, unaltered ideally, throughout all the changes of architecture, which it witnesses, but in which it does not participate.53 However, the overall socio-political conditions had evolved dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the rural paradigm remained more than ever a primary reference for architects attempting to shed the heritage of the academic past, and for artists who were looking for a subject that could respond to new techniques and interpretations of vision. The countryside and its vernacular architecture and landscape, whether natural or man-made, continued to be a major focus of attention and artistic subject in parallel to and contrast with the depiction of metropolitan life. Movements as diverse as the post-WW1 Futurism, the Surrealists in Spain like Picasso, Miró, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, or Kandinsky and the Russian Constructivists used the countryside as primary locus of their artistic experiments. On the other hand, the increased pluralism in politics and culture led to various interpretations of the rural context and the emergence of different ways of life reflected in the development of urban districts, early suburbs, and the single-family house concept. As the rural world and its values were increasingly emphasized as an alternative to the metropolis, the metropolitan phenomenon was debated, eulogized and demonized throughout the western world. In this perspective, one can argue that the traditionally opposed concepts of Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft—the village or small town vs. the metropolis—did contribute together to the definition of urban modernity and of the metropolis itself.54 It is well known that major dictatorial regimes in the twentieth history did privilege the countryside and/or considered de-urbanization and the return to the land as a fundamental conservative policy and ideology—see the cases of Italy, Spain, the Soviet Union, and countries of the Eastern Block after WWII. That reality has usually obscured a more complex panorama that can be traced back to the ‘fin-de-siècle.’ At that time, a series of rural-based ideologies arose, from the left to the right of the political spectrum, but overall it was quite difficult to distinguish between the essence of ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ visions as both took a relative negative vision of the metropolis and advocated decentralization, the return to the countryside, or the merging of the city and country:55 The Modern movement started to make an impact on rural landscapes as early as the mid-19th century (with the experiments of utopian socialism, radical state reformism, and enlightened philanthropy), and even more from the 1920s onwards, 53 Spengler, p. 121. See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. The book was first published in German in Tönnies, Ferdinand (1887). Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Leipzig: Fues's Verlag. An English translation of the 8th edition 1935 by Charles P. Loomis appeared in 1940 as Fundamental Concepts of Sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), New York: American Book Co.; in 1955 as Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft[sic]), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; and in 1957 as Community and Society, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Also see Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Richard Sennet, Classic Essays in the Culture of Cities, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall, 1969 [1903], pp. 23-46. 55 Moravánszky, pp. 8-9. 54 17 especially in the frame of late colonization as well as the new political movements of the time – such as Fascism, Socialism, Communism, Zionism, Anarchism, Communalism, the Co-operative Movement. In an attempt to cope with a “problematic” social group, an unproductive or underproductive land, and the dramatic backwardness of the agricultural sector, different actors such as NationStates, government assisted organizations, bottom-up movements or groups, and even individuals, engaged in more or less extensive campaigns to dramatically reshape the countryside … Through selective uses of the past and tradition, they “reinvented” unprecedented ideas of rurality.56 As Peter Hall has shown, the debate between ‘urbanists’ and ‘de-urbanists’ was intense and at times violently expressed. 57 The short-lived adventure of the Soviet de-urbanists like Ginzburg, Melnikov, and others, paradoxically echoed the thesis that Frank Lloyd Wright developed in many writings and gave form to in Broadacre City. The latter epitomized the apex of the American anti-urbanism that Morton and Lucia White analyzed in their seminal work The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (1962) and whose roots were deeply engrained in the American past and its ideological and cultural psyche.58 Likewise, the de-urbanist theories were strongly anchored in the socialist and even communist-anarchist camps. The Belgian socialist politician Emile Vandervelde (1866-1938) advocated L’exode rural et le retour aux champs but eventually imagined, like the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), that city and country would eventually morph into each other, creating a series of city-regions where agriculture and industry would be dispersed but remain in connection with the urban nuclei. Interestingly, in 1929 Vandervelde wrote Le pays d’Israël: un marxiste en Palestine in which he emphasized the rural-based and Socialist-oriented colonization of the biblical land. At the beginning of the 1920s, the Zionist village presented itself as a modern and progressive model of human settlement, a radical alternative to that of the modern western city.59 As Wolfgang Sonne has shown, traces of nationalist ideology and hostility towards the metropolis can be discerned even in the preface that Franz Oppenheimer, a Jewish physician-turned-sociologist and one of the promoters of the Zionist project for Palestine, wrote to a 1917 publication on the Gartenstadt Staaken near Berlin. In the text, this small suburb, designed entirely by Paul Schmitthenner according to the 56 See MODSCAPES, Modernism, Modernisation and the Rural Landscape, Abstract book and program, 2018 Conference, Tartu, Estonia, 11-13 June 2018, p. 9. 57 Peter Hall, “Metropolis 1890-1940: Challenges and Responses,” in Anthony Sutcliffe (ed.), Metropolis 1890-1940, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 19-66 [31-32]. 58 Lucia White and Morton White, The Intellectual versus the City: from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977;, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City New York: W.F. Payson, 1932; Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City, New York: Horizon Press, 1958; David de Long, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Living City, Milan: Skira, 1998. 59 Axel Fisher, “La ruralité comme territoire de projet ?: Questions d’architecture et de composition dans la définition des formes et caractères du village agricole sioniste, 1870-1929,” EAAE rurality network conference and workshops, 8-12 avril 2013, Fribourg, Suisse, unpublished. See Emile Vandervelde, L’exode rural et le retour aux champs, Paris: Alcan, 1910 [2nd edition]. 18 picturesque small town ideal and realized in 1914-1917, was interpreted as a medicine against the diseases caused by the metropolis: Statistics show us the consequences of this unnatural system [the metropolis] in the horribly increasing number of men unfit for the army and women unfit for breastfeeding […] Furthermore, the metropolis is heavily dangerous in regard to politics. It is everywhere the place of the most avant-gardist radicalism.60 Furthermore, at the end of World War I, Bruno Taut (1880-1938) whose socialist sympathies were well known, published his visionary Die Auflösung der Städte, which propounded the radical vision of a world without cities and states.61 On the conservative side, Spengler’s cultural pessimism in The Decline of the West, his concept of social cycle theory, and his critique of ‘urban sterility’ gave ammunition to the antiurban agenda: Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country […] There suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama - the sterility of civilized man […] When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard "having children" as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning-point has come.62 Spengler was a direct inspiration for Benito Mussolini’s anti-urban rhetoric and programs of rural foundations during the 1930s. However, as Diane Ghirardo demonstrated, even though the political systems of New Deal America and Fascist Italy were poles apart, the planned American communities of the 1930s, from Greenbelt towns to migrant worker camps, had close parallels in Italy.63 In each country, one solution to solve the massive unemployment problems involved conservative policies to entice impoverished workers to move back to the land: the programs highlighted the stability of the traditional nuclear family diligently at work on its own plot of ground, uninvolved in strikes or political demonstration. Likewise, Le Corbusier’s proposal for the Radiant Village stemmed from his anti-urban state of mind and his interest into the right-wing Regionalist Syndicalism. Moreover, he unsuccessfully attempted to get a commission from Mussolini to apply his concept to the new town of Pontinia.64 60 Sonne, “Political Connotations of the Picturesque,” p. 128. Bruno Taut, Die Auflösung der Städte, order Die Erde eine gute Wohnung, oder auch: Der Weg zur Alpinen Architektur, Hagen: Folfwang Verlag, 1920. On Taut, see in particular Manfred Speider (ed.), Bruno Taut – Natur und Fantasie, Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1995. 62 Spengler, Vol. 2, p. 102. 63 Diane Ghirardo’s Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. 64 See Chapter Two in this dissertation. 61 19 The modernization of the countryside continued to develop after World War II in various countries and under ideologically opposite regimes, including the UNRRA-CASAS program In postwar Italy under the guidance of Adriano Olivetti and architects such as Ludovico Quaroni (La Martella, near Matera, 1952-54), the sole experiment of Hassan Fathy with the model village of Gourna in the 1940s, and the failed colonization under Salazar in Portugal, and various large-scale State-driven collectivization programs in Eastern Germany, Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine. Within this international framework, the Spanish experience led between 1939 and 1971 under Franco’s regime constitutes, undoubtedly, a remarkable achievement in terms of its urbanistic and architectural impact. From 1939, the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (D.G.R.D.) was put in charge of the reconstruction of many small towns destroyed during the Civil War. In parallel, the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.) was created in October 1939 to implement a pro-active policy of land reclamation and rural foundation and strengthen the strategy of ideological ruralization of the proletariat. Over three decades, the architects, planners, and workers of the National Institute of Colonization worked in collaboration with State’s hydraulic engineers to create new man-made landscapes (Kulturlandschaften or cultural landscapes) of dams, irrigation canals, electric power plants, and new settlements. From 1944 to 1970, more than thirty thousand colonist houses were built in three hundred new pueblos integrated within the new regional networks. Hence, an estimated 200,000 residents considering the size of rural families settled in those new foundations and started a new life. 20 RESEARCH QUESTIONS Reciprocal Influences As Jordana Mendelson has demonstrated in her seminal work Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939, the years between 1929 and 1939 in Spain show “the surprising extent to which Spanish modernity was fashioned through dialogue between the seemingly opposed fields of urban and rural, fine art, and mass culture.”65 This dissertation expends Mendelson’s arguments about the contradictory nature of Spanish modernity in the realm of architecture and urbanism. More specifically, it highlights the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural in the frame of theory and practice, and this within a double direction of investigation: first backwards, from 1898 and the intense debates that followed the loss of the last American colonies about the regeneration of Spain; secondly forward, following 1939 during the three decades of Franco’s regime. The research underscores the continuity of these reciprocal influences with the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and the experiments of the Republic between 1929 and 1936, with a special focus on the importance of the rural vernacular, in particular the Mediterranean one, in the definition of an ‘other modernity.’ In this perspective, the dissertation explores how a genuinely Spanish modernity resulted from the interaction and dialogue between opposing fields, the rural and the urban/metropolitan. Following Hüppauf and Umbach’s theory, I argue that the study of and inspiration from arquitectura popular and its urban expression—the pueblo—were not only tools to abstract, replace, and clean up historicism and regionalism, but that there were in themselves critical agents of modernization before and after the Civil War. In other words, there was in Spain a rich body of architectural projects, realizations, texts and methods (other moderns, situated moderns) that offer alternatives to the paradigms of the pre-World War II modern avant-garde and what could be described as “high modernism.”66 As a result, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. At the same time, it provides an alternative chronicle in the story of modernity, i.e., how modern ideas impacted the countryside in many countries during the twentieth century and created distinctly national models for the Modern Village. 65 Jordana Mendelson, Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-39. University Part, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. See: . http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02474-7.html. 66 See Andres Ballantyne (ed.), Rural and Urban: Architecture between Two Cultures, London: Routledge, 2010. 21 Ortega y Gasset and Spanish Circumstances The dissertation evidences that the Spanish quest for vernacular modernism before and after the Civil War was not limited to architectural forms and building types, but that it equally embraced the urbanistic environment of that very popular architecture, i.e., the street, the plaza, and other Spanish iterations such as the paseo, as manifested in both the pueblo and the larger city. First, it is important to reflect on the use of the word pueblo in the Spanish language. It is a term, at once clear and complex, which is almost untranslatable due to its rich content and the particularities of Spanish historical culture. In English, it can be translated as village, town, and even a city that does not exceed 50,000 inhabitants and is not a provincial capital or of similar hierarchical level. Moreover, the pueblo does not only represent the physical reality of the built community, it also represents its very citizens, from the villagers to the citizens of Spain as a whole. In that sense, one can assert that the pueblo represents the essence of the country, of its compromise between the rural and the urban. Secondly, contrary to the more northern and Anglo-Saxon understanding of the word, the rural in Spain cannot be considered the opposite of urban. The social and physical reality of the Spanish countryside is very heterogeneous and especially difficult to equate with the more traditional, more often northern, representation of the rural as a world of farms, small villages, and rural sprawl along country roads. 67 North of the Cantabrian-Pyrenean line, the isolated farmhouse is the dominating typology, both physical and cultural, in direct connection with the fields and the landscape. This territorial relationship contributes, among other factors, to the often-disseminated nature of the settlements and/or their reduced size.68 On the other hand, the configuration of the towns to the south of the discussed line, in large areas of Aragón and the vast plateau of Castilla-León, has been generally compact and clearly demarcated from the countryside around, with the distance between towns reaching ten to twenty kilometers. To some extent, the limits of the towns seem to function as a frontier and ‘defense’ against the countryside, reminding us of Ortega y Gasset’s description of the formation of a genuinely human public space within the countryside. In most of these compact localities, whether large or small, the inhabitants tend to focus their life in the built environment, where almost everyone lives, and the public life gravitates around the plaza mayor and in the streets. The relationship with the field corresponds to the regular working hours; it is not the center of a lifestyle, which takes place within the compact urban fabric. Separated from the working countryside, the compact town prioritizes the presence of urban elements, spaces, and social practice such as the capacity for self-management, analogous 67 For this section on the Spanish concept of pueblo, I have relied on Francisco López-Casero, “Pueblo y sociabilidad: formas de vida urbana en el Mediterráneo,” Anales de la Fundación Joaquín Costa, 1999, pp. 177-205. 68 Among the most specific types, let us mention the Asturian farmhouse, the Cantabrian farmhouse, the Basque farmhouse, the Aragonese pardina and the Catalan masía. This regional identification extends into some areas of the Levant and the Balearic islands like Ibiza. 22 to that of the Antique polis. Expectedly, there is no institution parallel to the northern farmhouse, organized around the family with a strong value of identification. 69 The same urban lifestyle, further reinforced thanks to the large size of the population (which can easily go from five to fifteen thousand residents, mostly dedicated to the agricultural economy), dominates the third category of settlements in the countryside, the agro-cities of the south. There, sociability plays a special role "in the desire to live in the density of the city, in the passion of the bustle and of the human action, in the conversations and in the debates, in the preference for urban life over rural life.”70 In the agro-city system, the urban structure is fully developed and permits the development of more complex social structures, as well as a much greater degree of contacts, sociability, but also, given the greater economic dependency of many residents, a place of socio-political conflict. As a result, the term “rural” cannot adequately reflect the spatial reality of urban life in the countryside environment, with the only exception of the northernmost regions where the farmhouse dominates the social life. As Francisco López-Casero has stated, In reality, more than a rural Spain there is a Spain of pueblos. Within the Spanish countryside, the pueblo is the mediator between the rural and the urban world. It incorporates features of both and often presents a remarkable ambivalence. 71 To be sure, the ‘urban’ character of the settlements in the countryside is not limited to Spain, and can be found across the entire Mediterranean basin, as authors like Christian NorbergSchulz and Amos Rapoport have convincingly argued.72 In particular, they have emphasized the importance of Mediterranean compactness and well-defined public spaces—the square— in contrast with the Northern and Anglo-Saxon traditions. As Claudio D’Amato Guerrieri wrote in his contribution to the Biennale of Venice in 2006, The Mediterranean architectural ideals … really represent the classical idea of organic unit as well as Alberti defined it again. They extend it to all the design scales, because they consider architecture as a synthesis of a continuous process of 69 The only institution with a strong presence in space would be the farmhouse in Andalusia; but the farmhouse has not been a symbol of identification, but of disunity and conflict. 70 Quoted by López-Casero, p. 190 from Anton Blok and Henk Driessen, “Las agrociudades mediterráneas como forma de dominio cultural: los casos de Sicilia y Andalucía,” in Francisco LópezCasero, La agrociudad mediterrdnea. Estructuras sociales y procesos de desarrollo, Madrid, 1989: p. 102. 71 López-Casero, p. 192.In spite of fundamental differences between the Japanese society and its patterns of rural and urban development, it is interesting to point out a parallel reflection by Kisho Kurokawa, author of a metabolist project in the countryside: “It seems to me that there exists a city versus village concept with an emphasis toward cities. We say ‘the flow of agricultural population into cities’ or ‘dispersion of urban population.’ I am of the opinion that rural communities are cities whose means of production is agriculture.” See "Agricultural City, 1960 / Kisho Kurokawa," in ArchEyes, May 7, 2016, http://archeyes.com/agricultural-city-kurokawa-kisho/ (http://archeyes.com/agricultural-citykurokawa-kisho/ (last accessed November 1, 2018). 72 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1980; Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969. 23 transformation of nature that recognizes the relation and the belonging of every element and organism to a more complex unity.73 Likewise, as Giuseppe Strappa discussed the Mussolini’s foundations in the 1930s, It cannot be overlooked that most of the villages and cities of foundation built by Italian architects between the two world wars are part of a new, all modern Mediterranean specificity, which, if we look at the organic (tectonic and typological) roots of the construction and of its relationship with the urban organism ... it seems to derive largely from a central nucleus of shared characters, the conscience of which is born and is highlighted by the contrast with the seriality and discontinuity of the modern northern European world.74 Like many other Spanish intellectuals and architects, José Luis Sert acknowledged his debt to philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955).75 In general terms, Ortega proposes that philosophy must, as Hegel discussed before him, overcome the lacks of both idealism (in which reality gravitated around the ego) and ancient-medieval realism (which is for him an undeveloped point of view in which the subject is located outside the world) in order to focus in the only truthful reality (i.e. life), in which there is no me without things and things are nothing without me, thus no me (human being) detached from my circumstances (world). This led Ortega to pronounce his famous maxim "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" (I am myself and my circumstance) which he always situated in the core of his philosophy. In the published version of his CIAM 8 speech on “Centers of Community Life,” Sert introduced his talk with a quotation from Ortega y Gasset about the public square as the human separation from the “geo-botanic cosmos” of the countryside. Like Ortega, he believed that a square was necessary for the people to interact and develop a full civic life and that its origin was fundamentally a Greco-Roman creation that had impacted Mediterranean culture since Antiquity: Excavation and archaeology allow us to see something of what existed on the soil of Athens and Rome before Athens and Rome were there. But the transition from that pre-history, purely rural and without specific character, to the rising-up of the city, a fruit of a new kind produced on the soil of both peninsulas, this remains a secret. We are not even clear about the ethnic link between those prehistoric peoples and these strange communities which introduce into the repertoire of humanity a great 73 Claudio D'Amato Guerrieri, “Mediterranean Architectural Ideals,” in Claudio D'Amato Guerrieri (ed.), Cities of Stone / the Other Modernity / Stereotomic Architecture – 10. Mostra Internationale Di Architettura Venezia, Venezia: Marsilio, 2006, pp. 15-17 [16]. 74 Giuseppe Strappa, “Nuove città mediterranee,” in Renato Besana, et. al. (eds.), Metafisica costruita – Le città di fondazione degli anni Trenta dall'Italia all'Oltremare, Milano: TCI, 2002, p. 105. 75 For this section, see Jean-François Lejeune and José Gelabert-Navia, “Los arquitectos españoles y la construcción de la ciudad moderna: Sert, Moneo, Harvard y América” (with José Gelabert-Navia) – Pamplona Metropolis 1930-modernidad & futuro, Pamplona: Colegio Oficial de arquitectos Vasco Navarro 2006, pp. 18-39. 24 innovation: that of building a public square and around it a city, shut in from the fields. For in truth the more accurate definition of the urbs and the polis is very like the comic definition of a cannon. You take a hole, wrap some steel wire tightly round it, and that's your cannon. So, the urbs or the polis starts by being an empty space, the forum, the agora, and all the rest is just a means of fixing that empty space, of limiting its outlines. The polis is not primarily a collection of habitable dwellings, but a meeting-place for citizens, a space set apart for public functions. The city is not built, as is the cottage or the domus, to shelter from the weather and to propagate the species—these are personal, family concerns—but in order to discuss public affairs. […] The square, thanks to the walls which enclose it, is a portion of the countryside which turns its back on the rest, eliminates the rest, and sets up in opposition to it. This lesser rebellious field, which secedes from the limitless one, and keeps to itself, is a space sui generis, of the most novel kind, in which man frees himself from the community of the plant and the animal, leaves them outside, and creates an enclosure apart which is purely human, a civil space.76 The issue of “circumstance” was important for Sert, who, throughout his life and career, claimed his Mediterranean origins as a fundamental source of modernity. Following his exile to the United States, and particularly through the experience of his Latin American projects, Sert came out to recognize the importance of local building types and ways of life that would put into crisis, along with the younger Team X set, the international, abstract and universal agenda of the original CIAMs and Charter of Athens. Yet, it is in Rafael Moneo’s works—the Spanish architect initiated his career at the very heart of the Francoist regime—and writings that Ortega y Gasset’s thinking became a central principle of design and analysis. Indeed, for Moneo, circumstance in architecture becomes context, site, history and materiality. Circumstance calls for an architecture “that would ensure a building’s permanence within the modern tradition: an architecture that was concerned with construction, techniques, materials, and meaning in a building’s form.”77 Moneo's ability to “reabsorb his circumstances” is both a source of necessity and freedom to connect practice with intellect. Moreover, as the architect is fully immersed in the reality of the construction of architecture, it is only through knowledge of history and the theories of architecture that he or she is able to confront the immediate, the circumstantial and to reinvent architecture.78 Moneo always made clear that he aimed at a “socially responsible” architecture that rejected invention and individualism for their own sake. In Kantian terms, freedom must be bound in order to not to fall into “arbitrary spontaneity” and disintegrate. For Moneo, the freedom of the architect and of architecture is equally bounded, and that bind must be an intellectual one—the insertion into the city, into the rules of the city. 76 José Luis Sert, “Centres of Community Life,” CIAM 8: The Heart of the City (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952), 3. Quoted from José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, New York: Norton, 1932, pp. 164-5. 77 See the detailed analysis by Valeria Koukoutsi-Mazarakis, José Rafael Moneo Vallés: 1965-1985, Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001, p. 61. 78 Koukoutsi, p. 91. 25 In that sense, Sert and Moneo after him rejoined, at a much different scale and with programs of a different nature, the ideas put forth in the countryside by the architects of the I.N.C., Alejandro de la Sota and José Luis Fernández del Amo first among them.79 The dissertation will emphasize the importance of the public space within Spanish culture and thus its fundamental presence in the towns and villages of the reconstruction and the interior colonization. Urbanize the Countryside, ruralize the urban life Rurizad lo urbano, urbanizad lo rural … Replete terram. In 1867, Ildefons Cerdà wrote an epigraph to the Volume One of his Teoría General de la Urbanización, “ruralize the urban life, urbanize the countryside … Fill the earth.” Yet, as Vicente Guallart wrote, “the relationship between the country and the city is not explained in depth in his theory.”80 He made his ideas clearer in a letter of 1875 to the Marquis of Corvera, where he posited that Cerdà “conceived all territorial space - both urban (susceptible to urbanization) and rustic (susceptible to ruralization) and whatever its size (territorial division in successive jurisdictions) - as a space colonized by man through operational principles of transformation (homotheties or "analogies from greatest to least, from the difficult to the easy, from the complex to the simple)." 81 One can assume that for Cerdà, urbanizing the countryside implied “helping humanity understand that the aim is to free them of the ills from which they are suffering and to provide them with the legitimate advantages of which they are currently deprived.”82 Three decades later, Soria y Mata reasserted the same motto in his proposals of the Ciudad Lineal, as “ruralize the city, urbanize the countryside.”83 The dissertation argues that both terms of this vision were deployed in Francoist Spain in continuity with previous attempts during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the Second Republic. In contrast to the virulent anti-urban attacks launched by the most reactionary supporters of the regime, it is important to emphasize the balanced approach to the relationship city/country that César Cort, Professor of Urbanología at the School of 79 See Chapters Six and Seven. 80 Ildefons Cerdà, Teoría General de la Urbanización, y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona, Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1867; in English, Ildefons Cerdà, General Theory of Urbanization, Vincent Guallart (ed.), Barcelona: IAAC,/Actar, 2018: quote from Vicente Guallart, “Urbanization: the Science of Making Cities,” p. 25. 81 Javier García-Bellido García de Diego, “Ildefonso Cerdá y el nacimiento de la urbanistica: la primera propuesta disciplinar de su estructura profunda,” in Scripta Nova: revista eléctronica de geografía y ciencias sociales, no. 61, April 2000, http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn-61.htm (last accessed December 1, 2018): “todo espacio territorial--tanto urbano (susceptible de la urbanización) como rústico (susceptible de la rurización) y cualquiera que sea su rango de tamaño (división territorial en sucesivas jurisdicciones)--como un espacio colonizado por el hombre a través de principios operacionales de transformación (homotecias o "analogías de mayor a menor, de lo difícil a lo facil, de lo complejo a lo simple.” 82 Ildefons Cerdà, General Theory of Urbanization, p. 57. 83 See Georges Collins and Carlos Flores, Arturo Soria y la Ciudad Lineal, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1968. 26 Architecture of the University of Madrid, published in 1941. Under the title Campos urbanizados y ciudades rurizadas [Urbanized countryside and ruralized cities], Cort proposed an agenda that eventually guided the urban program of Franco’s regime, at least until the end of autarky.84 First of all, urbanizing the countryside meant modernizing it as debated from the very beginning of the twentieth century under the leadership of Joaquín Costa. It became the goal of Franco’s hydro-social dream of modernization of the countryside with a national strategy of interior colonization. This dissertation presents and analyzes the international concept of the Modern Village and its application in Spain through the post-Civil War reconstruction and the works of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. Secondly, “ruralizing urban life” was a fundamental strategy of modern Spanish urbanism, from the early schemes proposed by Cerdà and the variations on the ciudad lineal imagined by Soria y Mata. However, the limited success of the Garden City movement stimulated the architects in developing genuine Spanish models such as the Plan Macía for Barcelona and the Zuazo-Jansen masterplan for Madrid. Between Le Corbusier and German-inspired modernism these projects were reimagined and reinterpreted after the civil war under the general Plan Bidagor approved in 1947. As a leading intellectual member of the Falange, Bidagor developed a corporatist vision of the Grand Madrid where strict control of land development would structure the city as an archipelago of rural-based towns to be developed around the consolidated city center and interconnected by an advanced metro and train network system. Each of these towns expressed a genuinely Spanish vision of middle to highdensity districts structured around a hierarchical civic center where the church would dominate space and skyline, and formally influenced by a genuinely Spanish understanding and application of Sitte’s theories. As a later experience in Madrid, the poblado dirigido of Caño Roto (1957-63, Vázquez de Castro & Iniguez de Onzoño), consisted of a complex of courtyard houses and small slab blocks that partly brought rural typologies at the edge of the city. At the same time in Barcelona, Oriol Bohigas wrote his manifesto Elogi de la barraca [In praise of the shanty, 1963], which provocatively ennobled both traditional construction techniques and selfconstruction process in contrast with the speculative blocks of the periphery, and thus reconnected with the prewar discourse on housing and normalization discussed earlier. 84 César Cort Botí, Campos urbanizados y ciudades rurizadas, Madrid: Yagües, 1941. 27 Utopia of Nostalgia In his introduction to “The Historical Project,” Manfredo Tafuri argued that an ideology molded on the existing order is opposed, in history, by at least three other modes of ideological production: first, A ‘progressive’ ideology, typical of the historical avant-gardes, that proposes a total seizure of the real: this is the avant-garde … that rejected every form of mediation and that, when the chips were down, clashed with the mediating structures of the consensus, which in turn reduced it to pure ‘propaganda’”; secondly, “a ‘regressive’ ideology, that is, a ‘utopia of nostalgia,’ distinctly expressed, from the nineteenth century on, by all forms of anti-urban thought, by the sociology of Tönnies, and by the attempt to oppose the new commercial reality of the metropolis with proposals aimed at restoring mythologies of anarchist or ;communalist’ origins”; and thirdly, “an ideology that insists directly on the reform of the major institutions relating to the management of urban and regional development and the construction industry, anticipating not only real and proper structural reforms, but also new modes of production and a new arrangement in the division of labor: an example is the American progressive tradition, namely, the thought and the works of Olmsted, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and Robert Moses.85 “Utopia of nostalgia, regressive”? Although the program of reconstruction and interior colonization that will be the focus of this dissertation in the chapters 3, 5, 6, and 7, appear to respond to Tafuri’s category of the regressive ‘utopia of nostalgia’—an argument that many critics and historians have made one way or another—this dissertation will argue and research how: 1. The Franco regime, from the end of the Civil War to the end of economic and political isolation (second half of the 1950s) embraced a utopian vision of urbanism that involved both the city and the countryside. It was particularly dominant during the first half of the dictatorship, a period in which Pedro Bidagor advocated a well-balanced metropolis whose organic development would not be driven by capitalist speculation, and whose relation with the countryside would be as syncretic as possible, therefore diminishing the tensions between the urban and the rural. As I will develop in Chapter Three, the plans of the reconstruction by the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (D.G.R.D.), and to a lesser extent the pueblos de colonización, responded to the general ideas of the “organic city” that he developed from the end of the Civil War in the “Plan de Ordenación Nacional.” The organic city was thought of as an alternative to the liberal city dominated by economic and speculative interests. It would consist of a central core “of representation” surrounded by closed and strictly defined districts, interconnected by areas of countryside and landscape, and functionally organized in a hierarchical way. In 85 Manfredo Tafuri, “The Historical Project,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth – Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987, pp. 1-21. 28 line with the ideology of the early years of the regime, the “organs” would be primarily dedicated to agriculture.86 2. That the use of traditional forms of planning does not necessarily respond to a concept of nostalgia. Based upon the most common definition and etymological origin of the word, nostalgia is a learnt formation of a Greek compound consisting of nóstos, meaning ‘homecoming’, which is a Homeric word, and (álgos), meaning ‘pain, ache.’87 For most critics and historians, the traditional design of most pueblos, their rather conservative architecture, and their reliance on the traditional concept of streets and squares were echoes of a nostalgic vision. However, the evident use of those traditional typologies, architectural elements, and picturesque effects must be reassessed in their social and cultural context. Indeed, the traditional architecture and urbanism of the pueblos were conceived of and built for farmers, laborers, and their large families, i.e., for the very social classes that have always, one way or another, inhabited the genuinely historic towns and villages from which the architects of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.) took their inspiration. Thus, it would be quite paradoxical—and quite wrong—to speak of nostalgia: these were not man and women of the city, perhaps emigrated from the countryside, who aspired at returning home and find a facsimile of their previous life. They were not garden cities, which imitate the countryside for very different users, potentially nostalgic of a past that they have never experienced; to the contrary, they were genuine agricultural villages for genuine workers of the land. In other words, there was no “displacement of meaning” between architecture, urbanism and users - something that happens every day with tourist development, transformation of historic villages into touristic havens, or even middle-class villas in subdivisions. Hence, there is a profound difference between the pueblos de colonization and their use of the architecture of white walls, tiled roofs, balconies, and rejas of all forms, and the same elements when they are deployed in suburban subdivisions, touristic venues, and the middle-class chalets that will eventually take over the Spanish peripheries and especially the Mediterranean coasts to host retired generations from Spain and many other European countries. That being said, the question asked by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in their book Collage City remains fundamental for the development of the dissertation arguments: Why should we be obliged to prefer a nostalgia for the future to that for the past?” … It goes without saying that exponents of the city as prophecy theatre would be likely to be thought of as radicals while exponents of the city as memory theatre would, almost certainly be described as conservatives; but, if there might be some degree of truth in such assumption, it must also 86 See Bibiana Treviño Carrillo, “La utopía ruralista del primer franquismo en los planes de reconstrucción de la posguerra,” Actas de la II Conferencia de Hispanistas de Rusia, Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1999, unpaginated (internet accessed). 87 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books, 2001. 29 be established that block notions of this kind are not really very useful.88 3. That the Francoist utopia was politically very conservative but not necessarily so in terms of urbanistic and architectural expression. If the anti-urban theory and propaganda entailed, for a couple of years, a histrionic rhetoric from the most conservative side of the regime, the emphasis on the countryside was, in reality, nothing different from what was going on in many industrialized countries. This list of case-studies mentioned earlier (some of which will be studied in details in the Chapter 2 of the dissertation) is not exhaustive, yet I can safely argue that the anti-urban rhetoric used by the Franco regime during the very first years to follow the Civil War was not specific Fascist. There was no real policy of return to the land or transfer of population as happened partially in Italy, in post-WWII Communist regimes, and even with a very different political context with the population of Palestine. Spengler’s influence on Mussolini is well known but there was no equivalent with Franco.89 Likewise there was no cultural equivalent of the Italian interwar ideological and intellectual conflict between strapaese and stracittà in Spanish literature and arts.90 88 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978, p. 49. It is Ortega y Gasset himself who most promoted the works of Oswald Spengler by introducing it to the readers of the progressist Revista de Occidente. Ortega y Gasset’s contribution to opening the Spanish and Latin American world to the European and particularly German philosophy was highly significant. In his writings and in capacity as editor of the Revista de Occidente, he made his readers familiar with Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, and other important authors such as Spengler. In 1923, first year of Revista, he published a series of translated excerpts from Der Untergand des Abendlandes. 90 According to The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (2002), “The vision of peasant wholesomeness and a corresponding earthy pithiness of style which was promoted particularly by Mino Maccari apropos of Tuscany and Tuscan in Il Selvaggio in the interwar years. It was polemically opposed to the internationalism of stracittà associated with Bontempelli and the 900 (Novecento) group. Both tendencies claimed to be in tune with the true spirit of Fascism, but strapaese gained the ascendency in the 1930s.” According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica (Brittanica.com), “Stracittà, an Italian literary movement that developed after World War I. Massimo Bontempelli was the leader of the movement, which was connected with his idea of novecentismo. Bontempelli called for a break from traditional styles of writing, and his own writings reflected his interest in such modern forms as Surrealism and magic realism. The name stracittà, a type of back-formation from the word stracittadino (“ultra-urban”), was meant to emphasize the movement’s adherence to general trends in European literature, in opposition to strapaese (from strapaesano [“ultra-local”])—collectively, those authors who followed nationalist and regionalist trends.” 89 30 STATE OF THE QUESTION: THE ABSENCE OF SPAIN In Spain like in other European nations who had to suffer the consequences of twentieth century dictatorships, architectural historians either ignored or gave an often contestable and usually reductionist interpretation of the urban and architectural works of the long dictatorship period. Yet, over time, a new generation has developed a serious revision of earlier writings and publications in favor of a more balanced and less ideologically oriented interpretation of urbanism and architecture as professional disciplines. The evolution of the historical project follows that of Fascist Italy, where most of the works built under Mussolini’s regime have survived intact and are now an integral part of the urban life of millions of citizens. As a result, it is in the late 1960s/early 1970s that the process of rehabilitation of Fascist architecture and urbanism was initiated and has been, to some extent, completed at this time. Foreign scholars of Mussolini’s Italy have, in particular, developed extensive and important research on the subject, in part thanks to the important role played by the American Academy in Rome to support the research in modern Italian studies. A similar movement has been underway in Germany, Russia, and recently in the former Yugoslavia. In many of those cases, American or America-based scholars have been at the forefront of the international research and publications. However, this has not yet been the case for the Spain and Franco’s regime, which has been, in general, little studied or not at all. However, it is important to mention the 2015 volume Urbanism and Dictatorship – A European Perspective edited by Harald Bodenschatz, Piero Sassi, and Max Welch Guerra. A major volume Francos Städtebau is in preparation by the same team of editors and will be published in 2020, with my participation in regard to the program of Interior Colonization. Within this context, international scholarship on Spanish architecture and urbanism has been relative limited. Most studies have concentrated on the period 1900-1936 preceding the Civil War—with an emphasis on Gaudí and other architects of Modernism, as well as on the work of the GATCPAC around the key figure of José Luis Sert—and after 1975 with the works of Oriol Bohigas for Barcelona and the irruption of Spanish architects on the international scene (Ricardo Bofill, Rafael Moneo, etc.). Even though research on the architecture and urbanism of the Franco period has been intense in the last fifteen years among the new generations of Spanish historians and architects, the scholarly production by authors and researchers outside of Spain has been negligible, and this, in contrast with other disciplines of research which have produced important works (history, relations between State and Church, cultural studies, film studies, etc.). I argue that it is not possible to understand the importance of post1975 architecture and urbanism in Spain without studying the period 1936-1975. The decades of Franco’s regime were, overall, marked by continuity rather than rupture with the decade preceding the Civil War. Likewise, even though many architects decided to emigrate during the war, it is incontestable that many other excellent architects remained in the country and that the most important architects of the 1945-60—Francisco Cabrero, Fernández del 31 Amo, Miguel Fisac, Alejandro de la Sota—were men with strong religious belief who, by default, embraced the Franco regime. Likewise, a survey of the professional literature through periodicals such as Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, Arquitectura, and Nueva Forma—to name the most important of the 1950-75 period—reveals that the critic of modern urbanism was launched in the early 1960s by architects like Bohigas and Bofill who planted the seeds of the major revision of the 1980s-90s from Barcelona to Madrid to Seville. There are however some exceptions such as José Antonio Coderch and Alejandro de la Sota who are known through accessible monographs, but with the exception of William Curtis and Moshen Mostafavi (both having written about de la Sota), they originated from Spain. Gabriel Cabrero’s overview of post-1945 Spanish architecture published in 2001 remains the only introduction to the period. One recent important work is María González Pendás’s dissertation Architecture, Technocracy, and Silence: Building Discourse in Franquista Spain (Columbia University, 2016), which explores the intersections of spatial and building practices with processes of political, technological, and religious modernization during the twentieth century and applies to specific case studies including Oriol Bohigas’s Pallars Housing project in Barcelona. I have discussed the concept of vernacular modernism in a previous section of this introduction, using as reference Hüppauf and Umbach Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, which does not include Spain in its case studies, or my own work (with Michelangelo Sabatino) Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean. Two other important works were useful as well to frame my research positions and questions even though they do not include Spanish case studies, Rural and Urban: Architecture between Two Cultures (2010) edited by Andres Ballantyne, and Re-Humanizing Architecture – New Forms of Community, 1950-1970 edited by Ákos Moravanszky and Judith Hopfengärtner. The latter includes an important essay by Nelson Mota, “Dwelling in the Middle Landscape: Rethinking the Architecture of Rural Communities at CIAM 10,” which analyzes proposals for the planning of new villages made at the Dubrovnik conference in 1956.91 Beyond this original position, this dissertation embraces two interconnected bibliographic fields and their relation to the case of Spain: first, the question of the reconstruction after the Civil War; secondly, the interior colonization and the general concept of the modern village. Perhaps because most of the post-Civil War reconstruction took place before 1945, Spain has been mostly absent from important comparative studies such as Jeffrey Diefendorf’s Rebuilding Europe’s Bombed Cities and John Pendlebury, Erdem Erten, Peter Larkham’s Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction – Creating the Modern Townscape, and even Jean-Louis Cohen’s Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World. The Cañada Blanch/Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain Center published two 91 Andres Ballantyne (ed.), Rural and Urban: Architecture between Two Cultures, London: Routledge, 2010; Nelson Mota, “Dwelling in the Middle Landscape: Rethinking the Architecture of Rural Communities at Ciam 10,” in Ákos Moravánsky and Judith Hopfengärtner (eds.), Re-Humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community, 1950-1970. East West Central: Re-Building Europe 1950-1990, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017, pp. 311-24. 32 significant books on the reconstruction in Spain, but they are the works of Spanish scholars.92 However, in his important work of 2017, Urbanity and Density in 20th-Century Urban Design, Wolfgang Sonne has put Spain prominently in his transnational comparative approach and he includes a small chapter on the reconstruction following the Civil War.93 In 2006, the University of Leuven organized a European conference titled Making a New World? Modern Communities in Interwar Europe (Heynickx and Avermaete, 2012), whose focus was “on those individuals and organizations that engaged with modernity not in a straightforward and often dogmatic way, as did the avant-garde, but rather with a cautious ‘yes, but....”94 The event and publication unfortunately overlooked the Spanish situation, as did, casting a wider net of planned communities and all forms of garden cities, two significant publications from Belgium, Regionalism and Modernity: Architecture in Western Europe 19141940 (Meganck, Van Santvoort, De Maeyer, 2013), and Living with History 1914-1964 (Bullock and Verpoest, 2011). 95 Likewise, a recent issue of the Journal of Architecture focused on the Modern Village, with an innovative international overview that includes proposals by Doxiadis Associates for new rural development units or communities in postindependence Zambia, however it does not include Spain.96 David Fishman, Jacob Tilove, and Robert A.M. Stern’s monumental and international Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City totally ignored Spain that is only present with the Parque Güell in Barcelona. Even though the country was not the most fertile field of application of the concept of garden suburb and the book limits itself to 1945, the wide net cast by the authors around all versions of planned communities could have included score of projects, particularly in Catalonia and Andalusia, as well as the reconstructed villages by the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas and the first generation of pueblos by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización.97 Following on the successful publications on Los pueblos de colonización de Fernández Del Amo: Arte, Arquitectura y Urbanismo by Miguel Centellas Soler and the Pueblos de 92 Jeffry M. Diefendorf, Rebuilding Europe's Bombed Cities, London: Macmillan, 1990; John Pendlebury, Erdem Erten, and Peter J. Larkham (eds.), Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction – Creating the Modern Townscape, London/New York: Routledge, 2015; Olivia Muñoz-Rojas, Ashes and Granite : Destruction and Reconstruction in the Spanish Civil War and Its Aftermath, Cañada Blanch/Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain, Eastbourne/Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2011; Dacia Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War. Brighton/Portland/Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. 93 Wolfgang Sonne, Urbanity and Density in 20th-Century Urban Design, Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2017. 94 See Rajesh Heynickx & Tom Avermaete, eds., Making a New World: Architecture and Communities in Interwar Europe, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012. 95 Leen Meganck, Linda Van Santvoort, and Jan De Maeyer, Regionalism and Modernity. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013; Nicholas Bullock, and Luc Verpoest (eds.), Living with History, 19141964. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011. 96 Ayala Levin and Neta Feniger, “Introduction: The Modern Village,” in Journal of Architecture 23, nº 3, 2018, pp. 361-366; and Petros Phokaides, “Rural Networks and Planned Communities: Doxiadis Associates' Plans for Rural Settlements in Post-Independence Zambia,” in Journal of Architecture 23, nº 3, 2018, pp. 471-97. 97 David Fishman, Jacob Tilove, and Robert A.M. Stern, Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City, New York: The Monacelli Press, 2013. 33 colonización durante el Franquismo: la arquitectura en la modernización del territorio rural (2008), the research developed in Spain has been expanding widely with a focus on various regional actuations in Aragón, Extremadura, and the province of Almería in Andalusia. However, contrary to the Italian and Zionist experiences that have been widely published in English by local and international scholars, the scholarship on Spanish colonization and its most important architects (De la Sota, Fernández del Amo, Fernández Alba) remains relatively invisible outside of Spain. An important exception in international literature can be found in two works edited by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Die Architektur, die Tradition und der Ort: Regionalismen in der Europäischen Stadt (2000) and his opus magnum Die Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert – Visionen, Entwürfe, Gebautes, which positioned the Spanish colonization within the international context of regionalism and twentieth-century urbanism.98 Likewise it is important to mention the Cities of Stone (10th Biennale di Architettura Venezia 2006) and Mediterranei Traduzioni Della Modernità, edited by Paolo Carlotti, Dina Nencini and Pisana Posocco (2015). Last but not least, since 2016, the European association MODSCAPES “deals with new rural landscapes produced by large-scale agricultural development and colonization schemes implemented in the 20th century throughout Europe and beyond. Conceived in different political and ideological contexts, the underlying agricultural development and colonization policies (ADCP) were pivotal to Nation-building and State-building, and to the modernization of the countryside. Such policies and schemes provided a testing ground for the ideas and tools of agronomists, environmental and social scientists, architects, engineers, planners, landscape architects and artists, which converged around a shared challenge. Their implementation produced modernist rural landscapes (MRL) which have seldom been considered as a transnational research topic.”99 Modernism, Modernization and the Rural Landscape was the theme of the international conference held in Tartu, Estonia, from June 11-13, 2018. Organized by the European network MODSCAPES, it gathered about one hundred participants whose presentations were focused on the transnational process of modernization of the European countryside from the 1918 to the 1960s, with an emphasis on its many urbanistic and architectural expressions. The proceedings of the conference—with a variety of presentations on the case of Spain—will be released in 2018-2019.100 98 Antonio Pizza, “Die Dörfer Der Agrarkolonisation Im Spanien Francos,” In Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (ed.), Die Architektur, Die Tradition Und Der Ort: Regionalismen in Der Europäischen Stadt, Ludwigsburg: Wüstenrot Stiftung, 2000, pp. 464-493; Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, “Der Mythos Der Wahrheit; Städtebau Im Spanien Francos und im Italien des Neorealismus,” in Die Stadt Im 20. Jahrhundert – Visionen, Entwürfe, Gebautes, Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2011, pp. 668-95. 99 See https://modscapes.eu/about/ (last accessed December 1, 2018). 100 See MODSCAPES, Modernism, Modernisation and the Rural Landscape, op. cit. The case studies being developed by MODSCAPES as part of the program of comparative investigation include: Italy (1922-1943): Fascist integral reclamation of the Pontine Marshes & Apulian tableland; Spain (1930s1975): Francoist reclamation and internal colonization in the Ebro and Tagus Valleys; Portugal (1920s1950s): Salazar’s failed internal colonization of the common lands; Germany (1945-1989): State-driven collectivization in former GDR (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg); Estonia and Latvia (1944/5-1991): Forced collectivization under Soviet occupation; British Palestine / Israel (1920s-1973): Zionist agricultural colonization; Libya (1922-1947): Italian agricultural colonies in Tripolitania and 34 As Javier Monclús and Carmen Diez Medina wrote, the lack of translations has generally made it difficult for the English-speaking world “to appreciate the specificities of urbanismo and urbanística,” and prevents the inclusion of this body of work in the wider debate about planning history. They recalled how Anthony Suttcliffe identified “a specifically Latin culture of urbanism, which is used to contextualize both planning and architecture.” 101 The overall absence of Spain in architectural and planning history of the twentieth century undoubtedly reflects Monclús and Diez Medina’s affirmation. Cyrenaica; Morocco (1920s-1970s): French reclamation and rural development schemes of the Gharb Valley; Greece (1922-1968): Settlements in the Axios and Strymon Valleys for refugees from Asia Minor; Ukraine (1944/5 – 1991): Rural planning in Soviet Ukraine. 101 Javier Monclús and Carmen Diez Medina, "Urbanisme, Urbanismo, Urbanística – Latin European Urbanism,” in Carola Hein (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Planning History, London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 147-160 [147]. The reference from Suttclife comes from “Foreword” to Arturo Almandoz, Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities 1850-1950, London: Routledge, 2002. 35 SUMMARY OF CONTENTS 1. The Rural and the Modern, 1898-1936: The Lesson of Ibiza The Lesson of Ibiza deals with the issue of the vernacular in Spanish architectural theory from 1898 to 1936. It discusses the ideological and cultural crisis that followed Spain’s loss of her last territories in Latin America and the Philippines. The rediscovery of the Spanish heartland, away from the big cities, was a physical, geographical, cultural, and also architectural process that would spur a radical revision of national identity through the study of vernacular architecture and its urban expression in the pueblo. The chapter traces and attempts to understand the sources of vernacular modernism and the operations of appropriation it entailed (geography, materials, and culture) in the search for solutions to housing problems in Spain. It continues with a detailed analysis of the role of Fernando García Mercadal (Madrid) and José Luis Sert and the GATCPAC group (Barcelona) in the development of a modern architecture based upon a reinterpretation and abstraction of the vernacular—the “Lesson of Ibiza.” In doing so, they coincided with the paradigmatic shift in thinking about modernity that the German philosopher Walter Benjamin experienced in discovering the island. The last section consists of the comparative analysis of two masterplans, the Plan Macía for Barcelona (1931-36) in collaboration with Le Corbusier and the contemporary plan ZuazoJansen for the expansion of Madrid. Even though these two visions of the city and blocks strongly differed in morphology and typology, both embodied a modern and Mediterranean approach to urbanism and life, which contrasted in many ways with contemporary examples in Northern Europe. 2. The Modern Village: Spain and the International Context Following the crisis of 1898, politician, jurist, economist and historian Joaquín Costa Martínez became the intellectual leader of Regenerationism, a multi-disciplinary movement whose objective was the modernization of the country with a focus on the impoverished countryside. For Costa and his friends, modernization meant the remaking of Spanish nature and the complex answer involved the need for a major hydrographical re-engineering of the country. By the 1930s, decades of debates and legal initiatives, intensified during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and the Second Republic, had established a socio-political consensus that an ambitious state-driven hydraulic policy was the sine qua non condition of the modernization of Spain. The Modern Village outlines the Spanish national debate about the morphological and typological modernization of the countryside from Soria y Mata’s theories of the ciudad lineal and the International Exposition of Ghent in 1913 (Premier congrès international et exposition comparée des villes) to the 1932 competition for the design of new villages in the basins of the Guadalquivir and the Guadalhorce rivers in Andalusia. The second part of the chapter analyzes how the concept of the Modern Village was used ideologically and politically 36 between the interwar period in Italy, Palestine, Portugal, as well as Le Corbusier’s own study of the Radiant Village and his attempt to get a commission for from Mussolini. The modernization of the countryside continued to develop after World War II in various countries and under ideologically opposite regimes, including the UNRRA-CASAS program in postwar Italy under the guidance of Adriano Olivetti and architects such as Ludovico Quaroni (La Martella, near Matera, 1952-54), the experiment of Hassan Fathy with the model village of Gournah in the 1940s, and the debates held at the CIAM 10 in Dubrovnik. 3. The Ordered Town: The Reconstruction of the Devastated Regions Created in the last year of the Civil War, the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (D.G.R.D.) was responsible for the reconstruction of more than 150 damaged or destroyed towns and villages across Spain. Although the most urgent needs were in rebuilding the larger cities and their industrial peripheries, the reconstruction initially focused on the rural front. The main rationale was the State’s economic policy to bolster new agrarian development in order to allow the necessary reorganization of private capital, at that time without opportunities for rapid investment. Arguably, the program of reconstruction was not a creation ex novo. From the Renaissance, Spain had forged a rich and brilliant tradition of new urban foundations, both in America and in the Peninsula itself. Architects and planners of the reconstruction found a fertile ground in that heritage but, at the same time, demonstrated their unambiguous knowledge of pre-war modern European planning. The analysis of about twenty projects of integral reconstruction, which include Brunete, Villanueva del Pardillo, Belchite and Los Blazquez, underscores the rational morphology of the gridded plans replacing the medieval pre-war pattern. Simultaneously expression of an ideological (memory) and hygienist discourse (modernity), the rationalism of the urban plans contrasts with the regionalist architecture that masks the functional modernity of the patio houses. The chapter also highlights the political, conceptual and administrative continuity between the principles and standards developed under Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, the Second Republic, and the Franco regime. This chapter concludes with a special section of Case studies in the Madrid region, in the Zaragoza area, and in Andalusia. 4. The Modern and the Vernacular: Postwar Continuities Post-war Continuities studies how modern architecture returned to Spain through the advocacy of a modernized vernacular. José Antonio Coderch’s projects for the town of Sitges in the 1940-1950s and his design for the Spanish Pavilion at the IX Milano Triennale (1951), among others, provided the impulse and the cultural alibi, not only to adopt a stripped-down vernacular as a politically acceptable form of Spanish modernity, but also to set up a less rigid relational system between buildings and their environment. Furthermore, the chapter asserts that the Catalonian sphere did not have the monopoly on modernity. The search for modernity 37 was also part of the ambitions of regime–supporting Catholic-oriented architects that dominated the Madrid scene. Among that group, Gabriel Cabrero, Miguel Fisac, Alejandro de la Sota, and José Luis Fernández Del Amo aimed at retrieving the vernacular and particularly the Mediterranean one as a source of inspiration and development for a modern Francoist architecture that would break with the casticist mould of El Escorial as “imperial” reference during the first phase of the Francoist regime. As a result, many saw in the Alhambra in Granada a more appropriate historical reference to the modern condition and needs of postwar Spain (Manifesto of the Alhambra, 1953). In Madrid, the social crisis of 1956 in the chabolas [bidonvilles] of the periphery, the activism of a local priest, Padre Llanos, and the organizational energy of architect Julián Laguna, converged to produce an experiment in public housing. Of particular interest for this study is the poblado dirigido of Caño Roto (195763), a complex of courtyard houses and small slab blocks mixing vernacular-based techniques of auto-construction and semi-industrial typologies. At the same time in Barcelona, Oriol Bohigas developed a realist position, critical of the urbanism of the modern movement and was also an extension of the “vernacular discourse” that had until then concentrated on the countryside or the remote peripheries. Of particular interest is his famous manifesto Elogi de la barraca [In praise of the shanty, 1963], which provocatively ennobled both traditional construction techniques and self-construction process in contrast with the speculative blocks of the periphery, and thus reconnected with the pre-war discourse on housing and normalization discussed earlier. In the 1960s, from a position, supported by sociologist Henri Lefebvre and highly critical of the large-scale social housing projects of the 1960s, Bofill and his Taller de Arquitectura studied high-density housing schemes whose organic methodology is based on the geometric formation of elements in space (Ciudad en espacio), but whose spatial and cultural model relates directly to the traditional pueblo. 5. Rural Utopia and Modernity: The Pueblos de colonización, 1939-1971 This chapter outlines the ideological, political, and urbanistic principles of Franco’s grand “hydro-social dream.” From 1940 to the mid-1960s, the architects, engineers and agronomists employed by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (National Institute of Colonization or I.N.C.) created new man-made “colonial” landscapes that integrated dams, irrigation canals, roads, and new towns. Each town was designed as a ‘rural utopia,’ centered on a plaza mayor that embodied the political ideal of civil life under the national-catholic regime. The analysis starts with the first series of towns, designed from 1943 by the architects of the I.N.C. with a strong influence from Camillo Sitte (Gimenells, Valdelacalzada) and a regionalist vision of the vernacular. From the early 1950s, a series of new towns (Esquivel, Villafranco de Guadiana, Gévora del Caudillo) was commissioned to a generation of young architects such as de la Sota, Fernández del Amo, and Antonio Fernández Alba who, under the influence of organic architecture, the Manifesto of the Alhambra, and the international concept of civic center, radically modernized the practice, both in terms of urban form, typology and 38 architecture. For the young architects, the search for a more abstract urban form to match the modernized vernacular implied that the grid and the block could lose their absolute character and be substituted by more organic plans and relationships between city and nature. Camillo Sitte’s tenets of urban composition, which provided a traditional sense of identity to the first group of new towns, remained paramount, although reinterpreted, to the implementation of that novel dialectic between tradition and modernity. During the last phase of the 1960s, the design of the villages continued with a lot of variations, the growing influence of the automobile, and a highly repetitive, quasi-mechanical, deployment of the building types. 6. Five Villages by Alejandro de la Sota: Vernacular and Surrealist Modernity Alejandro de la Sota (1913-1996) was one of the most important modern architects of the post-Civil War period in Spain. Following his graduation from the Escuela Técnica de Arquitectura de Madrid in 1941, he was admitted as one of five architects at the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.). There he planned Gimenells (1943, Lérida) before leaving the Institute. He rejoined into the 1950s to design and build four new villages: Esquivel (1952, Sevilla), Entrerríos (1954, Badajoz), Valuengo (1954, Badajoz) and La Bazana (1954, Badajoz). His first independent work of architecture was the Gobierno Civil of Terragona that he built from 1956-1963, and the Gymnasium of Maravillas School (Madrid, 1960-1962), considered as two of the most significant works of modern Spanish Architecture during the Francoist period. This chapter summarizes the urbanistic and architectonic modernity of the five pueblos, in particular, the pioneering features of the separation of traffic, the propagandistic concept of the open plaza, the volumetric abstraction of the vernacular house, as well as his “ironic” use (as understood by Ortega y Gasset) of the pure Spanish classical architecture. Most importantly the research emphasizes how de la Sota transcends those “functionalist” elements of modernity in order to mobilize memories of the real and produce, in his last four pueblos, an “invented” or “surreal” reality. In so doing, de la Sota reverses the fundamental reference to the countryside that characterizes Spanish surrealism to bring surrealism within the process of rural modernization in Franco’s Spain. 7. Landscape and Abstraction: Twelve Villages by José Luis Fernández del Amo José Luis Fernández del Amo (1914-1995) joined the Madrid School of Architecture in 1933 but had to interrupt his studies when the Civil War erupted. In 1938, he incorporated in Franco’s army, and fought on the Guadalajara front and the final battle in Madrid. Reintegrating the University, he graduated in 1942 with ten colleagues, among whom Miguel Fisac and Francisco de Asís Cabrero. He then started to work for the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas and was one of the architects of the new social district of Regiones in Almería with Prieto Moreno and Fernández de Castro. In Granada, he got in contact with various modern artists, and laid the groundwork for his interest in contemporary art and the 39 “integration of the arts” in Spanish modern architecture. In 1951 he was named director of the new and small Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Contemporary Art Museum) where, for seven years, he produced and curated a series of important exhibitions revolving around abstraction and art. In 1947 he started to work for the I.N.C. where he was active for 20 years, built 12 villages and developed a very advanced program of integration of the arts. With Vegaviana (1954), Cañada de Agra (1962), and the other towns for which he was full responsible for urban design and architecture, Fernández del Amo developed a concept of “landscape urbanism” whose origins can be traced to the Manifiesto de la Alhambra but also to Aalto’s influence. Modern abstraction was one of the design tools that he pushed to the limits of the continuity of urban form. 8. Morphological Classification and Case Studies in the Evolution of Town Design This final section organizes the 300 towns and villages of the I.N.C. according to three hierarchically structured criteria. The first criteria represents the organization of the “heart of the town,” the plaza or as often mentioned by the architects, the “civic center.” It is hierarchically the most important as it can be best used to categorize the urbanistic invention and diversity of the pueblos. The second criterion characterizes the type of street system that was used for each town. Note that the categories relate to the foundation nucleus, independently from the potential extensions and additions. The third one will identify whether the plan includes the separation of pedestrian from animals and mechanical equipment. In order to illustrate the evolution of town design according to those criteria, the section concludes with the analysis of thirty-three pueblos, organized by theme and architect. *** 40 41 Salvador Dali. Portrait of Luis Buñuel, 1924. © Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid / Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York. 42 1: The Rural and the Modern, 1898-1936: The Lessons of Ibiza The popular in Spain is the permanent affirmation of the national; it is, at the same time, the most universal, the highest and the most constructed.... Popular art is the lyric representation of the creative force of man, of the building power of the people who build things and objects of invented proportions, shapes, and colors: magical creations of exact measurements.1 Walking through these old Castilian towns, so open, so spacious, so full of a heaven of light, on this serene and restful land, next to these sober little rivers, is how the spirit is attracted by its roots to the eternal of the caste.2 [The popular architecture] is a climatic product, subjected to the environment, adapted topographically to the place, built with materials from the region; it is a natural and a morphological product of the environment. Rational in the use of the elements, sincere and true, its exterior arises without anxiety and manifests the destiny.… Oblivious to transient mutations, it is the survival of secular taste and tradition, the immanent architectural expression. It is the normal, the innate, the manifestation of architectural serenity.3 1 Maruja Mallo, Lo popular en la plástica española a través de mi obra. 1928-1936, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, p. 7, quoted by Patricia Molins, "Surrealismo: El fantasma en el armario," in Campo Cerrado – Arte y poder en la posguerra española, 1939-1953, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2016, p. 78: “Lo popular en España es la afirmación permanente de lo nacional; es, a la vez, lo más universal, lo más elevado y lo más construido… El arte popular es la representación lírica de la fuerza creadora del hombre, del poder de edificación del pueblo que construye cosas y objetos de proporciones, formas y colores inventados: creaciones mágicas de medidas exactas.” 2 Miguel de Unamuno, Andanzas y visiones españolas, Madrid: Renacimiento, 1922, p. 82: “Recorriendo estos viejos pueblos castellanos, tan abiertos, tan espaciosos, tan llenos de un cielo de luz, sobre esta tierra serena y reposada, junto a estos pequeños ríos sobrios, es como el espíritu se siente atraído por sus raíces a lo eterno de la casta.” 3 Teodoro de Anasagasti y Algán, La arquitectura popular: discurso de Don Teodoro de Anasagasti y contestacion del Excmo. Señor Don Marceliano Santa Maria el dia 24 de marzo de 1929 ante la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, 1929, pp. 15-16: “[La arquitectura popular] es producto climático, sometida al ambiente, adaptada topográficamente al lugar, levantada con materiales de la región, es un producto natural y morfológico del medio. Racional en el empleo de los elementos, sincera y verídica, su exterior, que surge sin preocupaciones, manifiesta el destino. Labor colectiva y anónima, obra permanente surgida por la depuración y aleccionamiento del tiempo. Ajena a mutaciones transitorias, es la supervivencia del gusto y tradición seculares, la expresión arquitectónica inmanente. Es lo normal, lo ingénito, la serenidad arquitectónica.” 43 1898 was a critical year in the history of Spain. On the 1st of May in the Philippines and on the 3rd of July in Santiago de Cuba, the Spanish-American War ended miserably in Spanish defeat. The year marked the end of a world empire whose first steps had been set in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in Santo Domingo. For more than four centuries, Spain had been the most potent imperial power, even though the Wars of Liberation in nineteenth-century Latin America had considerably reduced its importance and economic strength. Faced with the backward situation of the countryside, the intense competition from the other European nations, and its own belated process of industrialization and modernization, Spain entered the twentieth century amidst a major intellectual, moral, political, and social crisis. Having lost most of its international network and prestige, the country had no other choice but to turn inwards and analyze the reality of its society in order to develop a new project and vision. The aftershock of the announced defeat provided an impetus for many intellectuals, including writers, philosophers, artists and architects, to diagnose their country’s ills and to seek ways to jolt the nation out of its predicament. Novelists, poets, essayists, intellectuals and philosophers active at the time of the lost war became known, in the expression of writer Azorín (1873-1967), as the Generation of 1898.4 Whereas this informal group shared primarily a literary and subjective approach to a new vision of Spain to be shaken from apathy and to be repositioned within a modernizing European scene, the Regeneracionismo or Regenerationist movement—that paralleled it and included some of the same actors— shared a more objective and more scientific aim at modernizing the country and “regenerating” the nation’s social and economic base.5 In this context of “deconstruction,” the question of “what is lo español”, i.e., the “national question” became of utmost importance across all disciplines, from literature to philosophy to politics, from the political right to the left.6 In the last decades of the nineteenth century already, there was a lingering impression that everything Spanish was diminished nationally and internationally. On one side of the debate were some intellectuals like Ángel Ganivet 4 José Augusto Trinidad Martínez Ruiz, alias Azorín, coined the expression in an article of 1913. See Ricardo Baroja, Gente del 98, Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1969; José Ortega y Gasset, Ensayos sobre la «Generación del 98» y otros escritores españoles contemporaneous, Madrid: Alianza, 1981; Azorín, La generación del 98, Salamanca: Anaya, 1961; Donald Leslie Shaw, La generación del 98, Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1977. 5 See Joseph Harrison and Alan Hoyle, Spain's 1898 Crisis: Regenerationism, Modernism, Postcolonialism, Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2000; Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898-1923, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997; Erik Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890-1930,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 89, no. 3, 1999; Erik Swyngedouw, Liquid Power and Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015. 6 For the following sections, see José Antonio Flores Soto, Aprendiendo de una arquitectura anónima: Influencias y relaciones en la Arquitectura española contemporánea: El INC en Extremadura, Doctoral Thesis, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 2013; Francisco Daniel Hernández Mateo, Teoría y pensamiento arquitectónico en la España contemporánea (1898-1948), Madrid: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2004; Ángel Urrutia, Arquitectura española contemporánea – Documentos, escritos, testimonios inéditos, Madrid: COAM, 2002. 44 (1865-1898), often considered as a precursor of the Generation of 1898.7 In what is considered his most important and philosophically richest work, the Idearium Español of 1896, the Granada-born author and diplomat projected a conservative and strongly spiritual voice. Rejecting the industry-based modernity, he insisted that Spain has to stand by itself, look into itself, and close the doors to foreign influences.8 On the other side, globally more representative of the evolving balance of power, members of the Generation of 98 and the Regeneracionists advocated a modernizing trajectory and the opening of Spain to its neighbors, what many called the ‘Europeanization’ of Spain. As philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) wrote in his third letter to Ganivet, published in El Porvenir de España: The intimate knowledge of what is foreign is the best way to get to know what is your own... A people who wants to regenerate by walling itself completely is like a man who wants to get out of a well by pulling on his ears. If among its virtues the Castilian people keep a deep vice, it is its self-imposed isolation, even when they live among other peoples. They ran land and seas among strange people, but always tucked into their shell. As they believe with stubborn ignorance that the resources of their soil will suffice for them to live the life that has become habitual today, closed in on themselves they also believe that they have in their traditional background everything they need to nourish their spirit and satisfy at the same time the imperative need for progress.9 Yet, both trends in this complex debate coincided on the fact that tradition was an important reality, even though they differed on its meaning. The conservative tended to see it as a fixed and immobile concept that had to resist modernity, whereas Unamuno and his followers argued that tradition was a living and evolving concept, and often the result of foreign influences. The “national” could only become richer through contacts with the rest of the world. Tradition needed to be studied, preserved, and reenergized, in order for Spain to enter modernity while maintaining its strong identity. As in other European countries, increasingly torn between the metropolitan globalization and the call for a return to the social values of smaller cities and towns, tradition in Spain meant to know, study, and cherish popular culture: 7 On Ángel Ganivet, see Julián Marías, “El 98 antes del 98: Ganivet,” RILCE (Universidad de Navarra) 13, nº 2, 1997, pp. 121-128; Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo, “Tres visiones de España (Unamuno, Ganivet y Machado),” Incursiones literarias, México: UNAM, Secretaría de Desarrollo Institucional: Dirección General de Publicaciones y Fomento Editorial y Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, pp. 65-110. 8 Ángel Ganivet, Idearium español, Madrid: Librería general de Victoriano Suárez, 1905 [1896]. 9 Miguel de Unamuno & Ángel Ganivet, El porvenir de España, Madrid: Renacimiento, 1912, pp. 188189 (Third letter from Miguel de Unamuno a Ángel Ganivet). El porvenir de España gathers four letters that both authors wrote to each other in 1898: “El conocimiento intimo de lo ajeno es el mejor medio de llegar a conocer lo propio… Un pueblo que quiera regenerarse encerrándose por completo en sí, es como un hombre que quiera sacarse de un pozo tirándose de las orejas. Si entre sus virtudes tiene algún vicio profundo el pueblo castellano es éste de su íntimo aislamiento, aunque vive entre otros pueblos. Corrió tierras y mares entre pueblos extraños, pero siempre metido en su caparazón. Así como cree con terca ignorancia que le bastarían los recursos de su suelo para vivir la vida que hoy se le ha hecho habitual, encerrado en sí, cree también que tiene en su fondo tradicional con qué nutrir su espíritu, satisfaciendo a la vez a la necesidad imperiosa de progreso.” 45 from its customs, traditions, crafts, music, all away to the urban and architectural environments that generated and protected them. In Spain, the increasing interest in popular culture rose exponentially during the last decades of the nineteenth century, mostly under the influence of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Education, I.L.E.). The I.L.E. was founded in 1876 by a group of professors—among whom was its primary leader Francisco Giner de los Ríos (1839-1915)— who separated themselves from the University in Madrid in order to defend the academic freedom and reject any interference in their teaching related to official dogmas in religious, political, and moral matters. Influenced by the writings of German philosopher and pedagogue Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832), Francisco Giner de los Ríos established the private institution as a progressive alternative to the University, before opening it up later to primary and secondary education. From 1876 until the civil war, the I.L.E. became the center of gravity of an entire era of Spanish culture and a channel for the introduction in Spain of the most advanced pedagogical and scientific theories.10 Among the faculty who resigned from the University and taught at the I.L.E., was the politician, economist, historian and leader of the Regeneracionismo movement, Joaquín Costa (1846-1911). 11 In his attempt to refocus and reenergize the attention of the country, he tirelessly advocated the revalorization of traditional customs, local histories, and popular culture, including the revalorization of Spanish towns, villages, and regional landscapes. Together and through their teaching, Giner de los Ríos, Manuel Bartolomé Cossio (1857-1935), a first-generation student of the I.L.E. who became its head at the death of Giner de los Ríos, and others like philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) contributed to the establishment of a cultural climate that would claim the values of the rural world, including in the architectonic field. Spain’s future would not be determined in its “ignominious present,” but in its distant past.12 It is within this intellectual framework that Unamuno coined the concept of intrahistoria. Dividing Spain’s past into “external history” and “internal history” (intrahistoria), he argued that the latter—“Spain’s true historical reality”—was the “spirit of the people.”13 As he wrote in En torno al casticismo, The newspapers say nothing of the silent life of the millions of men without history who at all hours of the day and in all the countries of the globe rise to the order of the sun and go to their fields to continue the dark and silent daily and eternal work.... On the august silence the sound rests and lives; over the immense silent humanity rise those who get bustled in history. That intra-historic life, silent and continuous as the 10 See Antonio Jiménez-Landi, Breve historia de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza (1896-1939), Madrid: Tébar, 2010. 11 On Joaquín Costa, see Chapter 2. 12 Jordana Mendelson, Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-39, University Part, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005, p. 52-sq. 13 The dictionary of the Real Academia de España defines intrahistoria as “Vida tradicional, que sirve de fondo permanente a la historia cambiante y visible” (traditional life which serves as permanent background to the changing and visible history). Also see Edward Inman Fox, La invención de España: Nacionalismo Liberal e identidad cultural, Madrid: Catédra, pp. 48-49. 46 very bottom of the sea, is the substance of progress, the true tradition, the eternal tradition, not the deceitful tradition that one goes to look for in the past, buried in books and papers, monuments, and stones.14 Rural Spain, whose rational and spiritual identity was formed through its relationship to the land and determined by regional differences, “would teach the urban intellectual the lessons that recent history had erased.”15 An excerpt from Cossio’s essay Elogio del Arte Popular of 1913 emphasized the connection between the collective—popular art—and the more individualistic or aristocratic—Art. It also reflected how important were the ideas of the I.L.E. in the education of the new generations: Because popular art, like language – both are anonymous creations born of the same process – embodies just the last and deepest elements, those primitive data of the soul of the multitude, which are called natural. From the amorphous background of the demo, sometimes the distinguished artist and the aristocratic work arise; from there sprout the differentiation, the schools, the transports of inspiration, and the accents of the creative geniuses. All of this, born out of popular art, reverts to it, incorporates in it, and he feeds on it, as Mother Earth lives and nourishes itself at the expense of the beings that her fertility engendered.16 1.1. From National to Regional Two years after the creation of the I.L.E, the young architect Lluís Domènech y Montaner (1850-1923) published, in Catalan, his famous essay “En busca de una arquitectura nacional,” published in La Renaixensa.17 Although the word “modern” did not appear in the essay’s title, Domènech i Montaner made it clear that the search was for a modern national 14 Miguel de Unamuno, En torno al casticismo, Madrid: Renacimiento, 1916 [1902], pp. 62-63, quoted by Flores Soto, p. 55: “Los periódicos nada dicen de la vida silenciosa de los millones de hombres sin historia que a todas horas del día y en todos los países del globo se levantan a una orden del sol y van a sus campos a proseguir la oscura y silenciosa labor cotidiana y eternal… Sobre el silencio augusto se apoya y vive el sonido; sobre la inmensa humanidad silenciosa se levantan los que meten bulla en la historia. Esa vida intrahistórica, silenciosa y continua como el fondo mismo del mar, es la sustancia del progreso, la verdadera tradición, la tradición eterna, no la tradición mentira que se suele ir a buscar al pasado enterrado en libros y papeles, y monumentos, y piedras.” 15 Jordana Mendelson, p. 53. 16 Manuel Bartolomé Cossio, “Elogio del arte popular,” Prólogo de Bordados populares y encajes, Exposición de Madrid, mayo, 1913, reprint in Anuario Brigantino, 2016, p. 219: “Porque el arte popular, a semejanza del lenguaje - anónima creación también de idéntico proceso- encarna justamente los últimos y más hondos elementos, aquellos datos primitivos del alma de la multitud, que por esto se llaman naturales. De ese fondo del demos, amorfo, surge a veces el artista distinguido y la obra aristocrática; brotan las diferenciaciones, las escuelas, los transportes de la inspiración, los acentos de los genios creadores, y todo esto, nacido, al arte popular nuevamente revierte y en él incorpora, y él de ello se alimenta, como la madre tierra vive y se nutre a expensas de los seres que fecunda engendrara.” 17 Lluis Domènech i Montaner, “En busca de una arquitectura nacional,” in La Renaixensa, 28 November 1878, pp. 149-160. In English, “In the search for a national architecture.” 47 architecture that would build upon the national styles—with a preference in Catalonia for the medieval and mudéjar—and adapt them to the contemporary conditions, including technological. In his opinion, the contemporary architect lived in a complex and modern civilization in which he had to deal with, and choose from, a plethora of artistic and material possibilities. In such a period of transition, a national architecture would take time to appear and consolidate, but in actuality the continuous exchange of knowledge between people and the assimilation of modernity could also make it impossible: in that scenario, “it would modern architecture, but not national.”18 Moreover, the contemporary architect had to accomplish two parallel tasks: to open the way for a new architecture and to realize the architectural structures that the new society needed urgently. The solution was the simultaneous use of the formal, constructive, and typological heritage of the history of architecture, and to adapt it to the needs and opportunities of modern society: Modern architecture, which is the daughter and heir of all past architectures, will rise above all, bejeweled with the treasures of the past and those of industry and science that it has acquired by itself.19 Domènech y Montaner’s vision for a modern national architecture was thus, in his own words, a “new type of eclecticism” that would be conditioned by the moral and material environment, would acknowledge the contaminations, and reveal a new force of expression in integrating the modern techniques and responding rationally to the new programs.20 To be sure, the manifesto was emblematic of the anxieties that ran under the surface of an architectural world that would soon enter forty glorious years and would change and enrich the urban landscape of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, but also many smaller towns, while establishing the premises of the future.21 Indeed, in the last decades of the nineteenth century and more intensely after the crisis of 1898, the architectural debates paralleled the general discussion at work in the country about national identity, the significance of popular architecture, and modernity. In particular, the question was whether a national architecture was really possible in a world that was evolving rapidly technologically, socially, and 18 Domènech i Montaner, p. 49. Lluís Domènech i Montaner, “En busca de una arquitectura nacional,” in La Renaixensa, 28 February 1878, pp. 149-160; reproduced in Utturia, pp. 46-53, here p. 48: “… la arquitectura moderna hija y heredera de todas las pasadas se alzará sobre todas enjoyada con los tesoros de aquellas y con los de la industria y la ciencia que han sido adquiridos por ella misma.” 20 See Urretia and Pepe Hereu, Josep María Montaner, and Jordi Oliveras, Textos de Arquitectura de la Modernidad, Hondarribia: Editorial Nerea, 1994, pp. 141-142. Urretia, pp. 35-36. Also see the first sections of the essay by Carlos Flores, "La obra de Regiones Devastadas en el contexto de la arquitectura española contemporanea," Arquitectura En Regiones Devastadas, Madrid: MOPU, 1987, pp. 51-59. 21 For the following sections of the essay, I have used references from Flores Soto, op. cit., Alfonso Muñoz Cosme, “Un siglo de investigación sobre la arquitectura tradicional en España,” in Alfonso Muñoz Cosme (ed.), Patrimonio Cultural De España – Arquitectura Tradicional. Homenaje a Felix Benito, Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 2014, pp. 21-42. 19 48 economically.22 They addressed the relevance of tradition, the merits of foreign influences, and under the encouragement of the Instituto Libre de Enseñanza, the necessity to know and see from one’s own eyes the historic heritage of the country. Manuel Cossio, in particular, made the issue of travel within the country a critical issue for the new students and, in 1904, a national law required travel to be included as a fundamental component of the University curriculum. Unamuno himself set up to discover the country in depth and published various works on his travels among which Por tierras de Portugal y de España (1911) and Andanzas y visions españolas (1922).23 On the architectural side, Vicente Lampérez y Romea (1861-1923) initiated, with the help of his students, an exhaustive campaign of investigation and documentation of the monumental architecture, whose publication would start from 1924 under the series’ title Catálogos monumentales.24 Over the years, the process focused more and more on popular architecture in towns and villages, to which Lampérez dedicated, for the first time in Spanish history, a sixty-eight page chapter in his Arquitectura civil española de los siglos I a XVIII published in 1922. This publication consolidated the research in progress and gave a critical impulse to more complete and detailed studies. To some extent, Lampérez y Romea became the theoretician of the national architecture and of the autochthonous against the foreign imports.25 In particular, he studied and advocated how Spanish styles could be adapted to the contemporary uses, thus separating what he called “estilos muertos” (romanesque, neoclassical) from the “estilos vivos” (mudéjar and renaissance). He was convinced that the national expressions of Spanish architecture were perfectly adaptable to the modern requirements, but also suggested that the new style could not be born from scratch, but that had to be formed by the slow and constant modification of the previous styles.26 In Madrid, the reconstruction of Calle Alcalà and the opening of the Gran Vía marked the triumph of the modernization of the national styles. Among the landmarks, the Casa de Correos (1905-1918) by Antonio Palacios & Otamendi deployed behind its historicist facades six floors of rationality and functionality where steel structures and glass floor walkways produced a unique interior space, only comparable to Otto Wagner in Vienna and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Also designed by Antonio Palacios, the Banco Española del Río de la Plata (1911-1918) was topped by an attic floor crowned with a glass cupola, while the 22 Those concerns about the international image of Spain following the crisis of 1898 received a symbolic but also political expression with the Spanish pavilion at the Universal Exposition in Paris (1900). The pavilion, a work of José Urioste y Velada, was built in “pure Renaissance style” and displayed a combination of various motifs from 16th and 17th century buildings. 23 See for instance Miguel de Unamuno, Por tierras de Portugal y de España, Madrid: Renacimiento, 1911, and Unamuno, Andanzas y visiones españolas, Madrid: Renacimiento, 1922. 24 From Flores Soto, p. 56 & sq. The first one, Catálogo Monumental de la Provincia de Cáceres was published in 1924 under the direction of José Ramón Mélida. The last ones were published in 1961 (Salamanca) and 1983 (Ávila). 25 Vicente Lampérez y Romea, Arquitectura Civil Española de los Siglos I al XVIII, Madrid: Editorial Saturnino Calleja, 1922. 26 See Carlos Sambricio, Madrid, vivienda y urbanismo 1900-1960 – De la "normalización de lo vernáculo" al Plan Regional, Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2004. 49 Círculo de Bellas Artes (1921-1926) appeared to be made of superimposed parts in various stylistic languages that corresponded to a highly complex section. As for the high-rise Palacio de la Prensa (Pedro Muguruza Otaño, 1924-1928) and the Edificio Telefónica (Ignacio De Cárdenas Pastor, 1926-1929), they introduced a new American-inspired skyline that did not exclude major Spanish stylistic references.27 At the occasion of the First Salón de Arquitectura in Madrid (1911), the Basque architect Leonardo Rucabado created the surprise by presenting an album of documentation drawings of popular architecture in Cantábria under the title Arquitectura popular montañesa. The same year he participated in the thematic competition La casa española and won with an entry in neo-montañés style.28 Until then his architecture had displayed a distinctive modern character, both anglophile and influenced by the Catalan Modernisme. Yet, Rucabado’s career veered in the opposite direction and the architect adopted a definitive regionalist stance that produced important neo-Basque edifices in Santander and other cities. As he wrote in 1918, Those spiritual aptitudes and predilections, those material singularities of the locality, when placed in timely operation and brilliantly channeled into happy and favorable historical moments of the people who possess them, are those that unfailingly point out the peculiar, intimate and profound character of what the artistic activity of that nationality, of that regional group, can and should cultivate with great probabilities of success. In synthesis, it is nothing other than the cult and the deliberate cultivation of the genuine tradition, which I have been preaching.29 Interestingly, some members of the Generation of 1898 took critical positions regarding the architectonic discourse in relation to the role of art in the regeneration of the country. In his book Granada la Bella of 1898, Ganivet denounced the trends of disrespectful modernization of the city and made a loud call in favor of an organic architecture that would be based upon the region and more specifically the rural environment. For him, a national regeneration needed to lean on the strong specificities of the regions; in other words, regionalism and 27 See COAM, Guía de arquitectura y urbanismo de Madrid, Madrid: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, 1982 (Tomo I. Casco antiguo). 28 See Leonardo Rucabado, Álbum de Arquitectura popular, I Salón de Arquitectura, 1911; and the modern publication, Isabel Ordieres Diez, El album de apuntes de Leonardo Rucabado, Bilbao: Xarait Ediciones, 1987. For a complete history see Carlos Velasco Barral, “La incorporación de la Arquitectura popular al Patrimonio Nacional: orígenes de sa valoración como monument histórico-artístico,” Ciudad y Territorio – Estudios territoriales, XLVI (182), 2014, pp. 1-17 (including legislation). The winning entry was published in Arte Español, nº 1, 1912. 29 Leonardo Rucabado Gómez, “La tradición en arquitectura. (Comentarios a la discusión de este concepto por el Congreso Nacional de Arquitectos celebrado en San Sebastián, el año de 1915)”, Arquitectura y construcción, n.34, Barcelona: Manuel Vega March, 1917, p. 39; quoted by Flores Soto, p. 117: “Esas espirituales aptitudes y predilecciones, esas singularidades materiales de la localidad, puestas en oportuno funcionamiento y brillantemente encauzadas en felices y favorables momentos históricos del pueblo que las posee, son las que señalan indefectiblemente, el carácter íntimo, profundo peculiar de lo que, la actividad artística de aquella nacionalidad, de aquella agrupación, regional, puede y debe cultivar con grandes probabilidades de éxito, lo que en síntesis no es otra cosa que el culto, el cultivo deliberado de la genuina tradición, que vengo predicando.” 50 nationalism were equivalent.30 Likewise, Azorín had warned about the potentially dangerous intervention of city-based architects within the fragile vernacular fabric of the countryside. In his opinion, in contrast with the anonymous builders, architects worked abstractly and usually did not take the regional conditions, like climate and materials, into consideration.31 Specifically it is at the National Congress of Architects (Congreso Nacional de Arquitectos) held in San Sebastián in 1915 that Rucabado, in association with the Seville architect Ánibal González, propounded the triumphant advance of the regionalist theses. Together they positioned themselves as the defenders and, in fact, the genuine instigators of a national architecture that would reject foreign influences and reflect the diversity of the regional. For the first time, they articulated the thesis that the establishment of a national architecture had to pass by the knowledge and the utilization of its regional manifestations in relation to climate, region, and materials. Their speech “Orientaciones para el resurgimiento de una Arquitectura nacional” (Oientations for the resurgence of a National architecture) concluded with a series of operational directions that firmly rejected any foreign influence, basically merged the concept of national with that of regional, and suggested that the future competitions for all major public buildings gave preference to the projects “inspired by the traditional styles of the region”: 1. The need for a resurgence of Spanish architectural art is necessary for our national dignity. 2. Spain does not show predilections for artistic freedom in architecture. 3. The cult of tradition is one quality of our race... 5. The practical establishment of a Spanish architectural art will have as essential inspiration the national historical styles, with their natural adaptations to place and time. 6. In the schools of Architecture, the teaching of our historical styles will be given great importance ... 10. The architectural competitions organized by the different Ministries, Provincial Councils, City Councils and other official institutions, should give preferences to the projects that are inspired by our traditional styles. 32 Taking a definitive stand in favor of regional tradition against the foreign modernizing influences, the tone and underlined threats contained in Rucabado and Gonzalez’s pro30 See Eric Storm, “Regionalismo y arquitectura en España, 1900-1930. Contexto cultural, ideología y logros concretos,” in Paula André & Carlos Sambricio (eds.), Arquitectura popular. Tradição e Vanguarda — Tradición y Vanguardia, Lisboa: Centro de Estudios sobre a Mudança Socioeconómica e o Território/Instituto Universitário de Lisboa 2016, pp. 52-53; also see https://openaccess.leiden univ.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/46525/ArquitecturaRegionalistaenEspana.pdf?sequence=1 31 See Eric Storm, pp. 50-51: Azorín, “La arquitectura”, ABC, 9 julio 1909, p. 6. 32 Aníbal Gonzalez and Leonardo Rucabado, “Orientaciones para el resurgimiento de una arquitectura nacional,” in Arte Español, nº 7-8, 1915, pp. 379-386/437-453, reprinted in Urrutia Nuñez, pp. 65-86, here p. 86: “1. Por dignidad nacional, se impone la necesidad de un resurgimiento del Arte español arquitectónico. 2. España no muestra predilecciones por la libertad artística en la arquitectura. 3. El culto de la tradición es uno de nuestros caracteres de raza…. 5, Las prácticas para la instauración del Arte arquitectónico español tendrá por inspiración esencial los estilos históricos nacionales, con las naturales adaptaciones de lugar y época. 6. En las escuelas de Arquitectura se dará capital importancia a la enseñanza de nuestros estilos históricos.…10. Se debe pretender que los concursos de proyectos que establezcan los diferentes Ministerios, Diputaciones, Ayuntamientos y demás Centros oficiales, determinen preferencias para los inspirados en nuestros estilos tradicionales.” 51 regionalist speech prompted an intense theoretical polemic.33 Yet, its influence was prolonged and manifold. First, it consolidated the use of regional styles, particularly for public buildings and residences of the middle and high bourgeoisie, often in the context of the garden suburbs; secondly, it coincided with the development of tourism and the need to consolidate a strong “Spanish image”; thirdly, it helped intensify a long-lasting period of research and study about the popular architecture and its regional forms across the country. However, it is important to distinguish the various theoretical and esthetic currents that were supported by the same research and interest on popular architecture and would develop over time and often in parallel: first, the “mimetic”, at times called pastiche, of a regionalist architecture that could be synthetized in Rucabado’s and González’s approach and practice; the rationalist inspiration for the development of a Spanish modern architecture that would guide the thinking of Leopoldo Torres Balbás, Fernando García Mercadal, and the GATEPAC in Barcelona; and thirdly, the first steps toward the conservation and restoration of pueblos, cities, and monuments. The theoretical reaction against the “Orientaciones” of Rucabado and González and what could be perceived as regionalist abuses such as excess of folklore, misinterpretations of the local tradition, and other potential falsifications of the past came from different actors in Spanish society. Demetrio Ribes (1875-1921), an architect active in Valencia where he built his masterpiece, the central train station in a singular adaptation of the decorative principles of the Sezession and the structural ones of Otto Wagner, defended the absolute creative freedom of the architect in relation to styles and modernizing tendencies.34 In May of 1918, the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos published the first issue of the periodical Arquitectura, which, over the years, published many articles about popular architecture. In the first issue, Leopoldo Torres Balbás (1888-1960) responded to the national/regional debate in signing his article “Mientras labran los sillares” (While they work the ashlars). Arguing against all dogmatic positions, he differentiated clearly between what he called the verdadero y sano casticismo (true and healthy casticismo) and the falso casticismo (false casticism). In relation to architecture, the latter involved a superficial process of copying, collaging, and manipulating elements of Spanish tradition, going from the mudéjar towers of Toledo to the University of Alcalá and other grand monuments. On the other hand, the casticismo sano was based upon a serious analysis of the past, from the monuments to the rural houses.35 From that process, the architect will derive the principles of the architecture that, in actuality, reside in the proportions, in the contrasts between light and shadows, in the relation between the 33 See Urrutia Nuñez, op. cit.; Hernández Mateo, op. cit.; Flores Soto, op. cit. Demetrio Ribes, “La tradición en arquitectura,” Arquitectura y Construcción, 1918, pp. 21-28; reprinted in Utturia, pp. 88-90. 35 Leopold Torres Balbás, “Mientras labran los sillares,” Arquitectura, nº 1, 1918, pp. 17-21. According to the Real Academia de España, “casticismo” can be defined as 1. Attachment to the castizo (Typical, genuine of the country or place in question) in the customs, usages and manners; 2. Attitude of those who, when speaking or writing, tend to use voices and traditional expressions. 34 52 masses and volumes, and other fundamental elements which only belong to Spanish architecture, high and low: You will know that the pinnacles of the Palace of Monterrey [in Salamanca] and its gallery of arched windows are isolated and episodic characters. The essence of that building is in its proportions, in the contrast between the large canvases of naked ashlar stone without windows or any decoration, the balconies, and the high gallery. You will also know that something analogous occurs in the façade of the [University of] Alcalá, that the Mudejar towers of Toledo form an inseparable whole with the churches and have proportions that are indissolubly connected to their forms; that the use of the horseshoe arch is an absurdity in contemporary constructions, and that it appalls our modern sensibility when it appears in new works.36 In his short essay “Nuevas casas antiguas” José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) described how “in the streets of Madrid we find every day a greater number of houses typically from Madrid. Similarly, Seville is filling up to the edges of ‘Sevillan’ things.” The philosopher saw progress in the construction of these new houses “in style.”37 They marked a return to a necessary concept of beauty, but he lamented that they were copied and selected from a catalogue rather than invented. Besides, the “stylistic” actuation of the architects, developers, and builders raised the question of the tradition castiza as well as that of nationalism. For Ortega, analyzing the concept of tradition in architecture meant to search for the common and invariable elements that made up its objective identity, i.e., the “invariants” that Fernando Chueca Goitia discussed after the war.38 As Ortega wrote in “La meditación del Quijote”, Isn’t it a cruel sarcasm that after three and a half centuries of wandering, we are being asked to follow the national tradition? The tradition! The traditional reality in Spain has consisted precisely in the progressive annihilation of the very possibility of Spain. No, we cannot follow the tradition. In my opinion, achieving Spanish-ness is a very high promise that has been fulfilled only in cases of extreme rarity. No, we cannot follow the tradition; quite the contrary. We have to go against tradition, beyond 36 Leopold Torres Balbás, “Mientras labran los sillares,” Arquitectura, nº 1, 1918, pp. 17-21, here p. 20, reprinted in Urrutia Nuñez, p. 94: “Sabrá que los pináculos de Monterrey y su galería, aislados, son caracteres episódicos, y que la esencia de ese edificio está en sus proporciones, en el contraste entre los grandes lienzos de sillería desnudos, sin ventanas ni decoración alguna, los balcones y el tema seguido de la galeria alta: sabrá asimismo que algo análogo ocurre en la fachada de Alcalá, que las torres mudéjares de Toledo forman un conjunto inseparable con sus iglesias y tienen unas proporciones unidas ya indisolublemente a sus formas; que el arco de herradura es absurdo emplearle en construcciones contemporáneas, y repugna a nuestra moderna sensiblidad en obras nuevas.” 37 See José Ortega y Gasset, “Nuevas casas antiguas [1926],” Obras completas, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957, vol. 2 (El Espectador, 1916-1934), pp. 549-51: “en las calles de Madrid encontramos cada día mayor número de casas madrileñas. Parejamente, Sevilla se está llenando hasta los bordes de sevillanerías.” The word ‘sevillanerías’ is quite ironic and implies a highly folkloric interpretation of what is genuinely Sevillan. 38 See Fernando Chueca Goitia, Invariantes castizos de la Arquitectura española, Madrid: Editorial Dossalt, 1947. 53 tradition.39 For Ortega, “raza” or race meant the ensemble of circumstances that have accompanied culturally the men and women of a particular region or nation. National styles and popular architecture related unquestionably with the small town, the pueblo, and eventually the rural, against the ‘globalized’ forms of architecture to be deployed within the metropolis. 40 Ortega’s concept of the popular and tradition was the main influence on Torres Balbás, who developed his concept of “sano casticismo” to support this vision of tradition in flux: Let us spread this healthy casticismo [national character] open to all influences, studying the architecture of our country, visiting its cities, towns and fields, analyzing, measuring, drawing the old buildings of all times, not only the monumental and richest, but also, and perhaps preferably, the very modest ones, those that constitute the everyday, popular and anonymous architecture, in whose forms a secular tradition has been perpetuated, and in which we will be able to perceive better the constructive spirit of our race.41 Beyond his role as architectural critic and editor, Torres Balbás was also a historian and an architect in charge of important restoration works, including the Alhambra in Granada. In 1923, he won the first prize in a competition organized by the Ateneo de Madrid regarding popular architecture in the regions of Spain. It was published in 1931, in an augmented version, under the title Folklore y costumbres de España.42 Contrary to Lampérez, his focus was not historical but geographical, with the two parts dedicated respectively to the rainy and arid regions of Spain, and a detailed presentation of building types, constructive systems, and materials.43 Another important critic of the falsified regionalism was the Madrid-based Teodoro de Anasagasti y Algán (1880-1938). A Rome Fellow from 1910 to 1914, he had a great 39 José Ortega y Gasset, La meditación del Quijote, Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 1914, p. 132133: “¿No es un cruel sarcasmo que luego de tres siglos y medio de descampado vagar, se nos proponga seguir la tradición nacional? ¡La tradición! La realidad tradicional en España ha consistido precisamente en el aniquilamiento progresivo de la posibilidad España. No, no podemos seguir la tradición. Español significa para mí una altísima promesa que solo en casos de extrema rareza ha sido cumplida. No, no podemos seguir la tradición; todo lo contrario; tenemos que ir contra la tradición, más allá de la tradición.” 40 See Carlos Sambricio, “La tradición, lo popular y la raza. Elementos de un debate en la arquitectura del primer tercio del siglo,” in Carlos Sambricio (ed.), Madrid, vivienda y urbanismo: 1900-1960, Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2004, pp. 85-100. 41 Torres Balbás, op. cit., p. 20, reprinted in Urrutia Nuñez, p. 94: “Propaguemos este sano casticismo abierto a todas las influencias, estudiando la arquitectura de nuestro país, recorriendo sus ciudades, pueblos y campos, analizando, midiendo, dibujando los viejos edificios de todos los tiempos, no sólo los monumentales y más ricos, sino también, y tal vez con preferencia, los modestísimos que constituyen esa arquitectura cotidiana, popular y anónima, en cuyas formas se va perpetuando una secular tradición, y en la que podremos percibir mejor el espíritu constructivo de nuestra raza.” 42 Muñoz Cosme, p. 23: Leopoldo Torres Balbás, “La arquitectura de las distintas regiones de España,” Memoria ganadora del premio Charro Hidalgo del Ateneo Científico y Literario de Madrid, 1923; Francesch Carreras y Candi (ed.), Folklore y costumbres de España, Barcelona: Casa Editorial Alberto Martín, 1931. 43 For more published works on regional architecture during the period, see Muñoz Cosme, p. 25. 54 knowledge of Austrian and German architecture, from Otto Wagner to Sant’Elia and the Futurists, and repeatedly stressed the importance of technique, the logic of construction, and the expression of new materials. In an essay of 1918, he wrote, “La tradición, el plagio y el pastiche nos envenenan” (Tradition, plagiarism and pastiche are poisoning us).”44 The year before, he won the competition for the Casa de Correos de Málaga (1917-1925), a powerful and beautifully crafted building, that demonstrated against González and Rucabado, that the regionalist option was entirely compatible with the development of modern architecture. His introduction lecture to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes, Arquitectura popular of 1929, was a plaidoyer in favor and in defense of the genuine popular architecture, “that of the national stock, the indigenous, the one we could call the country's own index.”45 He denounced the continuous and ruthless demolition, abandonment, and mutilation inflicted to popular architecture across the country. Likewise, he condemned the substitution of the authentic vernacular architecture by new constructions that were falsely traditional and that made an uncritical use of industrialized materials. Yet, a more critical point in his speech was that most of the interest given to popular architecture, not only in Spain but also abroad and particularly in the United States, continued to focus on the dwelling as an isolated object, often devoid of a real context. Hence, he emphasized that even if the study of the popular was truly complete, … it would show only one aspect of this architecture, because it would lack the analysis of the urban groupings, so diverse according to climates and civilizations.46 Notwithstanding all the theoretical debates, from 1915 onwards, the regionalist trend dominated the field, particularly outside of Madrid, often producing architecture of outstanding quality. Rucabado died young in 1918 but Aníbal Gonzalez Álvarez-Ossorio (1876-1929) produced great works in Andalusia.47 His masterpiece was the Plaza de España at the 1929 Universal Exposición in Seville, that, more than a work of regionalist architecture, was first of all a great intervention of urban design, an edifice-plaza, hence a completely modern concept. Far from being a manifestation of ‘façadism,” frequent in the Ensanche de Salamanca for instance—as some authors like Flores Soto have argued—the new regionalism actually enticed the development of a modern three-dimensional architecture that often took place in new urban or suburban neighborhoods. The Casa de Correos in Málaga by Anasagasti is a good example as it occupies almost a full block and exploits all the opportunities created by the multiple vistas that its position allows. Richard Etlin developed this issue from an Italian 44 Teodoro de Anasagasti y Algán, “La tradición, el plagio y el pastiche nos envenenan”, 1918, p.1. Teodoro de Anasagasti y Algán, "Arquitectura Popular – Discurso de entrada a la Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando." in Emilia Hernández Pezzi (ed.), Anasagasti: Obra Completa, Madrid: Ministerio de Fomento, Centro de Publicaciones, 2003, p. 305: “[la] del acervo nacional, lo indígena, la que podríamos llamar índice propio del país.” 46 Ibidem: “no mostraría más que un aspect de esta arquitectura. Porque le faltarián el análisis de las agrupaciones urbanas, tan diversas según los climas y las civilizaciones.” 47 Victor Pérez Escolano, “La Arquitectura de Aníbal González,” Hogar y Arquitectura, nº 82, May-June 1969, pp. 9-126 45 55 point of view and made important observations about the regionalist movement in Rome. Once freed from the hygienic grid and placed within a more artistic context, the vistas, the special points of views, the articulation of public spaces clearly helped architects to develop an architectural language that achieved a complex impact through its insertion in the new city. In this contextual approach it was logical that the renewed values of the vernacular cultures were brought to the forefront of the search for modernity in Italy but also in Germany, Spain, Sweden, to only name a few. In that sense, one can argue that, at its best, regionalism, which benefitted from the urban principles of Camillo Sitte and Ebenezer Howard, helped produce an architecture that was stylistically conservative but typologically modern.48 1.2. Vernacular and Workers’ Housing From the end of World War One onwards the study of popular architecture was seen as the basis for a new Spanish architecture of low-cost houses for the working class.49 In 1919, following the Inter-Allied Conference on the Reconstruction in Paris, Amós Salvador (18791963) reported in an article of Civitas that a new process of normalization and standardization of building materials, windows, doors, and furnishings was being implemented in the reconstruction of Belgium and other regions of Northern Europe.50 He argued, along with Cebrià de Montoliú and Torres Balbás, among others, that the same system should be applied in Spain to diminish the cost of housing and incentivize the construction industry. Spanish economy was booming during the 1910s as the country stood apart of the devastations of the WW1 and benefited from the industrial slowdown in war-torn countries. Consequently, rationalizing construction was critical to respond to the increasing migratory flux from the countryside toward the cities as well as to give a solution to substandard conditions of life in cities and towns as well as to major urban works, such as the opening of the Gran Vía in Madrid, that destroyed thousands of dwellings. In contrast to the developing debate in advanced industrial countries about full-fledged industrialization, the Spanish architects, specialists of vernacular architecture, and housing advocates oriented their reflection toward normalization and a new standardization of the vernacular production in order to conserve the traditional systems of production and to adopt solutions confirmed by tradition and the availability of abundant and qualified manpower. Hence, the study of the 48 See Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture 1890-1940, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991, p. 100 & sq. 49 A section of this essay was published in Jean-François Lejeune, “The modern, the Vernacular, and the Mediterranean in Spain: Sert, Coderch, de la Sota, Fernández del Amo, Bohigas,” in Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 65-94. 50 Civitas, 9 May 1916. For this section, see Carlos Sambricio, “La normalización de la arquitectura vernácula: un debate en la España de los veinte,” in Revista de Occidente, nº 235, December 2000, pp. 21-44; here pp. 23-24. A more detailed essay with the same title can be found in Carlos Sambricio, Madrid, vivienda y urbanismo – De la “normalización de la vernáculo” al Plan Regional, Madrid, Ediciones Akai, 2004. For the conference, see “Hygienic Reconstruction of War Devastation: an InterAllied Conference in Paris,” The Lancet, Volume 193, Issue 4994, 17 May 1919, pp. 856-857. On Amós Salvador, see Víctor del Reguero, Amós Salvador y Carreras, León: Piélago del Moro, 2011. 56 popular presupposed to precisely analyze the constructive elements in order to search for the optimal conditions of standardization, normalization, and implementation.51 As Carlos Sambricio wrote: To normalize meant to standardize the vernacular; it meant to look for a solution to the problem of building low-cost and hygienic dwellings; it became the action plan to establish a new policy of housing in a city which was being transformed into a metropolis.52 This policy implied the development of specialized workers’ neighborhoods in the periphery of major cities. Following unsuccessful attempts during the second half of the nineteenth century, the first laws of Casas Baratas (Economical Houses) were promulgated in 1911 and then revised in 1921 to make them more efficient and financially more applicable. From 1921 onwards, the projects of casas baratas were increasingly managed by housing cooperatives or specific public institutions like municipalities and political parties, which guaranteed a higher rate of adaptation to the needs of the working class. In 1926 the Socialist Parti and its leader Julián Besteiro saw strong convergences between Primo de Rivera’s policies of lowcost vernacular houses, and their own assumptions based upon the Austro-marxist principles of Otto Bauer, whose Der Weg zum Sozialismus [The Road to Socialism, 1919] was published in Spain in 1920. 53 The popular constructions—or casas baratas—became the point of departure for a program of participation of the Socialist parti to the de Rivera government.54 The morphological model of the casas baratas districts was the Garden City theorized by Ebenezer Howard whose writings and advocacy were introduced in Spain in the early 1910s by the Catalan urbanist and social reformer Cebría de Montoliú I de Togores. A “cultural agitator in matters of urban planning,” he traveled extensively in 1910-1911, meeting with the most important world planners and visiting the Expositions of Berlin and Düsseldorf. Then he founded the Sociedad Cívica Ciudad Jardín in 1912, edited the influential magazine Civitas (1914-1919), and strove to make the garden city and suburb a tool of urban and progressive social reform.55 More specifically, the Sociedad Cívica distinguished between three different 51 See Carlos Sambricio, “La normalización de la arquitectura vernácula: un debate en la España de los veinte,” in Revista de Occidente, nº 235, December 2000, pp. 21-44; here pp. 23-24. 52 Ibidem, p. 44. 53 Carlos Sambricio, Cuando se quiso resucitar la arquitectura, Murcia, Comisión de Cultura del Colegio Oficial de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Técnicos, 1983, p. 29. For the influence of Otto Bauer in Vienna, see Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1999. See Otto Bauer, Der Weg zum Sozialismus, Wien, Ignaz Brand, 1919 [In English, The Road to Socialism, 1919]. 54 On the casas baratas program, see Federico López Valencia, Las casas baratas en España, Madrid, Establecimiento tipográfico, 1928; Paloma Barreiro Pereira, Casas baratas: la vivienda social en Madrid, 1900-1939, Madrid, Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, 1992; Ana Julia Gómez Gómez and Javier Ruiz San Miguel, Las Casas Baratas De Bilbao 1911-1936, Bilbao: Polidori, 2004. 55 Susan Larson, “The Ciutat Jardí in the United States: Cebrià di Montoliú's Fairhope, Alabama, City Plan of 1921,” in Diseñar América/Designing America: El trazado español de los Estados Unidos, Fundación Consejo España-Estados Unidos, 2014, pp. 122-133. The Madrid section of the Sociedad Cívica was created in 1919. 57 concepts of usually quite different sizes: the garden city, the garden suburb, and the garden villas and colonies. For Montoliú this manner of making the modern city was inseparable from the worker dwelling concept and the cooperative movements. As applied in the middle-class and high bourgeoisie contexts, the garden city model entailed a vision of picturesque—a mix of medieval and Baroque design—supported by an architecture whose references were definitely regionalist. On the contrary, the districts of casas baratas were simplified to minimize costs: the grid became the common urban design standard and the architecture essentially an economical derivation from the popular architecture of towns and villages. The typological model was the small vernacular house of the countryside, one or two floors high, usually detached, and built in non-urbanized or poorly urbanized areas on the fringes of Madrid, Zaragoza, Tarragona, and other middle and large cities. At the same time, the movement of the casas baratas was instrumental to change the conditions of the debate about the new “national architecture.” As we have seen earlier, the concept of national was progressively replaced by the study of the vernacular and it increasingly dissolved in the study and use of regional styles perceived as more authentic and in fact potentially more modern. For Torres Balbás—the key figure of the debate along with his colleagues Gustavo Fernández Balbuena and Amós Salvador—the study of the vernacular was to become the system of reference in order to solve concrete housing problems, thus shedding away any remnant of a romantic vision of craft. Torres Balbás, who had intuited the difference between conservative thinking and the study of tradition, developed his reflection on contemporary architecture in parallel with the debate that had taken place earlier within the German Werkbund. In 1910 Muthesius had explicitly argued that the defense of a national architecture and the Heimatsbewegung of regional identity was a danger for the needed progress in construction. It was thus necessary to arrive to a simplification of the forms that would lead to a modern architecture.56 The Spanish architect saw it as an opportunity to rejuvenate the discussion about national identity by opening it up to foreign (mostly German) influences: There exists a type of architectural “chauvinism” that scorns the trivial and rather searches for the essence of buildings, and, with confidence, does not fear the contact with all foreign art that could fertilize it. Our task is to propagate that type of healthy “chauvinism,” open to all occurrences; and to do so we must study the architecture of our country, travel across its cities and countryside, and draw and measure the old buildings.57 56 Sambricio, “La normalización de la arquitectura vernacular,” p. 36. Torres Balbás, quoted by Sambricio, pp. 41-42: Leopoldo Torres Balbás, “Mientras labran los sillares…,” in Arquitectura, nº 2, 1918, pp. 31-34; reprinted in Ángel Urrutia Núñez, p. 91-94, quote in p. 94. 57 58 For Torres Balbás, who followed the lessons of Ortega y Gasset but also of Heinrich Tessenow, the study of tradition had to involve a reflection on the techniques of construction, on typologies, and eventually on a more abstract interpretation of the concept that would frame the more radical direction for a truly modern architecture inspired by the vernacular. In this fundamental debate one must emphasize the role of Luis Lacasa Navarro (1899-1966), later to be co-designer with Josep Lluis Sert of the Spanish Pavilion in the Paris Exposition of 1937. In 1921 he went to study urbanism in Germany and, at his return in Spain, helped propagate the terms of the German context through the works of Tessenow and Muthesius— he was their original translator—and their role within the Werkbund.58 When he wrote the review in 1924 of Muthesius’s book Kleinhaus und Kleinsiedlung, he emphasized that the cost of construction was only one issue and that the whole problem was social and ethical. Lacasa’s concerns paralleled those discussed by Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut when they accused Gropius—at the time of the Dammerstock Siedlung project—of avoiding the main question, i.e. that cost reduction was more intimately linked to the interests rates than to any real saving in construction: “The agenda is not to enlarge windows and save space, but to increase the buying power of families by lifting their revenues and reducing the prices of housing.”59 Nevertheless, Lacasa argued that putting narrow houses in rows and reducing the number of types would limit costs, especially—and here again we find the unique Spanish urban/Mediterranean point of view—if they were built along the narrow streets typical of small towns and pueblos and thus gave a more rural character to the whole ensemble.60 Likewise, Amós Salvador, at the time of the CIAM of 1929, established a set of criteria for Spanish minimal housing that the GATEPAC recuperated in some reduced form in the 1930s. In this context, it is worth mentioning the importance of the Residencia de Estudiantes, a complex of buildings built from 1913 on the Collina de los Chopos in Madrid at the initiative of the Instituto Libre de Enseñanza. There, the architect Antonio López Urdapilleta built a series of modern buildings, all in brick and of mudéjar style, equipped with the most modern technologies. The first two structures, known as the “twin pavilions”, with their clean architectural lines and beautiful proportions, were praised by Walter Gropius at the occasion of a lecture he gave there in 1930, stating that “new forms arise from the essence of the architectural project, from the function that it has to provide.”61 58 Sambricio, p. 41. Quoted by Winfried Nerdinger, Walter Gropius: Opera Completa, Milan: Electa, 1988, p. 34, from Martin Steinmann, CIAM. Dokumente1928-1939, Basel & Stuttgart, 1979, p. 70. Hermann Muthesius, Kleinhaus und Kleinsiedlung, Saldwasser Verklag, 1918. 60 See Concepción Diez-Pastor Iribas, “La vivienda mínima en España: primer paso del debate sobre la vivienda social,” Scripta Nova: revista eléctronica de geografía y ciencias sociales VII, nº 146, August 2003, p. 9. 61 Salvador Guerrero (ed.), Antonio Flórez, arquitecto (1877-1941), Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 2002. 59 59 1.3. García Mercadal in Madrid As architect and scholar, Fernando García Mercadal (1896-1985) was the most influential voice of the Generación del 25.62 Architect and historian Carlos Flores coined the expression to describe the generation of young architects who graduated from the School of Madrid between 1918 and 1923 and worked within the Madrid environment. Mercadal, along with colleagues like Luis Lacasa (1899-1966), Rafael Bergamín (1891-1970), and Carlos Arniches Moltó (1895-1958), headed an educated and cosmopolitan group which established the first serious contacts with the European modern architects and were definitely absorbing their progressive agenda. 63 Born in Zaragoza, García Mercadal graduated from the School of Madrid in 1921, where he recognized as most influential professors, Antonio Palacios and Teodoro de Anasagasti.64 Perhaps on the recommendation of the latter, he applied to the Academia de España in Rome and won a 3-year fellowship from October 1923 to September 1927. There he developed his interest in vernacular architecture, mainly Mediterranean, while traveling to the South, Capri and the Amalfi peninsula, and then Greece and Istanbul (1924). Elaborated in 1924, his book Camino de Grecia. Notas del primer viaje (Febrero 1924) was eventually published sixty years later. In an exhibition at the Academia in 1925 he presented some studies on Pompeian houses, but more significant was the series of drawings on the theme of the Casa Mediterránea (Mediterranean House), ranging from the Amalfi Coast to Capri to Greece and Santorin: During my prolonged stays in Paris, Vienna and Berlin... I noticed that the architecture that was being made and taught, from the end of the First World War, looked like these popular constructions, which are known for their covered terraces, their absence of decoration, as well as their elementary functionalism... This popular architecture of the Mediterranean, of its islands and coastlines, dates back several centuries before the architectural ‘cubism’ of modern trends.65 62 Carlos Flores, Arquitectura española contemporánea, Madrid: Aguilar, 1961; Concha Diez-Pastor, Carlos Arniches y Martín Domínguez, arquitectos de la Generación del 25, Madrid: Mairea, 2005. 63 See Paloma Barreiro Perreira, “García Mercadal, espiritú abierto y receptive,” in Fernando García Mercadal, La vivienda en Europa y otras cuestiones, Zaragoza: Institución ‘Fernando el Católico, 1998, p. xii; Oriol Bohigas, Arquitectura española de la Segunda República, Barcelona: Tusquets, 1970, p. 46. 64 See Sofía Diéguez Patao, Fernando García Mercadal, pionero de la modernidad, Madrid: Artes Gráficas Municipales, 1997; Ángeles Layuno Rosas, “Fernando García Mercadal, tradición e historia en la arquitectura de la modernidad,” in Miguel Ángel Chaves Martin (ed.), Fernando García Mercadal. Arquitectura y fotografía – Una mirada al patrimonio arquitectónico de Segovia, 1929-1936, Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2011, pp. 49-105. 65 Fernando García Mercadal, sobre el Mediterráneo, sus litorales, pueblos, culturas (imágenes y recuerdos) – Discurso leido por el arquitecto Don Fernando García Mercadal el día 20 de abril de 1980 con motivo de su recepción, Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1980, pp. 37-38: “Durante mis prolongadas estancias en Paris, Viena y Berlín… observe que la arquitectura que se hacía y enseñaba, a partir del final de la primera guerra mundial, se parecía a estas construcciones populares por sus cubiertas en terrazas, su ausencia de decoración, así como por el elemental funcionalismo…. Estas arquitecturas populares mediterráneas, de sus islas y litorales, datan de varios siglos antes del “cubismo” arquitectónico de las modernas tendencias.” 60 His focus on the relation between the Mediterranean and modernity was reflected in the article of 1926 published in Arquitectura under the title “Arquitectura mediterránea” and the following one “Arquitectura mediterránea II” one year later. In the first one he mentioned the studies of Albert Demangeon on rural habitat and of Augustin Bernard on indigenous Algeria to argue for the unity of purpose and the construction rationalism that tie the rural houses throughout the Mediterranean. He emphasized the relation geography/architecture, and particularly the concept of the “house as natural vegetation.” 66 He accompanied the text with his drawings for the Casa a la Orilla del Mar and the Casa in Sicilia, both of them showing influences from Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Adolf Loos. In the second article he presented his project for a Club Naútico and the Casa para el ingeniero, the latter showing influences from Mendelsohn and Loos again. 67 Beyond the Mediterranean, traveled to Vienna in the spring of 1924 where he met Josef Hoffmann and probably was made aware of the Austrian admiration for the architecture of Capri. Twenty-five years earlier, Hoffmann did not limit himself to an attentive analysis of the compositional interplay of the pure volumes of the island architecture, which he fixed in around two hundred drawings, but published upon his return a significant essay in the pages of Der Architekt (1897). Mercadal’s own familiarity with the architecture of Schinkel and Loos must have given him another impulse toward the modern promises of the Mediterranean.68 The following year he visited the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris where he was introduced to Le Corbusier. In 1926 he followed courses at the Institut d’Urbanisme with Marcel Poëte and Jacques Gréber. Later, fluent in German, he attended the Seminar of Urbanism at the Technische Universität in Charlottenburg with Hans Poelzig and Hermann Jansen. Back in Spain, he carefully compiled the results of his years of travel in a Memoria, titled La vivienda en Europa y otras cuestiones (1926). This manuscript, that integrated many articles published in ABC and Arquitectura, reflected his deep interest into the development of modern housing across Europe, often through the lens of the garden city and garden suburb. Guided by his understanding that the geographical phenomenon most intimately connected to human life was the dwelling, he discussed modern housing and the garden city in their variety of national and regional forms, from Letchworth to the Netherlands, to the French and 66 See Layuno Rosas, p. 60; Augustin Bernard, Enquête sur l’habitation rurale des indigènes de l’Algérie, Algiers, Fontana frères, 1921; 67 Fernando García Mercadal, “Arquitectura Mediterránea,” in Arquitectura 85, May 1926, 192-197; “Arquitectura Mediterránea II,” in Arquitectura 97, May 1927, pp. 190-193. Mercadal’s book of synthesis on the Mediterranean was only published in 1984: La Casa Mediterránea, Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Dirección General de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1984. 68 See Benedetto Gravagnuolo, “From Schinkel to Le Corbusier: The Myth of the Mediterranean in Modern Architecture,” in Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean – Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 15-40; Josef Hoffmann, “Architektonisches von der Insel Capri,” Der Architekt III, 13, 1897, pp. 13-14. 61 German examples.69 Moreover, Mercadal introduced for the first time the generation of architects who were involved in looking for new directions and solutions to the problem of the social dwelling: the German Bruno Taut, Paul Wolf and Hannes Meyer, and the Dutch Dudok, Berlage, Brinkman, Oud, Wils, Staal and De Klerk.70 A special issue of the periodical La Gaceta Literaria (15th April 1928) followed under the title “Nuevo Arte en el Mundo – Arquitectura, 1928.” Illustrated with projects by J.P. Oud, Le Corbusier (Palais des Nations, Villa Garches), the Bauhaus-Dessau, the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, and a modern house in Stuttgart, La Gaceta Literaria offered an instantaneous panorama of modern architecture. Oud, Zuazo, Taut, Le Corbusier, Moreno Villa, and others responded to Mercadal’s questionnaire about the relationship between modern literature and modern architecture, while the first page reproduced some excerpts from Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos ou l’architecte (1921). Also important was the introduction by Ortega y Gasset: The average man triumphs. But this average man has been awakened, we do not know how, suddenly, to a fine sensibility for the pure form and the pure colour, that are the opposite of the form and colour attached to things and always impure. In addition, he lives outdoors. Architecture, as art, has always assumed that if a man abandons his habitation and then looks at it from outside he will be nothing but embarrassed. The architecture that builds the interior is paradoxically the exterior art par excellence. Our age is this - the evasion towards exteriority.71 In 1927-1928 Mercadal built the first Spanish example of Rationalist architecture: the librarymuseum Rincón de Goya, “a modern creation but also a concretion of their ideas, a kind of doctrinal manifesto” built in a public park in the place of the sculptural monument originally planned. 72 El Rincón de Goya and his other built or unbuilt projects demonstrated how he intended to use the traditions of the Mediterranean architecture to develop a modern project. Likewise, the new middle-class single-family districts to the north of Madrid such as the Colonia Parque Residencia—planned by Bergamín and Luis Blanco Soler, 1931-1934—and the Colonia El Viso—planned by Bergamín from 1934 with houses by Mercadal, Bergamín and Luis Gutiérrez Soto among others—became the showpieces of the new Mediterraneaninspired rationalist architecture in the capital. The Colonia El Viso, where some of the most important professional and intellectuals of the period like Ortega y Gasset and Salvador de 69 The Memoria was only published in 1998. See Fernando García Mercadal, La Vivienda en Europa y otras questiones. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando El Católico – C.S.I.C., 1998, with a prologue by Paloma Barreiro Pereira. 70 See Diez-Pastor, p. 9. 71 La Gaceta Literaria, 15th April 1928, p. 1: “Triunfa el hombre medio. Pero a este hombre medio se le ha despertado, no se sabe cómo, súbitamente, una fina sensibiíidad para la pura forma y el puro color que son lo contrario de la forma y color anejos a las cosas y siempre impuros. Además, se vive al aire libre. La arquitectura, como arte, supone siempre que el hombre abandona su habitacúlo y al verlo desde fuera se avergüenza de él. La arquitectura que construye el interior es paradójicamente el arte exterior por excelencia. Nuestra época es esto — la evasión hacia ía exterioridad.” 72 Antonio Bonet Correa, Introduction to the new edition of Fernando García Mercadal, La casa popular en España, Barcelona, Editorial Gili, 1981, p. IX: “una creación moderna sino también una concreción de sus ideas, una especie de manifiesto doctrinal.” 62 Madariaga lived, showed strong influences from modern German Siedlungen in terms of morphology and typology. The colonies were the middle-class version of the casas baratas, but in the mid-1930s their planning had taken a turn toward modernity. During those years, Mercadal was the most distinguished and travelled architect in the campaign to link Spanish architecture with modern developments in Europe. He was a founding member of CIAM at La Sarraz, and organized a number of conferences at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, inviting some of the most notable contemporary architects, including Erich Mendelsohn, Theo van Doesburg, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier. Through his critical role of mediator between a modernized tradition (Torres Balbás) and modernism (CIAM), Mercadal embraced Le Corbusier’s ideas, but remained wary of the consequences of an “international agenda” on national values: [The] intellectual spirit of the southern people and its manifestation in civic art are today under threat. Our modern Zeitgeist tends to level and standardize all the ways of life; likewise, modern architecture, which should aim at the synthesis of all creative elements, turns out, with its powerful means of expression, to overturn and neutralize the sacred laws derived from the land and the race….73 As Layuno Rosas reminds us, while he was deep in studying the Mediterranean, Mercadal also explored the popular architectures of Castilla and other regions of Spain. As a good disciple of the Instituto Libre de Enseñanza and their leaders Francisco Giner de los Ríos and Manuel B. Cossío, he saw no contradiction between being at the same time a modern man and a deep admirer of the popular heritage and its lessons of simplicity and adaptation to the context. This work of investigation that resulted in many drawings, sketches, and photographs, surged within an intellectual—and increasingly professional—context dominated, as we have seen, by the figure of Torres Balbás, the tip of an iceberg of many historians, photographers, and ethnographers, which were deeply involved with popular architecture and culture.74 In 1930, he published La casa popular en España, the culmination of years of research on the various forms of regional vernacular, and in particular the rural house. Undoubtedly, like Torres Balbás, Mercadal’s interest in popular architecture was a prospective one in the sense that he saw it as a potential source for a Spanish modern architecture within the evolving European context: “Mercadal, who had studied popular architecture… in situ, visiting villages and hamlets, sketching and making notes on the spot, admired more than anything what they represented ‘as examples of logic and rationalism.”75 Illustrated with dozens of black and white sketches, the book covered all regions of Spain from Navarra to Catalonia to Andalusia 73 Fernando García Mercadal, La Casa Mediterránea, Madrid, Dirección General de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1984, p. 16. 74 Layuno Rosas, p. 66. 75 Antonio Bonet Correa, p. XV. 63 and the Balearic islands. In his introduction, the author summarized the importance of the casa popular: The house is the work that best reflects not only the way of being of the people, but also the relations between one and the other The popular house is always national art; [Joaquín] Costa has taught us that is the axis of rural life, the symbol of the family institution.76 Likewise, he insisted on the functionality of the rural house, i.e., on its “agricultural function, given that the peasant conceives and constructs his house tectonically, as an utensil or working tool….”77 It is in the pages dedicated to the Mediterranean island of Minorca, that he could anticipate the essential argument of Mediterranean modernism, as it would develop operationally by José Luis Sert across the GATCPAC and the CIAM meetings: Mahón, which is all geometry, might easily fulfill the aspirations of the most fanatical Cubists.78 1.4. Nationalism, and Noucentism in Catalonia Three years after the defeat of the Spanish-American Wars, the elections of 1901 brought the pivotal victory of the Catalan nationalist party, the Lliga Regionalista.79 The new social, political, and aesthetic sensibility that emerged from that victory coalesced into a specifically Catalan regenerationist vision, “the dream of projecting Catalunya into the orbit of advanced nations while creating the ‘ideal’ urban space of Mediterranean ‘civility’ at home.”80 The origin of this intellectual quest toward a “rediscovery” of the Mediterranean roots, both classical and vernacular, can be situated at the beginning of the twentieth century, when philosopher, writer, and essayist Eugeni d’Ors (1881-1954) advanced and promoted a culturally and politically nationalist project that would be based upon the return to a mythical Mediterranean past dominated by the Greek ideal—“a metaphor of progress, sea, commerce and opening of the borders.”81 D’Ors titled the movement Noucentisme. His writings about the new Catalonian cultural identity defended the classical, Greco-Roman inheritance of the past, as 76 García Mercadal, La casa popular in España, p. 7: “La casa es la obra que major refleja no solo la manera de ser de los pueblos, sino las relaciones entre unos y otros, y la casa popular, particularmente, es siempre arte nacional; [Joaquín] Costa la ha enseñado como eje de la vida rural; el símbolo de la institución familiar.” 77 Ibidem, p.9. 78 Ibidem, p. 54. 79 This section borrows from my essay, op. cit., “The Modern and the Mediterranean in Spain,” pp. 6594. 80 See Olivier Thomas Kramsch, “Towards the ‘Ideal City’ of Noucentisme: Barcelona’s Sirens Song of Cosmopolitan Modernity,” in Journal of Cultural Spanish Studies 4, nº 2, 2003, pp. 223-224. 81 Josep Rovira, José Luis Sert: 1901-1983, Milan, Electa, 2000, p. 197. On Eugeni d’Ors, see José Maria Capdevila, Eugeni d'Ors: etapa barcelonina, 1906-1920, Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 1965; Antonino González González, Eugenio d'Ors: el arte y la vida, Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010; Javier Varela, Eugenio d’Ors 1881-1954, Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2017. 64 well as the unequivocal “imperial” aspirations of Catalonia. For D’Ors, the goal was “to discover the Mediterranean in ourselves and to affirm it, in imperial work, among men.”82 The intellectuals supporting Noucentisme, among whom the industrialists Eusebi Güell and Francesc Cambó and the theoretician of Catalan nationalism Enric Prat de la Riba (18701917), were actively engaged within the new institutional and political context issued from the elections of 1901. Culturally, it was the Mediterranean that was to anchor the legitimacy of the new political parti, and establish the concept of reference for the Noucentist project of the Catalunya-Ciutat [Catalonia-City]—i.e., the vision of Catalonia as an “ideal city”, that would convey a ‘totalizing’ sense of nationhood, and embrace a new civic ethos of collective life at once urban and modern.83 It is significant that, from 1908 onwards, the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1956) had been leading the excavation works at Ampurias (in Catalan, Empúries), a Greco-Roman town in proximity to Cadaqués whose discovery nurtured the roots of the Renaixança in the Mediterranean: Emporium… Ampurias… It is a blue horizon that extends its serenity to the Mediterranean father, Mare Nostrum! …Sometimes I think that the ideal ambition of a redeeming Catalonian gesture would come down nowadays to discovering the Mediterranean.84 The Noucentist artists and architects advocated a return to a Mediterranean classicism based on order, proportions, moderation, and civic awareness. They stressed their southern— Mediterranean—roots in contrast to the Modernisme movement that Joaquín Torres-García dubbed as a phenomenon typical of “the people of the north.”85 Contrary to the exaltation of individualism in Modernisme, Noucentisme was seen as a social and public art, more intent to support the Catalan nationalist project than importing modernist ideals from afar. Like Modernisme, the Noucentist movement supported the renaissance of artisanal crafts, yet they did not emphasize the individualistic process of creation, but rather the pure beauty and perfectibility of the object. In 1911, d’Ors published the Almanac dels Noucentistes, a collection of texts, drawings and poems that had in common a return to classicism, a particular interest in urban life, and a special concern for the determining aspects of private life.86 82 Quoted by Alícia Suàrez and Mercè Vidal, “Catalan Noucentisme, the Mediterranean, and Tradition,” in William Robinson, Jordi Falgàs, Carmen Belen Lord (eds.), Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso Gaudí Miró Dalí, New Haven-London: Yale University Press, p. 230, from Eugeni D’Ors, “Emporium,” Glosari 1906-07, pp. 31-32. Also see Teresa Camps, “Critical Theories of Noucentisme, Classicism and the Avant-garde in Catalonia, 1906-1930,” in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, De Chirico, and the New Classicism 1910-1930, Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (eds.), London, Tate Gallery, 1990; Norbert Bilbeny, Eugeni D’Ors i la ideologia del Noucentisme, Barcelona: La Magrana, 1988. 83 Kramsch, pp. 225 and sq. 84 Eugeni D’Ors, “Emporium,” pp. 31-32. 85 Quoted by Alícia Suàrez and Mercè Vidal, “Catalan Noucentisme, the Mediterranean, and Tradition,” p. 226, from Joaquín Torres-García, “La nostra ordinaciò i el nostre cami,” Empori, April 1907. 86 See Jordi Falgás, “The Almanach dels Noucentistes: A Hybrid Manifesto,” Barcelona and Modernity, pp. 233-235. The Almanach was published once only, in 1911. 65 In reality, the opposition to Modernisme was not as clear-cut as its detractors would argue. Modernist artists like Gaudí and Puig i Cadafalch attempted to uplift Catalan arts and architecture to a par with other European cultures. They articulated Modernisme as a critical and unambiguous instrument of Catalan Renaissance [Renaixança] and linked it to the search for a style that would better express the claim for a genuine Catalonian culture and politics. Ruskin was one major inspiration for Gaudí’s return to the principles of medieval architecture and construction techniques to which he attempted to give a genuine Catalan character—see his use of the Catalan vault—while at the same time demonstrating his interest for the Islamic architecture in Spain. As William Curtis wrote about Gaudí, It was a matter of understanding local structural types and construction techniques in brick and ceramic, but also of reacting poetically, not to say mystically, to the hedonistic Mediterranean landscape and vegetation, as well as to the maritime character and traditions of Barcelona.87 Besides, as José Lahuerta discussed, Gaudí and Eugenio d’Ors already approached the theme of the Mediterranean in the planning of the Parque Güell between 1900 and 1914, and in particular the archaic Doric hypostyle hall imagined by Güell as a Greek theatre: The temple where songs would be sung in praise of Apollo… was not only the domed living room in the Güell Palace: there was another location… That of the Parque Güell, the theatre of Apollo, and the temple of the God.“88 Summarizing the complex and often contradictory aspirations of the Noucentistas, Josep Rovira argued that the return to Mediterranean classicism and tradition was in fact an ideological mask, ”an ideological covering for the programs, urban strategies and technological advances necessary to tackle the problems to be solved by the industrial metropolis in times of modernity and of the presence of the masses in the streets.”89 Noucentism pressed for an orderly vision of Catalonia in which urban life would eclipse ruralism. Yet, this collective ambition was not devoid of ambiguity. In 1911, Eugeni d'Ors, then secretary of the Instituto de Estudios Catalanes, published the most influential novel of the beginning of the twentieth century in Catalonia, La Ben Plantada. The novel, half work of fiction, half philosophical essay, envisioned the "Catalan Woman" as symbol of the future metropolitan society: woman as Mediterranean goddess, as embodiment of the value of the land, as a mother and driving force of the society. D’Ors and his colleagues affirmed a notion of ‘tradition’ that was rooted both in a classical, urban Mediterranean ideal, and in the popular 87 William Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd edition, London, Phaidon, 1996, p. 60. On Gaudí and the Mediterranean, see Juan José Lahuerta, Antoni Gaudí, 1852-1926, Milan: Electa, 1992, pp. 143-171 with quote on p. 155, from V.M. Gilbert, Gaudí, músico potencial. Also see Josep Rovirá, “La possessión del Mediterráneo,” Urbanización en Punta Martinet, Ibiza, 1966-1971, Almería; Colegio de Arquitectos de Almería, 1996, pp. 7-32. 89 Josep M. Rovira, “The Mediterranean is his Cradle,” J.LL. Sert and Mediterranean Culture, Barcelona: Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña, 1995, p. 47. 88 66 and rural communitarian values.90 As a result, within the process of modernization of the Catalonian metropolis, the forms of the countryside could equally be called upon to solve the problems of urban architecture. In the words of architectural historian Antonio Pizza, it was “a process of symbolic unification in which not only would architecture become ‘telluric’ and the countryside acquire an architectural sheen, but the woman would also have to be natural and ben plantada, spontaneous and constructed….”91 Thus, it is not surprising that the Mediterranean and his vernacular architecture framed the human geography of the seminal novel: Now I would like to speak to you about the Ben Plantada, who has blossomed, taller than the rest, during these days of heat and gold, in a very humble summer village, small and white, close to the wide blueness of the Mediterranean.92 And further: You see, then, that there is nothing particular about the tiny village in which the Ben Plantada spends the summer. It is neither rustic, nor rough, nor picturesque. It looks neither fashionable nor wild. But we must love it by virtue precisely of its humility, in which the secret resides of its profound grace and truth.93 Interestingly, the following paragraph alluded to the damages that a badly understood regional architecture was already producing and that would become a major point of debate, as we have seen earlier, i.e., the difference between regionalist architecture and the authentic vernacular: The rest of the village will also remain white, provided it is not vulgarly coloured and sneered by all the garbage that architects and builders are spreading throughout Catalonia in the abominable style that has degraded our Tibidabo.94 Joaquim Folch i Torres, author of Meditaciones sobre la arquitectura (1916) and a major Catalan art historian, also emphasized the harmony of the traditional houses in the landscape when he wrote, “houses in a landscape are like the eyes of a face and a kind of splendor on earth, just as the human eyes are a kind of spiritual splendor in the body.”95 Likewise, in a poem published in the Almanach dels Noucentistes by Josep Pijoan, one could read: 90 Kramsch, pp. 225 & sq. For this section, see Antonio Pizza, “The Mediterranean: Creation and Development of a Myth,” J.LL. Sert y el Mediterranéo, p. 23. 92 Eugeni D’Ors, La Ben Plantada, Barcelona: Ed. Selecta, 1958, p.15. 93 Eugeni d’Ors, p. 32. 94 Ibidem. 95 Quoted by Pizza, p. 23, from J. Folch i Torres, “Record d’una masía,” La Veu de Catalunya, nº 210, December 27, 1913. 91 67 Minorca, your white houses, the labyrinthine walls of the entire island, all painted white, make even more clear the grey sponge of the flat rock that rises out of the sea.96 This ongoing dialectic between the renewed civitas and a countryside arcadia was important for the development of an independent Catalonian identity. As Pizza wrote, “it is the rural world that is presented as the depositary of the new collective values which will be needed to construct the modern city, seen as the culminating moment of “artistic” investment on the part of a bourgeois nationalism which would thus claim recognition of its role as a driving force at the core of the political movements of the time.”97 This assertion was clearly at the basis of one of the manifestoes of Noucentisme and Catalan autonomy, Prat de la Riba’s La Nacionalitat Catalana of 1906. His vision referred to the organic nature of the nation and was imbued with Hippolyte Taine’s theory of “race, milieu, and moment” which can be considered as the foundations and roots of regionalism.”98 Prat de la Riba himself expressed its mistrust of the classical agenda, defending instead the architecture that originated from the countryside: The appearance of the country folk on the Catalonian public stage signaled the beginning of the renaixença. The accumulated vigor of so many generations could not remain unused and dead to the society. The sons and heirs of the masía owners are now renewing and strengthening, with their new blood, the population or our cities and towns.99 For the Noucentists, the masía—a type of rural construction connected to a large estate, often fortified, which had its origins in the antique Roman villas and was also influenced by the Palladian types—became a fundamental symbol of Catalan identity. Like so many artists, Joan Miró used it as a major source as in his famed work of 1921-1922, La Masia.100 Joaquim Sunyer’s paintings such as the Pastoral built up the image of an Arcadia for a Catalan nation; likewise, the Cala Forn of 1917, with its background of urbanization, brought together “the perilous dichotomy between the natural and the man-made, governed wisely by the controlled, progressive evolution of the times.”101 Under the impulse of Prat, three major ethnographic archives (one of which was specially dedicated to the Estudi de la Masia Catalana) were established in Barcelona, whose focus would be to scientifically document “not only that a specific Catalan culture existed but also that it was different from the rest of 96 Josep Pijoan, “De les terres Velles,” Almanach dels Noucentistes, 1911. Antonio Pizza, p. 19. 98 Alícia Suarez and Mercè Vidal, p. 226. 99 Enric Prat de la Riba, La Nacionalitat Catalana, Barcelona, Biblioteca Popular, 1906, p. 20; quoted by Josep Rovira, Urbanización en Punta Martinet, p. 15. 100 On the Catalan masía, see Joaquím de Camps i Arboix, La masía catalana: Historia-ArquitecturaSociología, Barcelona, 1969; “La Masía: historia y tipología de la casa rural catalane,” 2C: construcción de la ciudad, nº 17-18, 1981. 101 Antonio Pizza, p. 22. 97 68 Spain.”102 The most important one, the Arxiu d’Etnografía I Folklore de Catalunya (AEFC), made an innovative and pioneering use of photography and advanced classification to record all aspects of the region’s traditional culture and folklore, including architecture, labor, trade, and types of inhabitants. Context and truth, provided by the new medium, were “crucial to the Noucentiste notion of photography and archives.”103 For Miró—but also for Salvador Dalí—the passage from Noucentiste realism to surrealism would be swift, but the Catalonian countryside was equally important for the new aesthetic. In 1924, the twenty-year old Dalí painted an enigmatic portrait of Luis Buñuel, then twenty-four, shown as a very solemn Spanish man looking into a distance while, in the background, the cubic volumes of a village seem to anticipate the architecture of the new towns built by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.) in the 1950-1960s. It is also near Cadaqués, a vernacular white town on the edge of the Mediterranean, that Dalí and Buñuel would script and shoot the Surrealist manifesto, L’âge d’or (1930).104 In architecture, the Noucentistas lacked the range and importance of their Modernist counterparts, but their overall impact, particularly on the social and economic infrastructure of Barcelona, Girona, and the Catalan countryside, was remarkable. They defended a type of architecture that not only had a different aesthetic from Modernisme, but sought to represent their metropolitan ambition, both political and social. Classicism, links with Central European modernity like the Vienna Secession, but also neo-folk and regional trends characterized the diversity of the architectural period. The urban houses by Rafael Masó Valenti in Girona represent the transition from Modernism to Noucentisme: if his first houses seemed like Modernist houses with more abstract traits, the Casa Ensesa (1913-1915) shows the influence of Viennese architecture, both classical and Secessionist. Yet, it is with the family home overlooking the River Onyar (Casa Masó) and renovated in 1919 that Masó realized his masterpiece: not only do the white facades and large glazed sections integrate very well in the urban landscape of the river, but they can be seen as precursors of modernism in the thirties.105 In Barcelona, the works of Josep Goday illustrate the more social and populist direction of Noucentisme. He was the author of several municipal schools groups destined to be an essential symbol of Catalan modernity. As remarked in a manual de la Mancomunitat of Catalunya, "an ideal of dignity presides at the installation of these centers ... We tried to give each its own building, built expressly, and responding through its aesthetic qualities and comfort to an ideal life conducive to giving a lesson of refinement and elegance in simplicity." Stylistically, Goday’s schools formed a remarkable eclectic group, going from a discreet 102 Jordana Mendelson, p. 12. Jordana Mendelson, p. 15. 104 Dalí was one of the first artists to live in Cadaqués, which attracted many others like Picasso, Miró, etc. On Dalí and Buñuel, see Matthew Gale, Dalí & Film, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. 105 Joan Tarrús Galter (ed.), Rafael Masó y Valentí, Barcelona: Publicacions del Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya i Balears, D.L. 1971; http://www.rafaelmaso.org/cat/index.php. 103 69 Baroque (Group Escolar Pere Vila, 1921-1931) to the vernacular (Escuela del Mar, Barceloneta, 1922) and the classicism of German influence (Escuela Collaso Gil, Raval, 1933).106 However, it is Puig i Cadafalch, author of the essential study on the Romanesque architecture in Catalonia, who was the most important actor and promoter of the architectural shift from Modernism to Noucentisme in Barcelona. After his early Modernist phase (see Casa Amattler on Paseo de Gracia of 1898-1900), he opened his Noucentiste period with townhouses inspired by the Viennese Secession and incorporating vernacular references (Casa Trinxet, 1904; Casa Company, 1911). His third period began at the end of the second decade with an urban architecture, at once classical, civil, and expressive of the collective aspirations of Catalonia, particularly in its metropolitan appearance. Very representative of this vision was the renovation of the Plaza de Catalunya as a point of convergence between the historic center and the villages surrounding the Cerdà grid, and where, in 1919, Puig reformed an existing building with an architecture that symbolized the aspirations of the city to a modern European image (Casa Pich i Pon, 1929). The masterpiece of the twenties was the International Exhibition, initially scheduled for 1917 but delayed by WW1, and that eventually opened in 1929 with the active support of Puig y Cadafalch. The Exposición Universal of Barcelona finally opened under the dictatorship of Prima de Rivera, who was supported by Puig and the Catalan elite in exchange of a false promise of minor Catalan autonomy. However, it was reconceived as a large propaganda enterprise that meant “to reaffirm the central government’s power over both its internal and external satellites, its own ‘regions’ as well as its past colonies.”107 The Exposition celebrated the metropolitan achievements of Catalonia and Spain, and entered into architectural history with the quasi-Mediterranean vision of Mies van der Rohe’s German pavilion. Of particular importance were the gardens of Miramar and Laribal that the French landscape architect Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier and his assistant Nicolau Rubio i Tudurí designed between 1917 and 1924. The projects were distinctly Mediterranean with terraces, viewpoints, stairways inspired by the Generalife in Granada, Hispano-Arab fountains (such as Font del Gat) and white pergolas inspired by Andalusia and the Balearic Islands. Along the descent to the city, the gardens opened onto the Teatre Grec, an outdoor theater for two thousand spectators, inspired from Epidaurus and designed by the architect Ramón Reventós in collaboration with Forestier. As a landscape architect and urban planner, Rubio i Tudurí was one of the greatest representatives of Noucentisme and the return to the "Mediterranean world." In his position of director of Parques y Jardines de Barcelona since 1917 and under the influence of Forestier he was the main promoter of the "Mediterranean garden" in 106 See Jordi Carreras, “Noucentisme between Architecture and the Art of the Object,” in Barcelona and Modernity, pp. 281-293; Gonçal Mayos Solsona, "Escuelas en un contexto macrofilosófico y biopolítico" in Albert Cubeles and Marc Cuixart (eds.), Josep Goday Casals. Arquitectura escolar a Barcelona de la Mancomunitat a la República, Barcelona: Ayuntamiento de Barcelona e Instituto de Educación, 2008. 107 Jordana Mendelson, p. 9. 70 opposition to the English concept. The gardens of the square Francesc Macia (1925), the park de la Font del Racó (1926), the gardens of the Palacio Real de Pedralbes (1927) and those of the Parque Turó (1933) bear witness to this new Mediterranean spirit in landscape architecture.108 Overall, its most popular attraction was the Pueblo Español. Most accounts make the Pueblo the collaborative work of art historian Miguel Utrillo, visual artist Xavier Nogués, and architects Ramon Reventós and Francesc Follguera—the latter two acted as photographers during the more than 6,000 miles that the team travelled across the cities, towns, and villages of Spain to bring back the accurate documentation. One hundred seventeen buildings and places were selected from the photographic mission and picturesquely re-assembled to become, themselves, “photogenic.”109 Visitors were thus encouraged to take the place of the original rural subject, thus establishing the genuine Noucentiste aspiration at a fusion between city and country, a “new relationship between Spain’s rural architecture and its now urban inhabitants.”110 Contrary to other ethnographic exposition collages (for instance in Chicago, Paris, or Rome) which formed a mere assemblage of types and styles, often within a garden-city like environment, the vernacular pieces were here arranged to form urbanistically correct urban spaces, without distortion or downscaling. The plaza mayor, approximately 200 by 150 feet, gave the feel of a genuine urban space, while the Andalusian section of the Pueblo was the recreation of a barrio whose very urban structure was the reason of its success. Its houses, patios, and narrow streets like the “Calle de los Arcos,” projected a recognizable image of southern Spain. Swiss architect Alfredo Baechslin and great connoisseur of Spain through his travels, journals, and drawings, wrote enthusiastically about the Pueblo: “But the Spanish Village is more. It is a town composed of many styles, but it has a definitve Spanish flavor ... We breathe the air of a Spanish town.”111 As we will see in chapter Four, these were precisely the character and quality that enticed Oriol Hohigas to write an important article about the Pueblo español in the early 1960s. 108 Bénédicte Leclerc (ed.), Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, 1861-1930. Du jardin au paysage urbain, Paris: Picard, 1994; J.C.N. Forestier, Jardins: carnet de plans et de dessins, Paris: Picard, 1994 (1920). For Rubió i Tudurí, see Mercè Rubió i Boada, Nicolau María Rubio i Tuduri (1891-1981): jardinero y urbanista, Aranjuez: Ediciones Doce Calles/ Madrid: Real Jardin Botanico, CSIC, 1993. 109 Jordana Mendelson, p. 23. Also see Jordana Mendelson, “From Photographic Fragments to Architectural Illusions at the 1929 Poble Espanyol in Barcelona,” in Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (eds.), Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, Oxford-New York, Berg, 2004, pp. 129-147. 110 Jordana Mendelson, Documenting Spain, p. 25. 111 Juan Antonio García-Esparza, “Casas de campo españolas (1930): la revisión de un libro de Alfredo Baeschlin,” Ciudad y Territorio XLIV, nº 174, Winter 2012, pp. 750-751: “Pero el Pueblo español es más. Es un pueblo compuesto de infinidad de estilos, pero tiene sabor español… Respiramos aire de pueblo.” 71 1.5. Benjamin and the Lessons of Ibiza It is at Mercadal’s invitation that Le Corbusier came to lecture in Madrid. On May 15, 1928, at a stopover of the train in Barcelona, the Swiss architect was literally “intercepted” at the station: In Madrid I received a telegram signed by José Luis Sert (whom I did not know at the time) who said he would meet at 10 o’clock in the evening in Barcelona station, an intermediate stop for the Madrid-Port-Bou express, and rush me off without delay to give a talk somewhere in the city. At Barcelona station I was received by five or six youths, all short but full of fire and energy.”112 Le Corbusier lectured on his way back in Barcelona. This was a moment of frustration and crisis in his career after the failure at the competition for the Palais des Nations in Geneva. At the same time, his discourse about “the new architecture” was shifting away from the analogy of the machine toward an architecture where classical proportions, vernacular references, and Greece-based harmony could be harnessed to redefine modernity.113 After listening to Le Corbusier, Sert and his colleagues realized that there was neither contradiction nor opposition between modernity and tradition. In other words, it was possible to be truly modern without losing their Spanish roots and identity. Hence, they set up to demonstrate that they were the heirs of an “autochthonous culture whose roots revealed the same preoccupations as those concerning [northern] Europe in the years immediately before,” and that gave them the right to be now, albeit belatedly, at the forefront of the modernist movement.114 In working together to assert the Mediterranean and its vernacular as the primary sources of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, Sert, and many others across Europe, attempted to substantiate the myth of the origins beyond the machine and other technological analogies.115 Rejecting the regionalist mask, Fernando García Mercadal, Josep Lluís Sert, and the architects of GATCPAC saw in the reinterpretation and abstraction of the vernacular aesthetic and tectonics (Ibiza in particular) the means to “mediterraneanize” the modern.116 In the late 1920s, Sert and his classmate at the School of Architecture, Germán RodriguezArias, embarked on a series of journeys in the south of Spain to discover the vernacular 112 Le Corbusier, quoted by Josep Rovira, “The Mediterranean is his Cradle,” p. 49. See Juan José Lahuerta, Le Corbusier e la Spagna, Milan: Electa, 2006; and Le Corbusier, Espagne: Carnets, MilanParis: Electa, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2001. 113 Le Corbusier, Une maison, un palais – A la recherche d’une unité architecturale, Paris, G. Crès, 1929. 114 Josep Rovira, “The Mediterranean is His Cradle,” pp. 63-64. 115 See Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean – Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, London: Routledge, 2010. 116 This intellectual process brings to mind Marc-Antoine Laugier’s discussion of the primitive hut in his Essay on Architecture published in 1753. According to Alan Colquhoun, Laugier was not particularly interested in the vernacular world of architecture, but was in fact looking for the historical roots and the “de-stylization” of classical architecture: “This process entailed, not the discovery of vernacular building, but the revernacularization of classicism with which to substantiate a myth of origins.” From Alan Colquhoun, “Vernacular Classicism,” Modernity and the Classical Tradition–Architectural Essays 19801987, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989, p. 30. 72 architecture of its towns and villages.117 Ibiza was the next step and there they joined a small crowd of intellectuals who, like Schinkel, Hoffmann, and Italian futurists when they discovered Capri, saw in the “primitive” rural architecture and quasi-virginal culture of the island the values of modernity.118 To some extent, the island represented a return to a more innocent and primitive past where men and nature were united through simple handwork and the functional beauty of simple objects and spaces. Ibiza appeared as a new utopia, an antitechnological one, where the western men and women—the men and women of the metropolitan Gesellschaft—could find a pure Gemeinschaft within foreign land, away from the traditional conservative attitude associated with the small towns of Central Europe. The imagined and idealized island offered the possibility of a new way of life, “in the context of a privileged nature, renouncing the bourgeois conventions and any kind of comfort, and gambling on a new type of community in which the creative and individual freedom would have a leading role.”119 Among the international visitors were, to name only a few, Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and Hausmann. Benjamin (1892-1940) stayed on the island twice, between April and July of 1932 and the second between April and September of 1933. When he left the island for the second time in the fall of that year, Benjamin’s exile started in earnest and he never came back to Germany. Ibiza—at that time the poorest island of the Baleares—became for Benjamin the ideal terrain of observation of the modern world, and in particularly of the relationship between the antique and the modern, between primitivism and modernity. Following Jean Selz, a French writer who resided in Ibiza and who entertained a relationship with the German, the island offered to the modern traveler the possibility to know the antique world, not “across the ruins… but in the life of the inhabitants of Ibiza, in their customs, their beliefs, their crafts….”120 It is important to remember that Schinkel had reached the same conclusions when he visited Capri in 1804 and that from Josef Hoffmann onwards, the Italian island would be seen in a similar way by many generations including Rationalist and Futurist artists and architects alike.121 Benjamin left some short impressions in his correspondence: It is obvious from this that the island is really far removed from international trade and even civilization and that it is therefore necessary to do without every kind of comfort. This can be done with case, not only because of the inner peace given by economic 117 See Josep Rovira, “Ibiza y la mirada de la vanguardia,” in Urbanización en Punta Martinet, Ibiza, 1966-71, pp. 33-54; also see Josep Rovira, José Luis Sert, op. cit. 118 See Michelangelo Sabatino, Pride of Modesty – Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 119 Vicente Valero, Experiencia y pobreza – Walter Benjamin en Ibiza, 1932-1933, Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2001, p. 8: “en el marco de una naturaleza privilegiada, renunciando a las convenciones burguesas y a cualquier tipo de confort, y apostando por una nueva comunidad en la que tuvieran protagonismo el ocío creativo y la libertad individual.” 120 Vicente Valero, “Ibiza, la tradición seductora,” in A.C. – La Revista Del G.A.T.E.P.A.C. 1931-1937, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2008, p. 259. 121 See Benedetto Gravagnuolo, op. cit. 73 independence but also because of the composure the landscape provides; the most untouched landscape I have ever come across. … The interiors are likewise archaic. Three chairs along the wall of the room opposite the entrance greet the stranger with assurance and weightiness, as if three works by Cranach or Gauguin were leaning against the wall; a sombrero over the back of a chair is more imposing than a precious Gobelin tapestry. Finally, there is the serenity and beauty of the people—not only of the children—and, on top of that, the almost total freedom from strangers, which must be preserved by being extremely parsimonious with information about the island. The end of all these things is unfortunately to be feared because of a hotel being built in the port of Ibiza.122 … The most beautiful things are the view from the window giving onto the sea and a rocky island whose lighthouse shines into my room at night. There is also the privacy the inhabitants maintain toward each other by a clever arrangement of space and walls that are almost a meter thick, through which no sound (and no heat) can penetrate.123 Going fishing lobster in the sea, he narrated how We were then put ashore in a hidden bay [of Ibiza]. And there we were presented with an image of such immutable perfection that something strange but not incomprehensible took place within me: namely, I actually did not see it at all; it made no impression on me; because of its perfection, it existed on the very brink of the invisible… Four or five fishing boats had been pulled well up onto the shore. A few women were standing next to these boats, who were completely draped in black with only their serious and immobile faces uncovered… A child had died in the stone hut down below. The women draped in black had been keeners who, in spite of their duties, had not wanted to miss an unusual spectacle such as the arrival of a motorboat on this beach. In short, in order to find this spectacle striking, you must first understand it. Otherwise, you would look at it with the same kind of indifference and thoughtlessness as you do at a painting by Feuerbach. When looking at such a 122 Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gerhard Scholem, [Ibiza], April 22, 1932, in Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, Chicago / London: The University Press of Chicago, 1994, p. 390. 123 Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gretel Adorno, [Ibiza], Spring 1932, op. cit., p. 392. 74 painting, people remotely think that tragic figures on the rocky shore would make it just right.124 As Vicente Valero commented at large in his book Experiencia y pobreza, Benjamin was a highly productive writer on the island. In his Ibizenkische Folge, he rediscovered the art of traditional narration, which came to him by walking and observing the life of the people, their habitat and landscape.125 The theme of those Ibizan tales was nothing but narration itself: the art of telling a tale and to listen to stories.126 Yet, it is with his essay “Experience and Poverty” that the impact of Ibiza could be felt in his philosophy and his understanding of modern life and society127: “the traditional dwelling of Ibiza… was, for its location, a space propitious for artistic creation, and it was also, because of its specific conditions, structure and archaic typology, a space apt at living a life totally removed from any bourgeois conventions.”128 For Benjamin, following the disasters of WW1, men had become unable to communicate their experience, and this poverty of experience in general, personal and general, had led to a new kind of barbarism, indeed, “a positive concept of barbarism.”129 This new barbarism was forcing him to start from scratch; it implied the erasure of all historical traces from city and home. On the architectural level, it meant that glass, a material that has no “aura,”130 was desired because it is the “enemy of secrets… of possession.”131 Modern architecture, from Loos, Le Corbusier to the Bauhaus, had created rooms in which “it is hard to leave traces.” As mankind has given up one portion of human heritage after another, we had “to rely on the men who have adopted the cause of the absolutely new and have founded it on insight and renunciation. In its buildings, pictures, and stories mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need be.”132 It is a paradox that Benjamin was advocating the tabula rasa and the architecture of glass, at the very moment when the new generation of Spanish architects intended to reject the imported exterior signs of modernity (glass), and define an architecture adapted to the climate of the Spanish soil. Benjamin’s comments on architecture were logically related to his experience of Germany and Central Europe, and thus it would have been difficult to guess the 124 Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gretel Adorno, [Ibiza] June 1933, op. cit., p. 420. The German interest for Spanish vernacular has been extensively studied in Joaquín Medina Warmburg, Projizierte Moderne: Deutschsprächige Architekten und Städtebauer in Spanien (1918-1936)–Dialog, Abhängigkeit, Polemik, Frankfurt am Main, Vervuert Verlag, 2005. Of particular interest is the third section of the book, titled “Inseln” [Islands]. 125 Walter Benjamin, “Ibizenkische Folge,” Gesammelte Schriften - IV: Kleine Prosa. BaudelaireÜbertragungen, 2 volumes, Berlin: Suhrkamp Insel Verlag, 1972. 126 Valero, p. 261. 127 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” [Erfahrung und Armut] in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin Selected Writings: Vol. 2 (1927-1934), Cambridge: University Press, 1999, pp. 731-736. 128 Valero, p. 66. 129 Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” p. 732. 130 Ibidem, p. 734. 131 Ibidem. p. 732. 132 Ibidem, p. 735. 75 links between the vernacular Mediterranean architecture and the emerging Spanish vision of modernity. Yet, there was a clear common trait. Sert like Benjamin wanted to erase the signs of bourgeois past and imagine a new primitivism for modern life and for the modern man and woman. That such a primitivism could take different clothes was a reflection of a decade when return to order and avant-garde were interacting while fighting for predominance. On October 25, 1930, Josep Lluis Sert, Manuel Subiño, Josep Torres Clavé, José Manuel Aizpurúa, Fernando García Mercadal and others officially launched the group GATEPAC (Grupo de Artistas y Técnicos Españoles Para la Arquitectura Contemporánea) as the Spanish branch of CIAM, and announced the future publication of their periodical Arquitectura Contemporánea or A.C.133 The editorial, published in the first issue (1931) reflected the ambiguity of the group’s position. On the one hand, it advocated that the new architecture was the fruit of a new spirit “which annuls customs and traditions” and required industrialization and mass production; on the other hand, it claimed the “full Latinism” of modern architecture and the importance of the southern vernacular and climate by making direct reference to the Mediterranean “terraces, awnings, flown slabs, screened light“ in contrast with the “large glazed areas” of northern architecture.134 Attacked by conservative architects, the GATEPAC manifesto also saw strong reactions from Joaquín Torres-García, the former Noucentiste who had just created a constructivist group with Mondrian, and who criticized the lack of spiritual expression of an architecture that required “standardized mannequins” to inhabit them.135 The first issue of A.C. further set the tone for the series of twenty-five issues published between 1931 and 1937. Next to photographs of modern architecture in San Sebastián and Barcelona, and a discussion of the future urbanization of Barcelona and the Green City project in Moscow, it featured a double page that focused on traditional fishermen houses on the Mediterranean coast and compared them dramatically to J.P. Oud’s row of houses at the Weissenhof Siedlung of 1927. Opposed to the architectonic eclecticism of various regionalisms reduced to exterior signs of decoration, they saw in the sobriety of the white volumes of the peasant and fisherman houses, as well as in the strict functionality of their constitutive elements, a genuine model for a new modern and socially oriented architecture. In the second issue, the editors declared that they respected “the good architecture of the past.” They argued about the value of the good historical architecture (Santa Maria del Mar, Monasterio de Pedralbes, and the Romanesque buildings studied by Domènech y Montaner 133 For a synthetic understanding of the group, see A.C.: la revista del G.A.T.E.P.A.C., 1931-1937, op. cit. AC (Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea) was published from 1931 to 1937 with a total of twenty-five issues. See the integral reprint: AC Publicación del GATEPAC, Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2005. 134 A.C., nº 1, 1930-31, p. 13. 135 See Enrique Granell Trías, “Impossible not to succumb to the song of the sirens. Paralell 1933,” in J.LL. Sert and the Mediterranean, pp. 126-137. 76 and Puig I Cadafalch earlier in the century) as roots for the new architecture that the new social conditions required. 136 The authors wrote: We want to continue, without prejudice, the magnificent tradition of Architecture, but not that tradition based on erudition and eclecticism, but rather the tradition resulting from the understanding that architectural strength lies in the sincere, clear and optimistic exteriorization of a problem well planted, and of a well-articulated plan.137 Overall, A.C. was the publishing platform for Sert, his friends, Le Corbusier, and CIAM. Of his own work, Sert gave special attention to the apartment house at Calle Muntaner (A.C.4), his summer resort near Barcelona in collaboration with Torres Clavé (A.C.7, A.C.13), the plan Macìa (A.C.13) and the Casa Bloc for the revision of the Ensanche (A.C.10), and the weekend house in Garraf also with Torres Clavé (A.C.19), a modern-Mediterranean type of house which combined a ground floor in stone topped by a white stucco box with large windows opening on the sea. Likewise, the issue 11 gave a report from the CIAM IV on the Patris II ship and included a series of photos including the vernacular houses of the Aegean Sea. The first reference to Ibiza came within the issue A.C. 6 of 1932 which dedicated 3 pages of simple photographs under the titles “Ibiza, la isla que no necesita renovación arquitectónica” (Ibiza, the island that does not need an architectonic renovation) and “En Ibiza no existen los ‘estilos históricos” (In Ibiza the historical styles do not exist).138 Four photographs focused on the urban environment, while the four others showed views of rural fincas or farmhouses. Three years later, the A.C. 18 (1935) was entirely dedicated to popular architecture and its cover featured the photograph of a traditional ceramic vase and a straw plate, with the following commentary: "The popular architecture without style and the objects of domestic use that originate from places separated from the centers of civilization conserve a traditional base that constitutes the essence of their expression.”139 It also contained one of Sert’s most significant essays, “Raíces mediterráneas de la arquitectura moderna” [The Mediterranean roots of modern architecture] which ended with these lines: 136 A.C. 2, 1931, p. 22: “respetamos la buena arquitectura del passado… “queremos continuar, sin prejuicios, la magnífica tradición de la Arquitectura, pero no esa tradición basada en la erudición y el eclecticismo, sino una tradición fruto de la comprensión de que la fuerza arquitectural radica en la exteriorización sincera, clara y optimista de un problema bien plantado, de un plano con la debida articulación.” 137 Ibidem, p. 23. Logically, the Catalonian environment dominated the magazine but the first issues made clear that the new modern conditions were rising throughout the country: for instance, the masterplan for the extension of the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid by Herman Jansen and Secundino Zuazo (AC2), the new campus of the Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid (1927-), the modernist Club naútico by Aizpurúa & Labayen in San Sebastián (AC3), and the Casa del Doctor Horno en Zaragoza by Mercadal (AC3). 138 AC 6, 1932, pp. 28-30. 139 AC 18, 1935, cover text: "la arquitectura popular sin estilo y los objetos de uso doméstico de los lugares apartados de los centros de civilización conservan una base tradicional que constituye la esencia de su expression.” 77 Technically, modern architecture is mostly a discovery of the Nordic countries. Yet, spiritually, it is the “style-less” Mediterranean architecture which has influenced this new architecture. Modern architecture is a return to the pure, traditional forms of the Mediterranean. It is a victory of the Latin Sea.140 Besides two articles on ‘popular’ industry dealing with amphorae, ceramic vases, and fishermen’s boats, and on Joan Miró’s primitive synthesis of “abstractivismo” and “surrealismo” in painting, the issue focused mainly on Mediterranean towns, emphasizing the rationality of their streets and building types, in particular the casa-patio of various sizes. It was an analysis that emphasized the urban character of the Mediterranean—its streets, alleys, and small piazzas—and characterized the distinctly Spanish approach to the strategic use of the Mediterranean. Out of the 100 illustrations that made up the issue, about forty-six were directly related to the Spanish urban context, the others being mostly linked to the rural environment. Let us mention the casa de vecino in Córdoba organized as a simple threestory rectangular structure along a densely planted patio, and the one in Fernán Núñez organized as a large arcaded corral; the intimate nature of the streets of San Fernando and Tarifa in Andalusia; the “patio de volumen mínimo” in Tarifa, without style, functional as it provides air, light and heat protection, but also spiritual because of the identification and personification to their residents; and many other examples.141 Discussing the streets of the Andalusian towns and cities, A.C. suggested that the narrow streets for pedestrians “should exist in the layout of all modern towns and neighborhoods of Mediterranean climate, separating entirely the circulation of pedestrians from the main traffic.”142 Likewise, the short essay “Poblaciones mediterráneas” emphasized the unity, order, clarity, and repetition of the standard elements of the vernacular architecture, and described how, within the Mediterranean urban fabric and culture, A house is not built with the intention of surpassing that of the neighbor. The human scale here imposes a uniform measure of openings and a rational and economical ceiling height.143 The twenty-first issue (1936) was dedicated to the rural world, with an architectural and photographic survey of the traditional Ibiza rural house produced by Raoul Hausmann and Erwin Heilbronner. Hausmann (1886-1971) was an artist who was among the founders of the Dada movement in Germany and also a renowned photographer; Heilbronner (1898-1971) 140 José Luis Sert, “Raíces mediterráneas de la arquitectura moderna,” A.C. 18, 1935; reprinted in Antonio Pizza, J.LL. Sert y el Mediterráneo, pp. 217-18, quote on p. 217. 141 AC 18, 1935, pp. 16-27; 38-41. 142 AC 18, 1935, p. 27. It is important to relate these writings to the article by Alejandro Herrero in 1948 and the adoption of separation of traffic for many of the new towns of the INC. See chapter 5 and 6. 143 AC 18, 1935, pp. 33: “una casa no se edifica con la intención de superar en aparencia a la del vecino. La escala humana impone aquí una medida uniforme de aberturas y una altura de techo racional y económica.” 78 was a German architect who sought refuge on the island in 1934.144 Hausmann, who arrived on the island in March 1933 following foreign echoes from the CIAM IV and the GATEPAC, recorded his impressions in a series of articles as a correspondent. Twelve years earlier, the young Dadaist had claimed that “the new man needs a new language without the inheritance of the past."145 From the island, he shared the same fascination as the architects, yet his glance was more scientific, even ethnological: These primitive conditions and the patriarchal structure of the family are reflected in an architecture that is especially attractive to us due to the purity of its lines and cubic volumes. It appeals to our love for truth and simplicity....146 Ibiza is by excellence the land of architecture without architects. The houses that the peasants build there have such a pure style and such a harmonious expression, that they can perfectly sustain the comparison with more mature and more designed works of modern architecture. As soon as one leaves the city and enters the interior of the island, one goes from surprise to surprise; everywhere the same plastic expression, everywhere the same noble forms of dwellings.147 In the A.C. article, Hausmann and Heilbronner published accurate floor plans and sections, along with remarkable photos of peasant houses. They described the typological process of cell-based construction of the rural house (Can), its adaptation to topography, and the spatial and cultural significance of the porxo (porchu or portico), a sort of covered patio connected to the kitchen and facing the entrance of the house where, at times, a staircase would lead to a second floor room. The second part of the issue contained contemporary projects (a bath complex and a group of serial houses) by Heilbronner who, under his new name, Broner, continued his architecture practice after the War with a series of white houses mixing tradition and modernity, and created the group of modern artists Ibiza 59.148 Haussmann remained three years on the island. From 1933 to 1936, he produced an intense photographic investigation, going from the landscape to the house to the chair and the hands of its artisan. In doing so, he did not limit himself to the formal qualities of the island and its constructions, but he was also, perhaps even more, fascinated by the “materiality” of its natural and man-made reality. In a series of notebooks he discussed the employed materials and the artisanal and constructive techniques that revealed the human-based essence of the architecture. Hundreds of sketches and photographs document the intensity of his gaze and 144 AC 21, 1936, pp. 11-23. See Raoul Hausmann. Valencia: IVAM, 1991. Bartomeu Marí, Jean-Paul Midant et.al., Raoul Hausmann, Architecte. Ibiza 1933-1936, Brussels: Archives d’Architecture Moderne, 1990. 145 Valero, p. 101: “el hombre nuevo necesita un nuevo lenguaje sin la herencia del pasado.” 146 Raoul Hausmann, “Ibiza et la maison méditerranéenne,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, nº 1 1935, p. 33. 147 Raoul Hausmann, “Elvissa i l’arquitecture sense arquitecte,” D’aci i d’allà 184, 1936. Here quoted from the French translation in Bartomeu Marí, Jean-Paul Midant et. al., p. 28. 148 AA.VV., Erwin Broner, 1898-1971, Barcelona: Colegio de arquitectos de Baleares, Demarcación de Eivissa y Formentera, 1994. 79 the importance of the material references from the imperfections in the walls and the nudity of the surfaces to the making of a wooden chair. For Haussman, the “material” meant “history, culture, nature, landscape, architecture—and so many other things—; his Ibiza experience allowed him to recognize the universal character of its architecture across the material.”149 Hyle (the Greek word for ‘matter’ in philosophy as well as other meanings such as ‘material, thing, substance’) was the title of the experimental novel that he initiated in Ibiza but was only able to publish in 1969 in a reduced version.150 To complete this horizon tour of Ibiza in the 1930s, it is important to mention the Swiss architect Alfredo Baechslin (1883-1964) and the elegant drawings of rural houses that he published as “Cuadernos de Arquitectura Popular – La Casa Ibicensa” in 1934.151 In his attempt to design new “casas de campo” in Spain, the Swiss condemned both “the uniforming vanguards and the aesthetic transmigrations of false regionalism" while defending the real popular architecture, its natural adaptation to climate, the life forms, and the artisanal traditions.”152 He wrote, “the country house for the Mediterranean region will have a very simple architecture, bordering on the 'vanguard' but without dryness and with a healthy joyful spirit.”153 Reading A.C. more than 75 years after its publication, the harshness of Sert’s attacks against modernist architecture—and in general terms against the German origins and developments—remains surprising. In the issue 16 of A.C. (1934), he wrote in his summary of the conference he presented in front of the Asociación de Alumnos de la Escuela Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona: Theories about modern architecture led architects from some countries to create a functional architecture that, disregarding the spiritual needs of the individual, has resulted in works that can not satisfy our aspirations, which always go beyond the material needs. […] 149 The quote is from Aitor Acilu Fernández, “Raoul Hausmann. Hyle en la arquitectura rural de Ibiza." ZARCH: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Architecture and Urbanism, nº 4, 2015, pp. 114-23 [122}. 150 The book has now been published in its totality, with a selection of photographs, see Raoul Haussman, Hyle, ein Traumsein in Spanien, Munich: belleville, 2006; in Spanish see Hyle. Ser sueño en España, Gijón: Ediciones TREA, 1997. 151 Juan Antonio García-Esparza, “Casas de campo españolas (1930): La revisión de un libro de Alfredo Baeschlin,” om Ciudad y Territorio XLIV, nº 174, Winter 2012, pp. 743-58. 152 Joaquín Medina Warmburg, “La fábrica, la casa, el palacio: Franz Rank y Alfredo Baeschlin, dos “Heimatschützer” en España,” in Arquitectura, Ciudad e Ideología Antiurbana, Pamplona: Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura Universidad de Navarra, 2002, p. 137: “las vanguardias uniformadoras y las trasmigraciones estilísticas del falso regionalismo.” 153 Juan Antonio García-Esparza, “Casas de campo españolas (1930): la revisión de un libro de Alfredo Baeschlin,” Ciudad y Territorio XLIV, no. 174, Winter 2012, pp. 743-58: “la casa de campo para la region mediterránea sera de sencillísima arquitectura, rayando a la de ‘vanguardia’ pero sin sequedad, con sana alegría.” 80 There exists a 'functional academicism’, which is as dead, as academic and as dangerous as the school academicism. We have an example of this tradition in the German Siedlung. These spiritually miserable constructions are one more example, repeated frequently in history, that misinterpreted theories can be dangerous of and that great works have never been done solely with theories.”154 Criticizing the fetishism of architects who copied Le Corbusier and use elements of the machine and the cruise ship as decoración maquinista, Sert posited the concept of Spanish modernity: “We must defend an architecture of climate, a Mediterranean architecture that is made for an intense sun, a diaphanous atmosphere, and a friendly landscape. Architecturally we can not respect other borders than the natural, geographical, and eternal ones.”155 And in order to achieve that goal, it was useful to “We must take advantage of all the means at our disposal, from the most traditional to the most modern; from stone to brick and reinforced concrete, steel and glass, as long as they are controlled by a spirit of order, clarity and respect for the millenary constants, which are the spiritual essence of all the great architectural creations.”156 Finally, in his most stringent attack, The new social structure that is being prepared requires a new architecture in agreement with the same necessities. These, as in all epochs, will be from a lyrical/poetic or spiritual order and from a material one as well. The pure functionalism of the ‘machine à habiter’ is dead, but the movement will kill, before dying, the old styles and their teaching in the schools of architecture. Architects and theorists, above all Germanic, have carried functionalist experiments to absurd extremes.157 154 Josep Lluis Sert, “Resumen de la conferencia,” AC # 16, pp. 43-44: “Las teorías sobre la moderna arquitectura llevaron a los arquitectos de algunos países a la creación de una arquitectura “functional” que, prescendiendo de las necesidades espirituales del individuo, ha dado por resultado obras que no pueden satisfacer nuestras aspiraciones, que van siempre más allá de las necesidades materiales … “Existe un ‘academicismo funcional’ tan muerto, tan académico y tan peligroso como el academicismo de escuela. Tenemos un ejemplo de este tradicismo en los Siedlung alemanes. Estas construcciones espiritualmente miserables son un ejemplo más, repetido con frecuencia en la historia, del peligro de las teorías mal interpretadas y de que nunca las grandes obras se han hecho únicamente con teorías.” 155 Ibidem, p. 43: “Debemos defender una arquitectura de clima, una arquitectura mediterránea hecha para un sol intenso, una atmósfera diáfana y un paisaje amable. Arquitectónicamente no podemos respetar otras fronteras que las naturales, geográficas y eternas.” 156 Ibidem, p. 44: “Debemos aprovechar todos los medios que tenemos a mano, desde los más tradicionales a los más modernos; desde la piedra al ladrillo y hormigón armado, el acero y el cristal, siempre que estén controlados por un espíritu de orden, claridad y respeto a las constantes milenarias, osatura espiritual de todas las grandes creaciones arquitectónicas.” 157 Josep Lluis Sert, “Arquitectura sense ‘estil’ i sense ‘arquitecte’”, D’Ací i d’Allà 179, December 1934, reprinted in Antonio Pizza, J.LL. Sert and the Mediterranean, p. 210. 81 1.6. The Plan Macía and the Casa Bloc: Mediterranean Modernism in Barcelona In the first issue of A.C., the GATCPAC criticized the exponential and up hazard expansion of Barcelona. They suggested the organization of a competition, but the latter did not happen. Nevertheless, the group, which maintained close political contacts with Francesc Macià, President of newly declared Republic of Catalonia, started to work almost immediately on a master plan for Barcelona in collaboration with Le Corbusier.158 As the master had already written in 1928, “Barcelona is one of the most beautiful cities in the work, one must make it even more worthy of admiration. Hire me, I will be very happy to be useful to you.”159 The Plan Macià as it came to be known developed in multiple phases from 1932 and 1936, and a first comprehensive version, published in nº13 of A.C., was presented to the public from July 11 to August 14 of 1934 in the subterranean rooms of Plaza de Catalunya, with big panels and a huge 180º diorama, designed by Josep Torres Clavé and Le Corbusier. 160 In the CIAM tradition, the elaboration of the plan started from a rigorous critique and analysis of the urban development of Barcelona and of the living conditions of large segments of the population, not only within the historic center but also within Ildefons Cerdà’s Ensanche, the old but rapidly industrializing villages on the outskirts of the nineteenth century grid, and the exploding periphery. The group was equally very critical of the Garden City concepts that were developing quickly around Barcelona, “a form of urban development which was the fruit of a culture, a climate… totally distinct from the Mediterranean one.”161 Overall, the Plan was organized around five principles and objectives: the urban renewal of most dilapidated areas such as the Barrio Chino; a new model of urban expansion beyond the Cerdà grid; a new zoning at the metropolitan scale; the creation of a “city of leisure” at the edge of the sea; and the reform of the housing regulations. The urban renewal (saneamiento) involved the historic center on both sides of the Ramblas, with an emphasis on the Raval and Barrio Chino. Even though the architects admitted that the center should have been destroyed and rebuilt, they were aware, under the Republican regime, of the social conditions of the neighborhoods and thus proposed what could be qualified as ‘careful clearance.’ The idea was to selectively target the most derelict blocks (both from a social and housing point of view), demolish them and replace them by public spaces like parks, squares, and public equipment: “It is necessary that the residents of the historic center be given more sun, air, light, and a vision of space and trees; in one word, it is necessary for them to reestablish 158 See A.C. nº 1, pp. 20-21. Quoted by Salvador Tarragó Cid, “El Pla Macià o La Nova Barcelona, 1931-38,” in Quaderns, nº 90, p. 26. This last section of the essay was first published as Jean-François Lejeune, “Madrid versus Barcelona: Two Visions for the Modern City and Block,“ in Athens Journal of Architecture, Vol. 1, nº 4, October 2015, pp. 271-294. 160 See A.C., nº 13, 1934, pp. 14-28. Also see Tarragó Cid, op. cit. & “El Plan Maciá, sintesis del trabajo del GATCPAC para Barcelona, in 2c – Construcción de la Ciudad, nº 15-16, 1980, pp. 68-85; 161 Tarragó Cid, “El Pla Macià,” p. 25. 159 82 contact with nature.”162 At the same time, the authors heavily criticized the Municipality’s plan to open new streets and avenues within the historic center and, in particular, the so-called Via C from the cathedral to Via Layetana: We believe… that to facilitate the contemplation of monuments from new points of view and to extricate them from the neighboring buildings is a dangerous experiment, today abandoned universally and which has failed more than once…. The concept of creating a connection street between the monuments appears to us like the second part of the famous project “Barcelona Gothic,” which was rejected by all…. It is preferable to accept the actual environment made up of the superposition of styles of different periods.163 The GATCPAC’s strategy of limited and targeted demolition, coupled with its denunciation of the isolation of monuments, stand out as one of the most interesting aspects of the Plan Macià. For those architects, monuments only made sense in relation to their urban and social context and the old Haussmanian strategy had to be abandoned. 164 As the group’s architects asserted that their criticism implied “more respect for the past” than the official policy, they were somewhat distancing themselves from the CIAM theses. This departure from the concept of full-fledged tabula rasa certainly reflected the intensity of social life in the city—and an aspect that has not been often discussed in the history of modernist urbanism. To some extent, I would argue that they expressed a Southern—Mediterranean—vision of the modern city against the prevalent northern one as inscribed in CIAM’s tenets. It is here useful to remember the first project of the GATEPAC presented in A.C. 4 for the urbanization of the Diagonal. Although the succession of parallel and aligned slabs along the avenue corresponded to the tenets of CIAM, the Barcelona proposal placed these slabs on top of a continuous two-story high plinth. This plinth recreated the traditional urbanity at ground level with shops and other functions on the two floors while the roof became new recreational ground with gardens, pools and other leisure spaces for the residents.165 The second objective of the Plan Macià resulted directly from the critique of Cerdà’s Ensanche whose original design and concepts (two-sided blocks, low density and high proportion of gardens, open blocks for public structures) had been turned over and perverted by real estate speculation and increased density. In order to avoid the expansion of the Cerdà block beyond the limits of the plan, the GATCPAC presented a planning alternative based upon a new typological and morphological module that combined nine Cerdà blocks of 133m x 133m together to form a new grid of 400m x 400m to be deployed on the edge of the existing Ensanche and outside villages. This strategy was, according to the group, necessary 162 Quoted in Tarragó Cid, “El Plan Maciá, sintesis,” p. 77. Ibidem. The GATCPAC’s attack against the proposed Via C created such a political problem that they were obliged to remove one of their panels in the exhibition of 1934. 164 Ibidem, p.75. It must be noted that the Plan Macià involved the complete demolition of the Barceloneta neighborhood. 165 See A.C. nº 4, pp, 24-27. 163 83 to limit the size of the city expansion while increasing the density beyond 1000 residents/ha (i.e., twice the density of the actual Ensanche). They wrote: It is necessary to concentrate the city: modern urbanism must fight against the concept of garden city and the cities in continuous expansion.166 With this statement, the GATCPAC architects buried what they saw as the main, and problematic, characteristics of the urbanism of the Modernisme and Noucentisme, i.e., the indiscriminate demolitions in the historic center to widen streets for traffic and put monuments in evidence (a kind of late Haussmannian vision), the Beaux-Arts and socially divided city promoted by Jaussely’s Plan of 1903-1907 in contrast with the more egalitarian vision of Cerdá, the garden suburb and its villa type, as well as the regional vision of Rubió I Taduri, a controlled approach at the regional level of the oil stain strategy of expansion of the city. Adopting the system of Le Corbusier’s redents at the large scale, the GATCPAC placed itself again in contraposition with the rigidity of CIAM’s schemes. They refused the simplistic strategy of parallel housing bars and implicitly advocated an urban structure that, albeit totally new, may have been able to establish the public spaces necessary to the Mediterranean way of life and, in this case, the concept of the patio at a large scale. Expectedly, the plan also included the establishment of a zoning at the metropolitan scale. Beyond the many diagrams, two urban/architectural projects made that strategy visible within the landscape. First, as can be seen on the diorama, the Plan proposed an administrative and business center to be established as three tall cruciform towers set into a new park at the edge of the bay and harbor. Unavoidably, this large-scale zoning relied on a new highway system that involved significant widening of important arteries such as the Gran Vía. Linked to the new metropolitan zoning but presented as an autonomous project within the Plan Macià was the planning of a recreation city to the south of Barcelona along the beach of Castelldefells. “La Ciudad de Reposo que necesita Barcelona,” published in details in the issue nº7 of A.C., was an ambitious plan primarily targeted to the working and middle class, that included hotels, organized beaches and bath complexes, residential areas of cabins or small vacation houses, and other sport infrastructures. The vacation city was a couple of miles long and connected by trains, buses, and a highway terminating in the Gran Vía. All buildings were dispersed and connected by the beach and various nature trails in order to respect the ecologically sensitive pine area. The overall goal was “not to create a fashionable beach but rather a fundamentally democratic path to resolving the social needs of the middleand working class.”167 Last but not least, the Plan Macià proposed a radical reform of the housing regulations in order to require cross-ventilated spaces, eliminate the small internal ventilation patios, and 166 Quoted in Tarragó Cid, “El Plan Maciá, sintesis,” p. 73. Ibidem, p.81. 800,000 people were members of the Cooperativa de la Ciudad de Reposo y Vacaciones de Castelldefells (unions, cultural and sport associations, etc.). See A.C., nº 7, 1932, pp. 24-31. 167 84 thus reduce the typical width of the units. All of these were necessary to adopt the new module of nine Cerdà blocks for the expansion of the city. They were also instrumental in the design of the Casa Bloc whose construction was underway (1933) under the direction of architect Josep Torres Clavé in collaboration with GATCPAC members José Luis Sert and José Baptista Suberino.168 Built from 1932 to 1936, the Casa Bloc was an experimental social housing project for industrial workers located to the northeast of the Ensanche in the Sant’Andreu neighborhood. As described by the architect in the A.C. nº11, “the Casa [Bloc]… constitutes a first experiment for the Republican revolution: a new plan and type of social housing projects that will come out as results of the new social structure of the country.”169 The parcel was 170 meter long and 70 meter wide, along a street 30-meter wide. It was much smaller than the module proposed in the Plan Macià, but the architects adopted the same concept of “redents” that characterized their vision for the expansion of Barcelona. The S-shaped linear structure was organized around two large planted open patios, one toward the street and the other toward the back. The whole structure was articulated around four staircases and elevators with outdoor distribution corridors every two floors. Every section of the project consisted of three levels of cross-ventilated apartments designed as double-level units, and reaching a density of 1140 residents per hectare with outstanding environmental conditions. The living/kitchen level of every duplex was four-meter wide, which corresponded to the width of the structural system, whereas the switching of interior partitions off the grid on the second level allowed to provide three relatively generous bedrooms in each unit. Like the Plan Macià, the Casa Bloc did break away from a certain northern orthodoxy. José Luis Sert presented this project in his book Can Our Cities Survive?, published in 1942 in the United States following his voluntary exile during the Civil War: This housing scheme for low-income families, formed by 211 apartments (five-room duplex type), is adapted to the climate of Barcelona (Spain). These apartment units with their community services… form a small neighborhood unit. The widely spaced wings of these blocks and the semi-enclosed open space between them are reminiscent of the traditional Mediterranean patio and to a certain extent reconstruct this element on an urban scale. The relationship between open and built-up spaces is especially important in housing schemes: from it may be derived a great variety of architectural expressions.170 168 On Clavé, see the special issue of 2c – Construcción de la Ciudad, nº 15-16, 1980. See A.C., nº 11, 1933, p. 22. Also see Carolina B. García and Josep M. Rovira, Casa Bloc, Barcelona: Mudito & Co, 2011; Salvador Tarragó Cid, “Revendicació de la Casa Bloc,” Quaderns, nº 140, pp. 41-43. 170 José Luis Sert, Can Our Cities Survive?, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942, p. 73. The book was an attempt to introduce the Charter of Athens to the American profession and public. Ten years after in 1953, Sert and his partner Paul Lester Wiener published the famous article “Can Patios Make Cities,” in Architectural Forum, Aug. 1953, pp. 124-[131], where they advocated the use of the patio at the scale of the city (civic center), the neighborhood (plaza), and the house (patio). Also see 169 85 Moreover, even though the Casa Bloc was built on pilotis to help with ventilation of both streets and patios, important sections of the ground floor were reserved for retail, social services, etc. The plans published in A.C. indicated the extent of traditional mixed-use spaces integrated within the ground floor plan of the project. In so doing, the architects emulated—in the modernist language—the functions of the traditional Madrid block (manzana), or, as Sert wrote, as a “neighborhood unit”: concierge housing units, public library, public baths, workshops, shops, café, swimming pool, day-care center, and other gardens. Part of that program reflected the social ambitions of the second but short-lived Republican government, but beyond its ideological implications, it also emphasized that the Casa Bloc was an urban modernist alternative to the traditional block. This attitude was not an exceptional one: the same issue of A.C. 11 presented a revised Cerdà block whose urban characteristic—size, enclosed perimeter, mixed uses—were maintained and modified at the same time through the use of pilotis and sections of blocks set up at ninety degrees.171 The project for workers’ housing proposed within the Ensanche in a high-density area looked back to the principles of the original Cerdà block: housing along two opposite sides of the manzana; walls and gardens along the perpendicular streets. Eliminating the chamfers and using the oblique corners to create gated passages to the central public garden, the architects placed one tenmeter deep barre of duplex housing along the SW-NE streets, whereas three short housing bars to be built on top of a continuous one-story street front kept the continuity of the other streets. The entire perimeter was devoted to shops, social spaces, library, gymnasium, and other functions; some of the bars had a roof garden and children playgrounds. The capacity of the GATCPAC to combine modern and functionalist forms of housing while maintaining the urban continuity and occupation of the street edges was particularly remarkable and suggested, within the Cerdà Ensanche, a reinforced Mediterranean culture of housing that was necessary to maintain. As Carolina García and Josep Rovira wrote recently in their small monograph Casa Bloc: Redents and pilotis anticipate the conceptual scheme that informs the Casa Bloc, a formal scheme that unmistakably has intellectual implications: to take side in history, at the present moment. Against the linear block of the Siedlungen. Against Germany. And also, against the enclosed block and the garden city.172 Carola Barrios, “Can patios make cities? Urban traces of TPA in Brazil and Venezuela,” in ZARCH. Journal of interdisciplinary studies in Architecture and Urbanism, nº 1 (Las trazas del lugar / Traces of place), 2013, pp. 70-81. 171 See G.A.T.E.P.A.C., “Ensayo de distribución de la zona edificable en una manzana del Ensanche de Barcelona a base de un tipo de vivienda obrera,” AC 11, 27-31 (Fall 1933). 172 Carolina B. García and Josep M. Rovira, Casa Bloc, p. 11. 86 1.7. Zuazo & Jansen’s Anteproyecto for Madrid and the Casa de las Flores Born in Bilbao, Secundino Zuazo Ugalde (1887-1971) was one of the most important architects and urbanists to rise in 1920s Madrid until his forced exile by General Franco and his eventual return to Spain in the late 1940s.173 He graduated in 1912 and worked with Antonio Palacios and Joaquín Otamendi, two eclectic architects whose important work continues to mark the landscape of early 20th century Madrid. Between 1920 and 1927, Zuazo elaborated urban design projects for the interior redevelopment and the expansion of Sevilla, Bilbao and Zaragoza, among other cities—all proposals of indisputable originality and invention within the conventions of the European city. If the intellectual environment of Barcelona was highly influenced by Le Corbusier and his Mediterranean revelation, in Madrid, it was the German world of modern planning and architect-urbanists like Bruno Taut, Otto Wagner, Paul Mebes, Joseph Stübben or Paul Wolf who were the definitive references. 174 Those German planners and architects pursued the same goals of a better, more humane, more environmentally-friendly city and they had advocated a lot of new ideas such as the socalled “reformed block,” i.e., an enclosed block containing a large garden and, in some cases, some public infrastructure inside.175 Equally influential were the Viennese Höfe, the abstracted classical architecture of Adolf Loos, and Henrik Berlage’s conception of the modern city where the city block conceived as a whole, rather than the sum of individually built parcels, were to become the main component of modern urban monumentality. In the early 1930s Madrid, “Secundino Zuazo played, along with Leopoldo Torres Balbás… the role accepted by all of master of the younger generation: most prominently, in the controversy over the nature of the classical language or the analysis of the rational housing unit.”176 The planning of Madrid had been dominated since 1860 by the implementation of the Plan Castro, but the Ensanche was far from complete and what had been done was in many ways in contradiction with the original plan. Many public spaces were not respected, as the implemented grid privileged traffic and thus eliminated most of the public places programmed by Castro. Moreover, the successive building ordinances from 1864 allowed for a higher density, compensated only by small-scale courtyards for light and ventilation only. Even more important was the fact that there was an unplanned area between the limits of the Castro Plan—known as the Extrarradio—and the edges of municipal Madrid. In 1929, the City of 173 On Zuazo, see Lilia Maure Rubio, Secundino Zuazo, arquitecto, Madrid: Fundación COAM, 1987, and the special issue of the periodical Arquitectura, vol. 12, nº 141, 1970. Also see Carlos Sambricio, “Introducción,” Secundino Zuazo, Madrid y sus anhelos urbanísticos. Memorias, 1919-1940, Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 2003, pp.12-134. 174 See Carlos Sambricio, “Hermann Jansen y el concurso de Madrid de 1929,” in Arquitectura, nº 303, 1995, pp. 8-15; also see his very important essay “Zuazo in Caracas: The urbanism of exile in Venezuela 1937,” in Planning Perspectives, v. 28, 2013, pp. 51-70. 175 On the concept of reform block, see Wolfgang Sonne, “Dwelling in the Metropolis: Sitte, Hegemann, and the International Dissemination of Reformed Urban Blocks, 1890-1940,” in Charles Bohl and JeanFrançois Lejeune (eds.), Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis: Modern Civic Art and International Exchanges, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 249-274; Wolfgang Sonne, Urbanität und Dichte im Städtebau des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2014. 176 Sambricio, “Hermann Jansen y el concurso de Madrid de 1929,” p. 8. 87 Madrid called a competition to prepare an extensive study of the extension of the city (particularly to the north) and potential reforms of the historic center. Thanks to the intervention of Fernando García Mercadal, who worked in Zuazo’s office for some time, Zuazo associated with the German planner Hermann Jansen. Disciple of Karl Henrici in Aachen, Jansen had won the master plan for Groß-Berlin in 1910 and had in the aftermath been the artisan of various neighborhoods plans in Berlin, as well as abroad. He was also the editor of the important periodical Der Baumeister from 1924 to 1929.177 The team Zuazo-Jansen placed first in the competition but the jury headed by German architect Paul Bonatz decided not to designate a winner. The Zuazo-Jansen Anteproyecto del trazado viario y urbanización de Madrid responded best to the preconditions set by the municipal government, i.e., to plan the future of the city in relation to the global traffic, including automobiles, metros and railways, and to the housing needs with an emphasis on “the necessity to study the distinct typologies of housing as generating cells of the urban fabric.”178 In contrast with the Plan Macià, the Anteproyecto clearly limited the extension of the city with the use of a large green belt and “the development of satellite-cities which, new or superimposed on existing urban or rural nuclei would absorb the surplus of urban growth.”179 In line with international proposals by Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, Martin Wagner and Jansen himself, the greenbelt was to be connected with existing parks and gardens, in a fully integrated system of parks. Within the belt, Zuazo and Jansen designed the large-scale armature of the new neighborhoods to be planned in the Extrarradio in a combination of five density zones from 450 residents/ha to single-family houses; all proposed blocks were shaped as variations of long rectangles with large green cores in their centers. The plan also included a series of proposals for the historic center, mainly the widening of radial arteries and the design of an interior ring connecting the Gran Vía to the Opera and Calle Atocha. In addition, a large central market and business district was to be built into phases to the south of the Plaza Mayor. This project, along with another proposal between the Gran Vía and the Plaza Alfonso Martinez, was part of Zuazo’s ambitious plan of inner-city reform that he would study and present later.180 Both projects involved a significant amount of demolition of the 177 Ibidem. There is still no comprehensive study of Jansen’s extensive work, with the exception of his work in Ankara. 178 On the competition, see note 22 and Lilia Maure Rubio, Anteproyecto del trazado viario y urbanización de Madrid: Zuazo-Jansen, 1929-30, Madrid: COAM, 1986, p. xix. The project was partially published in A.C. nº2, 1931, pp. 24-25. 179 Lilia Mauro, introduction to Anteproyecto, p. xxiv. According to Carlos Sambricio, “Zuazo established the outline of the project, and they divided the workload between them. The evidence for this is seen in Jansen's original sketches, found in the Plan Sammlung del Kunstwissenschaft Institut of the Technische Universität in Berlin, as well as drawings located in the Zuazo archive in Madrid's National Library. The Berlin drawings demonstrate how Jansen approached the plan for the outlying districts. He proposed a zoned system for the city, with new industrial districts, a residential district, and a detailed study of how the extension of the Paseo de la Castellana should be conceived. At the same time Zuazo concentrated on alterations to the city center, indicating how to lay out the new infrastructure, as well as analyzing - based on criteria different from those set out by the German - the vision for the Castellana axis.” (from Sambricio, “Secundino Zuazo in Caracas: The Urbanism of Exile in Venezuela 1937,” op.cit.). 180 See Secundino Zuazo, “La Reforma interior de Madrid,” in Arquitectura, nº 7, 1934, pp. 175-206. 88 historic fabric—a fact not unusual at that moment of 20th century urbanistic practice and theory—but the proposed solutions were typologically quite inventive for their attempt, in spite of their radicalism, at developing a new urban form in relation to the historic city. The focus of the Zuazo-Jansen Plan was the prolongation of the historic axis Paseo del Prado/Paseo de la Recoleta/Paseo de la Castellana toward the north, a project in discussion for decades but without effective resolution. The first version of the plan presented for the competition in 1929—a two-kilometer long project mixing parks, public buildings and plazas— had the potential of dramatically impacting Madrid’s overall urban form and create a civic and residential pole, comparable in size and spirit with the Paseo del Prado and the Retiro Park, while proposing at the same time a new and modernist urban form for housing. At the center of the project was a 400-meter wide linear park embracing the central roadway boulevard on a length of approximately 1200 meter. At its southern end, at the connection point with the existing Paseo de la Castellana, Zuazo and Jansen designed two large courtyards blocks whose use was not determined; at its northern end, two large public buildings marked the intersection with another wide E-W green boulevard. Beyond this intersection the extended Paseo was reduced in width to about 100 meters. Even though it may suffer from excessive symmetry and may have been too wide to be fully activated, this monumental composition at the scale of the whole city, both traditional and modern, could have been one of the most impressive in a European city. It was overall, in spite of its traditional axial monumentality, a more “modernist” scheme than what GATCPAC had proposed in any section of the Plan Macià—almost an anticipation of Lúcio Costa’s conceptual scheme for Brasilia. Indeed, twenty parallel 12-story bar buildings connected by low structures flanked the wide Paseo on each side. At the intersection with the E-W green, Zuazo and Jansen planned two large cultural buildings, which would have appeared in the landscape by their attached 25-story thin towers. Moreover, in a bold but rational infrastructural move, they proposed to build an underground tunnel under the extended Paseo de la Castellana between the two main train stations of Chamartín to the north and Atocha to the south. In 1929, Zuazo, who intended to be a business partner in the execution of the Castellana project, criticized the decision to entrust the development to a Municipal Technical Office. Yet, a couple of months later, the Muncipality asked the Madrid architect to come back to the project and revise the proposal for the prolongation of the Castellana by making it more profitable both for the city and private real estate interests: parks were to be reduced and the density increased with the use of a new type of block; at the same time, Zuazo pleaded for the insertion of social housing in the overall scheme. The revised project, without the participation of Jansen, maintained the large-scale civic center in the middle of the development, whereas a more traditional urban fabric lined up both sides of the Paseo reduced in width to 120 meters. Like in Barcelona with the Casa Bloc, the block type proposed by Zuazo was being built at exactly the same moment in the Ensanche of Arguëlles 89 to the western side of the city near the Moncloa—the Casa de las Flores. This type of block implied a more continuous urban front along the extended Paseo de la Castellana and thus supported a more traditional vision of urban space, one that would have more appropriate to host the mixed uses that were fundamental for a successful urban life along the Paseo.181 The original block or manzana designed in the Plan Castro of 1860 left half of the block area free of construction and proposed to establish a large central patio to promote density with adequate ventilation and green spaces. Yet, in 1864 already, height had been increased from three to four floors with mandatory ventilation patios while the percentage of open space had been reduced to thirty-five and in some smaller cases to twenty per cent.182 Moreover, given that a typical manzana would be built as an assemblage of individual properties, the resulting spaces were more often than not inadequate for residents’ uses. For the Casa de las Flores, Zuazo went back to Castro’s original concept and percentage of open space: he organized the block in two parallel sections around a large public central patio, open on both short sides of the rectangle. The block/building was a complex massing of six sections with four, six or eight floors depending on their location and the neighborhood ordinances. The two parallel sections consisted of five individual apartment houses—each organized around a very large light and ventilation patio. The nuclei of vertical circulation were set up as bridges across the ventilation courtyards, thus providing airy and well-ventilated vertical circulation spaces and allowing for larger and better lighted apartments on both sides—interestingly, this new system became a familiar feature of Madrid housing from the postwar decades and is quite popular in contemporary construction. Overall, the Casa de las Flores contained 248 apartments varying from 88 to 170 square meters, i.e., originally hosting up to 1475 residents in the block; a variety of retail areas, including a café known for important tertulias (social and/or literary gatherings), provided all necessary services to residents and neighbors.183 As built, the Casa reflected Zuazo’s two main objectives: firstly, to remedy the problems of the Ensanche, i.e., to redefine the block versus the lot in the manner advocated by his German mentors and Hendrik Berlage, and thus provide more hygienic and better ventilated apartments; secondly, to propose a new typology for the extension of the city that would reflect a new social concept of “convivencia” or “living together.” In his manuscript notes, the 181 Sambricio mentions in the essay “Secundino Zuazo in Caracas” that the Spanish architect intended to use the Casa de las Flores type in the competition proposal but Jansen convinced him to adopt the more modern proposal. Carlos Sambricio, “El bloque Las Flores, de Secundino Zuazo,” in RA, Revista de Arquitectura, nº15, 2013, pp.23-34; “Antología de textos sobre la Casa de las Flores” in Quaderns, nº 150, 1982, pp. 86-87. 182 On the Plan Castro, see Carlos María de Castro, Memoria descriptiva del Ante-Proyecto de Ensanche de Madrid (con estudio preliminar de Antonio Bonet Correa), Madrid: COAM, 1978. 183 Pablo Neruda, selected lines from “Explico algunas cosas,” Residencia en la Tierra, Madrid: Ediciones Cruz y Raya, 1935: … I lived in a neighbourhood / of Madrid, with church bells, / with clocks, and with trees. / From there I could see / the dry face of Castille / like an ocean of leather. / My house was called / The House of the Flowers, for /they were geraniums in all parts; / it was a beautiful house / with dogs and a lot of kids. 90 architect described, in a modern language that recalls both Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, the functional aspects of his project: Projected under architectural inspirations and social concepts prevalent in our time. The group of houses is a huge mass of construction, an "Escorial" in pink brick. It is designed with strict sense of the function and the decorative elements are actually functional elements…. A very rational art of handling the brick, to establish rhythms and decorative series with different orders, is what gives particular grace to this set of large buildings together. The architect looked exclusively function, and has achieved a logical and rational set, which strongly impressed by the admirable play of volumes of construction.184 At the same time and like Clavé at the Casa Bloc, Zuazo combined the languages of modernity and tradition to produce a work of architecture and urbanism that strongly belonged to Madrid, its past, its present and its future. The facades of the four corners of Casa de las Flores displayed the Madrilenian brick, whereas the eight-floor recessed sections on both N-S sides, the interior courtyards, and all facades facing the garden-like patio at the center of the block were stuccoed. Most remarkable were the two apartment houses on the southern corners of the complex: their deep balconies, where flowers grow, are reminiscent of the vernacular interior courtyards or distribution terraces visible in Triana, Sevilla, or even the corrales—the open air theaters that used to be visible across Renaissance and Baroque Spain. Zuazo made direct reference to those traditional vernacular elements: When analyzed, one notices gracefully designed elements that were never exotic in Spain, but, on the contrary, reflect an ancient traditional lineage. Arcades along streets, as in many Spanish towns and cities. Garden courtyard, stepped terraces, balconies and sunrooms. Chromatic surfaces.185 184 Carlos Sambricio, “El bloque Las Flores,” p. 32. Ibidem. Corrales originated from courtyard performances, and were constructed within rectangular courtyards enclosed by buildings on three sides. The stage was raised with a permanent backdrop, and a patio for standing spectators was placed in the upper levels. 185 91 1.8. The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris 1937 World’s Fair On the 17th of July 1936, the Civil War erupted. Many architects—particularly modern ones from Sert to Candela to Lacasa and Domínguez—took the road of exile. Yet, a pioneer of Spanish modernism such as José Manuel Aizpurúa embraced the Falangist cause and ended his life executed by the Popular Front in San Sebastían. Most modern architects eventually remained in Spain.186 Before leaving for the United States, Sert and his colleague Lacasa designed the Spanish Pavilion for the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 and brought the spirit of the endangered Republic and the Mediterranean at the heart of the French metropolis. In contrast to the massive symbolism of the German and Italian pavilions, Sert and Lacasa’s work was light and open-air. The pavilion was made of two distinct parts: the rectangular steel-framed box that displayed Picasso’s Guernika and a vernacular open patio covered with a sail-like canopy reminiscent of the sheltered patios of Andalusia in the summer. Parts of the building floors were covered with typical ceramic tiles of Spanish terracotta, and the exhibition rooms were carpeted with “esparto,” the rope-like grass fiber used in Mediterranean cultures. Another spectacular detail was a wooden lattice characteristic of southern Arabic influence.187 “This pavilion”—Enrique Granell Trías wrote—“was a reliquary, a Noah’s Ark, a kind of artificial Ibiza where the ‘degenerates’ could seek refuge: Picasso, Miró, Alberto and Julio Gonzalez, among others, would be present there….”188 The pavilion plan encouraged movement in a continuous way. Following the entrance through the grand patio, a series of ramps and rooms defined a path not unlike an urban corridor, with an ingenious sequence that allowed the visitor to see the two upper floors before descending into the amenities of the ground floor. Jaime Freixa has interpreted this layout as “a metaphor of the city, with shelves and display cases that replicated the linear contemplation of storefronts in the city streets.” Here, it seems that The urban planner met the Mediterranean: the memories of the old medinas and historic quarters with their web of tight corners and narrow streets filled with intense life, alleviated finally by the splendid breadth of the plazas.189 186 On the impact of the Civil War on architects, see Sofía Diéguez Patao, La generación del 25: primera arquitectura moderna en Madrid, Madrid: Catédra, 1997; Juan José Martín Frechilla and Carlos Sambricio (eds.), Arquitectura española del exilio, Madrid: Lampreave, 2014. 187 Peio Aguirre, “The State of Spain: Nationalism, Critical Regionalism, and Biennialization,” Journal nº 22, January 2011, last accessed November 15, 2018 at https://www.e-flux.com/journal/22/67767/thestate-of-spain-nationalism-critical-regionalism-and-biennialization/ 188 Enrique Granell Trías, p. 136. 189 From the unpublished lecture notes of Jaume Freixa “From Ibiza to America: Josep Lluis Sert’s Modern Reinterpretation of the Mediterranean Vernacular,” University of Miami School of Architecture, “The Other Modern” Conference at Casa Malaparte, Capri, March 8-13, 1998. On Sert abroad, see for instance Josep Rovira, José Luis Sert, op. cit.; Xavier Costa and Guido Hartray (eds.), Sert: arquitecto en Nueva York, Barcelona, ACTAR, 1997. Also see the catalogue Pabellón Español 1937: Exposición International de París, Madrid: Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1987. 92 This ideology, about raising a truly national architecture, modern and avant-gardist at the same time, rooted in the tradition and in earth, was also manifest in the sculpture erected by Alberto Sánchez, entitled The Spanish People Have a Path Which Leads to a Star, that stood in front of the pavilion. In his complex organization and construction methods, the pavilion was an expression of Spain’s complex multi-identitarian reality.190 As Jordana Mendelson has shown, photography and graphic arts had an equivalent, possibly even bigger role on the image of the Spanish pavilion. Along the architectural promenade and on some exterior façade panels as well, the large photomurals, conceived by Valencian artist Josep Renau, used the most advanced techniques of photomontage, collage, and other contraposition to present Spain’s diverse regional geography, the social advancement of the Republic such as land reform, and the Misiones pedagogicas to bring art and culture to the countryside, as well as large and rich of popular arts and crafts.191 *** 190 Peio Aguirre, op. cit. See Jordana Mendelson, “Josep Renau and the 1937 Spanish Pavilion in Paris,” Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939, pp. 125-183. 191 93 Cover of book by Miguel de Unamuno, Andanzas y visiones españolas, Madrid: Renacimiento, 1922. 94 Daroca. Urban fabric and castle. © Otto Wunderlich, Fototeca del Patrimonio Histórico, Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España. 95 “Leonardo Rucabado” from Arquitectura, nº 8, 1918. © COAM. 96 Aníbal Gonzalez Álvarez-Ossorio. Plaza de España, Seville. 1914-28. Photo J.F. Lejeune.. Teodoro de Anasagasti. Casa de Correos y Telégrafos, Malaga, 1917-1925. From https://n-340.org/patrimonio/items-patrimoniales/malaga/malaga/ conjunto-del-paseodel-parque/antigua-casa-central-de-correos-y-telegrafos/ 97 Colonia Unión Eléctrica Madrileña. Aerial view, 1932. From Barreiro Pereira, Paloma. Casas Baratas: La Vivienda Social En Madrid 1900-1939, 1991. Colonia Maudes (1928-29). Sociedad Cooperativa de Casas Baratas y Económicas para los Ayudantes y Auxilioares de la Ingeniería y de la Arquitectura. Arch. Eladio Laredo Cortina, José García Nieto, et. al. Aerial view, 1932. From: see left. Colonia del Retiro (La Regalada). Los Previsiones de la Construcción (1925-32). General view, 1932. From: see above. 98 Top: Joaquim Sunyer. Cala Forn, 1927. © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Bottom: Joan Miró. La Masía, 1921-22. © National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 99 Cover of the special issue of the periodical 2c Construcción de la ciudad, 1981. Courtesy Biblioteca COAM. Joan Miró. La tierra labrada, 1923-1924. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York. 100 Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier. Gardens of Montjuic (Miramar), Barcelona, 1919. From J.C.N. Forestier, Gardens; a Note-book of Plans and Sketches, New York, 1924-28. Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier. Fountain del Gat, Montjuic, Barcelona, 1918. From J.C.N. Forestier, Gardens; a Note-book of Plans and Sketches, New York, 1924-28. 101 Pueblo Español, Barcelona, 1929. Source: Pueblo español, 1929, pamphlet, author’s collection. Pueblo Español, Barcelona, 1929. Plaza mayor. Photo J.F. Lejeune. 102 Cover and pages from the book La casa popolare en España, 1930. From Fernando García Mercadal, La casa popolare en España, Barcelona, 1981 [1930]. Following page: Pages from A.C. nº 1 (1931) & nº 6 (1932); from A.C. nº 18 (1935); from A.C. nº 21 (1936). 103 104 Top: Raul Haussman, photographer. House in Ibiza, c. 1933-1936. Source: Archives Raoul Haussman, Limoges. Bottom left: José Luis Sert and J. Torres Clavé. House “Week-End,” type A, Costas de Garraf, Barcelona, 1935. Source: A.C. 19, 1935. 105 Bottom right: cover of Hyle: ein Traumsein in Spanien, Munich, 2006. Le Corbusier and GATCPAC. Plan Macià, Barcelona, 1933. © Col-legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, Barcelona. 106 Le Corbusier and GATCPAC. Details of the Plan Macià, Barcelona, 1933. © José Luis Sert, Can Our Cities Survive?, Cambridge, The Harvard university press, 1942. Right & bottom: Josep Torres Clavé, José Luis Sert & Joan Baptista Subirana. Plans and perspective of Casa Bloc, Barcelona, 1932-36. © A.C., nº 11, 1933. Top: Josep Torres Clavé, José Luis Sert & Joan Baptista Subirana. Casa Bloc, Barcelona, 1932-36. © José Luis Sert, Can Our Cities Survive?, Cambridge, 1942. 107 Right: Secundino Zuazo & Hermann Jansen. Masterplan for Madrid, 1929-30. From Lilia Maure Rubio, Anteproyecto del trazado viario y urbanización de Madrid: Zuazo-Jansen, 1929-30, Madrid: COAM, 1986. Bottom left and right: Zuazo & Jansen. First version of the extension of the Castellana, 1929-30. From Lilia Maure Rubio, Anteproyecto del trazado viario y urbanización de Madrid: Zuazo-Jansen, 1929-30, Madrid: COAM, 1986. 108 Top: Secundino Zuazo. Casa de las Flores, Madrid, 1930-32. Photo J.F. Lejeune. Bottom left: Secundino Zuazo. Second version of the extension of the Castellana, 1930. From Lilia Maure Rubio, Anteproyecto del trazado viario y urbanización de Madrid: Zuazo-Jansen, 1929-30, Madrid: COAM, 1986. Bottom right: Casa de las Flores: site plan and axonometric view. From Lilia Maure Rubio. 109 Top: José Luis Sert and Luis Lacasa. Covered patio of the Spanish Republic Pavilion at the Paris Exposition, Paris, 1937 [“Le Pavillon de l’Espagne. Guernica, par Picasso. Fontaine de Mercure, par Alexander Calder”]. Source: Cahiers d’Art 8-10, 1937. The New York Public Library / Art Resource, NY. Bottom left: Interior view of the covered patio. Source: Cahiers d’Art. Bottom right: Model of the Spanish Pavilion. Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Photo J.F. Lejeune. 110 111 Victoriano Balazanz. Portrait of Joaquín Costa, 1912. © Biblioteca Nacional de España. 112 2: The Modern Village: Spain and the International Context The disgrace of Spain originated principally because of the absence in national consciousness of the vision that the internal war against drought, against the rugged character of the soil, the rigidity of the coasts, the intellectual backwardness of the people, the isolation from the European Centre, the absence of capital, was of greater importance than the war against Cuban or Filipino separatism; and because of not been as alarmed by the former as by the latter, and because of not having made the same sacrifices that were made for the latter, and of not having committed—sad suicide—the same stream of gold to the engineers and scientists as to the admirals and generals.1 There is no landscape that the hand of man, well guided, cannot embellish. In a few cases, absolute naturalness is justified, as in other extremes, a complete transformation in artificial scenarios.2 1 Joaquín Costa, Reconstitución y europeización de España, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local, 1981 [1900], quoted by Erik Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890-1930,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 89, no. 3, 1999), p. 451. 2 Victor d’Ors, “La Estética en el paisaje, preservación y realce de las condiciones naturales de las comarcas: Conferencia pronunciada por el arquitecto Victor d'Ors con ocasión de la III reunión de técnicos urbanistas en el Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, no. 85, 1949, p. 19. 113 2.1. REGENERATIONISM AND THE MODERNIZATION OF SPAIN The 1898 defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War and the subsequent loss of the last colonies opened a major intellectual, moral, political, and social crisis. Whereas the intellectual and writers, known as the Generation of 1898, shared a literary and subjective approach to a new vision of Spain, the Regeneracionismo or Regeneracionist movement that paralleled it shared a more objective and more scientific aim at modernizing the country and “regenerating” the nation’s social and economic base. 3 Constructing the concept of regeneration from the medical vocabulary as the opposite and genuine solution to corruption, the movement created a flow of new books and periodicals—Revista Contemporánea, 18751907; La España Moderna, 1889-1914; Alma Española, to name some of the most important—to criticize the incapacity of the political Restoration after 1876, the plague of caciquismo, and to promote new democratic forms of government that would end the backwardness of the country and integrate it into the modernizing European context on the other side of the Pyrenees. The dismal conditions of the countryside became a major focus of the movement as it synthetized all the ills of early 20th century Spain, i.e., extreme poverty, lack of productivity, archaic, and almost feudal social conditions in the south under the regime of latifundia owners, challenged by the new modernizing industrial and agricultural elites.4 Politician, jurist, economist and historian Joaquín Costa Martínez (1846-1911) was the most important representative of regeneracionism. Born in a small village of Aragón from a modest farmer family, he quickly became engaged in social issues, particularly as they related to the rural world. His life-long political efforts mostly failed, but the significance of his publications and ideas made him a figure of national and international importance for decades to come. In 1898 he published his book Colectivismo agrario en España where he strongly condemned the practice of latifundistas. Following the results of the investigation led at the Ateneo de Madrid in collaboration with Miguel de Unamuno and others, he issued a detailed denunciation of the political system under the title Oligarquía y Caciquismo como la forma actual de gobierno en España: urgencia y modo de cambiarla (1901). In this text, he pleaded for radical changes in the priorities of the State in favor of, among most important themes, education, scientific investigation, interior colonization, hydraulic public works and 3 For this introduction, see Erik Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” op. cit.; Erik Swyngedouw, Liquid Power and Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015; Josefina Gómez Mendoza, "Regeneracionismo y regadíos," in Antonio Gil Olcina and Alfred Morales Gil (eds.), Hitos hístóricos de los regadíos españoles, Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación, 1992, pp. 231-62; Fusi and Falafox, 1998; Joseph Harrison and Alan Hoyle, Spain’s 1898 Crisis: Regenerationism, Modernism, Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000; J.P. Fusi, and J. Palafox, España 1808–1996: El Desafío de la Modernidad, Madrid, Editorial Espasa, 1989; R. Garrabou, El regeneracionismo en España : política, educación, ciencia y sociedad, València: Universitat de València, 2007. 4 Swyngebouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” pp. 451-2. The Caciquismo is a distorted form of local government where a political leader has total control of a rural society expressed as a political form of clientelism. 114 reforestation, in brief “the de-Africanization” and the concomitant Europeanization of Spain.”5 In 1911 he published his most influential work in regard to the future process of interior colonization and the role of water, Política hidráulica, a sort of political testament whose influence throughout the twentieth century went across all ideologies and political changes.6 Costa’s emphasis on the role of water for the future and modernization of Spain had started earlier. He propounded his views in lectures to groups of farmers in Madrid in 1880 and 1881, where he argued already that “… if in other countries it is sufficient for man to help Nature, here it is necessary to do more; it is necessary to create her.”7 Likewise, Ricardo Macías Picavea, a leading regeneracionist intellectual, wrote in “El Problema Nacional”: There are countries which . . . can solely and exclusively become civilized with such a hydraulic policy, planned and developed by means of a hydraulic policy and its necessary works. Spain is among them . . . And the truth is that Spanish civilized architecture finds itself strongly subjected to this inexorable dilemma: to have water or to die…. Therefore, a hydraulic politics imposes itself; this requires changing all the national forces in the direction of this gigantic enterprise…. We have to dare to restore great lakes, make real interior seas of sweet water, multiply vast marshes, erect many dams, and exploit and keep all drops of water that fall over the peninsula without returning, if possible, one single drop to the sea.8 For Costa, modernization meant the remaking of Spanish nature and thus of the rural world. The erratic fluvial system, the uneven rainfalls, and the long periods of drought had hampered agricultural productivity for centuries, and the complex answer involved the need of an ambitious hydraulic strategy of irrigation and a radical social reform of the agricultural economical structure, in other words the creation of a “new” nature and a major hydrographic re-engineering of the country.9 Costa played a major role in this battle, the one of fusing a new geography and a new hydrographic condition with a renewed organization of the State that would help reduce social inequalities and provide the basis for a modernization of the economy and the state. His proposed solution was a state-driven national hydraulic policy. In the absence of private investments, the central government had the duty and responsibility of financing, planning, and building dams, reservoirs, and the canal infrastructure necessary to the irrigation of unproductive lands. He was aware of the extreme political forces at work— 5 Joaquín Costa, Colectivismo agrario en España: doctrinas y hechos, Madrid: Imprenta de San Francisco de Sales, 1898; Joaquín Costa, Oligarquía y Caciquismo como la forma actual de gobierno en España: urgencia y modo de cambiarla, Madrid: Revista de Trabajo, 1975 [1901]. On Costa, see Alberto Gil Novales, Derecho y revolución en el pensamiento de Joaquín Costa, Madrid: Ediciones Península, 1965. 6 Joaquín Costa, Política hidráulica: misión social de los riegos en España, Madrid: Biblioteca J. Costa, 1911. 7 From Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” p. 451: Costa, cited in Stephen L. Driever, “And since Heaven has Filled Spain with Goods and Gifts”: Lucas Mallada, the Regeneracionist Movement, and the Spanish Environment, 1881–90,” in Journal of Historical Geography 24, 1998, p. 40. 8 Swyngedouw 1999, S. 454, quoted from Ricardo Macías Picavea, El problema nacional, Madrid, Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local, 1977 [1899], pp. 318-20 (translation revised by author). 9 Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” p. 454. 115 from traditionalists to anarchists—and searched for a middle way. The project of the Regeneracionists was thus geographical, ideological and technocratic. The objective of modernization was intimately connected to the difficult situation of the farmers. It advocated the breaking of the large estates and their replacement with small peasant landowners, an intensive program of public education of the rural masses, and as condition sine qua non, the State’s control of water. In other words, it was predicated on the potential alliance of farmers as small landholders and the modernizing bourgeoisie against the reactionary system of cacicist control from the end of the Carlist Wars. For the Regeneracionists, the hydraulic route was an essential precondition and the role of the State critical to generate both investments and scientific resources.10 The writers of the Generation of 1898 were equally active on the subject and through their novels helped popularize the battle for water that Costa and his allies were trying to push politically. Miguel de Unamuno, who was one of the intellectuals most active in the campaign for the modernization of the countryside, wrote about “the cruelty of the climate” and the “somberness of the landscape.”11 Pio Baraja’s novel César o nada (1909-10) narrated the unsuccessful quest of a Castilian man who commits to create a municipal democracy in his small town by breaking the power of the elites and harvesting water for irrigation and reforestation. The ambiguous proto-fascist hero fails and nothing changes as “the people emigrate, but Castro Duro will continue living with its venerated traditions and its sacrosanct principles . . . sleeping under the sun, in the middle of its fields without irrigation.”12 Likewise, the “hydraulic” missionary in Macías Picavea’s La tierra de campos fails to turn around the local power structure and the village remains poor and without water. As Swyngedouw has stated, the “hydraulic heroes” that the novelists created were “apostolic figures whose voluntarist vision fought against the desperation and ignorance of the rural masses and the persistent dominance of the traditional rural elites, imposing on their modernizing program a hydraulic revival meant to resolve the contradictions emerging from the “Social Question” that seemed to plague Spain after its imperial downfall.”13 Rural development became, for Costa and many Regeneracionist colleagues, a fundamental way to develop, enrich, and balance the nation’s diverse regions and their various regimes of agricultural ownership and exploitation. The rural town or pueblo was seen, as in many other countries, as an ideal, communitarian goal, allied in a moderately progressist vision, with land reform that would give more independence and livability to the farmers and the farmworkers. For the Regeneracionist movement, the State was the only possible actor and instrument in 10 See Nicolás Ortega, Política Agraria y Dominación del Espacio, Madrid: Editorial Ayuso, 1975. The Carlist Wars were a series of civil wars that confronted various factions claiming the throne and that took place during the 19th century (1833-1840; 1846-1849; 1872-1876). 11 Quoted by Swyngedouw, Liquid Power, p. 54, from Stephen L. Driever, op. cit., p. 33. 12 Quoted by Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” p. 455 from Pio Baroja, César o nada, Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1965 [1910], p. 379. 13 For these references, see Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” p. 455; Ricardo Macías Picavea, La tierra de campos, Madrid: Librería de Victoriano Suárez, 2. Vols., 1897-1898. 116 the hydraulic project. Yet, theirs was a reformist vision that remained fundamentally capitalist in essence, particularly in relation to the landownership. They followed a reformist road for development against the traditional latifundia-based conservative elite. At the same time, by embracing the rural agenda, equally favored by the conservative classes afraid of the growing power and threat of the industrial sector and workers, they were able to receive some support from the right and the State’s apparatus. The promotion of this rural utopia became over the years “the spinal cord of the liberal state and the route to the Europeanization of the nation.”14 2.1.1. New Villages and Regional Planning The first significant response to the Regeneracionist multi-faceted drive to promote a new national water policy led by the State on a regionalist basis was the Plan General de Canales de Riego y Pantanos approved by the Government in 1902 and which was amended in 1909, 1916, 1919 and 1922. The plan included a list of projects for new dams, canals, reservoirs, and other water-related works, but was short of defining a clear implementation policy as well as a scientific understanding of the complexity of the river basins and other geographicalpolitical realities. Conservative forces and progressist ones increasingly shared the hydraulic agenda over the first two decades, yet the question of land ownership and the scale of the river basins would generate major dissensions and delays. Costa and many engineers advocated a new basin-based regional organization, whereas the conservative side intended the process to remain in centralized hands.15 This first plan of hydraulic works prompted an intense discussion regarding the potential colonization of the new reclaimed areas. As a result, the Ley sobre Colonización y Repoblación Interior [Law on Colonization and Interior Repopulation] was signed on the 30th of August 1907. In October of the same year the Junta Central [Central Board] de Colonización y Repoblación Interior was established to guide and monitor the program. The goal was to help “the families deprived of work or capital to take root in the nation, to provide for the necessities of life, reduce emigration, populate the field and cultivate uncultivated or not sufficiently exploited lands.”16 The law that only applied to public properties was criticized and revised various times along two decades, but was overall unsuccessful. In twenty years, eighteen rural foundations were established and 1700 families settled, mostly in Andalusia, in 14 Swyngedouw, Liquid Power, p. 74. The first law was the Ley de Aguas of 1879 that established the public ownership and management of water resources. For a complete study (in English) of the 19th and 20th century attempts at developing a coherent hydraulic policy, see Erik Swyngedouw, Liquid Power, op. cit.; Carlos Barciela López and Javier Melgarejo Moreno (eds.), El agua en la historia de España, Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2000, and in particular Joaquín Melgarejo Moreno, “De la política hidráulica a la planificación hidrológica. Un siglo de intervención del Estado," pp. 275-319; Antonio Gil Olcina, “Del Plan General de 1902 a la planificación hidrológica,” Investigaciones geográficas, nº 25, 2001, pp. 5-31. 16 See Sara Luzón Canto, “Precedentes de la colonización del franquismo: la Ley de 1907 y su contexto internacional," in Pueblos de colonización durante el Franquismo: la arquitectura en la modernización del territorio rural, Sevilla: Consejería de Cultura, 2008, p. 077. On a general history of colonization, see Javier Monclús and José Luis Oyón, Políticas y técnicas en la ordenación del espacio rural. Historia y evolución de la colonización agraria en España, vol. 1, Madrid: MAP/MAPA/MOPU, 1988. 15 117 settlements known as Algaida, Urrieta del Aguila, Las Navas, Coto de la Sierra de Salinas, Alisos, and others.17 La Algaida was the first village to be built with the direct intervention of the State and was laid out between 1910 and 1914 in the region of Sanlúcar de Barrameda near Cádiz. Its plan was a very basic gridiron structured on both sides of a wide central avenue at the center of which ran the train tracks leading to the water. With its small public structures and detached dwelling units placed parallel to the main town axis—quite unsophisticated in design but well ventilated and generously sized by the rural standards of the time—La Algaida appeared like a short segment of a rural ciudad lineal. It was indeed described as an aldea lineal (linear village) by its design engineers Torrejón y Boneta.18 Overall, the poverty of the proposed solutions reflected a lack of serious analysis of Spanish precedents, from the eighteenth century foundations under Carlos III to some interesting experiments of combined industrial and rural settlements such as the Colonia Güell at Santa Coloma de Cervelló in the periphery of Barcelona.19 Developed from 1882, sixteen years before Ebenezer Howard’s To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), architect Arturo Soria y Mata’s concept of the Ciudad lineal proposed a radical alternative to the historical logic of urban development. Instead of the radial expansion of most European cities along access roads and the streetcar lines, he envisioned the linear city as an infrastructure ring at a significant distance of the city center. This curvilinear ribbon included roads, railway lines, parkways, gas and water at its center, while the other components of the city would be attached on both sides within very large blocks of houses in walking distance from the central axis area. As compared to the diagrams of Ebenezer Howard, Soria's linear city aimed at channeling the process of expansion between cities and towns rather than allowing them to sprawl around their centers.20 In 1892 the Spanish Government approved Soria’s project of a rail-based streetcar of circumvallation around Madrid and two years later Soria established the Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización, or C.M.U., whose fundamental goal “was to set up and manage linear cities.”21 In 1906, the C.M.U. had built eighteen kilometers of rail line to the northeast of Madrid between the towns of Chamartín and Vallecas. In 1913, more than 4000 residents lived along the line. The advertising motto “for each family a house: and for every house an orchard and a garden” set up the parameters of a new city where self-sufficiency was emphasized in 17 La Algaida, Urrieta del Aguila, Montes Els Plans, Las Navas, Coto de la Sierra de Salinas, Alisos are some of those new rural nuclei. In total, 596 individual houses and 50 communitarian structures were built as part of this early program. 18 Luzón Canto, p. 77. 19 See “Colonia Güell en Santa Coloma de Cervelló,” in Conarquitectura nº 6, October 2002, pp. 77-92. 20 Arturo Soria y Mata, Pedro Navascués Palacio, “La Ciudad Lineal,” in AA.VV, Madrid, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979, pp. 1101-1120; George R. Collins, “The Ciudad Lineal in Madrid,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 18, nº 2, May 1959, pp. 38-53; Georges Collins and Carlos Flores, Arturo Soria y la Ciudad Lineal, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1968; Fernando De Terán, La Ciudad Lineal, antecedente de un urbanismo actual, Madrid: Editorial Ciencia Nueva, 1968. 21 Fernando de Terán, Planeamiento urbano en la España contemporanéa, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982, p. 74. 118 addition to private green space.22 This practical experiment was paralleled by an important work of promotion and planning propaganda, the periodical Ciudad Lineal, Revista de Higiene, Agricultura, Ingeniería y Urbanización, founded in 1897 and which became a major publication tool in the first international and transnational conferences and exhibitions at the beginning of the 20th century. Interestingly, as the full title indicates, the Ciudad Lineal intended to be a response to the global problems of urbanism, not only the city and its suburbs, but all the way to the countryside and the future of agriculture pro-acted by Costa and his colleagues. In an article of La Ciudad Lineal of 1903, Soria presented a decree proposal that in many ways anticipated the already discussed Ley de Colonización y Repoblación of 1907 and whose initial lines reflected the extreme of the socio-political situation: “The revolution from above, peaceful, quiet and convenient to avoid in time the one from below, with its bad manners, with blood, and with noise.” 23 Within the larger context of Soria’s program of expropriation and exploitation of unlabored land (with Andalusia as first region of application), he proposed to apply the concept of linear city to the regional scale between the most important towns: The distribution of land will be done under the direction of the civil engineers of each province, who will draw in the plans that they already have or intend to raise on the ground, a project of “Linear City” between each town of the province with each of the nearest ones and beginning with the most important. This city will be of the same dimensions, with respect to the width and layout of the streets, as those of the "Lineal City" of Madrid, varying as appropriate the dimensions of each block and its internal subdivision into individual lots. The axis of each linear city will be the same road that already existed or a parallel line next to it, whether it is a sidewalk, a horse path, a road, a tram or a railroad line.24 Furthermore, Soria described as well how poor families would be allowed to settle: “Each poor household father... will choose, on plan first and subsequently in situ, within the “Linear City” of the town where he lives, a plot of 400 square meters for himself and for each individual of the family that lives with him; then he will select other new lots in the parallel strip for himself again and for each individual in the family.”25 The first experiences of colonization promoted by the law of 1907 as well as Arturo Soria’s speculation on the regional development of the countryside had little geographic and physical impact. However, they marked the beginning of a systematic reflection to improve rural housing and living conditions in light of the developing international discourse on the garden city, the garden suburb, and the workers’ neighborhoods. Among the most critical themes 22 In Spanish: “para cada familia una casa: en cada casa una huerta y un jardín.” Arturo Soria y Mata, “El reparto de tierras,” Ciudad Lineal, no. 180, November 10, 1903, pp. 7-8: “La revolución desde arriba, pacífica, tranquila y conveniente para evitar a tiempo que se haga desde abajo con malos modos, con sangre, y con ruido.” 24 Ibidem. 25 Ibidem. 23 119 were the optimal dimension of the cultivated parcel and the colonist house itself, the number of families which should settle in the new foundations, the architecture and typology of the modern rural house, the public infrastructure such as the church, the schools, the water cisterns, and so on. 2.1.2. Kropotkin, Spain, and the City-Region According to Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), “anarchism,” from the Greek. ἅν, and άρχη, “contrary to authority,” was the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. 26 Contrary to what Karl Marx had predicted, the early twentieth century process of revolution did not start from the industrialized centers of Europe, but rather from an impoverished periphery, in Russia and in Spain, countries within which the process of modernization was chaotic, delayed, and highly contested by the resisting power of the land aristocracy. In both countries, the anarchist movement was able to develop and give the impulsion to larger and diverse workers’ movements. In Spain, anarchism had various centers such as the industrial bases of Barcelona and Zaragoza, but the peasant anarchism in the agricultural South, more specifically Andalusia, was critical to the movement. The roots of a strong ideological movement toward everything rural—from the concept of national identity, casticismo, vernacular architecture and popular art—had been growing during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth up to the Civil War.27 Two visions of the world entered into a long-lasting conflict, a communitarian and traditional one versus a more modern one that aspired at making Spain enter the era of liberalism and more generally a European, northern-based, vision of modernization. At the same time, the socialist ideas penetrated deeply in the society. The process of desamortización [confiscation] during the 19th century increased the social tensions by depriving many farmers from many communal lands and forests of which they had made useful use during centuries. Part of that peasantry had to convert to agricultural workers while others moved to the large cities to join the growing industrial economy. The rupture with a traditional way of life and the worsening of material living conditions tended to radicalize the peasantry, helping for instance the growth of the anarchist movement in Catalonia and Andalusia. 28 26 For this section, see José Luis Oyón, "La ciudad desde el consumo: Kropotkin y la Comuna anarquista de la conquista del pan," Urban, nº 507, March-August 2014, pp. 105-122; from Kropotkin's entry on "Anarchism" in the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1910. 27 See Chapter 1 in this dissertation. 28 In the words of jurist Francisco Tomás y Valiente, the Spanish confiscation process presented the following characteristics: appropriation by the State and by unilateral decision of immovable property 120 Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), founder of the anarchist movement, was never able to travel to Spain and it is the young Italian Giuseppe Fanelli who eventually introduced the movement into the Iberian Peninsula. At Bakunin’s death in 1876, Kropotkin became the leader of the movement. He was a Russian aristocrat and a scientifically trained geographer. A declared revolutionary, he was imprisoned in 1874 but escaped and went into permanent exile in Switzerland, France, and England. The starting point of his philosophy was the concept of mutual aid and human solidarity. Although he never fully explained the precise nature of the post-revolutionary society, he wrote that “the independent commune” would be the form for the anarchist revolution: “let all the country and the world be against it; but once its inhabitants have decided that they will communalize the consumption of commodities, their exchange, and their production, they must realize it among themselves.” 29 Kropotkin’s writings were heavily distributed in Spain, and among them, none other than La conquista del pan (The Conquest of Bread), originally published in 1892 and first translated in 1894. His relationship with the Spanish movement was intense and he himself was in the country in June-July 1878. In his important article on Kropotkin, José Luis Oyón argued that La Conquista del Pan (The Conquest of Bread) formed, in fact, a “territorial project.”30 The anarchist concept of the new city—the insurrectionary Commune—was based upon a decentralized vision of the territory where city and countryside would be fully integrated within an anarchist society founded on the conception of the “ciudad desde el consumo” (a city based upon the equality of consumption).31 La conquista del pan was a sign of belonging and recognition for the Spanish anarchist movement. Tens of thousands of copies were owned or passed in the hands of the Spanish workers of the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth—an estimated print of 100,000 copies by the times of Civil War. Written in a clear, simple and concise language, the book spoke eloquently to the working class and aimed at constructing the project of a new society to follow the revolutionary insurrection: “It is very likely that the concretion, simplicity, and clarity of the design of the new political edifice, of the new society of anarchic communism, was one of the attractions of the book for the Spanish workers.”32 Marx’s theory was essentially a-spatial. The goal to bring down the old society did not involve a specific spatial materialization. Likewise, the first anarchist Bakunin, equally resonant in belonging to “dead hands” (the church and religious orders); sale of the same and allocation of the amount obtained with the sales to the amortization of the titles of the debt.” See Francisco Tomás y Valiente, El marco político de la desamortización en España. Barcelona: Ariel, 1972. 29 See Robert Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, London: Janus Publishing, 1999, volume one, pp. 34-sq, quoted from Pyotr Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, 1903. On Kropotkin, see Jim Mac Laughlin, Kropotkin and the anarchist intellectual tradition, London: Pluto Press, 2016; Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 30 Oyón, p. 105. 31 Oyón, p. 106. 32 Oyón, p. 107: “es muy probable que la concreción, sencillez y claridad del diseño del nuevo edificio, de la nueva sociedad del comunismo anárquico, fuera uno de los atractivos del libro para los obreros españoles.” 121 Spain, assumed that nature would permit and bring about new social organisms. As Gerald Brenan has noted, “the kind of life that Bakunin had in mind was the small peasant community as it had seen it in Russia.”33 Kropotkin later would see great interest into the medieval communities and even Greek ones. That is to say that there is in anarchism “a strong element of reaction against industrialism, of return to (though without renouncing the advantages of modern industrial processes) to the freer, more human life of the Middle Ages. For it was only in small groups, he thought, that a proper regard for human rights and human dignity could be found.”34 For Kropotkin, the root of the problem was the separation of the medieval city from its agricultural hinterland, which had been the cause of its defeat by the State.35 Kropotkin was a geographer, thus it is no surprise that for him the anarchist utopia would produce its own space, its own city, a much more elaborate project than the reactivation of the old medieval center.36 His theory—which involved no capitalist distribution of salaries, a maximum of five working hours, and the sharing of manual and intellectual tasks— would push the Spanish workers and farmers out of the vicious circle of their inferior level of consumption and allow them “el derecho al bienestar, al bienestar para todos” (the right to well-being, to well-being for all).37 The source of all society evils was misery and the subconditions of life and consumption that make human exploitation inevitable. For Kropotkin, it was necessary to displace the economic analysis from the production to the consumption, i.e., the satisfaction of all necessities of the individual, before real production be discussed. This could not but have significant consequences in the anarchist’s manner to see the city and more generally the territory. The main culprit was the division of labor—the division of industrial tasks among the workers—and the division of the geographic space into specialized areas of production, countries, and regions. Capitalist wealth was based upon those increasingly unbalanced network of spatial inequalities: In order to compensate fairly some categories of workers, it is necessary for the peasant to be the beast of burden of the society; it is necessary that the cities leave the fields empty and desert; it is necessary that the small trades gather in the dirty neighborhoods of the big cities and manufacture, almost for nothing, the thousand objects of little value that put the products of the great manufactures within the reach of the buyers who are only paid mediocre salaries... It is necessary that the backward 33 Gerard Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth – An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950, [check printed version] 34 Ibidem. 35 Oyón, p. 117. 36 See the references given by Oyón (p. 108, note 2): Myrna M. Breitbart (ed.), Anarquismo y geografía, Vilassar de Mar: Oikos-tau, 1988. In La nueva utopia (1890), Ricardo Mella (1861-1925) imagines the life of a small town where anarchy has succeeded. The title makes an obvious reference to Thomas More. 37 Pyotr Kropotkin, La conquista del pan, Buenos Aires: Libros de Anarres, 1892, pp. 29-30; quoted by Oyón, p. 111. 122 countries of the East be exploited by those of the West.38 As a consequence, the new economy of the anarchist society had to be founded on a new relation between city and countryside, in fact a territorial project that would resolutely integrate city and countryside. Agriculture and industry had to be integrated at all scales, national, regional, urban and individual as part of a new economic regionalism which would cancel the old antagonism between city and countryside. In Spain, the revolution would be specifically based on the independence of all provinces and municipalities, which had been fighting for their autonomy along their entire history. The objective was to bring industry close to the country and agriculture close to the city.39 However, it is important to point out that Kropotkin’s discourse, although he proposed to merge city and countryside, was not fundamentally anti-urban or anti-metropolitan. On the contrary, in his example of the anarchist Paris, he argued that its theaters, houses, streets, industries, and monuments were the products of the common labor of generations of residents and workers, the heritage of millions of men and women who had worked hard to “make it habitable, clean it and make it more beautiful.”40 The century-long heritage of the city should be maintained and eventually given for free use to the entire population living in the city and around. At the same time, he imagined that the agro-industrial communities of 200 families that he had proposed for Russia in Campos: fábricas y talleres would be implanted around the metropolis but as locus of intensive agricultural production. In the other direction, agriculture would penetrate within the city by taking over empty lots and blocks, in the interstitial spaces of the city. Kropotkin’s communalist version of anarchism and his decentralizing vision of the city and the region were influential within the utopian segments of the garden city movement. His book Campos, fábricas y talleres was quoted in the 1902 edition of Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow as a potential demonstration of the concept of auto-sufficiency. It also influenced Thomas Adams, secretary of the Garden City Association from 1901 and the regionalists like Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. In Catalonia, the decentralizing proposals of Martínez Rizo in his anarchic-utopian work La urbanística del porvenir of 1932 also were indebted to 38 Kropotkin, La conquista del pan, pp. 100-101; quoted by Oyon, p. 112: Para llegar a retribuir medianamente a algunas categorías de obreros, hoy es necesario que el campesino sea la bestia de carga de la sociedad; es necesario que las ciudades dejen desiertos los campos, es necesario que los pequeños oficios se aglomeren en los barrios inmundos de las grandes ciudades y fabriquen casi por nada los mil objetos de escaso valor que ponen los productos de las grandes manufacturas al alcance de los compradores de salario mediocre…. Es necesario que los países atrasados de Oriente sean explotados por los de Occidente.” 39 For Kropotkin, the revolution would start within a new Paris Commune (on the model of 1871), which “deberá cultivar ella mismo su trigo, sus legumbres, su carne, y lo hará sobre el territorio de partida del departamento del Sena:” Pyotr Kropotkin, Carta a Jean Grave (1889), Institut Français d´Histoire Sociale, Fondo Jean Grave, 114 AS, Letters from Kropotkin to Jean Grave, p. 671; quoted by Oyon, p. 114. 40 Kropotkin, La conquista del pan, pp. 100-101; quoted by Oyon, p. 117; Pyotr Kropotkin, Campos: fábricas y talleres, Barcelona: E. Bauza, 1899. 123 Kropotkin and his territorial vision. 41 Likewise, but on a completely different ideological side, Pedro Bidagor’s concept of the ciudad orgánica was also somewhat similar to Kropotkin’s thesis, as we shall see in Chapter Three: There lies, in my opinion, the most transcendent of La Conquista del Pan. What is important in Kropotkin from the point of view of an ecological urbanism is not in itself the notion of food self-sufficiency but the very idea of geographical proximity of production and consumption that ecological thought sees today as absolutely essential for energy saving and the drastic reduction of greenhouse gases. This desired proximity between production and consumption, agriculture and industry, countryside and city, is the essence of the message of economic-territorial reordering that the Russian anarchist brought at the time and that we should rescue today. Begin to understand the metabolism of the city, how it consumes its food or can recycle its organic waste, as it is done in La Conquista, can be an excellent starting point.42 2.1.3. The World’s Fair in Ghent and the Village Moderne The concerns about the modernization of the countryside and the potential of new geographically driven projects about the relationship between city, countryside, and regions were not specific to Spanish society. Around the turn of the century, various organizations for the improvement of life in the countryside and its villages were founded in several European countries and in the United States.43 Within this international context, Belgium played an important role with the organization of the International Exposition of Ghent in 1913.44 Unique to the Ghent World’s Fair was a large section called Le Village Moderne, designed to reflect the modernization program that the study committee for the modern village had in mind: “the promotion of technical innovations on the farm, the improvement of road and railroad 41 Alfonso Martínez Rizo, La urbanística del porvenir, 1932. In the book, the engineer Mártinez Rizo (1877-1951) critiqued the “inorganic city” of the capitalist society, which grows without control, destroys the countryside, and concentrates the population into anti-hygienic and anti-social cities. He proposed the ciudad-campo, a city/country that supersedes the tradition division and replaces it with a continuous fabric mixing urban and rural functions. The ultimate objective would be the elimination of real estate speculation, and the reconstruction of cities into units of 100,000 residents maximum. See http://www.alasbarricadas.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=35012 (last accessed August 13, 2018). 42 Oyón, pp. 120-121. See Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 1988, updated in 1996, 2002, and 2014; Antonio Bonet Correa, “Teoría de la ciudad anarquista en España,” Ciudad y Territorio – Estudios Territoriales XLIII, nº 168-169, 2011, pp. 507-513. 43 In one of its first issues, the Boletín de la Junta Central de Colonización y Repoblación Interior published a detailed report by González-Besada, the author of the Law of 1907, that summarized the national and international documentation prior to the writing: see Luzón Canto, p. 86 and note 41. 44 In Belgium, world fairs had been staged in Brussels, Antwerp and Liège, and Ghent was determined not to be left out. In particular the Liège exhibition of 1905 fuelled the ambitions of Ghent’s industrial bourgeoisie and they became the driving force behind the project. The 1913 World Fair was held on a 125-hectare area in Citadel Park and the Sint-Pietersaalst district. The exhibition was also a catalyst for the development of the city towards the south. 124 networks, and the expansion of public amenities in the countryside.”45 The village resulted from the initiative of The Nationale Commissie ter Verfraaiing van het Landleven (National Commission for the Embellishment of Rural Life), founded the same year, in coordination with the Boerenbond and its feminine section, the Boerinnenbond. These associations not only aimed at modernizing and improving the countryside, but also to counteract the rural exodus toward the cities. Ideologically, the experiment was socially driven but politically quite conservative as the leading associations were intimately linked to the Catholic church and a vision of the society funded on a single-family structure and its architectural representation, the single-family house. The modernization of the rural world also involved a reevaluation and redefinition of the rural community, for instance with the introduction of corporative structures. Various images of village’s life as well as exhibitions were instrumental in diffusing a better and more modern image of the rural world. Two magazines, De Boerin, and De Boer, participated of these transformations. The first one, aimed at the female public, dealt with the house and the farm, and how to improve them while reinforcing their traditional character. The second one, which was the periodical of the Boerenbond, focused on improved methods of farming. Overall, the message transmitted by these modern medias was a pro-rural, antiurban message that emphasized the countryside as “the place of tradition, authenticity, purity and a life on the rhythm of nature and the seasons” in contrast to the city as the place of “temptation, uprootedness, and deterioration of morals.”46 Planned under the direction of Paul De Vuyst, General Director at the Ministry of Agriculture and Public Works, the Village Moderne presented a modern appearance that “reminded more of a semi-urban environment than of the traditional rural village.”47 A town hall associated with an exhibition area, a church, an hotel-restaurant and other farm-related structures surrounded the generously scaled central square from which departed wide and beautifully planted utilitarian and residential streets. The whole layout and the farmhouses that looked like workers’ villas followed the principles of the Garden City movement, which made the Village Moderne “compete with an urban environment not by producing a counter-image of a traditional village, but by projecting the modern comfort of the city upon the village.”48 Unlike the picturesquely touristic Oud Vlaanderen village that occupied an adjacent site in the Fair and reproduced a traditional small town with its square and its narrow streets, the Village Moderne aimed at redefining a “rural aesthetics,” that learnt from the traditional and regional character of the countryside while developing a fully modern and hygienic agenda that 45 See Bruno Notteboom, “Images of the Countryside: Landscape, Village and Community in the Discourse of Belgian Farmers," in Rajesh Heynickx and Tom Avermaete (eds.), Making a New World: Architecture & Communities in Interwar Europe, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012, p. 191. 46 Notteboom, p. 189. For a vision of the relationship between city and countryside in the Socialist parti, and in particular the writings of Emile Vandervelde: see my Introduction. 47 Notteboom, p. 191. See Paul De Vuyst (ed.), Le Village moderne à l'Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Gand. Notes, comptes rendus, vues et plans, Brussels, 1913. Also see Leen Meganck, and Linda Van Santvoort, "'Such a Magnificent Farmstead in My Opinion Asks for a Muddy Pool' – Rural Buildings and the Search for a 'Regional' Architecture in Belgium,” in Andres Ballantyne (ed.), Rural and Urban: Architecture between Two Cultures, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 116-133. 48 Notteboom, p. 191. 125 praised the rural work as spirit of community. The village was proclaimed to be the ‘natural’ Belgian habitat: “The village is the rule, the city is the exception.”49 The rural exodus, which is assuming alarming proportions, is not due exclusively to the attraction of the high wages of the industry; it is due again to the brilliant, enticing and often deceiving exteriors of the cities. To raise the level of rural life by a more diligent concern for habitation, hygiene, comfort and even good taste, is to strengthen the agricultural spirit; it is to give more vigor to the countryside, which constitutes the great reservoir of human forces. The rural house plays a major role in the revival of rural life, and the Village Moderne has shown its various forms: the large farm, the average farm, the small farm, and the house of the agricultural or horticultural worker, Moreover, the Village Moderne has forced the public to focus on an often relegated issue.50 These ideas on rural aesthetics were amply developed in the commemoration book Le Village Moderne (1913), which largely echoed the ideas of the Swiss baron Georges de Montenach. The latter argued that in order to efficiently fight against rural exodus, technology and improvement of the working conditions were not sufficient. Rural life was an aesthetic, cultural and patriotic reality that needed to be preserved from creeping industrialization, ugliness, and banalization. The international movement of Civic Art concentrated on similar issues in cities and urban life, but generally neglected the deteriorating situation of the countryside. Working toward the Village Moderne meant to preserve the landscape and the trees; to respect “l’art ancien” in regard to the church and the town hall while allowing to gently modernize the regional styles; to build pleasant and radiant schools; to improve streets, sewers, and public lighting; to study traditional architecture not as a style applied to a villa, but rather understand its typology and details to conceive a modern rural house with adequate functional needs such as the large kitchen; and to revive the forms and materials of the artisanal tradition; in brief reject the false bourgeois style imported from the city and re-appropriate the tradition of the countryside as genuinely representative of the fundamental values of the nation: “It is the plot of land and it is the home and hearth that are the essential roots of patriotism. It is in the heart of nature that it is conserved in all its strength and vitality.”51 Further, de Montenach wrote, “It is in the village that the representative types of the race are conserved… While the cities are neutralized by the cosmopolitan dust that has leveled them all, the countryside possesses still the kind of particularities that gives a nation its distinctive accent.”52 Spanish members of the Junta Central de Colonización and of the Compañia Madrileña de Urbanización (C.M.U.) attended the Ghent’s Fair and some of them also participated in the 49 Quoted by Notteboom, p. 194, from Le Village Moderne, op. cit. p. 18. Le Village Moderne, p. VI. Also see the Introduction in this dissertation. 51 Le Village Moderne, p. 18, quoted from Georges de Montenach, “Formation et éducation,” Conference, June 9, 1910. 52 Georges De Montenach, “L’art public au village,” Fribourg: Fragnière Frères, 1910, p. 39, quoted by Bruno Notteboom, op. cit., p.194. 50 126 parallel International Congress of Ghent.53 Hilarión González del Castillo, C.M.U. councilor and one of the most ardent defenders of the Ciudad lineal, even presented a paper titled Projet de cité linéaire belge.54 Likewise, the Catalan urbanist and social reformer Cebría de Montoliú i de Togores, a translator of John Ruskin and avid disciple of Patrick Geddes, reported from the Ghent Exposition in the Revista de Obras Públicas in 1914.55 In one of the reports of the Junta Central de Colonización, it was clearly made allusion to the International Exposition and Congress of Ghent in 1913: “"... they must not forget the teachings that Ghent gave us. We have them as a goal of our aspirations to improve the rural life, to devote more attention to rural housing. They help us invigorate the resistance of the countryside as a deposit of energies and strengthen the agricultural spirit….”56 But the Belgian influence did not stop at Ghent 1913. As Carlos Sambricio has pointed out, the Belgian experience of postWW1 reconstruction was critical for Spanish architects and planners as witnessed in the articles published in Civitas and the Boletín de la Sociedad Central de Arquitectos.57 More importantly, in 1919, Hillarón González del Castillo made an important report at the occasion of the Exposition de la Reconstruction that took place in Brussels in 1919 in relation to the heavy destructions incurred in the country. Under the title Projet de cité linéaire belge he presented and published the proposal for a regional-scale Ciudad Lineal to be implemented among the destroyed towns and villages of Belgium. Interestingly, whereas Soria y Mata’s diagrams had been criticized for their lack of urban character and, specifically, their lack of a real center. Castillo’s proposal borrowed from Howard’s Garden City diagram and inserted a genuine city center: The urban agglomeration is a living organism. As the human organism has a heart that pumps blood and carries activity, life and movement to the whole body, so the city needs a center of activity that irradiates urban life and business life. The planned 53 See William Whyte (ed.), Ghent Planning Congress 1913: Proceedings of the Premier Congrès International et Exposition comparée des Villes, London: Routledge, 2014 [1913]. 54 Carlos Sambricio, “De la Ciudad Lineal a la Ciudad Jardín. Sobre la difusión en España de los supuestos urbanísticos a comienzos del Siglo," Ciudad y Territorio, nº 94, 1992, pp. 146-59; Projet de cité linéaire belge inspiré par la Cité linéaire espagnole inventée par Arturo Soria y Mata, Imprenta La Ciudad Lineal, Madrid, 1919. 55 Montoliú was since 1908 the librarian of the Museo Social of Barcelona. He was an avid lecturer and introduced Geddes’s concept of the Civic Museum to Spain. A “cultural agitator in matters of urban planning,” he traveled extensively in 1910-11, meeting with the most important world planners, visiting the Exposition of Urbanism in Berlin and Düsseldorf. He founded the Sociedad Cívica Ciudad Jardín in Barcelona in 1912, edited the influential magazine Civitas (1914-1919), and strove to make the garden city a tool of urban and progressive social reform. See Susan Larson, “The Ciutat Jardí in the United States: Cebrià di Montoliú's Fairhope, Alabama, City Plan of 1921,” in Diseñar América/Designing America: El trazado español de los Estados Unidos, Fundación Consejo España-Estados Unidos, 2014, pp. 122-133. The Madrid section of the Sociedad Cívica was created in 1919. 56 Carlos Sambricio, “La ‘revolución conservadora’ y la política de la colonización en la España de Primo De Rivera,” in Pueblos de colonización durante el franquismo: La Arquitectura en la modernización del territorio rural, Sevilla: Junta de Andalucía, 2008, p. 062. The origin of the quote is not indicated. 57 Sambricio, “La ‘revolución conservadora,’” p. 071. On the reconstruction in Belgium, see Marcel Smets, Resurgam: La reconstruction en Belgique après 1914, Brussels: Crédit Communal, 1985; also see Nicholas Bullock and Luc Verpoest (eds.), Living with History, 1914-1964, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011. 127 heart of the Cité Linéaire Belge, which I have named Forum, will have, like the ancient roman forum, a triple aspect of place of amusement, center of public life and business center.58 Moreover he clearly distinguished between three populated zones, urban, suburban, and rural, accepting the idea that some of the districts would be agricultural and/or industrial. Over the years, González del Castillo’s interest centered more and more on the agrarian question and he clearly saw the relation between the Ciudad Lineal and the necessary program of interior colonization. In the Belgian version, he inscribed the project within a regional planning strategy and made the linear city the backbone of a regional/national program of interior colonization. In 1922, Lorenzo Pardo, hydraulic engineer for the Ebro basin, published a large-scale project, the Ciudad Jardín en el Ebro. Propuesta con fines agrícolas y navegación hasta Zaragoza (1922), which suggested colonizing the edge of the river with a series of agrarian garden cities. González del Castillo joined the proposal and imagined a series of garden cities along the Ebro in Logroño, Miranda de Ebro, Calahorra, Tudela, Zaragoza, Caspe, and Tortosa. Four years later, the same Lorenzo Pardo designed the Plan de Obras de la Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro for the government of Primo de Rivera.59 In 1925, the Junta Central published a document of synthesis, La Colonización y Repoblación interior en los principales paises y en España. Sus orígenes, desarrollo y estado actual. Two decades of research and work had made it that, according to the report’s boasting introduction, “Spain was the first nation in the world that embarked on the publication of a general treatise of interior colonization and repopulation … the reward for the efforts of the Junta to contribute, with the divulgation of agro-social progress, to the improvement of the fatherland.”60 As Sambricio has stated, “if, so far, the Spanish interior colonization could be understood as the sum of specific interventions, around 1923—when large-scale projects started to be developed—a new way of understanding the agrarian policy appeared. The issue had evolved from the punctual creation of wealth in zones hitherto unpopulated to the will to enhance energy and water resources of the country.“61 Those programs of modernization of the countryside did get a more popular voice, better adapted to the constituency of the countryside, with the periodical Agricultura, founded in 1919 in Madrid. Its editorial policy involved the productive and social modernization of the Spanish countryside, its techniques, education and information about technical progress. More importantly, Agricultura “reaffirmed with conviction that the agricultural industry 58 Hilario González del Castillo, Projet de Cité Linéaire Belge, Madrid: Imprenta de la Ciudad Lineal, 1919, p. 14. quoted by Carlos Feferman, “The City Center in Early Modern Planning,” Paper presented at the 15th International Planning History Conference, Saõ Paulo, 2012, pp. 7-8. 59 Sambricio, “La ‘revolución conservadora,’” p. 067 and note 15. Sambricio gives the following references: On the Ciudad Jardín along the Ebro river, see Ciudadanía, 30 September 1922, p. 3; and Luis Fuentes López, “Los riegos del Alto Aragón,” in Ingeniería y Construcción, 1924, pp. 50-54. 60 Luzón Canto, p. 088. 61 Sambricio, “La ‘revolución conservadora’”, p. 066. See Junta Central de Colonización y Repoblación Interior, La colonización y repoblación interior en los principales paises y en España. Sus orígenes, desarrollo y estado actual, Madrid: Junta Central de Colonización y Repoblación Interior, 1925. 128 constituted the basis of the prosperity, the industrial development, and the national economic independence of Spain.” 62 Beyond agriculture, the periodical functioned as instrument of more general information about modern life, politics, finances, and the National Plan of Hydraulic Works. Art was not absent as the periodical published articles about the symbolist and member of the 4 Gats in Barcelona (Modernisme), the Mediterranean painter Santiago Rusiñol (landscape) and the review of the Barcelona Exposition of 1929. 2.1.4. Primo de Rivera and the Confederaciones Geográficas The political and social chaos of the first two decades of the twentieth century ended in the manner that many like Joaquín Costa had feared, predicted, or even hoped for. On September 13, 1923, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Captain General of Catalonia, revolted against the government and led a successful military coup. The Civil Directory that was put in place (1925–30) was responsible for a thorough overhaul of local government and for initiating, at last, an ambitious public works program to increase irrigation, hydraulic power, and road building. Primo de Rivera did not miss the opportunity to see himself as the “cirujano de hierro” (iron surgeon) who was supposed to uproot the old culture of caciquism and whom Costa had ambiguously alluded to, in a Nietzschean kind of way, earlier in the century: That surgical policy, I repeat, must be conducted by an Iron surgeon, who knows the anatomy of the Spanish people and feel infinite compassion for it... that holds a steady hand and a value of hero, and even more than value, what we would call guts and courage to hold at bay those swarms of evil who live of letting the others die, a hero who, angry and desperate, craves for a homeland and, as an artist of the people, is thrown to improvise.63 Until the advent of the dictatorship, very little progress had been made in the development of the hydraulic project. It is thus during the De Rivera dictatorship that the geographical configuration of Spain started to be transformed. As Swyngedouw has argued, “geographical conditions are reconstructed as the outcome of a process of production in which both nature and society are fused together in a way that renders them inseparable, producing a restless “hybrid” quasi-object in which material, representational, and symbolic practices were welded together,” what he has called as well the “production of nature.” 64 Primo de Rivera encountered in the engineer Rafael Benjumea (1876-1952) the man who would help him lead a vast economic shift of the country toward large-scale projects such as transport infrastructures for roads and railroads, and eventually the hydraulic works and electrification. Early in his career Benjumea was involved in hydraulic projects along the Guadalhorce river 62 Mónica Vázquez Astorga, “La obra gráfica en la revista Agricultura (1929-1935). La aportación de José Borobio,” Artigrama, nº 16, 2001, p. 442. 63 Quoted by José Domingo Dueñas Lorente, “Notas sobre la interpretación mesiánica de la figura y obra de Joaquín Costa," Anales de la Fundación Joaquín Costa, nº 14, 1997, p. 109, from Joaquín Costa, Oligarquía y Caciquismo, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1998 [1901]. 64 Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” p. 461. 129 in Andalusia, and in particular, the construction of a dam and adjacent hydraulic plant (19035), known as the Pantano del Chorro or del Conde Guadalhorce (1921). 65 Aware that Benjumea was highly favorable to the concept of the State’s large-scale economic intervention, the dictator named him in 1926 Minister of Public Works, Agriculture and Mines. For the modernizing and Regenerationist engineering community, the river basins (cuencas) became the battleground over which political and social conflict was to be fought over many years. They understood that the regions marked by the natural hydrological divisions could be developed as pivotal institutions for instigating the hydrological revolution, and that such a territorial reorganization was the geographic and political instrument to challenge the power of the traditional elites. Instigated by hydraulic engineer Lorenzo Pardo and created by decree on March 5, 1926, the Confederaciones Sindicales Hidrográficas were gradually established as quasi-autonomous organizations for nine rivers basins: the Duero River between Salamanca and Palencia; the Tagus and Alagón Rivers from the Portuguese border to Toledo; the Guadiana River that would be the backbone of the Plan Badájoz from Badajoz to Ciudad Real; the Guadalquívir and its associate rivers such as the Viar in Andalusia; the Segura River around Murcía; the Júcar from Cuenca to the Gulf of Valencia; the Ebro River between Huesca and Lerida; and the Rio Miño in Galicia from Lugo to the Portuguese border. The task of the Confederaciones was to make plans and implement hydrological planning, management of water resources, concession of water rights, construction of new infrastructures, the environmental management of the area with special attention to preservation and water quality. This was a conservative revolution of sort, led by the Minister of Public Works Benjumea and technically devised under the leadership of Lorenzo Pardo, conscious that only the State had the capacity to care to the well-being of the national community.66 What had been the difficult struggle of the Regenerationism for two decades was eventually made law during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. According to historian Melgarejo, the epoch of the dictatorship produced a genuine extension of the role of the State in economic matters, concretely realized by the creation of large control institutions of public action, management and control. These interventions were driven by the belief that technology and engineering works—in this matter the hydraulic public works and the program of irrigation—would remove the country from its backwardness, reactivate and embark on the modernization of the economy, in brief “regenerate” Spain.67 At all moments of that long history, the engineers took the primary role and they would be the leaders throughout the Franco dictatorship as well. The 1920s saw a revival in the discussion, writings, and other studies related to the improvement and modernization of the rural house. There was a growing convergence 65 On Benjumea, see Swyngedouw, Liquid Power, and in particular, pp. 88-93 Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” p. 459 & sq. 67 Joaquín Melgarejo Moreno, “De la política hidráulica a la planificación hidrológica,” pp. 288-289. Melgarejo Moreno makes clear that this policy was not the prerogative of Spanish dictatorship but was also at work in Germany, France, etc., independently of the political regimes. 66 130 between architects, historians, medical doctors, agronomists and engineers toward the study of the modern house, which resulted in an important document, Contribución al estudio de la casa rural, published in 1929.68 The lack of hygiene, the over-occupation of the houses, and the lack of separation between human residents and the animals were increasingly seen as additional causes of misery and poverty. Unless resolved, the agrarian reform would only achieve partial objectives. In general, it was a larger discussion where the theme of the rural house was but a prolongation of a series of hygienic, moral and cultural concerns about the rural milieu in general, and about its poverty in particular. The goal was to “equalize” the conditions of life in the countryside with that of the city. The house was of course at its center but making it more hygienic only made sense if the hygienic conditions of the pueblos themselves were to be improved; likewise, it made no sense to build new isolated houses, thus maintaining the farmer isolated and away from the influences of modern civilization. It is thus from the 1920s, and more importantly during the dictatorship of Franco, that the Regenerationist project was eventually and gradually implemented.69 2.1.5. The Second Republic and the Competition of 1932 Once established the Second Republic, a decree of the Ministry of Justice of 21 March 1931 created a technical commission to study and initiate the implementation of a large-scale agrarian reform regarding, among others, the exploitation of communal lands, the reduction and elimination of the latifundia, and the conditions of credit. The Ley de Reforma Agraria approved on 15 of September 1932, along with the creation of the Instituto de Reforma Agraria, paved the way for wide-ranging reforms to be applied to the poorest, socially divided, and less productive regions of the country, including Andalusia, Extremadura, and La Mancha. Although politically and socially ambitious, the reform dealt only with the expropriations of fincas or large estates under certain conditions of size and productivity. The law also addressed their subdivision and transfer to small farmers, but did not deal with the necessary infrastructural improvements. Potentially more transformative for the future of Spanish agriculture was the proposed acceleration of the program of irrigation. On 13 April 1932, the Republic, eager to move quickly and energetically on the rural front, passed the Ley de Obras de Puesta en Riego (O.P.E.R.), which made the State responsible for the works of irrigation infrastructure of large agricultural zones. The idea was to create the conditions to accelerate and increase the profitability of large-scale hydraulic works through a genuine program of colonization. Under the leadership of civil engineer Lorenzo Pardo and agronomist engineer Leopoldo Ridruej, the Centro de Estudios Hidrográficos was put in charge of a Plan Nacional de Obras Públicas, published in 1933 and covering 1.3 millions hectares with a 68 Dirección General de Agricultura, Contribución al estudio de la casa rural, Madrid: Ministerio de Economía Nacional, 1929. Other studies include J.M. Soroa, Construcciones agrícolas, Madrid, 1930; M. Gutiérrez del Arroyo, El mejoramiento de la vivienda rural, Zaragoza, 1931; J. J. Fernández Urquiza, Viviendas rurales, Valladolid, 1932. 69 Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity,” p. 460. 131 large section in critical areas of Andalusia. The Prado plan was never officially approved but eventually guided the hydraulic and irrigation policy for most of the twentieth century. The Concurso de Anteproyectos para la construcción de poblados en las zonas regables del Guadalquivir y del Guadalmellato, the urban and architectural competition held at the end of 1932 in Andalusia, was organized in this tense context.70 The competition was related to the Ley de Obras de Puesta en Riego (1932) for the Guadalquivir and the Guadalmellato rivers, together covering an area of about 31,000 hectares. It required the design of eight villages in the Guadalquivir area ranging from 100 to 360 houses in the first phase to 400 to 1500 in the phase of more intense production. For the Guadalmellato River, it requested four designs ranging from 60 to 120 houses and then from 300 to about 500. As regards the generic architectural language, the program brief was quite succinct: All the buildings, especially the dwellings for the farmers and artisans, will reflect the simplicity and sobriety that correspond to a rural town. Their comfort has to be provided in proportion to the limited economic means of its inhabitants, without thereby losing anything in hygiene and amenities. In no case shall the function be sacrificed to the form ... All buildings will be easy and economical to maintain.71 The list of engineers and architects who entered the competition was impressive and exposed the professional interest that the modernization of the countryside was generating, even though most participants came from the Madrid circles and no GATEPAC architect took part in the competition.72 From an urban point of view the competition marked an exceptional moment in the evolution of the discussion of the modern village. As Calzada Pérez has noted, only a couple of years after the theoretical but unpractical proposals of the Ciudad Lineal, González del Castillo had made a pragmatic shift and embraced the now well established concept of the Ciudad jardín.73 The competition of 1932 was the first attempt to develop a truly urban form of the modern village, both morphologically and typologically. However, it was not the Anglo-Saxon model of the garden city that was adopted, the one that had been 70 The results of the competition were published in December 1934, see “Concurso de anteproyectos para la construcción de poblados en las zonas regables del Guadalquivir y el Guadalmellato,” in Arquitectura, nº10, December 1934, pp. 267-298. 71 Base octava, 2 y 3, Gaceta de Madrid, 7 May 1933, p. 954; quoted in Esther Almarcha NúnezHerrador, “El descubrimiento y la puesta en valor de la arquitectura popular: de Fernando García Mercadal a Luis Feduchi,” in María Pilar Biel Ibañez and Ascensión Hernández Martínez (eds.), Lecciones de los maestros: aproximación histórico-crítica a los grandes historiadores de la arquitectura española, Zaragoza: Institución "Fernando el Católico" (CSIC), 2011, p. 190: “Todos los edificios, especialmente las viviendas agrícolas y de artesanos, reflejarán sencillez y sobriedad como corresponden a un poblado rural. Su conforto ha de ser proporcionado a los pequeños medios económicos de sus habitantes, sin que por eso pierda nada en higienes y comodidad relativa. En ningún caso se sacrificará, por la forma, la función…. Todos los edificios serán de fácil y económica conservación.” 72 Manuel Calzada Pérez, “Barracones para jornaleros o ensayos para urbanistas. El Concurso de Anteproyectos para Poblados en las Zonas Regables del Guadalquivir y del Guadalmellato,” in DC: Revista de Crítica Arquitectónica, nº 13-14, 2005, p. 157. 73 Calzada Pérez has argued that the competition also served as a vehicle to study and approach the issue of the expansion of Madrid, particularly the design of the satellite cities proposed in Zuazo-Jansen Anteproyecto for Madrid (1929) and later in Plan de Ordenación de Madrid by Pedro Bidagor (1942). See Chapter 3. 132 dominating the international scene since the debates on the reconstruction after WW1. All winning entries, with the exception of the one proposed by Fonseca and Raimundo Beraza, took the grid as the primary morphology of departure and rejected the use of curvilinear streets to purely anecdotic moments in the schemes. At the same time, houses were aligned along the streets without setbacks and the patio typology radically eliminated the “garden” image of the Anglo-Saxon models. Fernando De La Cuadra’s winning designs for the Guadalquivir consisted of a precise but simple study of variations on the theme of the orthogonal and rectangular grid. In the three detailed schemes (Poblados A-B-C), two perpendicular axes led to a central square created through slight displacements in the alignment of the block edges. The resulting square was rectangular and organized in the “turbine” manner in order to place the town hall as terminating vista on the entrance axis from the train station. The building types included a patio closed by walls and outbuildings, but the simplified perspective only showed long rows of houses. In this view, the main axis was asymmetrically organized and small squares for schools, sport fields, and other public structures were dispersed within the plan.74 The second prize’s winner was the group made up of Santiago Esteban de la Mora, Luis Lacasa, Jesús Marti, and the engineer Eduardo Torroja. Their proposals were also based upon a prevailing grid but presented two elements which would make them the real precursors to the new towns created during the Francoist period by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización: first of all, the square appeared as an empty block taken away from the grid and in many examples was located at a particular moment of rupture within the grid itself. In all the proposals but one, one of the axes entered the town obliquely, with the effect of creating a direct or indirect terminated vista. This design strategy can be seen clearly in the detailed axonometric view of the Poblado B, a drawing that also emphasizes the use of the patio typology with interconnected outbuildings. The team won the first prize for the Guadalmellato section of the competition with similar designs and a striking approach to the issue of typological “repetition,” a theme that would be of fundamental importance in the following decades. Here, the architects gave great attention to the design of the street sections and to the street facades as coordinated projects that recalled the German Siedlungen of the 1920s and the works of J.P. Oud in the Netherlands with additional influences from Adolf Loos. The use of one-sided sloping roofs facing the backside of the lots emphasized the quasi-urban character of some streets. The other team to be awarded a prize included José Maria Arrillaga, Jésus de Zavala, and Martín Domínguez whose aerial perspectives (Poblado A Guadalquivir, and Poblado Q Guadelmellato) stressed the importance of the grid and the central square conceived as a 74 Beyond the three detailed types, the entry included variations on larger towns, marked as D-E-F-G-H. The “turbine” square was discussed in Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, Vienna, 1889, chapter 3 (Die Geschlossenheit der Plätze), in English: City Planning according to artistic principles, chapter 3 (That public squares should be enclosed entities) in the translation of George Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins. 133 void faced by all major public structures. Moreover, the perspectives emphasized the continuity and the horizontality of the long rectangular blocks, their street fronts, and the continuous rows of outbuildings within the patio-based blocks. Here again the variations on the design of the main streets were remarkable with the succession of inverted roofs, the display of oblique roofs parallel to the fronts, and so on. Other designs ranged from extreme modernist rationality (the parallel bars of the scheme by Luis Pérez Minguéz and José Lina Vaamonde that remind of Ernst May’s works) to the weak schemes of José Fonseca, César Cort, and the late Beaux-Arts one by Raimundo Beraza. Significantly, none of the projects showed any relation with the contemporary designs of rural towns in Italy such as Sabaudia or Richard Kauffmann’s planned settlements in Palestine. With the exception of the Lacasa/Torroja team, which explored a series of geometric variations by assembling various grids on different axes—a procedure that would be followed quite often in the works of the I.N.C.—most plans referred closely to the tradition of colonization in Latin American and later in eighteenth century southern Spain. Moreover, the striking element of all the entries was that the image of the towns derived mostly from the plan and the housing blocks, downscaling the potential importance of the civic buildings usually located around the plaza. Unsurprisingly, the brief did include the town hall, schools, and other services, but none of the projects included the church, a fact consistent with the socialist-oriented ideology of the moment in the Second Republic. From the architectural image point of view, the projects were far ranging and tended to propose a simplified architecture mid-way between modernist and regionalist sources. As Carlos Sambricio has stated “those [architects] who won the competition of 1932-33 shocked and disappointed both those who were claiming for an experimental architecture and those who supported the regional pastiche.”75 More importantly, it is critical to point out the typological similarities that characterized most entries. The consistent use of the patio-type house and the capacity of most house types to expend in terms of rooms and productive spaces were deployed in various ways and demonstrated the capacity of most architects to develop a genuinely Spanish alternative to the Garden City, marked by morphological and typological memory and modernity. Moreover they corresponded with architect José Fonseca Llamedo’s contemporary studies and publications regarding the rural house and the importance of the vernacular in the definition of another Spanish modernity. Interestingly, Lacasa, de la Mora, Martí and Toroja developed the blocks in more details and the back-to-back arrangement of the houses created a type of cluster that would be studied internationally in the 1950s. As for the Domínguez team, they emphasized the rural character of their proposals by systematically lining up the most important streets with the back of the houses and reserving the street fronts on quieter streets—an early strategy of separation of traffic that would be theorized by Alejandro Herrero in his article of 1947.76 75 Sambricio, “La ‘revolución conservadora’”, p. 070. See chapter 5: Alejandro Herrero, “Independencia de circulaciones y trazado de pueblos,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 81, September 1948, pp. 348-57. 76 134 The improvement of the rural dwelling was debated in Spain during the first decades of the twentieth century, but it is the competition for the new towns in Andalusia of 1932 that actualized the discussion to the new socioeconomic and international architectural context. In 1934, the Vth Congress Nacional de Riegos concluded that the new irrigation territories had to be planned and realized in a comprehensive manner that included not only the hydraulic works but also the residential and public services in the new settlements to be destined to the expected colonists. One important element of the debate and one that would repeat during the first five years of activities of the Institute of Colonization was whether habitat would be dispersed in the fields on the Italian model, or rather as most Spanish experts would agree toward concentration in compact new villages. From 1932 to 1936, José Fonseca directed the Seminar of Urbanology of the School of Architecture, attached to the Chair of César Cort in the School of Architecture at the University de Madrid. In that position and in association with the students, he studied the typology of the rural house in order to link it, economically and rationally, to the size of the rural exploitation, its production capacity, and its socio-cultural value. The objective was the systematization and rationalization of the rural environment and in particular of the minimal rural house through an intensive examination of plans, functions, minimum sizes, and hygiene criteria—in brief, “all elements that come from the rural tradition, but in this case not by a pastoral nostalgia, but by constructive and functional convenience.”77 At the same time and from a more conservative political background than his peers in the GATEPAC he advocated the value of popular architecture in the definition of a nationally driven modernity: In the face of the international uniforming movement, the only possible salvation is the inexhaustible vines of inspiration in our rural architecture. With an advantage in favor of this inspiring source; for indeed, however rabidly one intends to defend functional architecture, it is not a stance that thrives against traditional local styles that are all functional.78 In October 13, 1935, Fonseca and his team won a national competition on the theme of “la vivienda rural en España” [The rural house in Spain]. Fonseca’s study (La vivienda rural en España: Estudio técnico y jurídico para una actuación del Estado en la materia) analyzed the fundamentals of the necessary program of colonization, including the foundation of new villages and towns, the typology of modern dwelling units and their functional organization, the economy of the installation of non-proprietary farmer, and the existing or to be proposed Spanish legislation. Interspersed within the article were sketches of building types of the Italian colonization of the Pontine area, counterpoised with more modern and rational proposals for Spanish types drawn by students of the course of Urbanology. The Spanish examples were more explicit in regard to the recommended separation between the residential and the agricultural sections of the house: the one-story house with patio and 77 78 Manuel Calzada Pérez, “La vivienda rural en los pueblos de colonización," PH, nº 52, 2005, p. 058. José Fonseca, “Arquitectura Popular," Cortijos y rascacielos, nº 20, 1935, p. 2. 135 corral was proposed as most desirable rural type, in contrast to the predominant two-story house (casa colonica) of the Pontine area, characterized by its agricultural ground floor and its second floor residential. Furthermore, Fonseca and his students endorsed the model of the dense and compact residential village as opposed to the dispersion strategy of the rural houses implemented in the Fascist reclamation of the Pontine Marshes. Beyond its functional content, the report stressed also the symbolic and national values of the rural house and of the pueblo, all arguments that would resonate ideologically during the Franco regime:79 In addition to the economic and hygienic campaign, there will be a necessary revendication of the spiritual values of the field, of the conservation of its beautiful architectural peculiarities, of the exaltation of its traditions, of the restoration of the personality and individuality of the peoples that have lost it; in short, of all the stimuli of peasant life that should contribute, as well as the well-built home, to make the life in the Spanish fields kind and dignified.80 At the inauguration of the seminar of Urbanology in December 1935, José Fonseca, Eugenio d’Ors and César Cort once again argued in favor of a new balance between city and country. Seeing in the development of the big cities the hand of the State—Estado-Ciudad—he advocated to turn to the Campo-Hogar: We must pay special attention to the countryside, fighting against the disappearance of the peasant culture and the monstrous growth of the cities, in which it is increasingly difficult to live.81 In February 1936, the Frente Popular won the elections, a milestone event that was followed by weeks of extreme social and political convulsions. In July, the Civil War started. In 1939, at the end of the Civil War, Fonseca was appointed Director of the National Institute of Housing (Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda) and continued his pre-war line of research on the rural dwelling. The two institutes which were created to implement the Franquist policy of post-war reconstruction and interior colonization—the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización—not only adopted the ordinances that he designed but many of his students eventually became important actors within those two institutes. 79 José Fonseca, “La vivienda rural en España: estudio técnico y jurídico para una actuación del Estado en la materia,” Arquitectura XVIII, nº 1, January 1936, pp. 12-24. 80 José Fonseca, “La vivienda rural en España,” p. 22: “Al lado de la campaña económica e higiénica se hará una revindicatoria de los valores espirituales del campo, de conservación de las peculiaridades bellas de su arquitectura, de exaltación de sus tradiciones, de restauración de la personalidad e individualidad de los pueblos que la han perdido; en fin, de todos aquellos estímulos del vivir campesino que deben contribuir, tanto como el bien hallarse en el hogar bien construido, a hacer amable y digna la vida en los campos españoles.” 81 "Notas de actualidad: inauguración del seminario de urbanología,” Arquitectura XVII, nº 10, December 1935, p. 337: “hay que prestar una atención preferente al campo, cortando la desaparición de la cultura campesina y el aumento monstruoso de las ciudades, en las que llega no poderse vivir.” After the Civil War, Cort expended the discussion in his Campos urbanizados y ciudades ruralizadas, Madrid: Yagües, 1941. 136 2. 2. ITALY: THE METAPHYSICAL AND THE POSTWAR VERNACULAR How much did we laugh, us intellectuals, about the architecture of the Regime, about such cities as Sabaudia! And yet, nowadays, analyzing them, we cannot but experience an unexpected feeling. The architecture of Sabaudia has nothing unreal, nothing ridiculous: the passing of time has given its architecture of Fascist origin a modern character between the metaphysical and the realistic…. A city that we saw as preposterous and Fascist suddenly appears to us as haunting and delightful.82 The date of 26 May 1927 marked a momentous turning point in Fascist urban policy. In his notorious Ascension Day’s Speech Benito Mussolini argued that metropolitan industrialization induced the “sterility of the population.”83 A year after, in his article Sfollare le città, the Duce outlined the regime’s radical goals to limit metropolitan growth by re-equilibrating city and countryside and “ruralizing” the country.84 A major program of public works was initiated to restructure older neighborhoods through demolition and reconstruction, as well as to modernize towns and cities with a new infrastructure of post offices, train stations, and other representative buildings such as the Case del Fascio. 85 The reclamation of the Pontine Marshes and the subsequent founding of agricultural new towns and villages, along with new industrial towns in Sardinia and the aeronautical city of Guidonia near Tivoli, followed this line of ideological and technical planning. “With both types of towns—Diane Ghirardo wrote— Fascism seemed to be promising a new and bright future with up-to-date, hygienic living conditions and improved agricultural and industrial productivity.”86 About one hundred and seventy new communities were created in Italy (including Sardinia and Sicily) between 1928 and 1942. Fifteen of them can be considered as towns and cities, most of them in the Lazio area.87 82 Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated from an excerpt of the short film (15 minutes) Pasolini e la forma della città directed by Paolo Brunetto and completed in 1973. The film can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btJ-EoJxwr4 (last accessed January 2016). 83 For the Ascension Speech, see http://cronologia.leonardo.it/storia/a1927v.htm (last accessed January 2016). 84 Benito Mussolini, “Cifre e deduzioni. Sfollare le città,” Il Popolo d’Italia, December 22, 1928. 85 The Case del Fascio (Houses of the Fascist Parti) were built throughout Italy, from villages to cities, as local seats of the National Fascist Parti (P.N.F.). 86 Diane Ghirardo’s Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. 87 The political and socio-cultural origins of the Fascist program have been studied at length. Among the most important books: Roberta Martinelli and Lucia Nuti, Le città di Strapaese: La politica di ‘fondazione’ nel ventennio, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1981; Elisabetta Novello, La bonifica in Italia: legislazione, credito e lotta alla malaria dall'unità al fascismo, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2003; Renata Besana, Carlo Fabrizio Carli, Luigi Prisco (eds.), Metafisica costruita. Le città di fondazione degli anni Trenta dall'Italia all'Oltremare: dagli archivi storici del Touring Club Italiano e dell'Istituto italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente e dai fondi locali., Milano: Regione Lazio and Touring Club Italiano, 2002; Eugenio Lo 137 Plans for the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, the malaria-infested region to the south of Rome between the Via Appia and the Mediterranean Sea, go back to Antiquity. Rulers like Julius Cesar, Augustus, and Renaissance Popes like Leo X (with the likely help of Leonardo Da Vinci) and Sixtus V developed more or less ambitious but aborted projects to sanitize the area. Eventually, it was the Fascist regime, which from 1927 embarked on the bonifica integrale, a multi-throng public work program to engage a “total war” against malaria, drain the marshes, and colonize the reclaimed areas.88 The first years focused on vast works of hydraulic engineering. The law of 9 April 1931 created the Commissariat for Migrations and Interior Colonization (Commissariato per le Migrazioni e la Colonizzazione Interna), an organism involved with the policies of internal migrations and transfers. 89 The Opera Nazionale dei Combattenti (ONC) was put in charge of the management of the newly created parcels of land and of the installation of more than four thousand small farms distributed to thousands of colonists who were encouraged (at times through coercion) to move, like the Peruzzi family in the novel Canale Mussolini, from the impoverished provinces of Veneto, Friuli and Emilia-Romagna.90 The hierarchical organization of the region was structured at three levels by the ONC: First, the poderi or farms, each with an isolated farmhouse (casa colonica) The casa colonica was usually two-floor high, with 4 or 5 bedrooms upstairs, and kitchen storeroom, and animal stables at the ground level—those functional rooms were not separated but integrated within the overall structure; second, the district, each of them centered on a borgo or hamlet consisting of a small church, a small casa del fascio, a bank and a school; thirdly, the new towns also called città di fondazione (cities of foundation). The five towns built from 1932 to 1939 —Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, Aprilia and Pomezia—were primarily conceived as service centers.91 They contained houses and apartments for artisans, shopkeepers, and civil servants, but overall a strong policy of dispersed dwellings was encouraged. The Roman artist Dullio Cambellotti saw and depicted this rural urbanism—or urban ruralism—as the purest expression of Fascist modernity.92 The central section of the Redenzione dell’Agro— the large narrative triptych painted in 1934 at the Prefecture in Littoria—shows the central Sardo and Maria Luisa Boccia, Divina geometria: modelli urbani degli anni Trenta — Asmara, Addis Abeba, Harar, Olettà, Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, Borghi , Firenze: Maschietto & Musolino, 1995. 88 Anatolio Linoli, "Twenty-six Centuries of Reclamation & Agricultural Improvement on the Pontine Marshes", in Christof Ohleg, Integrated Land and Water Resources Management in History, Schriften der Deutschen Wasserhistorischen Gesellschaft (DWhG) Sonderband 2, DWhG, 2005, pp. 27–56; Frank Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 89 A. Treves, Migrazioni Interne nell’Italia Fascista: Politica e Realtà Demografica, Torino: Einaudi, 1976. 90 The institution O.N.C. (Opera Nazionale dei Combattenti) was established at the end of World War I to help veterans. The law of 9 April 1931 created the Commissariat for Migrations and Interior Colonization (Commissariato per le Migrazioni e la Colonizzazione Interna), an organization involved with the policies of internal migrations and transfers. See Antonio Pennacchi, Canale Mussolini, Milano: Mondadori, 2010. 91 I will use the original name when writing about Littoria during the Fascist period, and the new name of Latina for post-World War II events (renaming in 1945). 92 Carlo Fabrizio Carli and Egisto Bragaglia, Duilio Cambellotti e la conquista della terra, Latina: Edizioni Agro, 1994. 138 nucleus of the city-region in construction: in the background the network of roads, farms and hamlets is clearly visible and inscribed within the rigor of the geometric division of the territory in Migliari (parallel roads at intervals of one kilometer) and canals; in the foreground, groups of soldiers/farmers and animals struggle to create a Fascist new nature, new city and new society.93 Reflecting on the Pontine foundations, Luigi Piccinato, one of the urbanist-architects of Sabaudia, wrote in 1934 that “neither Littoria nor Sabaudia were cities in the usual urbanistic significance of the term.”94 They were not walled or closed in opposition with the countryside, but “authentic agricultural centers, with an indissoluble link to their territory and to the soil that produces.”95 Arguing against the metropolis and the large city, Piccinato emphasized the regime’s embrace of urban decentralization (decentramento urbano), in line with early twentieth century experimentation with garden cities, linear cities, etc. In other words, the traditional concept of a city was, in Piccinato’s words, to be replaced by a new “city-region, city-province, city-nation.”96 Echoes of the American regionalist and anti-urban experiments, in particular the Greenbelt creations and the works of the Tennessee Valley Authority, were evidently resonating in the new Fascist policy of de-urbanization. As Mussolini declared one month before the inauguration of Sabaudia: The rallying cry is the following: within a couple of decades all the residents of the Italian countryside will have a large and healthy house ... Only in this way can we fight against the nefarious urbanization; only in this way will we be able to bring back to the fields and villages all those dreamers and disappointed ones who have left their established families in order to follow the urban mirages of the salary in cash and easy recreation.97 To be sure, this negative vision of urbanization and urban life preceded the advent of Italian Fascism and had deep roots in the industrialization of cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. During the interwar period, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) was a major source of inspiration for anti-urban policies and for Benito Mussolini among others. The debate was international in nature and had influenced major experiments such as the Socialist Siedlungen of Ernst May in Frankfurt and of Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner in Berlin, the de-urbanist projects in the Soviet Union, and the rural aspirations of the New Deal in the United States.98 The new foundations in the Pontine region partook in these 93 Federico Caprotti and Maria Kaïka, “Producing the Ideal Fascist Landscape: Nature, Materiality and the Cinematic Representation of Land Reclamation in the Pontine Marshes,” Social & Cultural Geography 9, nº 6, 2008, pp. 613-634. 94 Federico Malasurdi, Luigi Piccinato e l’urbanisticá moderna, Roma: Officina Edizioni, 1993, p. 355, from Luigi Piccinato, “Il significato urbanistico di Sabaudia,” Urbanisticà 1, January 1934. 95 Malasurdi, p. 357. 96 Ibidem. 97 Quoted in Martinelli and Nuti, p. 154; also see Danilo Breschi, Mussolini e la città. Il fascismo tra antiurbanesimo e modernità, Milan: Luni Editrice, 2018. 98 See Martinelli and Nuti, op. cit.; Diane Ghirardo, op. cit. 139 international trends. At the same time, their unique program and form were the result of a complex negotiation between two tendencies of Fascist politics: on the one hand, a ruralism that aimed at ascribing “a new dignity to every form of work, particularly agricultural,” and on the other hand, the attraction of a vernacular and urban monumentalism that strove to express the lineage of Fascism with the antique and medieval past.99 Fascist propaganda extolled the virtues of rural and healthy living, with a new sense of values and morality, and promoted, particularly in the rural areas of the north, a Fascist land program that aimed at placing individual families on their own piece of land, thus making them individual landowners. A major target was the returning veteran from WWI, which led to the creation of the Opera Nazionale per i Combattenti (O.N.C.). As spelled out in 1926 after its reorganization by Mussolini, its task was to “promote the growth of agricultural colonies and new living centers, bringing veterans there—especially those who were farmers. The importance of this task is obvious: only with the formation of new living centers will it be possible to resolve a grave problem of hygiene and morale; to clear out overcrowded areas, especially in the south, and to give veterans sanitary houses.”100 In other words, the O.N.C. was “one of the fundamental forces to be mobilized for the ruralization of the country”101 The exaltation of the “rural values” did not only reflect the renewed potential of agriculture in the national economy, but also helped define the design agenda to which the architects of the Pontine cities would respond from 1932 to 1939. As Mia Fuller has argued, relegating the farmers to isolated farmhouses was a serious departure from tradition and a policy that reflected the desurbanamento [de-urbanization] tendencies of the regime under supposed gains in productivity.102 As Gustavo Giovannoni summarized it in his 1936 book: After having studied in depth what is being done and built abroad, we must now go home and operate with our simple and Italian sentiments. The new towns shall be designed as to not alter the local character of the environment, while responding to the concepts of modernity and practical utility. Let us plan a nucleus of compact houses, yet not too high, that contains the main square, intimate and tranquil like the antique plazas, outside of the main roads of circulation. Then the fabric shall diminish in intensity toward the outskirts, adapting to the terrain, creating harmonious groupings of masses without following systems too rigid; even if the architectural inspiration is not directly local… approach, simple but Italian. at any rate it should follow a common sense 103 99 Massimo Pica Ciamarra, “Occasioni mancate,” in Giovanni Marucci, ed., Architettura Città Rivista di architettura e cultura urbana, nº 14 (Città pontine), 2006, p. 39. 100 Ghirardo, p. 45, from O.N.C., L’opera nazionale per i combattenti, Roma, 1926, p. 69. 101 Martinelli and Nuti, p. 21. 102 Mia Fuller, “Tradition as a means to the end of tradition: Farmers’ houses in Italy’s fascist-era new towns,” Nezar Alsayyad (ed.), The End of Tradition?, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013, pp. 171-186. 103 Gustavo Giovannoni, L’urbanistica e la deurbanizzazione, Roma, 1936, pp. 17-18. 140 2.2.1. Foundations and the Reclamation of the Pontine Marshes In April 1932, O.N.C’s president Valentino Orsolino Cancelli commissioned the Roman architect Oriolo Frezzotti to design the master plan and main buildings of the first Pontine city, Littoria. Frezzotti prepared the plan in less than sixty days.104 Six months later the town was inaugurated with its main public buildings and spaces in place. Seen from the air, Frezzoti’s radio-concentric design brought to mind Palmanova and the Ideal City of the Renaissance, re-actualized in light of Ebenezer Howard’s and Raymond Unwin’s theories. Littoria became an international sensation. In the fifth issue of Quadrante, Pietro Maria Bardi reported the excitement that the presentation of the new town at CIAM IV had generated: Our report on Littoria is ready, the maps and photographs have been attached to the boards. Van Eesteren has asked the architect Bottoni to make the presentation. After London, Berlin, Paris, now Littoria. We are truly at the center of a very curious attention.105 Littoria was planned for five thousand residents, yet it presented a highly urban image, one that contradicted the regime’s goal of “de-urbanization.” However, Mussolini quickly understood the political and propagandistic value that could be derived both nationally and internationally. On the day of its inauguration, the Duce announced the foundation of a second new town, Sabaudia. Sabaudia was the result of a one-month design competition held in early 1933 and won by a team of young architect-urbanists who had graduated from the new School of Architecture of Rome and were members of the Gruppo degli Urbanisti Romani (GUR): Luigi Piccinato, Gino Cancellotti, Alfredo Scalpelli and Eugenio Montuoti. 106 The town plan, its tri-dimensional construction and the Rationalist architecture of Sabaudia gave it an immediate iconic image. The plan was structured on three principles: first a modern reinterpretation of the Roman colonial diagram with two axial streets—decumanus and cardo—intersecting at the Piazza della Revoluzione; second, the balanced asymmetry of building masses and the careful termination of the visual lines characteristic of the medieval city; third, the loose arrangement, on both sides of the main axis, of two paradigms of modern housing: the organic garden neighborhood and the rational grid of the modern housing movement of the 1920s. Key to the planning of Sabaudia was Camillo Sitte’s book Der Städtebau, first published in 1889 and popularized in Italy since the 1910s by Gustavo Giovannoni and the association AACAR 104 On Littoria, see Carlo Fabrizio Carli and Massimiliano Vittori, Oriolo Frezzotti: 1888-1965: Un architetto in territorio pontino, Latina, Lazio: Novecento, 2002; Pietro Cefaly and Giorgio Muratore, Littoria 1932-1942: gli architetti e la città, Latina, Lazio: Casa dell'architettura, 2001; Francesca Bocchi and Enrico Guidoni, Atlante storico delle città italiane/Lazio 3: Sabaudia, Roma: Multigrafica, 1988. When Littoria was given the status of a provincial capital in 1933, Frezzotti signed the first expansion plan of the city. 105 The quote is from Bardi (1933), quoted in Carlo Fabrizio Carli and Massimiliano Vittori, p. 31. Littoria’s early critical fame was eventually short-lived as its plan and its architecture were increasingly seen as too traditional in comparison with Sabaudia. Yet, for many Fascist leaders, Littoria better reflected the esthetic goals of the regime. 106 On the G.U.R., and its professional profile, see Giorgio Ciucci, Gli architetti e il Fascismo: Architettura e città 1922-1944, Torino: Einaudi, 1989. 141 (Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura).107 The first axis, decumanus, enters the town from Littoria and the reclaimed countryside at the end of a four-kilometer long perspective that terminates on the City Hall’s tower; the other and shorter axis, cardo, connects the military headquarter to the church. Sabaudia’s “medieval” image was exalted in the complex of two central squares, the civic one at the intersection of axes with the tower of the town hall, the hotel, the shops and the cinema, and, isolated but visually connected, the religious one, complete with the church and its detached campanile and baptistery. The whole organism was oriented according to modernist requirements of light and air, and surrounded by a system of parks equivalent to a greenbelt. Whereas Littoria’s urban spaces were fundamentally introverted, Sabaudia’s response to the regime’s concept of “de-urbanization” was clever and made physical with direct visual links between city, the man-made countryside, and the mythical landscape to the south: The long entrance axis; the transparent patio of the City Hall opening on the waterway and the dunes; the subtle articulation of the central square with the public garden, the tall and slender towers of the city hall, and the church’s campanile aimed at establishing a connection with the flat landscape. For Alessandra Muntoni, this physical concept was conceived “to make the void speak, to render quasi physically this re-conquered territorial space, new protagonist of a reversed relation country-city….”108 Sabaudia’s ensemble was resolutely modern and one of the first examples of Rationalist architecture in the country. However, it is the public architecture of the city hall, the church, the towers, and the “metaphysical” image of the urban spaces that were first built, advertised and ultimately recorded in the “collective memory” of residents, visitors and readers. As Piccinato explained: The building of these institutions should be proportioned to the needs of the entire agricultural center and not only to those of the communal town center itself: this explains the apparent disproportion between the size of the public buildings and the number of houses that together with the public buildings comprise the true and characteristic urban aggregate…. Sabaudia is seen comprehensively in its territory, or rather as a strongly decentralized building pattern that has its center in a large central district.109 Arguably, the iconicity of Sabaudia, Latina, and the other Pontine cities (Pontinia, Aprilia and Pomezia) was significantly different than that of most planned twentieth communities. Overall, 107 On Sabaudia, see Francesca Bocchi & Enrico Guidoni, Atlante storico delle città italiane / Lazio 3 Sabaudia (Roma: Multigrafica Ed., 1988); Giorgio Muratore, Daniela Carfagna & Mario Tieghi (eds.), Sabaudia, 1934: Il sogno di una città nuova e l’architettura razionalista (Sabaudia: Comune di Sabaudia, 1999); Richard Burdett, et. al., Sabaudia 1933: città nuova fascista, London: Architectural Association, 1981. On Sitte in Italy, see Giorgio Piccinato, “Sitte e le parole dell’urbanistica italiana,” in Guido Zucconi (ed.), Camillo Sitte e i suoi interpreti, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1992, pp. 116-144. 108 Alesandra Muntoni, “Urbanistica e Architettura nelle città dell’Agro Pontino,” Architettura Città Rivista di architettura e cultura urbana, nº 14 (Città pontine), Camerino: Università degli Studi di Camerino, 2006, p. 27. 109 Malasurdi, p. 358. 142 their iconic value was not related to a modern image of housing and dwelling, like in Greenbelt, Welwyn, or the Red Frankfurt, but rather to the modernity of their plans, public architecture and the “metaphysical” image of their urban spaces. Within the context of deurbanization, they were created as service centers with minimum residential content. Most city users lived around the city, in the farms located on the outskirts of the towns, in the borghi and other isolated structures located at the heart of the agricultural heart—as shown in the beautiful and poetic interpretation of Cambellotti’s cycle in Latina. To be sure, housing was an important component of Littoria and Sabaudia’s existence. Luigi Piccinato and his colleagues defined three types for Sabaudia, from the apartment type in the very heart to the rowhouse and the single-family house on its own plot. Not surprisingly he emphasized the importance of the villa-Type C (D in Littoria) as “the richest type, distributed on the edges in direction of the most important vistas, and penetrating within the center, in particular around the church.”110 It was also the type that corresponded best to the anti-urban objectives of the regime. These typologies were clearly influenced by the contemporary context of housing research in Europe and in the United States, but their value in terms of iconicity was eventually limited. The repetitive nature of this arrangement showed obvious influences from the 1920s Siedlungen by German architects Bruno Taut, Ernst May and Martin Wagner.111 However, no part of those housing sections was implemented. The following years saw the design and the construction of three other towns and a score of hamlets in the region. Pontinia was the most traditional and designed, without competition, by Pappalardo and Frezzotti (1934-35). The competitions for Aprilia and Pomezia, held in 1936 and 1938 and won by the group Petrucci-Tufaroli-Paolini-Silenzi, further revealed the extent of the typological and morphological inventions of new town planning in a uniquely Italian way. Most of these plans, built or unbuilt, were the works of a new generation of young architect-urbanists, often from the School of Rome, the first generation of “integral architects,” trained and often assistants of Marcello Piacentini and Gustavo Giovannoni. The latter coined the terms in 1916, when he affirmed the necessity to change the traditional figure of the “dilettante architect” and make him or her an “architetto integrale.” In Giovannoni’s words, the “integral architect” was to be “a genuine architect, who is simultaneously artist, technician, and cultivated individual.”112 In 1932 he defined the figure as an architect “who needs to be prepared to the most acute constructional problems as well as to the development of an artistic concept, to the preservation of monuments as well as an urbanistic task.”113 110 Piccinato, “il significato di Sabaudia,” in Malasurdi, p. 363. The competitions for Aprilia and Pomezia respectively held in 1936 further revealed the extent of the typological and morphological inventions of Italian new town planning, but once again, the housing areas were left unbuilt. It is only in the case of the aeronautical city of Guidonia near Rome that housing became essential in defining the public image of the town: see Jean-François Lejeune, “Futurismo e città di fondazione: da Littoria a Guidonia, città aerofuturista,” Angiolo Mazzoni e l’architettura futurista, Roma: Fondazione C.E.S.A.R., 2008, pp. 59-74. 112 Ciucci, p. 9; see Gustavo Giovannoni, Gli architetti e gli studi in Architettura in Italia, Roma, 1916, p. 12. 113 Ciucci, p. 10; see Gustavo Giovannoni, La Scuola di Architettura di Roma, Roma, 1932, p. 9. 111 143 Seen as an ensemble, and even though they were supposed to be non-cities, the new foundations created significant moments of urbanity within the countryside. The cardo/decamanus that was used in most cases gave them a strong sense of rational planning, inspired by the Roman castrum, while setting up subtle perspectival effects directly related to the lessons of Sitte. Eventually, the absence of real housing typologies—with a couple of exceptions such as the suburban pattern of Carbonia that consisted of long roads bordered by single-family houses and stretching far into the landscape—has impacted their overall image and monumentalized them. Housing was not really part of the equation of the foundations. Even if building types such as case a schiera (townhouses) were indeed planned in most projects, none of them were ever realized, Rural typologies were not really strongly studied but basically adapted from existing patterns. This made the Italian foundations particularly unique in contrast with other international situation where, most of the time, it is housing or the rural house that was meant to define the new identity. In this evolving context, the new towns reconciled the apparently contradictory presence of modernism and ruralism, of city and country, and of experimenting between modernity and reference to tradition. Not surprisingly, the iconic urban form of Sabaudia, as well as its integration within the new Fascist landscape, attracted the gaze of the aero-futurist painters and photographers. Following the Manifesto of Aero-painting of 1929, the airplane and the aerial gaze became the symbolic means and tool of futurism.114 Faced with the sickness, the ugliness, and poverty of the traditional cities, altitude allowed seeking for relief, by abstracting the multitude, and the masses in movement on the earth. Works like Bonifica integrale (1933) by Peruzzi, Tato’s Sorvolando Sabaudia (1934), Prampolini’s Cuore aperto di contadino bonificatore, or Di Bosso’s Spiralando su Sabaudia (1936) situate the Aero-futurist movement at a point of reconciliation between the two antagonistic factions of Italian culture during Fascism, i.e., Strapaese and Stracittà. As Emily Braun wrote, “it was not Strapaese’s intention to reject modernity in its entirety, but rather to absorb it through the filter of tradition, and in this way to counter the complete eradication of the past.”115 114 Giacomo Balla, Benedetta Marinetti, Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Fillia, F.T. Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, Mino Somenzi, Tato, “L’aeropittura, manifesto futurista,” in Futurismo 1909-1944, pp. 555556. Also see Umbrio Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, London: Thames & Hudson, 1973. 115 Emily Braun, “Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi's Still Lifes and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese,” Modernism/Modernity 2, March 1995, p. 95. According to The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (2002), “The vision of peasant wholesomeness and a corresponding earthy pithiness of style which was promoted particularly by Mino Maccari apropos of Tuscany and Tuscan in Il Selvaggio in the interwar years. It was polemically opposed to the internationalism of stracittà associated with Bontempelli and the 900 (Novecento) group. Both tendencies claimed to be in tune with the true spirit of Fascism, but strapaese gained the ascendency in the 1930s.” According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica (Brittanica.com), “Stracittà, an Italian literary movement that developed after World War I. Massimo Bontempelli was the leader of the movement, which was connected with his idea of novecentismo. Bontempelli called for a break from traditional styles of writing, and his own writings reflected his interest in such modern forms as Surrealism and magic realism. The name stracittà, a type of back-formation from the word stracittadino (“ultra-urban”), was meant to emphasize the movement’s adherence to general trends in European literature, in opposition to strapaese (from strapaesano [“ultra-local”])—collectively, those authors who followed nationalist and regionalist trends.” 144 Most observers, historians and critics have emphasized the even more explicit connection with the other great movement in Italian Modern Art, i.e., the Metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, and, after World War One, other artists like Mario Sironi. The città di fondazione formed in Renata Besana, Carlo Fabrizio Carli, and Luigi Prisco’s words, a Metafisica costruita or Constructed Metaphysics. Like many authors before them, they equated the “metaphysical” character of the urban spaces of the Pontine cities with the series of paintings produced, mostly by de Chirico between 1914 and 1925, under the general title of Piazze d’Italia. De Chirico’s abstracted architectural language was at once traditional and modern. As such, and with various degrees of intensity, it was strongly reflected in the architectures of Littoria, Sabaudia, Aprilia and others like Pomezia. 116 The period photographs, mostly produced by and for the Touring Club Italiano (T.C.I.), and some of the architect’s drawings, consciously exploited these standard elements of metaphysical painting. From their very start the Pontine cities were scenically, urbanistically and politically conceived as urban objects of propaganda and as such were extensively photographed. In contrast with Tato’s Sorvolando Sabaudia and other aerial works that suggested or effectively showed the masses that were supposed to fill the large spaces imagined by the architects as points of gathering for the Regime, most T.C.I. photos were precisely constructed to emphasize the illusion of one or more vanishing points; they were more often than not either empty of human beings, or featured an enigmatic figure standing in isolation, a statue as in one of Chirico’s Metaphysical squares, or even, as an iconic element of modernity, the silent presence of an automobile.117 2.2.2. Postwar Villages War destructions on the Italian territory were considerable. About two millions habitable rooms were destroyed and another four millions severely damaged.118 The reconstruction process was thus two-fold. On the one hand, it involved the reconstruction of towns, cities, and monuments within the confines of their urban fabric; on the other hand, it embraced an ambitious process of new neighborhoods, that would favor low-cost social housing outside of the pre-war limits of the urban fabric, usually on lands without infrastructures, often remote from public transportation, and eventually functioning in quasi-isolation as neighborhood units or urban villages. In 1948, Amintore Fanfani, Minister of Labor and Social Security, signed the Legge Fanfani that created the Ina-casa program that provided the financing for a massive program of housing that created 350,000 new dwellings from 1949 to 1963. Formerly a 116 Renata Basana, Carlo Fabrizio Carli, Luigi Prisco, op. cit. Note that I will not discuss here the Italian foundations created in Ethiopia as they follow the same principles and do not include any housing. See Renata Basana, Carlo Fabrizio Carli, Luigi Prisco, op. cit., and Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, cities and Italian imperialism, London: Routledge. 2007. 118 See Paola di Biagi (ed.), La grande ricostruzione: il piano Ina-Casa e l'Italia degli anni cinquanta, Roma: Donzelli Editore, 2001; Stephanie Zeier Pilat, Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era, London: Ashgate, 2014. 117 145 member of the Fascist parti, Fanfani was situated to the left of the Christian-Democrat party and was driven by a Catholic view of capitalism that encouraged and supported the role of the State to temper the “amorality and excesses of market-capitalism.”119 Funded by the Marshall Plan, the aspiration of the INA-casa program was “to give workers a civilized home, studied in ways so that each can feel in its own and where each man can feel himself a citizen of a new community.”120 The Institute published two design manuals in 1949 and 1950.121 These manuals combined normative rules, examples of projects both good and bad, and were richly illustrated with diagrams and photographs. Together the first and second manuals comprise a theory and method of interior, architectural, and urban design for architects working during the first seven years of the plan. Overall, they promoted a humane type of urbanism, in rupture with the geometric rationalism of Fascist low-cost housing in the peripheries, with winding streets, changing perspectives, and a vernacular approach to materials that favored labor-intensive techniques. Those were in many ways Camillo Sitte’s principles, albeit reinterpreted in a more modern mode. In post-1945 Italy, under the spell of Bruno Zevi, it was the word “organic architecture” that best described the search for the architecture and urban design of the new democratic era: The house should contribute to the formation of the urban environment, keeping in mind the spiritual and material needs of man, of a real man and not an abstract being; a man, that is, who neither loves nor understands the unending repetition and monotony of the same type of dwellings…. He does not love the arrangement of a chessboard, but rather those environments that are both cozy and dynamic.122 The most famous of the new post-war districts of the INA-casa, the Quartiere Tiburtino was designed between 1949 and 1954 by a team of architects led by Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi, and including W. Frankl, C. Aymonino, C. Chiarini, M. Fiorentino, F. Gorio, M. Lanza, S. Lenci, P. Lugli, C. Melograni, G. Menichetti e M. Valori.123 Commenting the project in Casabella, Aymonino wrote that it had “the character of a village, archaic and free, as something more intimate than the chaos of the periphery of the metropolis.”124 And further: “from the very beginning of the project for the district, the accepted idea was to move beyond a rationalist type of composition, dictated by uniform orientations, constant distances, and the repetition of a few building types… in order to obtain a unity by means of the superposition of always different perspectives formed by a succession of diverse spaces brought together by a 119 Zeier Pilat, p. 50. Quoted from Luigi Beretta Anguissola, I 14 anni del piano Ina-Casa, Roma: Staderini, 1963, cited by Zeier Pilat, p. 29. 121 Suggerimenti, norme, e schemi per la elaborazione e presentazione dei progetti: Bandi dei Concorsi, Roma: F. Damasso, 1949, and Suggerimenti, esempi e norme per la progettazione urbanistica: Progetti tipo, Roma: F. Damasso, 1950. 122 Zeier Pilat, p. 69, cited from Suggerimenti, 1950, pp. 10-11. 123 “Quartiere Tiburtino a Roma,” Urbanistica 21, nº 7, 1951, pp. 24-25; Carlo Aymonino, “Storia e cronaca del quartiere Tiburtino,” Casabella continuità, nº 215, November 1955, pp. 18-43. 124 Carlo Aymonino, Casabella 215, 1957, p. 20. 120 146 renewed value of the street.”125 The team successfully pursued the “picturesque,” “with the studied happenstance of many different types of façades and roofs, with the use of balconies for their sculptural functions, with the extension of the first flights of stairs on the exterior of the building in order to reinforce their character of being constructions that had arisen spontaneously at successive moments in time.” 126 As Bruno Reichlin has commented, Wolfgang Frankl, a member of the team and a former student of the Stuttgarterschule in Germany, was passionately interested in minor architecture. He scrutinized and drew the towns and villages of central Italy in search of design ideas.127 Written for and applied in the periphery of cities within the context of the INA-casa, those principles were deployed as well to guide the design and construction of new villages across the country, and primarily in the South or Mezzogiorno. Toward the end of the war, a group of exiled figures including Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Luigi Einaudi, and Adriano Olivetti had initiated the debate about the physical and moral reconstruction of the country, and particularly the development of the South. Influenced by the New Deal, Olivetti initiated programs of development such as the Olivetti complex in Pozzuoli and the adjacent INA-casa neighborhood. Yet, it is in the countryside that his action would be decisive as a member of the board of the UNRRA-CASAS (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration/Comitato Amministrativo Soccorso ai Senzatetto) founded in 1946 to manage international help with a priority for the rural south. More specifically, at the end of the 1940s, the Basilicata and the city of Matera became the focus of study by Italian and foreign intellectuals. Among them, the German Frederic Friedmann, professor at the University of Arkansas and Olivetti’s personal friend, who arrived in Matera in the footsteps of Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli and immediately epitomized Matera as a socio-economic model of the rural world.128 Levi’s novel, published in 1945, was a devastating portrait of Matera’s unique historic center, the Sassi. In his memoir, Levi, a doctor, painter and author revealed the wealth of civic values of work and solidarity in Matera, suffocated in the deepest misery and that had to be recognized and eventually protected: These inverted cones, these funnels are called Sassi, Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. They have the shape with which, in school, I imagined Dante's hell ... The narrow road passed over the roofs of the houses, if they can be called so. They are caves dug into the walls of the ravine’s hardened clay ... The streets are both floors for those who leave the houses above and roofs for those who live below ... The doors were open for the heat, and I could watch as I was passing by: and I saw the 125 Ibidem. Ibidem. 127 Marcel Meili and Markus Peter, interview with Wolfgang Frankl in “Durch die Abruzzen nach Rom: Eine architektonische Reise,” photo-copied document distributed during research trip for the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Zurich, 1993, pp. 111–25, quoted by Bruno Reichlin, “Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture (Part 1), Grey Room 05, Fall 2001, p.86. 128 See Federico Bilò and Ettore Vadini (eds.), Matera e Adriano Olivetti – Conversazioni con Albino Sacco e Leonardo Sacco, Ivrea: Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, 2013. 126 147 inside the caves: they take no more light and air than from the door. Some do not even have that: you enter from above, through hatches and small stairs.129 Levi’s Cristo had a massive and awakening impact on the society and particularly on the intellectuals and politicians of the early 1950s. Matera became a symbol of the condition of the South, a “disgrace” that had to be cured and renewed. Promoted by the UNRAA-CASAS and the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (I.N.U.) under the leadership of Adriano Olivetti, and by Frederic Friedmann, a commission was put in place to study the design of new and modern communities that could reproduce and maintain the civic values of the old habitat.130 The result was the Piano regolatore di Matera (1953-54), authored by Luigi Piccinato, who led the design team of Sabaudia twenty years earlier. The plan was the response to the law of 17 May 1952 that decreed the urban renewal of the Sassi and the subsequent forced expulsion of their residents. It included the construction of five new villages to serve as agricultural communities—La Martella, Borgo Venusio, Santa Lucia, Drago di Picciano, Torre Spagnola— and a series of suburban quarters closer to the city, Serra Venerdì, Spine Bianche, Villa Longo, and La Nera.131 What Tiburtino was for Rome and the urban environment, La Martella, projected by Ludovico Quaroni, Federico Gorio, Luigi Agati, Pietro Maria Lugli, and Michele Valori, became for the countryside: an instant icon of Italian postwar modern and neo-realist architecture. The village was loosely organized around a multi-focal civic center where the church, administrative buildings, schools formed two U-shaped compositions that provided public space and responded to multiple viewpoints in a clearly picturesque manner: at the very edge of the village were the commercial center and the modern church whose cubic, quasi-medieval and tower-like volume jutted out in front of the landscape. This urban composition was a notable departure from the 1930s examples in the pontine area. The architects abandoned the concept of a central and geometrically—one could say rationalistically—conceived piazza and replaced it by a more modern concept of civic center made up of a loosely arranged assemblage of buildings with diverse places of encounter.132 Behind them were other public functions such as schools, dispensary, sport fields, etc. From the civic center, four roads extended into the landscape, with almost continuous and irregular group of houses aligned on one or both of their sides. Between the roads and branching out of them were a series of short and curved streets that functioned as a type of semi-private 129 Carlo Levi, Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli, Turin: Einaudi, 1945; in English, Christ Stopped at Eboli, New York: Farrar, Strauss and company, 1947: “Questi coni rovesciati, questi imbuti si chiamano Sassi, Sasso Caveoso e Sasso Barisano. Hanno la forma con cui a scuola immaginavo l'inferno di Dante... La stradetta strettissima passava sui tetti delle case, se quelle così si possono chiamare. Sono grotte scavate nella parete di argilla indurita del burrone... Le strade sono insieme pavimenti per chi esce dalle abitazioni di sopra e tetti per quelli di sotto... Le porte erano aperte per il caldo, Io guardavo passando: e vedevo l'interno delle grottesche non prendono altra luce ed aria se non dalla porta. Alcune non hanno neppure quella: si entra dall'alto, attraverso botole e scalette.” 130 See Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, Esperienze urbanistiche in Italia, Roma: INU, 1952; Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, Nuove esperienze urbanistiche in Italia, Roma: INU, 1956. 131 Luigi Piccinato, “Matera: i sassi, i nuovi borghi e il piano regolatore,” Urbanistica 24, nº 15-16 (1954), pp. 142-151; Carlo Aymonino, “Matera: mito e realtà,” Casabella continuità, nº 231, September 1959, pp. 7-12; “Matera,” Casabella continuità, nº 231, September 1959, pp. 8-33. 132 For a discussion of the modern civic center, see Chapter 5 in this dissertation. 148 cul-de-sac but were eventually connected all together on the outskirts of the village. Those short streets were, to some extent, villages within the village, the desired equivalent of the sassi and of the mini-community that the antique typology had spurred. Almost banal houses at the front of narrow and deep lots reinterpreted the vernacular and the architecture without architects. In contrast to the fixed nature of the città di fondazione where the matrix center permitted to understand the whole from one point, Matera and its followers were all about movement. What Quaroni, Ridolfi and the team planned in La Martella was not focused on the plaza as Sitte studied extensively, but rather on Kevin Lynch’s version, more dynamic and closer to the Townscape approach. As Lucio Barbera summarized, Quaroni’s experiments became a voyage through the geographical landscape of Italian architectural languages, into places whose identity had remained true and distinct. And the miracle of La Martella was born together with the studies into the language of an architecture without architects, into the merits of apparent randomness and the substantial resources of spontaneously created historical fabrics, which had their origins in the severe economic conditions, in the need to live together in communities, in the harsh competition barely held in check by the fear of other people, microcosms in which the embryo of the contemporary metropolis, free, rejoicing and savagely stern, was unexpectedly already alive.133 However, the success of La Matera hides a double paradox. On the one hand, the expediency with which the Piano Regolatore, as well as the construction of more than 2000 housing units, was achieved at the cost of the quasi-destruction of a unique urban culture with roots deep in history. On the other hand, the relocation program supported by the masterplan was only partially successful as some residents did not adapt and returned to the sassi, while some of the planned villages were not built or left incomplete. Within the new democratic context, La Martella and the other villages created by the UNRAA-CASAS offered a new perspective on the role of housing. The Fascist concept of dispersed farmsteads and isolated centers of service was replaced by a semi-compact design that integrated the agricultural housing within the overall composition. This radical shift could be explained by the humanistic intent of the program. These villages were not the focus of a regime’s propaganda: it was the modernity of their housing structure that mattered, not only to the architects but mainly to the institutional promoters who were under big pressure to solve the housing crisis and the increasing economic disparities of the immediate postwar era. Michele Valori and Stefano Gorio won the competition for Torre Spagnola, one of the five villages planned outside Matera, with a quite sophisticated masterplan that remained unfortunately on paper. The village was organized in two sections joined on both sides of an ambitious civic center that included a park, a rectangular piazza, and a system of public spaces defined by the public structures. The most remarkable was the long rows of courtyard houses, accessed from the inside the village and that literally enclosed it in the form of 133 Lucio Barbera, The Radical City of Ludovico Quaroni, unpublished manuscript, p. 200. 149 inhabited walls. The only interruption was an outdoor auditorium facing the landscape. The tall volume of the church, “the best invention of the whole Italian neorealism” in the words of Benevolo, dominated the suggestive perspective.134 For another settlement, Borgo Venusio, Luigi Piccinato planned a civic center immersed in a small park and surrounded it with a ring of small residential islands. Each island consisted of 15 to 20 houses built around and entered from a central green. The village remained incomplete but its planning structure can be clearly distinguished. The civic center, on a slightly elevated stone terrace, is one of the most successful of the postwar generation of villages: conceived as a U-shaped piazza open to the landscape on one side, it sits an elegant modern church, an arcaded bar-like line of housing on top of shops and residences, and a 3-story apartment buildings whose mass articulates strongly the pedestrian and vehicular access to the square. Beyond Matera, the post-war program of new villages is relatively little investigated. To be sure, Olivetti’s role was not limited to the exceptional case of Matera. As president of the I.N.U, he advocated for reclamation and agrarian reform in the south (particularly Sicily, Puglia and Sardegna) as well as similar programs in the Maremma and in the region of L’Aquila. In February of 1940, in occasion of the Mostra del latifundo e dell’istruzione agraria held in Palermo, the projects for eight new villages were presented and some of them were in construction when the war interrupted the works in 1942. Borgo Schirò and Borgo Schisina, the latter because it was the site of a famous scene in Antonioni’s movie L’avventura, were quickly abandoned or even never occupied.135 The majority of the postwar villages, and that was clearly the case in Sicily, remained conceived as service centers with limited housing capacity. Among the projects that were brought to fruition, it is important to mention Pescia Romana and Santa Maria di Ripescia, both of them in the Maremma, Ottomila (Vittorini, Boccianti) in the region of L’Aquila, and Gromola, Province of Salerno.136 Carlo Boccianti realized the core of the small village of Santa Maria di Ripescia, also in the Maremma, where he planned a completely traditional church at the heart of a gridded plan. However, it is the heart of Pescia Romana (1953), which stands out as one of the most successful modern centers of the 1950s. The hexagonal church, an apartment building, and a mixed-use complex form an active pentagonal square. Realized in stone like the rest of the square, the church features a tall campanile-like tower on one side—a rare occurrence in the 1950s examples—and, on the other side, a hexagonal pedestrian square for use by the schools and the day-care center. In the early 1950s, the UNRAA-CASAS commissioned Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, two masters of prewar Italian Rationalism, to design a masterplan for a new town, the Borgo Porto Conte, on the coast of Sardinia in an area depressed by poverty and depopulation near 134 Quoted by Maristella Casciato, Michele Valori. Taccuini di architettura, Roma: Gangemi, 2013, p. 12: “la migliore invenzione di tutto il neorealismo italiano.” 135 See Jean-François Lejeune, “Pueblos modernos,” Teatro Marítimo 6 (Tradición y modernidad), 2017, pp. 42-51. 136 See Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, Esperienze urbanistiche in Italia, Roma: INU, 1952; Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, Nuove esperienze urbanistiche in Italia, Roma: INU, 1956. 150 Fertilia. It was planned to relocate hundreds of Italian-Dalmatian refugees from Yugoslavia in a familiar Mediterranean environment.137 The long report written by the architects gave a precise description of a carefully studied project for 750 habitants in 125 housing units, which, unfortunately, did not materialize. The beautifully drawn and detailed project was important for two main reasons. Firstly and for the first time in the practice of Italian new settlements since the 1930s, the architects selected to use a courtyard type for the fishermen’ and farmers’ houses. Dispersed on an informal grid pattern all around the civic center, the houses and their outbuildings were to be grouped two by two, each one having access to two small patio: a residential one as prolongation of the private realm and a “rustic” one for tools and work. Here, not unlike Le Corbusier in Chile, they took clues from the Sardinian Mediterranean landscape and vernacular and designed the houses with high stone walls and long one-sided roofs to protect from winds and sun. As for the square, it appeared as a large public space, closed on three sides by a continuous portico structure containing shops, a bar, the medical office, a 200-seat cinema and meeting room, and other services. The fourth side opened up to the church placed some distance away and framing the landscape. According to the architects, “the entire compound aspires to be the heart of the village; the concept of the Italian piazza has been taken here, closed and lined with porticos, defended from the winds, the sun, and the rain ... These are the fundamental elements that, in many ancient plazas of our cities and our towns, continue today, favoring the most suitable conditions for the development of human relationships and of society's life, together with the harmony of the architectural spaces that derive from them.”138 Clinging to the landscape from the waterfront to the hill, the town reflected the natural environment, with its skyline dominated by the tall, cubical tower of the church complex and its inverted V-shaped roof. Porto Conte was the last major design for an agricultural settlement within the Italian context. Interestingly, the Spanish periodical Revista Nacional de Arquitectura published the project in all its details. The year was 1957, at the very moment when Alejandro de la Sota, José Luis Fernández del Amo, and Antonio Fernández Alba were developing their most innovative pueblos for the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. To some extent, the 30-year long Italian experience of colonization had come full circle, from the Fascist modern monumentalism to the equivalent of the Spanish approach based upon an “architecture without architects.” 137 Interestingly, the project was published in great details in the Spanish periodical press: Luigi Figini and Giorgio Pollini, “El poblado de Porto Conte,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 188, August 1957, pp. 23-30; also see Vittorio Gregotti and Giovanni Marzari, Luigo Figino, Gino Pollini: opera completa, Milano: Electa, 1996. 138 Ibidem, p. 29: “Todo ese conjunto aspira a ser el corazón del pueblo; se ha tomado aquí el concepto de la piazza italiana, cerrada y con porticos, defendida de los vientos, del sol, y de la lluvia… Son éstos los elementos fundamentales que, en muchas piazzas antiguas de nuestras ciudades y nuestros pueblos, continúan aún hoy favoreciendo las condiciones más idóneas para el desarrollo de las relaciones humanas y de la vida de sociedad, junto con la armonía de los espacios arquitectónicos que de ellas se deriven.” 151 2.3. LE CORBUSIER’S RADIANT VILLAGE OR THE OTHER CITY OF TOMORROW In the 1934 edition of La Ville radieuse, Le Corbusier wrote in chapter Seven, titled “Rural Reorganization”: Friends, The city cannot keep the city planner all to itself; the countryside is crying out for him too. The country is the other city of tomorrow. Our cities are crammed to the bursting point with parasitic elements of population. Our cities must be purged. We cannot send these underprivileged groups of people back to the land unless we first redevelop our countryside. … The spirit of the age must reign over the entire country: why should the peasant, because of our negligence or idleness, remain as underprivileged as he now is? The man in the fields and the man in the factory must have the same sunshine, whether of sky or spirit, shining onto their homes and into their hearts.”139 Le Corbusier’s involvement in the small French political movement known as Syndicalisme regional (Regional Syndicalism), and his participation in the Fascist-leaning periodicals Plans (1931-32), Prélude (1933-36), and L’homme réel (1934) is now well known.140 “Syndicalism” alluded to the prewar syndicalist movement, which called for government by unions for unions. It represented a sort of decentralized socialism that was based on the trades (métiers) rather than political structures. At the same time the group advocated a government based upon the natural regions, hence on administrative units whose limits would be based upon natural conditions “that dominate the machine-age adventure: climate; topography, geography, race.”141 Yet, the group rejected the Italian model of centralized State fascism of Mussolini in favor of “regional” structures of power. The movement and Le Corbusier as one of its most important spokesmen argued that reorienting the modern currents of energy toward the new and most fruitful regional axis and borders would “protect the world from the present threat of national conflicts.”142 A page from Prélude republished by Le Corbusier 139 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City – Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of our Machine-Age Civilization, New York: The Orion Press, 1964 [1933], p. 331. The Radiant Farm and the Radiant Village (1933-34) can be found in pages 320 to 338; also published in Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète, 1934-38, Zürich: Les Editions d' Architecture, 1970 [1953]. 140 For this section, see François Chaslin, Un Corbusier, Paris: Seuil, 2015; Mary McLeod, "La Ferme Radieuse, Le Village Radieux,” in Marc Bédarida and Claude Prelorenzo (eds.), Le Corbusier. La Nature, Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 2004, pp. 128-49; Gilles Ragot, “La ferme et le village radieux de Le Corbusier. Nouvelle déclinaison du principe d'équilibre entre l'individuel et le collectif,” In Situ (Revue des patrimoines), nº 21, 2013, pp. 1-11. 141 Le Corbusier, p. 193. It is interesting to put this concept in parallel with the hydrographic zones in Spain (see early in this Chapter). 142 Le Corbusier, p. 194. 152 placed the movement “ni droite, ni gauche,” “ni capitalism, ni marxisme.”143 In the tradition of the French utopian socialism, “they believed—and certainly this was part of the appeal for LC—that they could create a ‘new order’ now.”144 Hughes Lagardère, one of the founders of “regional syndicalism” had since the beginning of the century been involved in the agrarian question, when he published La question agraire et le socialism in 1899. Unsurprisingly, the movement intended to expand its principles to the countryside where new agricultural unions would be involved in government. In 1931 an agricultural laborer and veteran from the Sarthes region, Norbert Bézard, became involved in the regional syndicalist movement and later joined the Prélude group. In 1933 he wrote a passionate letter to Le Corbusier and pleaded for him to become involved in the life of rural France: Do you know my village on the main road? … it’s charming – for people who like old things. An old church, old houses… Last winter, the floods nearly caused a real disaster… It ought to be rebuilt…. We need a new village, but not a heap of cardboard boxes “cheaper by the dozen.” So where is the architect who will build my village? We need people who know how to build. 145 Bézard further elaborated his ideas. Proposing to keep the 1000-old church in its place, he argued for a big central square that would be lined with the school, the community center—to contain the Council chamber, the radio station, a meeting hall, a movie house and a library— the Co-op, the mechanic, the cartwright, the smith.”146 Houses should be only family units, practical and comfortable, with a big garden: “We want houses on pilotis. Because we have had enough of standing with our feet in dung and mud… give us windows, wide windows, so that we get sun in our farm.” Likewise the farms along the communal roads should be rebuilt. He ended with a loud call to LC: “Make us a model of our future. You have created ‘The Radiant City’ all right. Now do something about the Village, the Farm.”147 Beyond the dynamic of new planning and architecture, Bézard and the Syndicalist group were adamantly clear: the rural land had to remain in private hands and cultivated by individual families. Le Corbusier responded quickly to that call and in 1933 he started to study and read about the French countryside, its history and its economy. In March 1934 he completed the drawings for the family-owned ferme radieuse. Early in the decade and impressed by the Soviet experience, Le Corbusier had been ambiguous about the individual and the collective ownership of land, calling “for the wholesale reorganization of land tenure in the country as a 143 Reproduced in Le Corbusier, p. 174. Mary Mc Leod, "’The Country Is the Other City of Tomorrow’ – Le Corbusier's Ferme Radieuse and Village Radieux,” in Dorothée Imbert (ed.), Food and the City – Histories of Culture and Cultivation, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, 2015, p. 104. 145 Norbert Bézard, “My Village,” in Le Corbusier, p. 320. 146 Le Corbusier, p. 320. 147 Le Corbusier, p. 320-321. 144 153 whole and the cities in particular.”148 On his trip to Moscow in 1928, he praised the Soviet collective and industrialized vision of agriculture. Yet, a couple of years later, in line with Regional Syndicalism he had embraced a more traditional vision of the farm property. He saw the “link between the peasant and the earth” so “indissoluble,” that, for him, it became “impossible to avoid the conclusion that we should attach the peasant to his land with the most fundamental bond: the family.”149 The Radiant Farm was a new farm unit of about twenty hectares that would modernize and make the cultivation more profitable with the silo as its architectural symbol. Le Corbusier described it in symbolic terms as “a kind of geometrical plant that is as intimately linked to the landscape as a tree or a hill, yet as expressive of our human presence as a piece of furniture or a machine.”150 In the radiant farm, the farmer was going to be an “other” man, a man who reads, listens to radio, gets connected through the airwaves, the car, the railroad, or the books. He would thrives on his modern individuality but partake in the collective of the radiant village or cooperative village, with the club as the center not only of the local and regional community but also of modern life, where modern life reaches all residents as equal as the city. In Le Corbusier’s extensive drawings, the radiant farm was planned alongside two perpendicular axes. The first axis, the short one, was private, with the family house in its center facing the private road, with the orchard at the front and the kitchen garden, the poultry yard, and the flower house at the back. The house was on pilotis, because the farmers have had enough of the mud and the deplorable conditions of the land. The sketches show a light, open and airy structure which allowed to control all the farmland and in particular the productive units. From the house, the family could survey the orchard and kitchen garden, and find refuge underneath from the summer sun and rain. Its rectangular plan was simple and functional, with two bathrooms and a kitchen. An outside staircase gave access to the open gallery that preceded the entrance to the housing unit. The second axis was the public and productive one. From the outside, a densely planted road entered the farm with the house on axis deflecting the road in a bend. Passed the house, the working farm was organized within a walled courtyard, with the large barn on its end and on its side the animal enclosure, silos, and sheds. The sketches show a tall and light standardized steel structure, made up of a series of parallel low-vaulted sections. Flexibility, cleanliness, order, and structural elegance characterized the entire radiant farm. Using the roadside village of Piacé in the Sarthes region as proposed example, Bénard and Le Corbusier placed the Radiant Village perpendicular to the road and more or less parallel to the principal village road, with the linear dimension of the Radiant village equal to the transversal size of the existing village, i.e. approximately 350 meters. The site was flat for 148 Le Corbusier, p. 148. Le Corbusier, p. 191. 150 Le Corbusier, p. 322. 149 154 easy transportation, on the edge of a river and with gentle hills in the distance. The village structure was similar to the farm: a linear plan, connected to the express road by a new service street along which would be aligned, on either side of the axial composition, the workshops, the cooperative building, the school, the post office, the collective housing block, the club and the town hall. In contrast with the picturesque structure of the road village of Piacé, the Radiant village harbored a monumental, axial, quasi-classical image. A linear entrance pavilion made up of the collective silos and accessory garages functioned as a modern gate, whose grandeur was emphasized by the height of the silos. At the other end of the axis and on slightly elevated terrain was the town hall or mairie. Unfortunately, in spite of his regional approach, Le Corbusier did not draw the relationship between the farm and the village, eventually leaving the impression of an atomized landscape, without a clear structure of public spaces. Along with the concept of Rural Reorganization as part of the Radiant City global project, Le Corbusier developed very ambiguous concepts regarding what he called the “dead embers of men and homes and communities that have accumulated around the city’s bright furnaces…” 151 . These represented the poor and the desperate, who had flocked to the metropolis and crammed into it to the bursting point. He argued that Paris could contain more inhabitants within this wall but that, perhaps, it would be better to have less of them. “How to purge our cities of our inefficient populations” was the great planning question. 152 In his proposal for de-urbanization, only a modernized countryside, a modern way of country life, and the radiant villages could attract the parasitic hundreds of thousands back to the soil, the earth, and nature. As discussed by Marina Epstein-Plioutch and Tzafrir Fainholtz, Le Corbusier was very interested by the Palestine experience and had a follow-up correspondence with the most modern architects, Arieh Sharon and others, but the connection gave no results.153 Likewise, Le Corbusier pursued a multi-year effort, from 1931 to 1936, to meet Mussolini and to work for the Fascist regime, which represents for him the Autorità and thus a potential client. His relation to Italy was at that moment two-fold: first, he had various exchanges with the young generation of Italian architects that gravitated around the magazine Quadrante, including 151 Le Corbusier, p. 197. Ibidem. 153 Marina Epstein-Plioutch and Tzafrir Fainholtz, “Is the Kibbutz a 'Radiant Village'? Le Corbusier and the Zionist Movement,” in Andrew Ballantyne (ed.), Rural and Urban: Architecture between Two Cultures, London: Routledge, 2010, p. 162. In his dissertation (Technion Institute of Technology) “Le Corbusier and the Zionist Movement” (2015), Fainholtz Issues explored the common origins for the ideas and work of Le Corbusier and of the Zionist movement; the parallel cooperative rural projects of Le Corbusier and of Zionist architects: The Radiant Village the Kibbutz and the Mohav; connections between Le Corbusier and Jewish architects such as Sam Barkai and Julius Posener who were active in Palestine; the relationships between Le Corbusier, the Zionist movement and the publication of Zionist architecture in Europe through conferences, journals and international exhibitions; Le Corbusier's participation in attempts to resolve the “Jewish question” in the 1930s, and his connections with the Zionist Revisionist leader, Ze'ev Wolfgang von Weisl; and Le Corbusier's involvement in the question of immigration and Jewish settlement before and after World War II and in the years subsequent to the establishment of the State of Israel. 152 155 Bottoni e Pollini, Pietro Bardi, and the engineer Fiorini (inventor of the tensile structure employed by Le Corbusier for his project for Algiers in 1932); secondly, he attempted at getting in touch with the center of power, and thus Mussolini himself. Around the end of 1933, Pietro Maria Bardi and Massimo Bontempelli sent him an invitation to come to Italy and give two lectures in Rome along with an exhibition of projects.154 While in Rome from June 4 to June 23, 1934, he encountered a wide range of architects from the young members of the BBPR group (Banfi, Barbiano de Belgiojoso, Peressutti, Rogers) to Marcello Piacentini and Luigi Piccinato, the porte-parole of the designers of Sabaudia. He visited the Agro Pontino and the new towns of Littoria and Sabaudia, which was inaugurated one month earlier. His criticism of Littoria was expectedly negative, “… a poor little town in the garden city manner, a garbage dump for the schools of architecture."155 But, contrary to the Italian Rationalists who regarded him as a main reference, he was equally critical with Sabaudia, which in spite of many efforts was not “the village of modern times, but a dream, a sweet and somewhat romantic poem, a ‘shepherds’ dream….”156 Right before his departure, he sent a short note to Giuseppe Bottai with destination to Mussolini. Therein he suggested that he be commissioned to design the third new town of Pontinia: “… what results most urgent following my passage to Rome appears to be a proposal for the town of Pontinia according to a program and a concept that reflect the apex of modern urbanism and architecture issues.”157 Obviously the timing was excellent as he was working on the Radiant farm and village projects. Unsurprisingly, Le Corbusier’s interest and priority for the modern housing unit and its assemblage in “unités d’habitation” did not match the Fascist regime’s interest in a modern monumentality, which gave neither place nor image for modern housing. His sketches for Pontinia showing two large housing barres and a series of modern farm facilities were directly inspired by his projects of 1934 for the Radiant Village and Farm. From the high floors of the apartments, farmers would have been able to admire the “ideal Fascist landscape” of the reclaimed lands.158 In The Radiant City, he wrote further on Sabaudia: The layout is sensitive and full of pretty intentions. But what I would like to show here, by comparing Sabaudia with Piacé, is that Sabaudia is merely an artistic imitation of ‘lovely villages’ all over the world, whereas Piacé is a piece of infrastructure, a strict, pure, efficient, necessary and adequate creation—a rigorously defined and useful function. The equipment this modern age of ours needs … Sabaudia is “very nice, 154 See Marida Talamona, “Roma 1934,” in Marida Talamona (ed.), L'Italia di Le Corbusier, Milano: Electa, 2012, pp. 241-61; and Giorgio Ciucci, “A Roma con Bottai,” Rassegna, nº 3-4, 1980, pp: 66-71. Giuseppe Bottai (1895-1959) was a journalist and politician. He was one of the first Fascist deputies, and held various important posts, including the ministries of corporations (1929–32) and education (1936–42). He worked hard to make Fascism a modernizing and reforming force in Italy and was responsible for some important cultural initiatives, some related to art and architecture. 155 See Giorgio Ciucci, “A Roma con Bottai,” op. cit. 156 Ibidem. 157 Letter of Le Corbusier to Fiorini, 3 July 1934, cited by Giorgio Ciucci, p. 70. 158 On the Fascist landscape, see Caprotti and Kaïka, op. cit. 156 charming; on can discuss about the style of architecture. But, in actuality, it represents at best the urbanism of today, certainly not that of tomorrow.159 Le Corbusier’s attempts at exporting the model of the Radiant Farm came to a halt with the onset of WWII, yet, as Mary McLeod has studied, his interest in the rural world took another direction, one that embodied “a significant transformation in both his social orientation and formal ideas during the 1930s and the Vichy period.”160 In 1940, Le Corbusier and his partner Pierre Jeanneret designed the construction system known as “Les Constructions Murondins” as a means to erect provisional housing and basic village infrastructure (school, club, youth center), rapidly and inexpensively. They imagined that these structures would be built as temporary shelters by local youths using rammed earth (pisé), tree trunks, and other readily available materials. The building type formed a rectangular one-story building which could be occupied as workshops, common rooms, and dormitories under the same gabled roof; the two slopes, inclined differently, did not intersect but created a ventilating and lighting section running the whole length of the structure. Urbanistically, the buildings were disposed haphazardly, parallel or perpendicular to each other. Beyond housing those in need, he hoped that these new settlements would be the foundation of a new grassroots regional culture that would revitalize the French countryside. This concern was another facet of his participation in the Regional Syndicalism movement, some of whose members, including Le Corbusier himself, became involved with the Vichy government. In addition, the project can be seen as representing a shift in his work toward a more primitive, organic and vernacular aesthetic. For the following two years, he actively promoted the project, yet unsuccessfully, to the Vichy government both as a response to the early devastation of WW2 and as a means of mobilizing rural youth groups. Following the Liberation, he campaigned for it again as a solution for housing war victims. Later, in 1955, he proposed it to the Abbé Pierre and his association Faim et Soif as a solution for sheltering the homeless. Eight years later he offered it again as a means of housing Algerian Muslims fleeing to France after the Algerian war.161 159 Le Corbusier, p. 336. Mary McLeod, "‘To Make Something with Nothing’: Le Corbusier's Proposal for Refugee Housing— Les Constructions ‘Murondins’", The Journal of Architecture 23, nº 3, 2018, pp. 421-47. 161 Ibidem. 160 157 2.4. THE ZIONIST COLONIZATION OF PALESTINE In 1862, German-French philosopher Moses Hess (1812-1875) argued in his book Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage (Rome and Jerusalem, The Last National Question) that European Jews should resettle in Palestine as a means of resolving the national question. Hess, who is often considered a founder of Labor Zionism, proposed a socialist state in which the Jews would become “agrarianized.” A process of "redemption of the soil" would transform the Jewish community into a true nation whose citizens would occupy the productive layers of society rather than being an intermediary non-productive merchant class.162 Thirty years later in a Vienna confronted with the rise of Karl Lueger’s anti-Semitism, Theodor Herzl published Die Judendstaat, where he advocated the unity of the Jewish people for a similar thesis. The new Jewish state for a “new Jew” would be constructed not through political diplomacy but rather from the base, i.e., by the resettled Jewish working class who would build a progressive society based upon a new rural society and land organization.163 Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. The adopted program (Basel Program) declared that Zionism aimed at establishing a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine for the Jewish people.164 In 1902, Herzl embraced the idea that the new agrarian society would be the basis of the new socialist society. He imagined the cooperative village as the foundational element of the future state, and he referred to it as the Neudorf in his utopian novel titled Altneuland (1902). The book told the story of the positive transformations that Palestine would incur from 1902 to 1923. From a destitute and sparsely populated land as it appeared to Herzl on his visit in 1898, it would transform twenty years later into a productive and prosperous society. European Jews have rediscovered and re-inhabited their Altneuland, reclaiming their own destiny in the Land of Israel. Moreover, this utopian narrative described the future state of the Jews in Palestine through the eyes of an architect, an element that would clearly influence the future of Zionist colonization: 162 See Moses Hess, Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage, Leipzig, 1862; also see http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7649-hess-moses-moritz 163 Theodor Herzl, Die Judendstaat – Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question), Leipzig & Wien,1896. See Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980 (Chapter 3). 164 For the attainment of this purpose, the Congress considered the promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine; the federation of all Jews into local or general groups, according to the laws of the various countries; the strengthening of the Jewish feeling and consciousness; and the preparatory steps for the attainment of those governmental grants which were necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose. See: . https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/First_Cong_&_Basel_Program.html 158 Thousands of white villas appeared, glowing amidst the green opulent gardens. From Akko to Carmel, it was as though a great garden had been planted, and the mountain itself also was crowned with gleaming structures.165 While those important steps occurred in Central Europe, the first waves of immigration took place between 1882 and 1903 as a result of the persecution of Jews in Russia and Romania. It is usually considered that one hundred thousand Jewish people became farmers in Russia during the nineteenth century as a way to establish a more positive identity. Soon enough, “the ruralization of the Jewish people emerged as an effective device to turn the Luftmensch into a productive member of the modern nation.”166 During the First Aliya, about 25,000 Jews came to Palestine, but many soon left the country again because of the extremely harsh living conditions. Those who remained founded the first agricultural settlements such as Zikhron Ya’akov. These first villages or moshav established between 1890 and 1900 were based upon a private enterprise system and were organized as a linear street faced with narrow and deep plots. Facing a crisis, the moshavot received financial and technical help from Baron de Rothschild (1845-1934) that involved the modernization of the agricultural means and methods. It also facilitated the modernization of the street village with the introduction of a public garden, landscape, and public facilities at its center. The Second Aliyah happened between 1903 and 1914 following major pogroms in Russian cities. After the 1917 Russian Revolution and World War I, the Third Aliyah occurred between 1919 and 1923. This new wave of immigrants had a different urban background; they were more educated, secular and heavily influenced by utopian and Socialist ideas. Degania, the first self-managed commune in Eretz-lsrael was established in 1909 as an experimental farm whose vital center was a large courtyard containing the laborers’ houses, whereas the administration and communal services were left outside of the precinct. Around the same time, Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1943), a Berlin doctor and sociologist, who established his first cooperative settlement in 1893 in Barenklau (Oranienburg) and was one of the founders of the Deutsche Gartenstadtbewegung (German Garden City Movement) propounded the idea of such cooperatives as a social solution among Zionists.167 The first village established 165 Theodor Herzl, Altneuland, Leipzig: Seemann, 1902. Quote from Herzl, Old New Land, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1960, p. 58. The Hebrew title is Tel Aviv, the inspiration for the founding of the new city next to Jaffa. 166 For these sections, see Axel Fisher, “Rurality, a playgroud for design?”, in Pieter Versteegh and Sophia Meeres (eds.), AlterRurality: exploring representations and ‘repeasantations’, Fribourg: Arena Architectural Research Network, 2014, pp. 171-204. The quote is on page 172 and note 2. Luftmensch is the Yiddish expression for a contemplative and visionary person, devoid of practical skill, profession and financial means, living of air, which obsessively haunts the works of Marc Chagall. 167 Franz Oppenheimer was a passionate advocate of cooperative thinking and production, the Garden City movement, and the regeneration of the countryside. A strict opponent of Marx’s collective socialism, he was a supporter of Pietr Kropotkin. See Kristina Hartmann’s dissertation Die städtebauliche Konzeption der Deutsche Gartenstadtbewegung, Berlin, 1977. Also see Emanuel Tal, “The Garden City Idea as adopted by the Zionist Establishment,” Social Utopias of the Twenties: Bauhaus, Kibbutz and the Dream of a New Man, Dessau: Stiftung Bauhaus, 1995, pp. 64-71; Jean-François Lejeune, “From Hellerau to the Bauhaus: Memory and Modernity of the German Garden City,” The New City, nº 3 (1996), pp. 51-69. Oppenheimer was one of the instigators of the Garden City model for the new settlements in Palestine in the 1920s-1930s. 159 as a co-operative farm following Oppenheimer’s concept was Merhavia at the beginning of 1911.168 Merhavia marked the genuine beginning of the planned colonization of the Palestine countryside as a series of important architects moved to the new land to practice and develop a unique experience of town founding and planning. Jewish architect Alexander Baerwald (1877-1930) designed it as a series of interconnected buildings creating a U-shaped courtyard square with a water tower in its center.169 Keren haYesod was established at the World Zionist Conference held in London on July 7– 24, 1920, to provide the Zionist movement with resources needed for the Jewish people to return to the Land of Israel. It came in response to the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, in which the British government declared that “His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing nonJewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” 170 The main points in the program of the Keren haYesod, for which the cooperation of the entire Jewish people was sought, were to promote immigration to Palestine and the foundation of new agricultural settlements. The “return to the land” and the formation of a Jewish peasantry represented the noblest ambition of early Zionist ideology. Hence, the Jewish village was considered as the cornerstone of the future Jewish nation: The emergence of Zionism introduced a radical shift in the previous attempts to reform Jewish identity, moving from the realm of charity to the political, secular, and public scene. The auto-emancipation of the Jewish people, Zionism claimed, depended on its capacity to turn into a Nation among the Nations, to establish a healthy national economy based on agriculture, and to settle within well-defined territorial boundaries, possibly in Palestine. There, the Jews would build to be (re) built, they would regenerate physically and morally and become a New Jew.171 Impressed by Zionism's political success, many young people went to Palestine, often without the appropriate preparation, to lend their physical efforts to the building of national homesteads. They were known in Hebrew as the chalutzim, or pioneers, and they energetically proceeded to settle the country with new moshavot and kibbutzim.172 The Fourth 168 The founders had arrived in the area in 1910 and consisted of members of Kvutzat Kibush and workers of the Second Aliyah. It was supposed to operate as a cooperative farm with differential wages, and was founded with the assistance of Arthur Ruppin, native of Poland and head of the Palestine bureau that managed Zionist settling between 1908 and 1945 (Alon-Moses 60), and of the AngloPalestine Bank. In 1922 it was converted to a moshav ovdim after being joined by Polish immigrants and residents of Tel Aviv who wanted to work in agriculture. 169 On Baerwald, see Myra Warhaftig, They laid the foundation: lives and works of German-speaking Jewish architects in Palestine 1918-1948, Tübingen/New York: Wasmuth, 2007. 170 From the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917. 171 Axel Fisher, pp. 172-173. 172 The moshav is a cooperative village of farmers founded on the nuclear family; the Kibbutz is a collective and communitarian based on agriculture. 160 Aliya occurred between 1924 and 1928, primarily due to the economic collapse in Poland and other Eastern European countries that affected the livelihood of many Jews. In this case, most of the Fourth Aliya immigrants were members of the middle class and many went on to establish themselves as merchants and small factory owners in Tel Aviv. The persecution of European Jews under National Socialism in Germany and the outbreak of World War II brought mass immigration to Palestine from 1933 to 1945, the period of the Fifth Aliya: two hundred and thirty thousands moved to Palestine between 1933 and 1941 and by that date five hundred thousands Jews had immigrated in the Holy Land. As Arthur Ruppin, director of the Settlement Department of the Zionist Executive and one of the founders of Tel Aviv, wrote in his book The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine, the Jewish population outside of Palestine formed a pyramid whose base was made up with the merchants and their employees, followed by the professional classes, and the farmers and industrial workers at the top. He argued that in Palestine, […] the order of this pyramid must be exactly reversed, if agriculture is to the foundation of economic life. That which forms the apex outside Palestine must now become the base.173 Hence Ruppin understood that to entice and educate Jewish townsmen to the agricultural life in Palestine necessitated the application of new methods. In particular, it implied a new mode of urban and rural planning as well as a special response to the climate and the soil. 2.4.1. Richard Kauffmann and the Planning of the New Palestine Architect Richard Kauffmann (1887-1958) joined the Yishuv in 1920-1921 at the initiative of Ruppin, and from then onwards, his career flourished under the institutions of the Zionist Federation. 174 He studied architecture in Darmstadt before expanding his studies at the Technische Universität in Munich under Theodor Fischer who was also the master of Bruno Taut, Ernst May, Bruno Häring, and many others. Under Fischer, he learnt about urban design, the garden city and the influence of Camillo Sitte, both in the urban and the suburban context. He worked for Georg Metzendorf in Essen and then in Christiana, Norway. The German architect entered the relatively close circles of middle-Eastern European intellectuals—he was a colleague of Erich Mendelsohn whom he helped move to Palestine— that became the elite of the emerging Jewish community in cosmopolitan Jerusalem. Out of 173 Arthur Ruppin, The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine, London: M. Hopkinsoin, 1926; quoted by Richard Kauffmann, “Planning of Jewish Settlements in Palestine: a brief Survey of Facts and Conditions,” The Town Planning Review 12, nº 2, November 1926, p. 107. 174 The Yishuv (Hebrew: ‫ישוב‬, literally "settlement") or Ha-Yishuv (the Yishuv, Hebrew: ‫ )הישוב‬or HaYishuv Ha-Ivri (the Hebrew Yishuv, Hebrew: ‫ )העברי הישוב‬is the term referring to the body of Jewish residents in the land of Israel (corresponding to Ottoman Syria until 1917, OETA South 1917–1920 and later Mandatory Palestine 1920–1948) prior to the establishment of the State of Israel. 161 his 282 projects, realized fully or partially, almost half were for new rural settlements in Palestine. For more than two decades, Kauffmann had the privilege of planning every new village in detail and in the most practical way possible in regard to the social and cultural characteristics of the new immigrants as well as to the physical requirements of the place. The soil structure, the direction of wind and streams, and the distance from water springs: all had to be studied and taken into account. At the same time, the communal amenities had to be planned and designed, from the collective dining hall, which was also to serve as the meeting place for the whole settlement, the infants’ and children’s houses, the rooms for study and recreation, as well as the ordinary farm buildings and dwelling houses.175 The very existence and power of the bare mountain region where most of the settlements would be built “call for a creative effort, which a genius might perhaps succeed in. Our task is to clear this way, to keep the summits of the mountains free for the monumental buildings of the future, to push settlements towards the higher regions.”176 Kauffmann’s urban design activity in Palestine was intense and widespread in quantity, size, and type. It is in the issue of The Town Planning Review published in November 1926 that he was himself able to describe the scope and importance of its planning activities over the first six years. The article presented works that included garden suburbs (Jerusalem, Haifa, Migdal on the Lake of Tiberiade), urban works such as the radio-concentric new city of Afuleh in the Emek region, regional planning in Haifa, and more specific to this work, various agricultural settlements as kibbutz and moshavot. To introduce those settlements, he distinguished between the cluster model (the European village tradition) and the scattered settlement (the American example). He saw neither type adapted to the Palestine situation. The absolute decentralized type implied an expensive system of roads and water supply, difficulties of social intercourse and distance to public infrastructure. He argued that the ideal type would be a semi-centralized one, “combining the advantages of the scattered and collective settlement type, while avoiding its drawbacks as far as possible.”177 As for the site, the ideal place “would be in the midst of its cultivated fields on a moderate hill… if possible, [close to] a railway station, open to the cooling summer breezes from the west and at a distance from the swaps….”178 Nahalal or the Promised Village (1921) located in the Plain of Esdraelon (Emek Jesreel) was Kauffmann’s first designed village and certainly the most iconic one. The moshav was based 175 See Richard Kauffmann, From Planning to Reality—an Exhibition of Plans and Photographs representing the work of Richard Kauffmann, Architect and Town Planner, Jerusalem: Bezalel Jewish Museum, 1947, pp. 4-5. Also see Alona Nitzan-Shiftan and Marina Epstein-Plioutch, “Richard Kauffmann between Architectural and National Modernisms,” Docomomo: Modern Architecture in the Middle East, nº 25, September 2006, pp. 48-53; Ines Sonder, Gartenstädte für Erez Israel: Zionistische Stadtplanungsvisionen von Theodor Herzl bis Richard Kauffmann, Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2005. 176 Kauffmann, “Planning of Jewish Settlements in Palestine,” p. 95. 177 Ibidem, p. 108. 178 Ibidem, p. 109. 162 on a mixed economy and independent labor, principles that he translated into his combination of bi-axial and radial design in Nahalal. In this type of settlement, every family owned its homestead and it was critical to facilitate easy access to the communal center. In a quasicircular diagram that harks back to the Ideal City and its modern Garden City version, a road follows the contours of a gentle hill, with the farmsteads on its outer side. The two axes of the oval (600 meter by 480 meter) intersect at the heart of the village where Kauffmann placed the most important and economic communal buildings “crowning the settlement and at the same time outwardly embodying the principles of cooperation”—the school, the stores, the sheds, etc.179 Between the civic core and the ring he placed the houses for the artisans, teachers, and other employees. Kfar Jehezkel (1921, Jecheskiel in Town Planning) was based on the same geometric principles but the central irregular circle, almost an octagon, was smaller at about 300 meter in diameter. Here again the civic center was planned at the focal point and, in all cases, the farmstead was a complete entity with house, sheds, and its directly attached cultivated field. Yet there was a major difference. As Nahalal’s form suggested and prevented expansion (another village would have to be created), Jehezkel had multiple radial streets that opened into the landscape and provided for organic growth.180 Other new villages planned by Kauffmann included Kfar Hittin, Kfar Gidon (called originally Transylvania Village as it was planned to settle residents from Central Europe Transylvania and was built on both sides of a major highway), Kfar Yehoshua (near Nahalal, 1927), and Kwutzah Geva made up of the two kibbutzim Ein Harod and Tel Yosef (circa 1921). According to Kauffmann, the essential principle of the kibbutz in contrast to the moshav was to keep the various zones apart and preserve the unity of the whole. Consequently, he separated the residential zone of the grown-ups, with their dining-hall and communal center, from that of the children with their school, also the workshops and storerooms, and both from the respective zones allotted for the animals: Collectivism is the founding principle of the kibbutz life, and must find its expression in the kibbutz architecture.181 As Axel Fischer has shown, the kibbutzim responded indeed to a different formal pattern, usually that of “an open urban layout independent from the street network,” and in a certain sense a quite modernist one.182 As seen in the original design for Ein Harod & Tel Yosef, for instance, most structures were small barre buildings oriented more or less parallel to respond better to the climate and organized around a large-scale civic center usually organized on a symmetrical structure. The concept of street, already quite weak in most moshav given the deep setbacks of the houses, almost disappeared entirely, a paradoxical design as it 179 Ibidem, p. 110. Fischer, p. 190. 181 Quoted by Fischer, p. 192, from Richard Kauffmann, “Twenty Years of Planning Agricultural Settlements” (Hebrew), in Allweill, A. (ed.), haHistadruth - Agudat haMehandessirn Adreikhalirn vehaModedim (Engineers, Architects and Surveyors Union), Tel Aviv, 1940, pp. 65-69. 182 Fisher, p. 191. 180 163 contrasted with the quite traditional Beaux-Arts symmetrical system of axis and park-like squares. In this particular case, the double spatial sequence was to culminate on the top of the hill, “crowned by communal buildings,” a planning strategy that also involved the symbolic hegemony of the Jewish settlers over the Arab Palestinian countryside.183 As in Nahalal, his drawings suggest, without any doubt, the influence of Bruno Taut’s concept of the Stadtkrone.184 From the point of view of planning history, Kauffmann’s ability to plan street patterns beautifully adapted to the topography, the views, and the natural resources was outstanding. The intellectual background and urban form was of course the Garden City that he had learnt to practice in Central Europe and Scandinavia even before leaving for Palestine. His understanding and practice of planning was imbued with the lessons of Sitte, Fisher, and other important urbanists including more modernist ones such as Ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Martin Wagner. Zionism and the Garden City were, in a way, intimately connected visions. From a socio-political point of view, both movements believed in the power of a new environment to change human conditions and human behavior. They saw mass migration as crucial to the creation of a ‘new society’ and a ‘new Jew’. Both movements shared a basic ‘humanistic socialism’ and were directly influenced by anarchist geographer Piotr Kropotkin. From an urban planning point of view, the Garden City solution served the Zionists well: Its tendency towards low density and spread out nature was instrumental in establishing facts on the ground throughout Palestine, even with the small numbers of immigrants actually arriving. The green belts between cities and neighborhoods were used to separate the new settlements from the old cities housing both the Arab population and orthodox religious anti-Zionist Jews. The Garden City’s planned order, spaciousness, and green nature contrasted with the compact traditional Middle Eastern city. It became a symbol that contributed to building the new Zionist identity.185 However, from planning to reality understood as real and verifiable urban form—to paraphrase the title of the major exhibition held in Jerusalem in 1947, Planning to Reality: an Exhibition of Plans and Photographs representing the work of Richard Kauffmann Architect and Town-Planner to Mark his Sixtieth Birthday, the implementation of Kauffmann’s schemes can be characterized as highly incomplete, making their analysis difficult and in many ways misleading. Indeed, the literature that has been published for decades regarding his works has relied primarily on his plans and 3-dimensional renderings, usually aerial drawings, and on early aerial photographs. Nowadays, thanks to Google Earth and Google View it is easier to analyze the settlements, their general form, and provide for a more accurate and less ideologically driven assessment. 183 Kauffmann, “Planning of Jewish Settlements,”, pp. 114-115. Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone, Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1919. 185 Miki Zaidman & Ruth Kark, “Garden cities in the Jewish Yishuv of Palestine: Zionist ideology and practice 1905–1945,” Planning Perspectives 31, nº 1, 2016, p. 73. 184 164 • Plans: The overall street plans drawn by Kauffmann were generally implemented as published. Even if the dense landscape obscures at times the readability of the street and urban spaces system, the overall form of the moshavat and kibbutzim can be easily identified from the air within the landscape of the first colonized regions of Israel. There is in fact an interesting paradox in Kauffmann’s work. In spite of all its pragmatism and functionalism, the beauty of his figurative planning can be best appreciated from the aerial point of view, whereas, on the ground, there were relatively few of the elements that made the tradition of the garden city alive and the understanding of the plan possible. • Streets: Even within the landscape-based morphology of the Garden City, the streets and spaces of the moshavat and kibbutzim were never defined with architecture. The low density, the deep setbacks, and the density of the landscape transform the streets into roads immersed in the landscape. There is thus no townscape in Kauffmann’s built plans. Landscape prevails, the buildings can barely be viewed and there is no real public space in the traditional sense. In practice, it makes the villages extremely suburban and more American than what Kauffmann must have intended in his designs. • Civic centers: Kauffmann’s plans for agricultural settlements, as for the middle-class and high-class garden suburbs that he designed for the outskirts of Jerusalem and Haifa, displayed very elaborate civic centers to provide for the public life and facilities. His drawings of the 1920s and early 1930s always delineate the structures and the public spaces. The aerial perspectives, published in The Town Planning Review, and many times republished over the years showed quite compact centers that many observers, in part due to their potential position uphill, referred to as Taut’s Stadtkrone. In the context of Palestine, Kauffmann’s drawings seemed also to make reference, albeit distant, to the massing of the Arab village and the vernacular settlements that still populated Palestine. Clearly, the modern analysis shows that these groupings of buildings were highly exaggerated in the renderings. When built in Nahalal, Jehezkel or Yekoshua for instance, all sense of place was lost in favor of a suburban one. In Palestine, landscape replaced townscape in almost all cases. Other examples like in Kfar Gidon that Kauffmann designed, reluctantly it seemed, on both sides of a highway, the center straddling the landscaped highway does not exist. Moreover, in many cases, ambitious compositions such as Kvar Hittim, Ein Harod, and Tel Yosef for instance, never materialized. In their locations, public services and buildings can be found but usually the arrangement of masses was essentially that of, at best, interconnected singular objects lost in the dense planted landscape; it is only within his renderings that a leftover of public space can be decoded. Alex Fisher’s analysis of the overall landscape is thus particularly important as it rejects the “mythical” quality of the plans in the history of planning: 165 A peculiar rural architecture did develop in Jewish agricultural villages, but never as meaningful and ripe as their landscape architecture. In coeval European urban parks and promenades, planting was used as an ornamental device, to foster passive contemplation, aesthetic pleasure, with hygienic and moralizing purposes. In modernist architecture, "greenery" evoked an abstract nature and set up a neutral background for isolated architectural objects. In Jewish agricultural villages, instead, public gardens always combined a landscape rationale - building and qualifying public space in the village - with productive and useful aims, while anticipating the transformation of the rural landscape as a whole. In this sense, the experience of Jewish rural planning can be seen as an early case study of vegetal urbanism.186 2.4.2. The Arab Question and Arieh Sharon’s Regional Planning Richard Kauffmann introduced the modern planning in Palestine but he was never integrated into the circle of the new generation, the group called the Chug, formed in 1932 by young architects—including Yoseph Neufeld, Ze’ev Rechter and Arieh Sharon—who returned to Palestine after receiving a modernist education and apprenticeship in Europe. Neufeld worked with Mendelsohn and Taut, Rechter worked in France under the spell of Le Corbusier, and Sharon studied under and worked with Hannes Meyer. The Bauhaus-inspired architecture of the Chug would increasingly reflect the “ideology of the socialist leadership’s Labor Zionism” inspired by Herzl’s political vision of Zionism.187 In the 1920s, a battle for national expression had opposed two German immigrants, Alex Baerwald who led the Orientalist camp by exploring the indigenous Arab architecture, and Richard Kauffmann who argued for Modernism and the importation of an architecture that would reflect the progressist tenets of the movement. Unsurprisingly, the Arab-based typologies and morphologies did not directly influence Kauffmann. None of the mosvah or kibbutz made use of any courtyard or patio-based types. By the 1930s, increasing tensions between the Jewish settlers and the local Palestinian inhabitants rendered the search for a modern identity based on local and regional forms more and more politically unsustainable. With the creation of the Chug, the question of urban and architectural identity was openly discussed and debated. In the first issue of the new architecture magazine Habinyan Bamisrah Hakarov (December 1934), the question was clearly stated: ‘The architect, newly arrived in Palestine, is confronted with the following problems: What experience, elements of construction, materials and building forms, should be adopted from the local methods of building, for the creation of the Jewish-Palestinian dwelling?’188 For the magazine and the Chug, European modernism was the solution and the architects claimed cleanliness, 186 Fisher, p. 198. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism – Alternative Modernism: Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in Mandate Palestine," Architectural History 39, 1996, p. 151. 188 Habinyan Bamisrah Hakarov, nº 1, December 1934, English Supplement, p. 4. 187 166 simplicity and the white apartment or house as a “liberation from memories of the past,” a policy that included the rejection of Palestinian traditions, in this case Arab architecture and the Arab village. 189 The resulting society in Mandate Palestine enticed the rise or rather the creation of a “new Jew,” for whom the New Architecture would provide “a house free of past memories”190: “a new Jew, a Nietzschean Superman, a secular man of nature who lives a productive life in the village and will lead the Jewish people on the path of national rejuvenation”191 The last issue of Habinyan (1938) was specifically dedicated to the “Villages in Palestine.” In his introduction, Julius Posener analyzed the pros and cons of the vernacular settlements. In what could be considered as early political correctness, he asked and suggested what could be learnt from them, from the specific response to climate, but also argued that they were “ancient” and “hardly changed,” meant un-modern and probably irrelevant. Posener who had worked with Mendelsohn and knew about his Mediterranean-leaning and Orientalist ideas did not take a strong position, but warned anyway: Habinyan equally refrain from romantic glorification of the wholeness of the fellah village as well as from criticism and denunciation. We will not say: we should build in such a stable traditional manner, nor will we say it is forbidden to build in such an odd and bad way. The Arab village does not serve us as a model for imitation, nor is it a contradictory position to any alternative, which determines this or that, old or new style.192 Overall, Posener and the leftist side of the architectural milieu emphasized the modernity of Kauffmann’s settlements, seeing them as “a scientific experiment which intended to forge something greater than agricultural efficiency.”193 They respected Kauffmann’s oeuvre but were definitely interested into a more visible image of modernization through a more radical importation of the Bauhaus principles and esthetics. With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the following Arab-Jewish War, many Arab villages were either destroyed by war and deliberately left in ruins, rebuilt, or re-appropriated without any reference to their past. The pre-war policy of settlement accelerated with the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jewish families escaping from Arab countries and having survived the Holocaust. Richard Kauffmann disappeared from sight and the new villages were implemented under the authority of Arieh Sharon (1900-1984), the new head of Planning Division of the Prime Minister’s Office. 189 Julius Posener, “The village in the Land of Israel,” (in Hebrew), Habinyan 1-2, 1938; quoted in Haim Yacobi and Hadas Shadar, “The Arab Village: A Genealogy of (Post)Colonial Imagination,” The Journal of Architecture 19, nº 6, 2014, pp. 977. 190 Julius Posener, Habinyan 1,2, 1937, p. 1: quoted in Alona Nitzan-Shiftan and Marina EpsteinPlioutch, “Richard Kauffmann,” p. 48. 191 Wolfgang Pehnt, ”The 'New Man' and the Architecture of the Twenties,” in Jeannine Fiedler (ed.), Social Utopias of the Twenties, Wuppertal: Müller + Bussmann, 1995, pp. 14-15. 192 Julius Posener, “Villages in Palestine,” Habinyan 3, 1938. 193 Ibidem. 167 During the War of Independence, Arieh Sharon and his staff initiated the work on the National Plan for Israel: Our team was full of dash, imagination and enthusiasm. There was a fighting mood; we were determined to overcome vested interests, local ambitions and short-range emergency targets. Our spirits soared even higher when, in the spring of 1949, a new Government was formed, and the importance of national planning was acknowledged by attaching our department to the Prime Minister's office. From there we could work with the high authority of David Ben-Gurion behind us.194 The objectives of the National plan implied the complete planning of the country in the strongest affirmation of the Labor’s Zionism progressist-socialist doctrine. The Plan included the “siting of agricultural settlements and agricultural areas; determination of a rational and healthy distribution of urban centers; effective disposition of industry in the various regions of the country; indication of the road network and centers of communication, and provision of a chain of forests and national parks.”195 The Plan, first published in 1951 and entitled “Physical Planning in Israel,” applied a full modernist approach to planning. Among the most important tenets were the functional zoning, the emphasis on the modernist housing barre (shikun) as primary equalizer of the immigrant integration within the new country, the concept of the neighborhood unit, the dispersion of housing within the landscape, and the elimination of the traditional Garden City street.196 The plan consolidated the importance of agriculture by continuing the settlements of kibbutzim, but it regionally connected them to complete new towns—varying from 10,000 to 40,000 inhabitants—that were to function as larger administrative, service, distribution, industrial, and cultural centers. Those new towns followed modernist principles based upon division in self-sufficient neighborhoods units grouped around a more urban center. Most post-war kibbutzim were variations on the 1930s projects, with a strict division of functions, important greenbelts of separation between zones. Housing was now a combination of independent houses and modernist barres of collective housing, whose sterile penetration in the landscape was made modern and powerful in the set of black and white photographs that illustrated the full report and book. In most cases, single-family houses followed the contours of the hilly terrains, sort of marking the borderline between desert and town. Oftentimes they surrounded large plots of land that were to be developed with modernist barres of 3-4 story houses. 194 See https://www.ariehsharon.org/NewLand/Introduction/ Arieh Sharon, “Planning in Israel,” The Town Planning Review 23, nº 1, April 1952, p. 66. Sharon headed the Planning Department which was attached directly to the office of the Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and included about 150 diverse professionals: architects, town planners and mapping and land experts. See https://www.ariehsharon.org 196 Paradoxically, in spite of the policy of agrarian settlement, at the close of Mandatory rule, in May 1948, the Jewish population of the country was concentrated in the large towns of Jerusalem and Haifa, and to an even greater degree in Tel Aviv and its satellites (400,000 residents in TA, i.e, 60% of the total population). Jewish agriculture extended around a few dozen settlements, chiefly in the valleys, while the small towns were in state of gradual decline. 195 168 Overall, with the exception of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem, early post-war planning in Israel acquired an image that was at once suburban and modernist. Apartment barers were objects in the landscape; single-family houses followed long and sinuous streets in the postwar American manner; all streets were eventually sized to the scale of the automobile and other moving vehicles. As in pre-war planning, only the abundant landscape was able to redeem the often desolate and sterile urban space created by this rigid series of planning principles. As Rosemary Wakeman has argued, this practice of utopia all but considered the towns and particularly in the Negev desert as a blank slate where all traces of history had been annihilated.197 Propaganda films like Song of the Negev (1950) showed that optimistic vision of young people building a new land in threat of Arab populations and were not fundamentally different in terms of ideology from Mussolini or Franco’s own apparatus of happy towns full of happy farmers. However, if planning in Franco’s Spain was all about a national identity rooted in the vernacular and popular art, architecture and urbanism, the new land of Israel was started from scratch, modernity without memory. Some exceptions to this rigid modernist planning appeared in the 1950s. In a neighborhood for new immigrants in Upper Nazareth, parallel lines of single-family rowhouses, combining local stone and concrete, were used to form terraced pedestrian streets, and in some areas, a type of atrium house was employed as well. In 1959, a “model neighborhood” was built in Be’er Sheva with groupings of modernist patio houses, which is referred to the “carpet settlement.” The neighborhood was the first attempt to create an alternative to the standard public housing projects in Israel. Under the influence of Team X and projects such as George Candilis and Shadrach Woods for Casablanca, these experimental projects translated the structural qualities of the Arab villages into modernist architecture: straight lines and right angles, meticulous attention to natural lighting, residential units suited to modern nuclear families and adapted to western society. During the second decade of the State of Israel, the Arab village became “a target of educated reference and sensitive analytical examination, a source of abstract architectural qualities that were translated into modernist architecture.”198 Ram Karmi, Chief Architect of the Ministry of Construction and Housing, wrote in his canonical article “Human Values in Urban Architecture” of 1977, following the 1967 war and the taking over of East Jerusalem, about the “re-discovery” of the low-scale dense construction and inner courtyards: “we should therefore observe the traditional Mediterranean architecture that surrounds us, and examine the timeless values this architecture has developed, in order for us to learn some lessons about current architecture.”199 197 Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, p. 110. Haim Yacobi and Hadas Shadar, p. 986. 199 Haim Yacobi and Hadas Shadar, p. 988 from A. Harlap (ed.), Israel Builds 1977, Jerusalem: The State of Israel, Ministry of Housing, 1977, p 326. 198 169 2.5. THE FAILED PORTUGUESE COLONIZATION In Portugal, agricultural development and colonization policies were discussed repeatedly across the country’s history, mostly to confront demographic problems of population decline and to reduce the dependency on foreign wheat issues. Under the Estado Novo ("New State"), the corporatist authoritarian government that António de Oliveira Salazar established in 1932 and ruled until 1974, the country’s common lands, known as baldios (literally “empty”) were surveyed with the intention to reallocate them to poorer farmers.200 Although attempts were made in earlier years, it is only in 1936 that the Junta de Colonizaçao Interna (J.C.I.) was established in response to productivity issues and increasing rural exodus. Originally part of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Junta was eventually transferred to the Ministry of Economy. This organism, with autonomous legal and operational administration, had the mission to study, purchase, and develop plans for the baldíos or common lands, which were for sale and held promises for production and colonization. The Junta was also involved in coordinating settlements being developed by the private sector and that also benefited from new hydraulic infrastructures. Following the general survey led between 1939 and 1941, very few baldíos were found to be adequate for agriculture and colonization and the Junta was only able to realize a few settlements—7 to 8 colonies—by the end of the 1950s. From an urbanistic point of view, the new Portuguese colonias followed a radically different pattern than other examples of colonization in Italy and, as I will develop in the Chapter Three of this dissertation, Spain. Overall, there was no stated intention to urbanize the countryside. Each colony usually consisted of several hamlets, some organized as a group, and others as a dispersed pattern across the territory. The hamlets were made up of individualized family houses, located at the center of large parcels in a fully suburban mode, but whose gardens and surrounding green spaces were usually articulated by the use of low stone walls and in some cases agricultural outbuildings. At any rate, the houses were never attached together and thus were not generating the traditional courtyard space of old villages. Urbanistically, the plans were usually formal and symmetrical, with curvilinear streets adapting themselves to the topography. There were no real town centers, but each hamlet had a small chapel, usually detached and set up in a green space, a small school often in the typology of the house, and other small structures as needed. Among the most documented and relatively well preserved examples, the colonies of Montalegre, Boalhosa, and Pegões stand out as the most interesting.201 200 In the 1920s, a period of great political upheaval took place in Portugal, and it was with the coup d'etat of May 28, 1926 that an era of dictatorship began. With the approval of the 1933 Constitution, the Estado Novo regime was instituted, an authoritarian political regime that lasted until April 25, 1974, constituting the longest dictatorial regime in Western Europe, prefacing a total of 48 uninterrupted years. 201 The literature on the colonias is increasing. For this summary, I have used the dissertation by Ana das Mercês Oliveira, “Colónias Agrícolas da Junta de Colonização Interna no concelho de Montalegre Modos de habitar a ruralidade,” Universidade do Porto, 2018. 170 The colony of Montalegre, started in the 1940s, was laid out as a group of five distinct settlements and a separate social center, quite distant of each other and interspersed between existing rural habitat mostly organized along roads and country streets with Montalegre as historical and primary community center of the region. With its forty-six houses disposed symmetrically on both sides of a central axis, Aldea Nova de Barroso was the largest and the most iconic. Its oblong layout, gently curved at both short ends to better adapt to the climbing topography and its streets lined with interesting adaptations of the stone country houses of the region, led to a small hill topped by a tiny stone chapel. Overall, the most successful aspect of this type of settlements was the subtle and humble integration within the landscape. To the contrary of Montalegre, the colony of Boalhosa and its hamlet of Vascões were designed and built according to the concentrated model (1944-1966), in which all houses and limited public facilities were clustered in a single location and separated from the agricultural lands. This configuration was “aimed at rationalizing the infrastructural system and, at the same time, strengthening the sense of community, thus forming a small civic center and a socialization space.”202 The symmetrical fan-shaped layout of Vascões is quite iconic and is not without reminding of the much larger and much more complex scheme of Esquivel (1952) by Alejandro de la Sota. The three curvilinear streets conform to the steep topography and establish a series of parallel terraces rising toward the public green that contains small public structures and terminates the central axis. The colony of Pegões in the Montijo region east of Lisbon, was built according to a totally dispersed pattern, with most houses (207 in total) lined up along roads and streets in a territory quite geometrically organized. 203 Its interest lies in the presence of a series of innovative modern buildings, mainly country churches. During the 1950s, the architect Eugénio Correia (1897-1985) designed the small civic area of the hamlet of San Isidro de Pegões. Located in a beautifully wooded area at the end of a short country road, it consists of a church, probably the best known and most idiosyncratic of the colonization, two symmetrical primary schools, and three houses for the priest and the professors. The rectangular nave of the church has a parabolic section supported by a series of concrete arches; three smaller parabolic volumes jut out of the façade and both sides.204 The two primary schools (boys and girls) are symmetrically placed on both sides of the main axis and consist of a long parabolic concrete vault with a series of smaller rooms attached on both sides. The three houses display a quasi-expressionist assemblage of vaults that seem to rise from the ground and its intense vegetation. The ensemble forms a surprising and formally bold composition, where 202 Paolo Marcolin, “The Settlement's Design of the Boalhosa's Agricultural Colony. A Dialectical Perspective: between Tradition and the Construction of Modernity,” paper presented at the Regionalism, Nationalism & Modern Architecture, Porto, October 25-27, 2018, pp. 190-201 [192]. Also see Mercês Oliveira, op. cit. 203 The entire colonization of the JCI only constructed 500 houses, a fact that makes Pegões the most important realization of the failed program. 204 The churches were also interesting examples of synthesis of the arts. In the main chapel there is a grand fresco painting, the figure of Saint Isidro, by the well-known Severo Portela Júnior. Other churches and chapels have works by one of the major Portuguese painters of the second half of the twentieth century, Artur Bual (San Pedro de Bombel). 171 one could detect influences from Latin America, particularly Oscar Niemeyer and Eladio Dieste: The works of Eugénio Correia, with their buildings made up of parabolic surfaces, constitute a radical scream of modernity that make them a unique case in the panorama of architecture in Portugal. (...) In addition, they use a rare constructive technique, based on ceramic spindles, that gives them an added originality.205 Overall, the agricultural development and colonization schemes promoted by the J.C.I. were a trial and experimentation process, which failed but nevertheless had an important impact on various aspects of the Portuguese society and identity. First, the common lands were mainly reforested, visibly changing the countryside. In parallel, new power stations and hydraulic infrastructures were implemented in preparation for an expected increase in agricultural production. Secondly, like in Italy and Spain, the J.C.I.’s works and propaganda embodied the regime’s discourse about the ‘New man’, the values of the traditional family, and the role of the countryside as the authentic repository of Portuguese identity. Finally, and again in a manner similar to the impact of the I.N.C. in Spain and the città di fondazione in Italy, the Junta was an incubator for modern expert and professional cultures in the fields of agriculture, geography, anthropology and architecture, whose works strongly influenced the emergence of modern and contemporary Portuguese architecture and landscape architecture, as can be seen with the works of Correa in Pegões.206 *** 205 Nuno Teotónio Pereira, quoted in Paulo Lima, A Colónia Agrîcola de Santo Isidro de Pegões (Montijo), Montijo: Câmara Municipal do Montijo, 2013, p. 27. 206 I have borrowed this paragraph from the Case Study Portugal 1920-1970s summary, to be found on the Internet site of the project MODSCAPES, https://modscapes.eu/casestudies/portugal/ (last accessed November 25, 2018). 172 Arturo Soria y Mata. Drawings for the Ciudad Lineal, Madrid, c. 1882. From George R. Collins, “The Ciudad Lineal in Madrid,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 18, nº 2, May 1959. H. G. del Castillo. Cité Linéaire Belge, 1919. From George Collins, Arturo Soria y la Ciudad Ideal, 1968. 173 Colonists in La Algaida, c. 1913. © La Época, 8 October 1913. Source Wikipedia. Detail of a poster “100 años Tierra de Colonos Monte Algaida,” 2013. Source Wikipedia. 174 Plan and view of the Village Moderne at the International Exposition of Gand, 1913. From Le village moderne, 1913. 175 Pages from Arquitectura 10, December 1934 displaying selected projects from the Concurso de anteproyectos para la construcción de poblados en las zonas regables del Guadalquivir y del Guadalmellato. 176 Pages from Arquitectura 10, December 1934 displaying selected projects from the Concurso de anteproyectos para la construcción de poblados en las zonas regables del Guadalquivir y del Guadalmellato. 177 Top: General plan of the colonization of the Agro Pontino. Littoria is slightly at the center of the region (in black); Sabaudia is visible to the its right along the coast (in black). From Architettura, June 1934. Middle: Detail of the La Redenzione dell’Agro (The Redemption of the Pontine Area), painted at tempera on Eternit panels by Duilio Cambelotti in 1934. Photo J.F. Lejeune. Right: Aerial view of Sabaudia, c. 1934. © Archivio Fotografico Touring Club Italiano (TCI). 178 Top: Aerial view and view of the central square of the first Pontine city, Littoria (now Latina), in 1934. © Archivio Fotografico TCI. Bottom: Plan and view of Sabaudia as published after the competition. From Architettura, June 1934. 179 Arch: Ludovico Quaroni, Federico Gorio, Michele Valori, et. al. New rural village of Matera, 1952-. Perspective of the square, perspective of a street, and general plan. © Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Fondo Federico Gorio. 180 Top: Ludovico Quaroni, et. al. Church in La Martella, Matera, 1952. © INA-Casa. M. Lanza, S. Lenci, P.M. Lugli, C. Melograni, G.C. Menichetti, G. Rinaldi, M. Valori. 1949-54. © Archivio INA-Casa Roma. Middle: View of a street in the INA-Casa Tiburtino district in Rome, Lot B Lotto B, edificio 8, houses with open gallery. Mario Ridolfi, con L. Quaroni, C. Aymonino, C. Chiarini, M. Fiorentino, F. Gorio, Bottom:Arch: Michele Valori and Stefano Gorio. Competition entry for Torre Spagnolo near Matera (unrealized). From Casabella, nº 31, 1959. 181 Arch. Carlo Boccianti. Plan, perspective and church elevation. New village of Pescia Romana, 1953. From Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (INU), Nuove Esperienze Urbanistiche in Italia, Roma: INU, 1956. Views of the built village, c. 1955. From INU. 182 Le Corbusier. The Radiant Farm, 1933. From Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, New York: The Orion Press, 1964 [1933]. Site plan and perspectives. 183 Le Corbusier. The Radiant Village, 1933. From Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, New York: The Orion Press, 1964 [1933]. Le Corbusier. Cover of the manual “Les Constructions Murondins,” Paris, 1941. 184 Top and middle: View and original sketch of the experimental farm of Kibbutz Merhavia, 1911. Arch: Alexander Baerwald. © National Photo Collection of Israel, 1946. Aerial view of the Moshav Nahalal, 1921. Arch: Richard Kauffmann. Photo Wikipedia. 185 Top: Richard Kauffmann. Project for Kfar Hittin, c. 1922. Page from The Town Planning Review 12, no. 2 (November 1926). Bottom: Richard Kauffmann. Scheme for the twin kibbutzim Ein Harod and Tel Yosef, 1927. From Axel Fisher, “Rurality, a playground for design?,” 2012. 186 Luigi Figini and Giorgio Pollini. The village of Porto Conte (unrealized). From Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, no. 188 (August 1957) 187 Top: Colónia agrícola de Santo Isidro de Pegões. (Municipality of Montijo, Portugal). Land preparation, 1950’s. Photography by Mário Novais (1899-1967) © Calouste Gulbekian Foundation. From http: modscapes.eu. Middle: Poster for the Junta de Colonizacão interna (Portugal). Bottom left: Plan of the village Nova do Barrroso, c. 1950. Bottom right: Arch: Eugénio Correia. Church and school in Santo Isidro de Pegões. 1950s. From Paulo Lima, A Colónia Agrîcola de Santo Isidro de Pegões (Montijo), Montijo: Câmara Municipal do Montijo, 2013 188 189 D.G.R.D. Photomontage of the war destructions. © Archivo General de la Administración, Alcalá de Henares (AGA). 190 3: The Ordered Town: The Reconstruction of the Devastated Regions Next to the heroic stones of the old Belchite, the cordial and welcoming layout of the new Belchite will rise; next to the rubble, the reconstruction; next to the heap of ruins that Marxism sowed as the unequivocal trace of its fleeting passage, the happy monument of peace that Franco's Spain builds.1 Nowadays survive in Spain many towns and villages whose laments, curses, and tears tell us of a past of squalor and poverty. Spain used to live at the expense of its villages. At the best they served as the scenography of a picturesque drama, glimpsed through the window of a train or of an automobile… It is the war itself that eventually brought the city dwellers nearer to the countryside.2 Architecture has been captured by the cinematographic dynamism. Most neighborhoods and towns in construction nowadays in the regions of the Peninsula appear like movies sets, through which the architect can show to the world the singular character that distinguishes each of those people: nothing more joyful, more replete of gleaming whiteness than the small Andalusian houses; more nostalgic and more majestic than the residences of the northern regions; more suggestive of quiet shades and peace than new constructions in the Castilian country… Who inspired these works? Without doubt the movie pictures, the mentors of the synthesis and dynamism of modern life; these are the cities of the movies epoch. (…) We do not ignore that these works have a lot of detractors. Suffice to us to record their existence, anticipating the attention that scholars of the future will likely give to the urbanistic enterprise of our time.3 1 Pedro Gomez Aparicio, “El símbolo de los dos Belchites,” Reconstrucción, nº 1, April 1940, p. 6. Francisco de Cossio, “Muerte y reconstrucción de unos pueblos,” Reconstrucción, 8, 1949, p 4: “Hoy quedan en España en pie muchos pueblos que nos dicen en lamentos, en imprecaciones, en lágrimas, todo un pasado de sordidez y de pobreza. España vivía absolutamente de espaldas a sus pueblos. A lo sumo servían de escenografía de una dramática pintoresca, entrevista de paso y a todo velocidad desde la ventanilla del tren y el automovíl. Los españoles pasaban deprisa por los pueblos, y si la atención penetraba a través de sus ventanillas encuadradas en tierra y de sus pobres humanos entre las junturas de sus tejas, bien pronto se disipaba en la lejanía del paisaje, quizá presintiendo el rigor de un remordimiento. Fué la guerra misma la que acercó a los pueblos los hombres de la ciudad.” 3 Cecilio Barberán, “El Concepto de lo cinematográfico en las construcciones urbanas modernas,” Reconstrucción, nº 97, January 1950, pp. 23-30. 2 191 Between General Franco’s uprising of July 1936 and the fall of Madrid on April 1, 1939, Spanish combatants on both sides of the Civil War and their international allies damaged and destroyed more than 200 villages and towns. The periphery of the capital and the larger circle of Republican resistance that included the small town of Brunete and the historic center of Toledo laid in ruins with an estimated sixty thousand homeless residents living in the ruins of their houses. In the North, the symbols of devastation were Guernica, Oviedo, and a large section of Bilbao and its iron belt. In the East, destruction followed the front line of Aragón with Huesca, Belchite and Teruel, and the battle line at the Ebro River with Lérida and Tortosa. The South was hard hit as well, particularly Almería, Guadix and other towns between Córdoba and Granada.4 Like in many other countries during WWII, planning and structures of planning for the postCivil War reconstruction were put in place during the year 1937-38. 5 Under the supervision of the Servicio Técnicos de Falange, a series of architects and urbanists met multiple times in Burgos to start the process of reconstruction both from the theoretical and the technical point of view. Among those were Pedro Bidagor, Carlos de Miguel, Luis Moya, Muñoz Monasterio, José Tamés Alarcón, and many others, who met during the war in a “spirit disposed to work and sacrifice, a spirit of organized work that expected the moment when it could be realized.”6 Likewise, during the last year of the Civil War in 1938-39, meetings were held in Burgos by the Servicio Nacional de Reforma Económica y Social de la Tierra. The participants analyzed the agro-social situation of the countryside, its causes, as well as a review of the colonizing policies of the last centuries with an emphasis on Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship and the Second Republic. Those discussions and debates—whether dealing with the metropolitan condition or with the rural environment—strongly reflected the ideology and program of the Falange, the movement of national-syndicalist character created in 1934 by the dictator’s older son José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Following the first National Congress of the Falange, that took place in Madrid 4-7 October 1934, José Antonio commissioned the redaction of the operational program of the movement, which would appear as a short manifesto-like document titled Los XXVII Puntos del Estado Español. Three years later, when Franco 4 See for instance, Dacia Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War, Brighton/Portland/Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2011; Olivia Muñoz-Rojas, Ashes and Granite: Destruction and Reconstruction in the Spanish Civil War and Its Aftermath, Cañada Blanch/Sussex Academic Studies on Contemporary Spain/Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. 5 Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 2011. It must be noted that Cohen did not include Spain within his study. 6 Pedro Muguruza, "Ideas generales sobre ordenación y reconstrucción," in Sesiones de la I Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectos, Madrid: Servicios Técnicos de FET y de la JONS, 1939, p. 4: “espiritú dispuesto al trabajo y al sacrificio, un espiritú de trabajo organizado que esperaba el momento en que éste pudiera realizarse.” For the preparation of the reconstruction and, in particular, the Plan General de Ordenación de Madrid, see Sofía Diéguez Patao, "Pedro Bidagor. Dos contextos: los años de guerra y posguerra en Madrid. De la Sección de Arquitectura de CNT a la Junta de Reconstrucción," in Carlos Sambricio (ed.), Plan Bidagor 1941-1946. Plan General De Ordenación De Madrid, Madrid: Editorial Nerea, 2003, pp. 19-34. 192 consolidated the Falange Española y de la JONS, the 26 Points became the “vademecum” platform of the future regime.7 In his many texts and speeches held before the war, José Antonio argued that it was necessary “to put in place the Agrarian Reform in a revolutionary way; it means, to impose to the owners of large properties the sacrifice of handing over to the little farmers the land that they miss.” And this implied that compensating the landowners with the full price of their land “was an insult to the laborers.”8 To be sure, demagogy ruled in those electoral times, and, immediately following the Civil War, the new regime embarked on rolling back most of the Republican agrarian reform. Yet, the fundamental goal of the Falange remained, i.e., to transform the economy by favoring the development of agriculture as prime source of national wealth. Most importantly, it implied the spatial reorganization of the agricultural land through a process of property fragmentation that would reduce social conflicts and create a more stable situation of work and individual property. Moreover, the manifesto directed to increase the living status of the farmers and agricultural workers, to ensure a minimum prize for the products from the earth, to rationalize the cultivation process, to stimulate the syndication of the workers, to move farmers from infertile grounds to better areas if needed, to expropriate properties acquired illegally, to accelerate the hydraulic public works, and to provide cheap credit for investment independent from the local corrupted structures: The rules of work in the agricultural sector of the economy will be adjusted to their special characteristics and to the seasonal variations imposed by Nature. The State will take special care of the technical education of the agricultural producer, enabling him to carry out all the work required by each unit of exploitation. The embellishment of the rural life will be achieved, perfecting the peasant housing and improving the hygienic conditions of the villages and hamlets of Spain. The State will assure the stability of the tenants in the cultivation of the land through long-term contracts that guarantee them against unjustified eviction and ensure them the amortization of the improvements they would have made on the property. It is the aspiration of the State to arbitrate the means by which the land, under fair conditions, might become the property of those who directly exploit it.9 7 The Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (Falange Española de la JONS) was an extreme nationalist political group founded in Spain in 1934 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Influenced by Italian fascism, the manifesto further repudiated the republican constitution, party politics, capitalism, Marxism, and clericalism, and proclaimed the necessity of a national-syndicalist state, a strong government, and Spanish imperialist expansion. During the Civil War, Franco merged the group with the Comunión Tradicionalista (one of the names of the Carlist movement since 1869), to form the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET y de las JONS). It became the sole legal parti after 1939, until its dissolution in 1977. 8 José Antonio Primo de Rivera, “Labradores,” Arriba, 1st of November 1935, quoted in Esther Almarcha Núnez-Herrador, Nueve pueblos de colonización en la provincia de Ciudad Real, Ciudad Real, 1996, p. 15. 9 Franco, “El Fuero del Trabajo,” cited on: . http://www.generalisimofranco.com/descargas/26%20puntos.pdf (last accessed September 30, 2018): “Las normas de trabajo en la empresa agrícola se ajustarán a sus especiales características y a las variaciones estacionales impuestas por la naturaleza. El estado cuidará especialmente la educación 193 The material collected, examined, and discussed during the war became the basis of the doctrine that would coalesce in the two most important institutions of the first phase of Franco’s regime: the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (D.G.R.D.), which included the Junta de Reconstrucción de Madrid) and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.). The task of reconstruction was entrusted to the Department General of Devastated Regions, created within the Ministry of the Interior well before the end of the war, in January 1938. The Article 1 of the decree of March 25, 1938, ascribed to the D.G.R.D., "the direction and vigilance of any projects, general or particular, whose purpose is to restore or reconstruct properties of all kinds damaged by the effects of war.” 10 The Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.) was created in 1939 to strengthen the overall strategy of modernization of the countryside and, more specifically, to implement a pro-active policy of rural settlement linked to the post-war program of drainage and irrigation in depressed agricultural areas around the country. 3.1. The Countryside as Locus of Modernization Post-Civil War Spain used the countryside as locus and symbol for the economic reconstruction and the modernization of the State during the autarchic period (1939-1959).11 The main rationale was the State’s economic policy to bolster new agrarian development in order to give time for the necessary reorganization of private capital, at that time without opportunities for rapid investment and rebuilding of the industrial sector. The implicit objective was to stabilize the impoverished rural population away from the big cities and thus prevent rural flight, excessive urban expansion, and potentially explosive socio-economic conditions. 12 Altogether these priorities adjusted to the demands of the oligarchy, the primary supporter of Franco, whose immediate goal was to recuperate the land lost in the Republican agrarian reform; likewise, they were fueled by the low cost of labor in the countryside, and the international embargo on import and export. 13 More importantly, the physical técnica del productor agrícola, capacitándole para realizar todos los trabajos exigidos por cada unidad de explotación. Se conseguirá el embellecimiento de la vida rural, perfeccionando la vivienda campesina y mejorando las condiciones higiénicas de los pueblos y caseríos de España. El estado asegurará a los arrendatarios la estabilidad en el cultivo de la tierra por medio de contratos a largo plazo que les garanticen contra el desahucio injustificado y les asegure la amortización de las mejoras que hubieren realizado en el predio. Es aspiración del estado arbitrar los medios conducentes para que la tierra, en condiciones justas, pase a ser de quienes directamente la explotan.” 10 Eugenia Llanos, "La Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas. Su organización administrativa," Arquitectura en Regiones Devastadas, Madrid: MOPU, 1987, p. 43: “la dirección y la vigilencia de cuantos proyectos, generales o particulares, tengan por objeto restaurar o reconstruir bienes de todas clases dañados por efecto de la guerra.” 11 On the Spanish economy and economic policies after 1939, see Carlos Barciela López, “Guerra Civil y primer franquismo (1936-1959),” in Francisco Comín, Mauro Hernández Benítez, Enrique Llopis Agelán (eds.), Historia económica de España, siglos X-XX, Crítica, 2010, pp. 331-368. 12 Lluís Domènech, Arquitectura de Siempre: Los años 40 en España, Barcelona: Tusquets, 1978, pp. 23-24. 13 Luis Domènech, op. cit., pp. 16-17. 194 reconstruction of the destroyed towns and the program of interior colonization that would parallel it had a major objective in line with the macro-economic strategy of the regime: The colonization has, for the Architects, a political and general interest, since its mission is to achieve the agricultural potential of Spain and to improve the quality of life of the farmer. As a result it will capacitate the industrial empowerment that he needs for his subsistence and the development of its Imperial Mission.14 Carlos Sambricio has pointed out that the integral process of reconstruction and colonization marked a critical moment in the development of an “agrarian economy of industrial type.” It was a transition from “a late feudalism to capitalism, taking advantage of a relative abundance of manpower in the countryside—and putting to use a low-salaried workforce and necessary improvement in the techniques of production—in such a way that the situation would generate sizeable savings that could be directed toward the process of industrialization.” 15 The assumption was that the financial capital linked to the rural aristocracy, traditional engine of Spanish economic development and now revalorized through the cancellation of the Republican agrarian reform, would stabilize the economy of the countryside, limit the rural exodus, produce an agriculture capable to supply with its surplus, and for a limited period, a new industrial development.”16 In other words, the Reconstruction was not only about the restoration of monuments and the redevelopment of destroyed towns and villages, but also the policy that intended to lay the foundations of a new economic structure that would reorganize, “not only the relations of production, but, and above all, the means, thus defining a new order of wealth." 17 The particular conditions of Spanish agriculture after the Civil War were thus at the basis of the modernization and industrialization of the economy from the mid-1950s onwards. The “true industrialization of Spain,” to which Jordi Nadal referred polemically regarding the 1960s was in fact inseparable from the agricultural phase. 18 The savings and profits generated from the countryside were to 14 Germán Valentín Gamazo, "La reorganización general desde el Instituto Nacional de Colonización," Segunda Asamblea de Arquitectos, Madrid, 1941, p. 30: “La colonización tiene por los arquitectos, en primer lugar, un intéres político y general, por cuanto su misión es lograr la potencialización agrícola de España que permita mejorar el nivel de vida del agricultor y hacer posible la potenciación industrial que necesita para su defensa y el desarrollo de su misión imperial.” 15 Carlos Sambricio, "’… Que Coman República!’ Introducción a un estudio sobre la reconstrucción en la España de la posguerra," Cuando se quiso resucitar la arquitectura, Murcia: Comision de Cultura del Colegio Oficial de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Tecnicos/Consejeria de Cultura y Educacion de la Comunidad Autonoma, 1983, p. 204. Also in Arquitectura para después de una guerra, Barcelona: Cuadernos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, 1977: pp. 21-33. See José Luis García Delgado, “A propósito de la agricultura en el desarrollo capitalista español,” La cuestión agraria en la España contemporánea, VI Coloquio de Pau, Madrid, 1976. 16 Sambricio, “Que Coman,” p. 204. 17 Sambricio, Que Coman, p. 200: “Pero mientras que para unos la reconstrucción era una mera operación de restauración, para otros el concepto se entendió no tanto en términos arquitectónicos—de conservación de monumentos o de mantenimiento de ciudades—, sino como la actuación que tendía a sentar las bases de una estructura económica nueva de formal tal que se reorganizasen, no sólo las relaciones de producción, sino, y sobre todo, los medios, definiendo así una nueva ordenación de la riqueza.” 18 See Jordi Nadal, El fracaso de la Revolución industrial en España 1814-1913, Barcelona 1975, p. 23, quoted by Ignacio de Sola-Morales, “La arquitectura de la vivienda en los años de la Autarquia, 19391953,” in Arquitectura 199, April 1976, p. 24. 195 progressively feed the resurgence of capitalist accumulation necessary for the redeployment of the industrial sector, linked to the end of the autarchy period and the re-opening of the country to the American influence in the 1950s. Propaganda was also instrumental in this politics. The schematic and often simplistic pre-war partition of the country between the Republican industrial cities and the Falangist towns and villages remained in the memory of the victors. Consequently, the New Spain not only thanked the agrarian man for his sacrifice during the war, but also strove to mythify and present him as the model of the New Spaniard, long-suffering and reserved, anchored in the old tradition of the individual courage in the face of daily labor. In a speech of 1959, Franco summarized the political and ideological substrate of those economic priorities: Many Spanish people, and the ruling classes, believed that Spain was to be found in its capital and cities; they were unaware of the vivid reality of the small towns and hamlets, of all the smallest places […]. And all of this is what the Movement has come to redeem: the incomparable creative capacity of the pueblos that our great national program is forging across all provinces.19 Franco’s position was widely supported by ideologues of the regime, among which Onésimo Redondo—founder of the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (JONS) and promoter of an agrarian Fascism—, Rafael Sánchez Maza, and Eugenio d’Ors.20 In his essay of 1939, La civilización campesina, D’Ors who had the vision of an imperial Catalonia and Spain, emphasizing the Roman classical tradition, adopted the revindication of the rural world: “If the proletarians and the ‘rustics’ of the world, united, make a perpetual guard of honor to the tomb of Lenin, why couldn’t the ‘fathers’, the ’farmers’ of the world go on a pilgrimage now, as September and the centenary of his peasant death approach, to the tomb of Federico Mistral, epic poet of the agricultural civilization?"21 And in Vértice, the periodical of the Falange in 1939, one could read some of the rare and most extreme anti-urban invectives: The city devours man ... that is the great sin that must be fought against; and the towers of Babel will remain in our memory as examples of great crime. And all those who had honest peasants in their lineage, but fled to the city and stayed in their dirty 19 Speech given in Valladolid on the 29th of October 1959, in Franco Bahamonde Discourse of the Head of State, 3 November 1959, p. 492. Carlos Sambricio commented further: “La reconstrucción termina, por tanto, no cuando se eliminan las ruinas, sino cuando la aristocracia financiera consigue rehacer la infraestructura económica porque, a partir de ahí, la palabra “reconstrucción” será sustituida por la de especulación.” (“Que coman Republica,” pp. 242-3). 20 On Eugenio d’Ors, see Chapter 1. 21 Quoted by Bibiana Treviño Carrillo, "La utopía ruralista del primer Franquismo en los planes de reconstrucción de la Posguerra," Actas de la II Conferencia de Hispanistas de Rusia, Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1999, n.p., from Eugeni d'Ors, La Tradición, Buenos Aires: Ed. Reunidos, 1939, p. 24: “Si los proletarios y los rústicos del mundo, unidos, dan perpetua guardia de honor a la tumba de Lenin–¿por qué los “padres”, los “labradores” del mundo no irían en peregrinación–ahora, en la época del año, en que, al acercarse septiembre, se acerca el centenario de su muerte campesina–, a la tumba de Federico Mistral, poeta épico de la civilización agricola?” 196 suburbs, engendering degeneration and abnormality, will lament that modern betrayal in the ruins of the city. They are the sad glories of time: cities like beehives, cold shelters of a wholly deviated humanity, which the friendly fields, the white villages, the joyful houses, the open air, and the clear skies that the colossal chimneys and the hundred floors of the skyscrapers do not cloud, impatiently await … The city lies, lies in everything, and lies by virtue of its own vice.22 However, in contrast to the virulent anti-urban attacks launched by the most reactionary supporters of the regime, it is important to emphasize the balanced approach to the relationship city/country that César Cort, Professor of Urbanología at the School of Architecture of the University of Madrid, published in 1941. Under the title Campos urbanizados y ciudades rurizadas [Urbanized countryside and ruralized cities], Cort proposed an agenda that eventually guided the urban program of Franco’s regime, at least until the end of autarky:23 Bringing the countryside to the city and the city to the countryside must be the anatreptic purpose of the new developers and planners, although the statement seems somewhat paradoxical. "Ruralize the cities and urbanize the fields", was the motto of the first Spanish book of urbanization, written by Cerdà, towards the middle of the last century, when still in Europe nobody was dealing doctrinally with these subjects. And in the urbanization of the fields; that is to say, in procuring to its inhabitants most of the advantages enjoyed by those of the city, and in ruralizing cities, which is as good as introducing into the cities as many rural sectors it is possible to locate, without losing the unity of the whole or the aspect of the city, we must seek the material improvement of daily life that influences both the maintenance of good morals and morals in the ordering of material activities.24 22 “Babel o la ciudad,” Vértice, 16 July 1939, reprinted in Gabriel Ureña, Arquitectura y Urbanística Civil y Militar en el Período de la Autarquía (1936-1945). Análisis, cronología y textos, Madrid: Ediciones ISTMO, 1979, p. 269: "La ciudad devora al hombre...el gran pecado que hay que combatir; quedarán babeles como recuerdo de un gran crimen. Y aquellos que tuvieron en su sangre labriegos honrados, que huyeron hacia la ciudad y se quedaron en sus arrabales sucios, engendrando degeneración y anomalía, se lamentarán en las ruinas de tanta ciudad por culpa de aquella traición moderna. Son las tristes glorias del tiempo: ciudades como colmenas, albergues fríos de toda una humanidad descarriada, a la que espera el campo compañero, las aldeas blancas, las villas alegres, el aire libre, el cielo claro que no enturbian chimeneas colosales, que no ocultan los cien pisos de los rascacielos. Ya puede disfrazarse la ciudad y hacer los diez halagos de la mujer adúltera. La ciudad miente, miente en todo y miente por propia virtud de su vicio.” 23 César Cort Botí, Campos Urbanizados Y Ciudades Ruralizadas. Madrid: Yagües, 1941. 24 César Cort Botí, “Campos urbanizados y ciudadas rurizadas,” in Campo Cerrado, Madrid: Museo del Reina Sofía, 2016, p. 149: “Llevar el campo a la ciudad y la ciudad al campo ha de ser el propósito anatréptico de los nuevos urbanizadores, aunque el enunciado parezca un tanto paradójico. “Ruralizad las ciudades y urbanizad los campos”, fue el lema del primer libro español de urbanización, escrito por Cerdá, hacia la mitad del siglo pasado, cuando todavía en Europa nadie se ocupaba doctrinalmente de estas materias. Y en la urbanización de los campos; es decir, en procurar a sus habitantes la mayoría de las ventajas que gozan los de la ciudad y en rurarizar las ciudades, que vale tanto como introducir en las urbes cuantos sectores rurales encuentren posible acoplamiento, sin perder por ello la unidad del conjunto ni el aspecto de ciudad, hay que buscar el mejoramiento material de la vida cotidiana que influye tanto en el mantenimiento de la buena moral, como la moral en el ordenamiento de las actividades materiales.” 197 3.2. The Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas (D.G.R.D.) As its first director José Moreno Torres argued in his 1941 essay in Reconstrucción, the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas was organized “in the form of a large private enterprise.”25 The D.G.R.D. had no intention to compete with the private initiative, yet, Torres admitted that it was necessary “not only to promote it but also to orient it and give it the necessary support.”26 Originally, the mission to rebuild the destroyed towns and villages that bore witness to “the holy and victorious Crusade of liberation or the irrefutable witnesses of the barbarous and cruel mercilessness of the hordes trained by Russia” was to orient, facilitate, and in some cases, directly implement the process.27 First, the Instituto de Crédito para la Reconstrucción Nacional was put in place in March 1939 to provide credit with a low interest rate and a long period of amortization to individuals and institutions ready to embark on the reconstruction works, the whole being based upon the Italian model of 1919 and with mandatory participation of the mortgagee. 28 However, as the Department immediately ordered the field survey of already liberated towns and villages, it became clear that in light of the physical and economic condition of many towns and villages, the reconstruction could only proceed with a massive help from the State. For this purpose, Franco signed the decree of “adoption” of the most damaged areas on 23 September 1939: the reconstruction of towns and villages damaged at more than sixty per cent would be entirely financed by the State. Under director Torres, the Department of the Devastated Regions initiated the planning and implementation of an ambitious program of reconstruction of the 192 towns and villages adopted by 1945.29 A large staff of architects, engineers and other professionals (100 in 1940 reaching more than 200 in 1945) was assembled in twenty-eight regional offices to control and direct the process. The program included the reconstruction of damaged towns and cities, the construction of new towns to replace destroyed settlements, and a vast enterprise of restoration of civic and religious public buildings. In 1947, architect Gonzalo de Cárdenas replaced Moreno Torres at the head of the Dirección. De Cárdenas was a college graduate of the same promotion and collaborator of José Fonseca Llamedo at the Seminario de Urbanología de la Escuela de Madrid. Fonseca was named director of the Instituto de la Vivienda in 1940 and the two men kept a close collaboration during the 1940s, thus reinforcing the continuity of policy and interests between the Second Republic and the first period of Franco’s regime. 25 José Moreno Torres, “Un organismo del Nuevo Estado: La Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, Reconstrucción, 12, May 1941, p. 4. 26 Ibidem. 27 “Organismos del Nuevo Estado: La Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas y Reparaciones,” Reconstrucción, I, nº 1, p. 2: “[…] la santa y victoriosa Cruzada de liberación o testigos irrefutables del bárbaro y cruel ensañamiento de las hordas alecccionados por Rusia […].” 28 José Moreno Torres, La Reconstrucción urbana en España, Madrid: Artes gráficas Faure, 1945, unpaginated. 29 José Moreno Torres left the direction in 1946 when he became the Mayor of Madrid. There were 148 towns and villages adopted by 1941 and eventually reached 227 in the mid-1940s. 198 During the first two years of the reconstruction it was often necessary to actuate directly in order to reach often remote villages and property owners; this was to be done quickly in order to avoid the much dreaded rural exodus toward the cities, a phenomenon obviously feared and ideologically opposed by Franco and the Falange. Necessary expropriations were regulated with the law of December 1939 and were paid by the Institute of Credit over five years with a 4% interest rate in order to stabilize population and avoid its abandoning the villages and towns. All affected persons were granted the right to solicit long-term loans at a low rate of interest, from the National Reconstruction Credit Institute. By 1944 no less than 18,700 workers were employed by the D.G.R.D., including a significant number of political prisoners who typically received a two-day reduction of imprisonment for one day of work.30 By 1946, the D.G.R.D. had reconstructed 14,845 housing units, built 16,019 new dwellings, and intervened on more than 800 public structures, including churches, schools, markets, and others.31 In 1951, the Department counted 108 architects, 46 engineers and 180 civil servants distributed within the regional offices.32 3.3. The First Exhibition of the Reconstruction On June 14, 1940, in the Palacio de Bibliotecas y Museos in Madrid, General Franco inaugurated the first Exposition of the Reconstruction of Spain (Exposición de la Reconstrucción de España). The show was organized by the Department of Devastated Regions and mounted with the help of students and young graduates of the School of Architecture of the University of Madrid, including Aburto, Ayuso, Baselga, de Asis Cabrero, Calonge, Chapa, Cuevas, Fernández Del Amo, Marcide, Molíns, Pérez, Páramo, and San Millán. The curator of the design was the young Asturian architect José Gómez del Collado (1910-1995), a native of Cangas del Narcea, a town where he eventually built most of his architectural work.33 Gómez del Collado was himself an alumnus of the School of Madrid. He graduated in 1940, having spent a year in Italy with a fellowship, where he was strongly influenced by the works of Terragni, Moretti, and Gardella. Also trained as an engineer, he worked for many years for the D.G.R.D., in particular for the installation of radio antennas from Brunete to Sevilla, and he collaborated in the design of new towns like Belchite. Less than a year had passed since the end of the Civil War and the amount of design work produced was nothing short of exceptional in quantity, consistency, and quality. The 30 José Moreno Torres, La Reconstrucción urbana en España, unpaginated. José Rivero Serrano, "Regiones Devastadas: Figuración, Morfología y Tipología," in Carlos Sambricio (ed.), La Vivienda Protegida, Madrid: Ministerio de la Vivienda, 2009, p. 76. 32 Eugenia Llanos de la Plaza, "La Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas," Cayetana de la Cuadra Salcedo (ed.), Villanueva de la Cañada: Historia de una reconstrucción, Villanueva de la Cañada: Ayuntamiento, Concejalía de Cultura, 2001, p. 41. 33 See the "Número extraordinario dedicado a la Exposición de la Reconstrucción de España," Reconstrucción nº 3, June-July 1940, and José Ramón Puerto Álvarez, “La obra arquitectónica de José Gómez del Collado” at http://www.touspatous.es/index.php/arte/955-la-obra-arquitectonica-de-josegomez-del-collado.html. 31 199 exposition itself was designed in less than two months and required hundreds of masons, painters and carpenters, working day and night. Along the walls of the three introductory rooms—Information, Statistics, and Conference—were tapestries, symbolic paintings, and frescoes that showed strong influences from El Greco and the Italian painters of the Novecento.34 As an example, the fresco of the Destruction in the Information Room showed direct influences from Mario Sironi or one of the other artists working on the E42 exposition in Rome. They illustrated the ideological and socio-cultural process of reconstruction, in an exhibition environment where a great sense of symmetry, order, and color (which can only be guessed from the black and white photographs) gave those rooms the character of a vernacular Gesamtkunstwerk. In the pages of the special issue of Reconstrucción, Gómez de Collado and the young students and architects commented on the joyful spirit of the projects and the exhibition, while attacking pre-war modernists: In the persistence of polychrome sculpture we can focus the most marked characteristic of our personality. Here, then, we have to face something inherent to ourselves, color, as a result of a way of conceiving the world ... Why then should we defect from such singular fidelity? Let those who embrace the ultra-Pyrenean philosophy do it and arrive at the unbearable monotony of false purity.35 The colors, the abstracted decorations above the doors that recalled Gio Ponti, the alignment of all major plans at a lower level of the rooms, the low pedestals on which the large models were displayed, all of these exhibition devices created an impression of serenity that contrasted with the real state of the country. Another ten rooms contained the renderings, plans, and very detailed models of a dozen of towns and villages in the initial stage of reconstruction: among them, the heroic centers of Republican resistance and Falangist victories, Guernica, Toledo, Brunete (which had its own room), Nules and Belchite. For Moreno Torres, the exhibition primary goal was to show to the public “how a modern town should be, how it should be lived in the future. Notions about hygiene. Social type standards.”36 In its reiteration in other cities of Spain like in Granada (see Reconstrucción June 1941), full-scale models of houses and interiors were even displayed amidst the drawings and other objects. In another venue, Bilbao (see Reconstrucción July-August 1941), the exhibition was presented in a modern industrial interior, which emphasized the horizontality of the space, and with a resolutely more modern graphic layout. 34 The role of Francisco Cabrero must have been important in this artistic endeavour if one analyzes the manner of those inconographies in relation with his personal paintings. See for instance his self-portrait from 1942 and some of his travel sketches from the same period in Gabriel Cabrero, ed., Francisco de Asís Cabrero, Madrid: Fundación COAM, 2007. 35 José Gómez del Collado, Reconstrucción, nº 3, Junio-Julio 1940, unpaginated: “En la persistencia de la escultura policroma podemos centrar la característica más acusada de nuestra personalidad. He aquí, pues, que hemos de enfrentarnos con algo consustancial nuestro, el color, como resultado de una manera de concebir el mundo… Por qué entonces hemos de desertar nosotros de tan singular fidelidad? Que lo hagan quienes por campos de filosofía ultra-pirenaica llegarán a la monotonía insoportable de la falsa pureza.” 36 Reconstrucción, nº 3, Junio-Julio 1940, unpaginated: “Cómo debe ser un pueblo moderno, cómo se ha de vivir en el futuro. Nociones sobre la higiene. Normas de tipo social.” 200 In its issue of June 22, 1940, the periodical El Tajo made this situation very clear. Commenting on the lack of political unity in Spain in the last 100 years and its repercussion on the cultural condition, the newspaper emphasized how “the team spirit, the spirit of unity, preside over the execution of all the projects that are exhibited, in such a way that, beyond the individual temperaments of each executor, the existence of norms and plans is perceived without effort. This has been made possible only when the individual style has given way to a more noble collective vision; that is, when a professional aristocracy has been formed.”37 Likewise, in the description made by Gonzalo de Cárdenas in 1940, “for the first time in the history of Spanish architecture, eighty-two architects, united and fused together, are realizing a unanimous and silent work, with a unique criteria, well defined and concrete, of what the reconstruction of Spain must consist of.”38 Within the national-catholic ideological framework, modernization was a major concern. Reconstructing the towns and villages as they were before the war was neither the objective nor a direct motivation. For the Francoist planners and architects, most of the destroyed towns lacked hygiene, functional qualities, and their urban design and architecture was average if not mediocre. In all texts and speeches, a clear functionalist and hygienist discourse prevailed, a familiar tone since the beginning of the century, in most European countries and even more so in Spain: The reconstruction does not aspire to bring back the pueblos of Spain to the state that they had yesterday. It aspires to improve them, and to infuse in them the breath of the National Revolution, since – and we are not afraid to proclaim this sad truth – in many of them the conditions of housing were sometimes incompatible with human dignity. We hope that these new houses will meet the demands of hygienic and cheerful homes, so that the children of those who sacrificed themselves may appreciate the fruit of so much effort.39 In light of this assessment, it was logical that a completely new understanding of the urban structure be established. Its logic was to be found within the tradition of Spanish colonization but also within the international experience of the garden city and the modern village as discussed and implemented before the war. The medieval and organic character of most 37 Ibidem: “El espíritu de equipo, de unidad, preside la ejecución de todos los proyectos que en aquella se exhiben, de tal manera que, por encima de los temperamentos individuales de cada ejecutor, se perciben, sin esfuerso, la existencia de normas y de planes. Esto sólo ha sido posible conseguirlo cuando el estilo individual ha sido vertido en otro más noble colectivo; es decir, cuando se ha formado una aristocracía profesional.” 38 Gonzalo de Cárdenas Rodríguez, "La Reconstrucción Nacional vista desde la Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas," in Segunda Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectos, Madrid: Dirección General de Arquitectura, 1940, p. 154. 39 Reconstrucción, nº 3, June-July 1940, unpaginated: “La reconstrucción no aspira a dejar los pueblos de España sobre los que opera en el estado que ayer tuvieron. Aspira a mejorarlos, llevandos a ellos el aliento de la Revolución Nacional, puesto que—no nos asusta proclamar esta triste verdad—en muchos las condiciones de la vivienda eran en ocasiones incompatibles con la dignitad humana. Aspiramos a que aquellas casas cumplan las exigencias de los hogares higiénicos y alegres, para que los hijos de los que se sacrificaron aprecien el fruto de tanto esfuerzo.” 201 destroyed towns might indulge some nostalgic appeal, but it was within a more logical and rational structure that urban diversity would be created. As stated by Joaquín Vaquero, In the reconstruction of the towns devastated by the war, it would be neither possible nor convenient to achieve, unless with great prudence, the picturesque value that they previously displayed. It will be necessary to pursue another beauty, achieved by the rational organization of constructions and free spaces, adopting the whole to the climate and landscape of each place, and to the means of life not only of each town, but also to the future, after studying the possibilities of soils, crops, industries, etc.40 Modernization for the Spanish planners was not limited to the morphology of the towns and the typology of their fabric, but presupposed a radical change in the social behavior of the countryside residents. This was necessary to guarantee that the residents would de facto abandon the destroyed villages and move to the new towns. In order to fulfill the first objective of the reconstruction, which was to maintain the impacted population within the countryside, it was necessary to understand and to combat the traditional inertia of the farmers, a community inertia that resulted from ancestral traditions, from cultural isolation from modernity, and more importantly from the scarce means of subsistence that made all traces of modern comfort either unachievable or undesired because of cost and associated inconvenience. In the words of Moreno Torres, The first thing to reconstruct and transform is the idiosyncrasy. It is not enough to rebuild homes and clean up the rural areas of Spain. It is necessary that the habits change. We have no idea how the people in our fields have lived so far. I have recently been in a town that had no water ... Centuries have passed and this village does not know how to satisfy such a peremptory and elementary need as that of water. They are going to build a lift. They will have the water in their own town. But that naturally requires expenses and electricity. The neighbors cannot pay it. They would prefer to continue the uncomfortable and painful habit of carrying water.41 This particular condition, endemic to the countryside and to impoverished districts, was not unique to Spain but could be encountered across the world. It is significant that some of the 40 Joaquín Vaquero, “Arquitectura popular española. Pintoresquismo en la reconstrucción,” Reconstrucción, nº 16, nov. 1941, p. 13: “En la reconstrucción de los pueblos devastados por la guerra, ni sería posible ni conveniente lograr, sino en medida prudente, el valor pintoresco que anteriormente haya tenido el pueblo. Será necesario perseguir otra belleza, lograda por la ordenación racional de construcciones y espacios libres, adoptando el todo al clima y paisaje de cada lugar, y al medio de vida no solamente actual de cada pueblo, sino también al futuro, después de estudiar las posibilidades de subsuelos, cultivos, industrias, etc.” 41 José Moreno Torres, “La significación moral de la Reconstrucción en España,” La Vanguardia Española, 26 junio 1940; reprinted in “Noticiario,” Reconstrucción June-July 1940, unpaginated: “Lo primero que hay que reconstruir es la idiosincrasia. No basta con devolver hogares y sanear los medios rurales de España. Es necesario que cambien las costumbres. No se tiene idea de cómo ha vivido hasta ahora la gente de nuestros campos. He estado recientemente en un pueblo que no tiene agua…. Son siglos enteros en que este pueblo no conoce otro procedimiento para satisfacer necesidad tan perentoria y elemental como la del agua. Se les va a construir una elevadora. Tendrán el agua en su mismo pueblo. Pero eso requiere, naturalmente, un gasto, una utilización del fluido eléctrico. Los vecinos no pueden pagarlo. Preferirían seguir toda la vida con su incómodo y penoso acarreo.” 202 architects of the D.G.R.D. quoted Karl Brunner, the well-known Austrian architect and planner active in Chile and Colombia, and author of the Manual de Urbanismo just published in 1939. Its author argued that, like many other inhabitants of towns, “the people living in the unhealthy sectors, because they are acclimated to their environment, do not long for other conditions or do not know how to adapt to them .... Perhaps the custom, the ignorance, the laziness and the discouragement produce these phenomena; but, if so, human civilization must consider these people as victims of a social malaise that awaits their relief from outside.”42 This focus on modernity established a direct line of continuity with the theories and preoccupations that had been raised not only during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera but also the Second Republic. The role played by Fonseca and De Cárdenas was critical in establishing that continuity beyond the radical change of regime. Obviously, during the early 1940s, the time of the ideological discourses and highest intensity of propaganda, the imperialist rhetoric of early Francoism tended to mask how rational and how modern the program of reconstruction was in its planning essence. The emphasis on national sources and references for the urbanistic and architectural proposals were real but equally underscored the knowledge of international experiences that the architects in charge of reconstruction (and also of colonization) had acquired at the University of Madrid, in particular through the courses of César Cort. In the words of historian Lluís Domènech, “Brunete, Seseña, Esquivel, Nules, Montarrón, Los Blázquez, Villanova de la Barca… were names dispersed across the geography of Spain, which revealed serious experiments, never repeated, of rigorous planning.”43 Likewise, as historian Llanos de la Plaza wrote in her discussion of the D.G.R.D., the reconstruction “produced some 'discrete' global results that were sometimes estimable and surprisingly positive when compared, over time, with the results, also globally speaking, that developmentalism and the speculative tide produced in the towns and cities of the 60s. The towns of the reconstruction have aged better, they withstand better the passage of time.”44 42 Quoted in Luis Prieto Bances, "Estudio de un pueblo adoptado: Seseña,” Reconstrucción, no. 9, February 1941, p. 20: “la gente de los sectores malsanos, por estar aclimatados a su ambiente, no anhelan otras condiciones o no saben acomodarse a ellas…. Quizá la costumbre, la ignorancia, la pereza y el desaliento producen estos fenómenos; pero, de ser así, la civilización humana debe considerar a esas gentes como victimas de un malestar social que espera su alivio de fuera.” 43 Lluís Domènech, op. cit., p. 13. 44 Eugenia Llanos de la Plaza, "La Dirección General De Regiones Devastadas," in Cayetana de la Cuadra Salcedo (ed.), Villanueva De La Cañada: Historia De Una Reconstrucción, Villanueva de la Cañada: Ayuntamiento, Concejalía de Cultura, 2001, p. 44: “produjo unos resultados globales ‘discretos’ a veces estimables y sorprendenmente positivos al compararlos, pasado el tiempo, con los resultados, también globalmente hablando, que el desarrollismo y la marea especulativa produjo en los pueblos y ciudadad de los años 60. Los pueblos de Regiones envejecen mejor, soportan mejor el paso del tiempo.” 203 3.4. Theorizing the Reconstruction One year within the war and with the country already facing intense moral and physical devastation, Victor d’Ors — son of Eugeni d’Ors and architect — wrote an important article in the Falangist periodical Vértice.45 For d’Ors, Spain had grown without proper planning. By that he meant that the countryside had remained quite isolated and lacked, in general, the basic infrastructures for modern life. At the same time, the cities had expanded in incoherent manner, particularly under the pressure of the rural-urban immigration. The reconstruction after the war needed to take these structural problems in consideration and he argued that a serious analysis should precede any attempt at any spontaneous reconstruction or new settlement, in order to transform not only the territory but also the socio-cultural reality: "Urbanization must be a consequence, like the colonization in general, of the natural reality shaped by political intention, which, in order to justify itself, has to embody the spiritual reality of the world at the service of higher interests. And to a new politics, new urbanism."46 For the architect, it was necessary to merge city and countryside in a “superior unit of organization”: “if the countryside and the city could interpenetrate and embrace, losing their antagonism, in a superior unity of organization, man would live a more complete and harmonious life.”47 Reflecting the concept of ciudad orgánica that Pedro Bidagor would be developing and synthetizing in the Plan General de Ordenación de Madrid, he imagined that new cities would be formed by a redevelopment of the existing districts into functional and specialized social and economic units. The latter would be at once autonomous, mixed-use, and integrated into a system hierarchically superior. The city would thus become “multipolar in its conquest of the countryside”, which, on its own turn, would penetrate into the urban cores with planted terraces, parks and recreational zones. All together city and country would thus form “an organic whole” that would go from the most remote hamlet that radio and book can reach until the Plaza Mayor of the capital.”48 Interestingly, the form and organization of the territory that he proposed had strong international roots, from the city-region of Luigi Piccinato in the planning of Sabaudia, Martin Wagner’s Trabantenstadt concepts and diagrams, all away to the thesis of Kropotkin analyzed in the Chapter 2. As I have alluded earlier, the preparation of the reconstruction started officially from Burgos in the 1938 where architects, planners, and other technicians could safely debate and propose 45 Victor D’Ors, Vértice, June 1937, reprinted in Gabriel Ureña, Arquitectura y Urbanística Civil y Militar en el Período de la Autarquía (1936-1945). Análisis, cronología y textos, Madrid: ISTMO, 1979, pp. 249253. Vértice was an illustrated periodical which was published from April 1937 to 1946 (83 issues) by the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S. See Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Historia de la literatura fascista española, Madrid: Akal, 2008. 46 Ibidem, p. 249: “La urbanización debe ser consecuencia—como la colonización, en general—de la realidad natural moldeada por la intención política, que, a su vez, tiene que representar para justificarse la realidad espiritual del mundo al servicio de intereses superiores. Y a nueva política, nuevo urbanismo.” 47 Victor D’Ors, Vértice, p. 250. 48 Victor D’Ors, Vértice, p. 251. 204 solutions for the future. It is thus unsurprising that, not even one month after the official end of the Civil War, the First National Assembly of Architects was convoked under the presidency of Pedro Muguruza Otaño (1893-1952) on June 26-29, 1939. The Reconstruction of the country was the central theme.49 It was to be, both architectural and urbanistic, a “national revolution… with methods and technical disciplines absolutely Spanish” in contrast to the prewar experiments and “their exotic origins.”50 Muguruza, recently appointed Director of the Dirección General de Arquitectura, gave confidence to his colleagues and rallied them to the task of reconstructing towns and cities, and of solving the problems of housing for the poorest classes in the country. If reconstruction was indeed to lift up what had been destroyed and rehabilitate what existed, He made clear that reconstruction had to be preceded by a precise analysis, i.e., “not to simply and simplistically rebuild automatically and mechanically what had disappeared and been destroyed.”51 Reconstruction had to be a well-studied process of “revision, elimination and selection” and adopt Philip II’s famous motto “Never will a country be great if one does not know its geography and all its characteristics.”52 The New Spain needed a plan of national reconstruction, well-coordinated, reflecting a perfect organization but capable of elasticity to adapt to the “tortuous path of realities.” 53 The plan of reconstruction had to start “with an inventory of agricultural wealth, to know perfectly the productive needs of the country, its capacity, the increase in production that was necessary, the places where it had to be applied, the intensity appropriate to each of those places, and, as solutions to all those issues, will follow the plans of colonization and all the communication processes to connect each center with the rest of the country… the industrial plans, the plans of repopulation, colonies and housing.”54 Architects would work at this plan with precision, order and functionality, in the same way that they would design a house from the single cell to the whole organism. And “elasticity” was the speech’s theme, elasticity in the plan, in the professional organization of the architects, in the manner to build and put the plans into action and place. For Muguruza, improving the condition of housing—urban, rural, or suburban— was an absolute priority and the causes of its low quality should be studied and eliminated if possible. The premises were clearly stated: It is absolutely indispensable to think that one critical element [to achieve the goal of eliminating the condition of poor housing] is to get rid of the purely material concept of making the housing unit a “machine for living.” This idea cannot but annihilate or negate the concept of place. By extension, the dwelling unit must be considered as 49 For the complete transcript, see Sesiones de la I Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectos, Madrid: Servicios técnicos de FET y de las JONS, Sección de arquitectura, 1939. For an analysis of the First Assembly, see Fernando de Terán, Planeamiento urbano en la España contemporánea, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982 [1978]. 50 Pedro Muguruza, “Ideas generales sobre Ordenación y Reconstrucción,” Sesiones de la I Asamblea, p. 6. 51 Pedro Muguruza, op. cit., p. 6. 52 Quoted by Pedro Muguruza, op. cit., p. 7. 53 Pedro Muguruza, op. cit., p. 8. 54 Ibidem. 205 the primary cell of the living organism that is the city. Thus we need to dissolve the inorganic groupings that surround the city and in part make it what it is; they asphyxiate it, make it a purely material environment where the city loses its essential meaning: to be a living body whose various organs provide vitality to the whole.55 Muguruza’s attack against Internationalism and the avant-garde during the Republican period can be interpreted as a reactionary statement by a conservative and pro-regime architect. Yet, a comparison with the Josep Lluis Sert’s statements that followed the CIAM IV held on the Patris ship from Marseilles to Athens in 1933 is quite revealing. At that time, the so-called monolithic image of the avant-garde was already shattered: “The pure functionalism of the “machine à habiter” is dead, but it will kill, before its demise, the old styles and teachings at the schools of architecture. Architects and theorists, above all Germanic, carried functionalist experiments to absurd extremes.”56 In his speech titled “Dignificación de la Vida (Vivienda, Esparcimiento y Deportes),” the architect Luis Gutiérrez Soto’s (1900-1977) reflected a functionalist attitude, devoid of any international “rigidity” or “formalism,” and anchored in a serious understanding of workingclass life in poor families.57 Under the title “dignificación,” he argued that improvement in the way of life was not only a technical issue, but that the architect and the urbanist had to be accompanied by the sociologist and the politician. Otherwise, their work would lack of all spiritual and traditional content. Dignify did not only mean the achievement of material comfort but to recover the maximal spiritual values, the feelings of fatherland, family, place and work. 58 The State would ultimately be responsible and its organization had to be “totalitarian, dictatorial, national” in the means of implementation.59 As for the architects, their task would be to improve the dwelling, organize the cities and villages, in one word, “to urbanize the country.”60 After having divided the country in regions and districts, each city, town and village would eventually have its function within the whole: “we will know what must be preserved, created, enlarged or simply destroyed, because the word “urbanization” does not only refer to the city as center of gravity of the region; it refers also to the countryside, to the pueblos, to these Spanish villages, arid, dusty, full of misery and ugliness. One must humanize them, one has to penetrate them with roads and streets, until the bottom of their 55 Pedro Muguruza, op. cit., p. 7. Josep Lluis Sert, “Arquitectura sense ‘estil’ i sense ‘arquitecte’”, D’Ací i d’Allà nº 179, December 1934. See Chapter One for more discussion of Sert’s writings and speeches. 57 A virtuoso of eclecticism and classical-modernism in his middleclass architecture before and after the War, Luis Gutiérrez Soto was one of those architects of the 1920s-1930s that historian Carlos de San Antonio has called “personalidades al margén.” See Susan Larson, p. 58. Carlos de San Antonio, Veinte años de arquitectura en Madrid. La edad de plata: 18-36, Madrid: Comunidad Autónoma Madrid, 1996. 58 Luis Guttérez Soto, “Dignificación de la vida (Vivienda, Esparcimiento y Deportes),” Sesiones de la I Asamblea, p. 40. 59 Luis Gutiérez Soto, op. cit., p. 41. 60 Luis Gutiérez Soto, op. cit., p. 42. 56 206 soul; give them life and minimum existence; one must colonize them; one has to urbanize the countryside.”61 Gutiérrez Soto’s speech contradicts the supposed isolation of Spain from the modern European tradition. Gutiérrez, who like Cort, Bidagor and d’Ors was one the theoreticians of the new city, argued further that the housing unit was as “cell” the most critical element of the global organization. But it could not be considered as an isolated element that multiplies but rather as part of an organic whole that he called “órgano de la vivienda [organ of the dwelling unit]”62 Each of those districts would integrate all social classes, thus eliminating the roots of resistance and class struggles, and replacing the unplanned suburbs that had started to form around Madrid and all major cities. Each district would contain a network of churches, schools including professional ones, library, auditorium, healthcare offices, market and retail shops, as well as a full-fledged civic center. Behind its nationalist overtones—although it is important to note that Gutiérrez Soto used the term ‘spiritual’ rather than catholic or religious—this program reflected the international knowledge of those young planners, from Stübben to Howard to Geddes and the city-region. It also made reference to the Neighborhood Unit but imagined it as an intermediary echelon between city and district—he envisioned it with 20 to 50,000 residents, not unlike the “satellites” proposed by Zuazo-Jansen in their entry for the 1929 Madrid competition. Another proof was Soto’s discussion of the hierarchy of streets in the proposed districts and his statement that it was necessary “to bury the old concept of the street and the old concept of the block”: “the street is not a space for all uses, along which houses are aligned to the left and right.”63 Hence, he argued for low-traffic streets, pedestrian streets, green areas, and other potential improvements. In regard to the situation of housing, he attacked the bad conditions of housing in all areas of the country, the rampant speculation, the hygienic, functional and esthetic deficiencies. For Soto, the house was to be in relation with the landscape, the region, the climate, and the country where it is deployed. An international agenda was thus fundamentally absurd as climate and constructive materials differ from place to place. Yet, he made it clear that it was important to study what had been written and done outside of Spain as it provided for a huge amount of study and experience: Let us do an architecture, fresh and adapted to our land, our spirit, our climate, but we have to work before create. Let us not pretend, in a very Spanish way, to diminish all the trends of functionalism, modern technique and tradition. Let us collect all fecund ideas and this from a high point of view […] Tradition is spirit, not matter; the old house does not serve our modern requirements….64 61 Luis Gutiérez Soto, op. cit., p. 43. Ibidem. 63 Luis Gutiérez Soto, op. cit., p. 44. 64 Luis Gutiérez Soto, op. cit., pp. 45-46. 62 207 Likewise, he argued that the “international E-W orientation” of the bedrooms was not suitable for most regions of Spain and that it was important to adapt the housing orientation, the size of the windows, and the height of the rooms to the region and climate. Moreover, to the excessive decomposition of functions advocated by the Bauhaus, he opposed simple arrangements inspired by tradition: In the minimum dwelling unit, only one zone living room is admissible; it must support multiple functions: eating, working, playing, family reunions, etc. Thus, the importance of a relatively large room that can be subdivided into its multiple functional areas. […] The minimum dwelling does not depend on size and dimensions of rooms, but on a good organization of space.65 Gutiérrez Soto concluded his impassioned speech with a summary in five points: a Plan General de Urbanización y Reconstrucción; each zone, region or district will have its housing types based upon customs, climate, materials, function and salaries; the “Órgano de la Vivienda” will be a complete and fully functional urban area; the minimum house, well studied, is not the same than the casa barata, because it has to fulfill a higher social role in the new State; architects must accept their responsibilities, not accuse the builders, speculators, or bankers, but organize the profession in order to develop a “dirigida arquitectura” [a coordinated architecture]. Another set of questions posed by Soto was particularly illuminating: Do we know with precision what will be the political orientation on these matters? What political criteria will exist in regard to private capital, real estate speculation and the bad construction in Madrid? Will the idea of subdividing the blocks in parcels, where everybody builds his house like he wants, remain alive, or will we go toward the unity of the block with construction of the whole block or grouped? Will the owner or the contractor continue to regard the housing unit as a speculative project or will he be enticed to see it as a social objective in service of the State, within the limits of economic exigencies?”66 Pedro Bidagor, now the official leader of Spanish architecture and its primary theoretician, gave the fourth speech titled “Plan de Ciudades.” He reflected upon the national-syndicalist aspirations of the Falange, a program of socialist or national-corporatist overtones where the State would regulate and temper the excesses of unbridled capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. For him, "the restricted scope of the urban reforms leads to speculation, and the vanity of the population is satisfied with obtaining a wide and straight street, exponent of modernity, with buildings higher than the old ones."67 And he pursued, Urban civilization is measured in the width of the streets and the height of the buildings. It does not matter that behind the frivolous facades, and their accumulation of anachronistic motifs, which pervert the taste and the aesthetic sense of the people, the courtyards are increasingly reduced, the life more nervous, the work more 65 Ibidem. Ibidem. 67 Pedro Bidagor, “Plan de Ciudades,” Sesiones de la I Asamblea, pp. 52-53. 66 208 difficult. The result is the enthronement in the heart of our cities of rudeness, ‘Yanquism,’ and frivolity.68 Like César Cort and Luis Gutiérrez Soto, Bidagor envisioned the plan of urbanization as the result of the scientific study of the regions, of their topography, climate and natural resources.69 He pleaded for an “organic city” that would contrast with the chaotic development of the capitalist-industrial agglomerations and whose organization would depend of the interaction and the good functioning of the urban organisms in the manner of the human body. He suggested to "Imagine the possibilities of creation of urban organisms destined for the capital, with the gathering of all the monumental buildings in an enclosure in the manner of the acropolis, commercial markets in the manner of the Roman forums and our plazas mayores... housing neighborhoods, and professional sectors for industry and craft.”70 Behind the ideological thrill, Bidagor’s “organic” city synthetized many international concepts of modern planning, including the American civic center, the regional visions of Unwin and Geddes, the Trabantenstadt and metropolitan park diagrams of Martin Wagner, the decentralized model and neighborhood unit of Clarence Stein, and others. Yet, at the same time, those theories had to adapt to a Spanish traditional way of doing things. Bidagor argued for a global decentralization and the “vertical” multi-functionality of each organ, in practice establishing the modernist theoretical concept of the Neighborhood Unit as basis of his urban and regional planning tenets. In synchrony with the national-corporatist vision of the Falange—a vision that would quickly be replaced by capitalist profit and then full-fledged urban speculation—it was necessary to radically transform the laws that guided private property and expropriation, “and not tolerate the absurdity of the fact that many urban parcels, equipped with all necessary services, remain unproductive because the owners have the freedom to use or not use them.”71 Hence, in alternative to the “liberal” city, the “ciudad orgánica“ or “la ciudad del Movimiento”— the one Bidagor will intent to promote to eventually fail in front of the capitalist vision of the second phase of Francoism—rejected the concept of separate workers’ districts whose only finality was to make visible the differences between their residents and other neighborhoods, thus arguing that the “ideal would be that, on the different floors of the same house, could reside, without any distinction, people from different social ranks.”72 For the Falange, the separation of classes within separate neighborhoods ultimately favored the class struggles and encouraged the development of radical positions. In that sense, the urban zoning 68 Pedro Bidagor, op. cit., p. 60: “La civilización urbana se mide en metros de anchura de calles, y de altura de los edificios. No tiene importancia que tras las frívolas fachadas, amontonamiento de motivos anacrónicos, que pervierten el gusto y el sentido estético del pueblo, los patios sean cada vez más reducidos, la vida más nerviosa, el trabajo más difícil. El resultado es la entronización del corazón de nuestras ciudades de la grosería, del yanquismo, de la frivolidad.” 69 César Cort gave an additional speech during the Sesiones de la I Asamblea, see “División de España en Regiones y Comarcas naturales, Sesiones de la I Asamblea, pp. 14-38. 70 Pedro Bidagor, op. cit., p. 63. 71 Pedro Bidagor, op. cit., p.66. 72 Pedro Bidagor, op. cit., p.67. 209 became the material translation of the socialist vision of class struggles that had to be banished. The “organic city” would thus be organized on the basis of groups of economic activities, between which all social conflicts would eventually be terminated. Within these neighborhoods, the family was to appear as the superior form of social organization. In this theoretical vision, the “Madrid orgánica” would be made up of the large, more or less existing, central sections surrounded by a series of new neighborhoods, separated from the core and each other by large green belts and that would be organized functionally and hierarchically related. In concordance with the regime’s priorities, those neighborhoods would have a primary agricultural function. Bidagor’s speech was essentially an introduction to the Plan de Ordenación y Reconstrucción de Madrid, which he had been elaborating on behalf of the Falange since 1938. The plan of 1941 aimed to overcome the divisional system of the Ensanches and of the outlying suburbs that had been rising during the first decades of the twentieth century. For Bidagor, the Plan intended to substitute the geometric organization of the Ensanches with a functional organization that divided the city in areas of specialized functions. In particular, he proposed to locate the industrial working classes in satellite-cities, fully autonomous and in direct contact with the rural areas around the city.73 The Plan was completed in 1941, published in 1942, and adopted in March 1946 for Madrid, and for twenty-eight municipalities in the region between 1948 and 1954. Eventually, the Plan became hostage of opposition forces on two fronts, which eventually conspired to make it fail. On the one hand, it was a continuous object of tensions between the Falangist vision and the conservative speculative vision of property owners in and around the city, thus preventing the implementation of the satellites and their green belts; on the other hand, the urbanistic basis on which he was drawn—a system of streets, blocks, squares, and various densities and typologies of housing—was increasingly under attack by the younger generation of architects eager to enter the international modernist movement in urbanism and housing. 3.5. Trazados genuinamente españoles As a branch of the Ministry of the Interior, the Department of Devastated Regions was under political pressure to act quickly and adopt the most efficient methods of planning and construction. Spain was devastated, and its productive system was in shambles. Recovery was made difficult by the destructions of the Civil War (especially of the railway system and communications in general), by a loss of skilled labor, and by the restriction of imports on capital goods imposed by the advent of World War II and its aftermath. These difficulties were increased by the specific policies of autarky, particularly the state control of prices and 73 See Fernando de Terán, Historia del Urbanismo en España III. Siglos XIX y XX, Madrid: Cátedra, 1999, p. 25 & sq. Also see Jesús López Díaz, "Vivienda social y Falange: Ideario y construcciones en la década de los 40," in Scripta Nova: revista eléctronica de geografía y ciencias sociales, VII, no. 146, August 2003, pp. 1-18. 210 industrial development within a protected national economy cut off from the international market. Thus, in the short term, there were few architectural options possible. The return to tradition and to the vernacular forms of building was, first of all, a pragmatic solution imposed by the economic shortages and technical obstacles endemic in the country.74 However, the architects benefited from a high degree of autonomy to improve the miserable conditions of housing, particularly in rural areas. This often included total reconstruction if deemed necessary. An order issued in 1938 forbade anyone to rebuild without prior authorization to be granted in accordance with the approved town-planning scheme of reconstruction or restoration: It was seen at once that, since destruction was—alas—an accomplished fact, it should at least be turned to advantage in better planning to raise modern, healthy and cheerful towns and villages that should, nevertheless, retain their local character and their traditional architecture.75 In order to receive the designation of “adopted” and the corresponding reconstruction budget by the D.G.R.D., towns and villages had to show a degree of destruction at least equal to 75% of the overall public and private fabric. As a result, the first major step in the process was to decide whether the town would be reconstructed in its previous location or whether it would be moved to a more convenient site. A famous photomontage, published in the first issue of the magazine Reconstrucción in 1940, epitomizes the spirit of the process. It shows General Franco in front of the ruins of the city of Belchite, arms up and swearing that “on the ruins of Belchite a city will be built, generous and beautiful, in homage to its unmatched heroism.”76 In actuality, Belchite, like many other destroyed towns, was not rebuilt over the ruins, but rather displaced to an adjacent site, leaving the impressive ruins to stand—and they still do today— in the background of the modern town. As such, the reconstruction of Belchite referred obliquely to the “theory of the ruin-value”—a theory generally attributed to Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler, and frequently cited by Franco in his first postwar speeches.77 Speer believed that the buildings of the Third Reich should be designed with the expectation that their ruins would have the value of Antiquity. In Belchite, the first symbol of reconstruction, the leftover ruins were seen as an ideological witness of Civil War—as would the ruins of the Frauenkirche in Dresden for the German Democratic Republic. 78 74 Carlos Sambricio, “L'architecture espagnole entre la IIème république et le franquisme,” in Les années 30 – L'architecture et les arts de l'espace entre industrie et nostalgie, Paris: Editions du patrimoine, 1997pp. 184-5. I found the expression “style of the devastated regions” in the special issue of Reconstrucción, November 1946, pp. 268-9. 75 José Moreno Torres, La reconstrucción urbana en España, Madrid: Artes Gráficas Faure, 1945, unpaginated. 76 General Franco, Reconstrucción, nº 1 (April 1940): p. 10. 77 Manuel Blanco, “España Una,” Arquitectura en Regiones devastadas, pp. 20-21. 78 See “A Theory of Ruin-Value,” on the internet site: . https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/7.4.html (accessed April 28, 2008), from Cornelius Holtorf, Monumental Past (Scarborough: CITD Press, University of Toronto at Scarborough, 2001). 211 In reality, in cases such as Seseña, Villanueva de la Cañada, Villanueva del Pardillo, Boadilla del Monte in the periphery of Madrid, as well as in Llers, Gajanejos, Montarrón, Villanueva de la Barca in the provinces of Guadalajara and Lérida, the decision to move from the existing location and establish a new town foundation on an adjacent or more distant site was related to a variety of technical factors, including the difficulty in clearing the site from the rubble because of the topography or other site conditions; the inadequacy of the old site location in regard to topography and sunshine; and the excessive distance to the fields and/or major roads. In Brunete, Titulcia, Las Rozas, Pitres, and Los Blazquez to mention the most important, only the church was reconstructed in its original location, but at the center of a complete or partial new town plan. In all instances, the ruin-value of the destroyed town— which was left untouched or used as reserve of construction material—was not a major factor in the decision process. In his speech at the Second Assembly of Architects of 1940, Gonzalo de Cárdenas gave an executive description of the planning principles to be followed by the architects involved in the selection of the site and the process of reconstruction: After having determined the size of the towns and their location, one must proceed with the study of the planning arrangement; planning for which it is necessary to dispense completely of all the principles that have come to us from over the borders. The reconstruction of our towns must be based solely according to the genuinely Spanish layouts, made according to our temperament and our way of living. To do so, all the techniques that may come from another country not only do not serve us, but they impede us. The center of the town will always be the traditional and genuine plaza mayor. The plaza mayor, with its arcades, will be surrounded by the representative edifices of the Municipality, of the State, and of the Party. The streets that depart from it lead to the workplaces in the fields or in the factories. A second religious will consist of the plaza de la Iglesia, with its attached rector and catechesis house, its church and tower, dominated by a cross whose open arms will watch over the future life of the population. The schools, with their sports field, and the municipal buildings and other services for the population's life will be distributed in the villages, giving them their just importance and situation. These buildings and the dwellings will shape the general masterplan. Different types of houses will be studied, according to the function and profession of the families that should inhabit them. It is important to remember that each region has its characteristic type of housing, which depends, most of the time, on the kind of cultivation of the land. The houses will always consist of, as a minimum, of the kitchen-dining room and three bedrooms, so that there may be a proper separation of sexes. The dwelling type will determine the type of block; the organization of the blocks establishes the general masterplan, which will be completed with the layout of the streets, their elevations, sections and 212 profiles; great care will be taken for the outside appearance of the blocks and town, so that they forms, within the variety of each type, a harmonious whole.79 Given that the architect-urbanists of the Reconstruction generally made no reference to the sources of their works, whether Spanish or foreign, this particular section of De Cárdenas’s discourse must be considered as the fundamental text of reference for the reconstruction works of the D.G.R.D. It allows us to understand the combination of tradition and modernity that shaped the reconstruction as well as its links to the fundamental history of Spanish urbanism from the Renaissance onwards. Let us examine the text in details and point out the parallels with other texts in the history of Spanish urbanism. First of all, De Cárdenas’s injunction to use “trazados genuinamente españoles” [layouts genuinely Spanish] and to reject “the techniques coming from other countries” reveals the obvious ideological and nationalistic tenets in the first phase of Franco’s regime strongly under the influence of the Falange. However, neither De Cárdenas nor the architects employed by the D.G.R.D. made clear statements about the sources of their projects. Arguably, the program of reconstruction was not a creation ex novo. From the Reconquista and the Renaissance, Spain had forged a rich and brilliant tradition of new urban foundations, both in America and in the Peninsula itself. 80 I argue here that the experience of Latin America and its translation in the corpus of the Laws of the Indies, as well as the most important program of interior colonization during the enlightenment regime of Carlos III, the Nuevas Poblaciones, were indeed the most obvious Spanish references of the program. A rare allusion to these sources can be found in the document Doctrina e Historia de la Revolución Nacional Española (1939), where Pedro Muguruza mentions the ideal of Spanish 79 Gonzalo de Cárdenas Rodríguez, "La Reconstrucción Nacional vista desde la Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas," in Segunda Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectos, p. 151: Fijada la capacidad de los pueblos y su emplazamiento, viene el estudio de la ordenación; estudio de ordenación en el que hay que prescindir por completo de todas las normas que nos vengan de mas allá de las fronteras. La reconstrucción de nuestros pueblos hemos de basarla únicamente en los trazados genuinamente españoles, hechos con arreglo a nuestro temperamento y a nuestra manera de vivir, y en la que no nos sirven, sino que nos estorban, todas las técnicas que puedan venir de otro país. El centro del pueblo será siempre la tradicional y genuina plaza mayor. Su plaza mayor, con soportales, en la que estén los edificios representativos del Ayuntamiento, del Estado y del Partido. De ella parten las calles que conducen a los lugares de trabajo del campo o de la industria. Un segundo centro religioso, formado por la plaza de la Iglesia, con sus anexos de Casa Rectoral y Catequesis. Iglesia con torre, rematada con una cruz, bajo cuyos brazos abiertos se desenvuelva la vida futura del poblado. Se distribuyen en los poblados, dándoles su justo valor y situación, las escuelas, con su campo de deportes escolar, y los edificios y servicios municipales de vida de la población. Con estos elementos y las viviendas formamos el plan general de ordenación. De las viviendas se estudian distintos tipos, según la función y profesión de las familias que deban habitarlas. En esto no hace falta decir que cada comarca tiene su tipo de vivienda característico, que depende, la mayoría de las veces, de la clase de cultivo del terreno que labran. Las viviendas se componen siempre, como mínimo, de cocina-comedor y de tres dormitorios, para que pueda existir la debida separación de sexos. El tipo de viviendas nos da el tipo de manzana; la agrupación de todas ellas constituye el plan general de ordenación, completándose con el trazado de las calles, alzados, secciones y perfiles; cuidando el aspecto exterior de pueblo, para que forme, dentro de la variedad de cada tipo, un todo armónico.” 80 As we will see in Chapter Five, Tamés Alarcón in 1948 gave a detailed historical panorama of the Spanish and foreign tradition and influences for the new towns. See José Tamés Alarcón, "Proceso urbanistico de nuestra colonización interior," in Revista Nacional de Arquitectura VIII, no. 83, November 1948, pp. 413-424. 213 urbanism which must use as examples the design of cities of the Reconquista and the American colonization as “material particularly adapted to the genius of the race, eminently realistic, integrating and hierarchical, and which rejects the rationalist or opportunist French or English unilateralism.”81 The Laws of the Indies (1573) Geometrically planned towns were founded in Spain since the beginning of the twelfth century, a systematic urban policy that continued in the 16th century at the end of the Reconquista and was reenergized in the 18th century under the Enlightenment policies of King Carlos III. The first examples were created in the northern regions of Navarra and Aragón, close to the French border, and thus quite similar to the French bastides.82 Most of these new towns or foundations were sponsored by a central government and implied a concept of regional planning. In general terms, they were “founded to give order to the region, to populate, to settle colonists, to reclaim agricultural land, and to establish new commercial centers.” 83 Military reasons were equally important but overall the concept of orderly planning, whether reticular or frankly orthogonal in contrast with the organic spaces that resulted from the transformation of the Arabic patterns of urbanization, was used in almost all cases. Among the earliest examples are Sangüesa and Puentelarreina both founded in 1122 by King Alfonso I and organized along three parallel streets; the 13th century Villas Reales established by Jaime I around Castellón, north of Valencia (Castellón de la Plana, Nules, Villareal); and the foundations near Cádiz from the 13th century such as Puerto de Santa María (1283) and Puerto Real established two centuries later in 1483 both with a similar distorted reticular grid. The Ordinacions (1300) of Jaime II on the island of Majorca established the legal basis and the formal principles for the foundation of a series of new urban nuclei in the relatively flat and scarcely inhabited eastern section of the island: Petra was the most concrete example with its regular grid centered on a square plaza. In all of these examples the plaza mayor followed a well-defined geometric definition that could be described as a square or rectangle, regular or slightly distorted in its early manifestation. Moreover, the square was at the roots of the urban plan and, in that sense, could be considered as the prime generator of the orthogonal plans. From the foundation of Santa Fe de Granada (1492), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (1486), and San Cristóbal de la Laguna (1497) onwards, the concept of the central plaza or plaza mayor at the center of a checkerboard plan was consolidated as the fundamental and recurrent urban space in the 81 Mentioned in Jesús López Díaz, op. cit., p. 4. The reference is In the document FET y de las JONS, Doctrina e Historia de la Revolución Nacional Española, p. 23: “materia propicia el genio de la raza eminentemente realista, integrador y jerárquico, que repugna la unilateralidad racionalista u oportunista francesa o inglesa." 82 On the bastides, see Philippe Panerai, et.a.l, , Les bastides d'Aquitaine, du Bas-Languedoc et du Béarn. Essai sur la régularité, Brussels: Archives d'architecture moderne, 1985. 83 On the towns of the Reconquista and Spanish America, see Graziano Gasparini, “The SpanishAmerican Grid Plan, an Urban Bureaucratic Form,” The New City I (Foundations), 1991, pp. 6-17. On eighteenth century foundations, see Carlos Sambricio, Territorio y Ciudad en la España de la Ilustración, Madrid: Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transportes, Instituto del Territorio y Urbanismo, 1991. 214 history of Hispanic and Hispanic American urbanism. From the 16th century onwards, Spanish urbanism was marked by the modernity of Renaissance thought and practice. The foundation of Santo Domingo and dozens of new cities in Central and Southern America initially responded to the limited ordinances of Carlos V and his request that “order” be the main element of the settlement. Many ordinances followed which emphasized the same concept of “order”. Enacted and signed in 1573 by Philip II, the “Ordinances for the Discovery, the new Population, and the Pacification of the Indies” consolidated the foundation strategy. They constitute one of the most remarkable documents of “modern” urbanism, a Hispanic utopia of the “ideal City,” to create a city perfect in its form and in its physical and symbolic order. 84 Accordingly, the conquest of the New World was the first phase of an European-induced process of globalization in America: the orderly checkerboard plan of foundation—with its memory of Roman settlement forms in Iberia and its abstraction of a cross—symbolized the rational organization of the territory combined with forced evangelization. As John Charles Chasteen wrote in his introduction to the translation of Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City), “writing, urbanism, and the state have had a special relationship in Latin America.”85 From the early years of the discovery and the founding of the outposts of what would become the first world global empire, the Spanish conquerors established a network of cities and towns carefully planned according to royal instructions, where institutional and legal powers were administered through a cadre of elite men called letrados. Rama’s The Lettered City provides an overview of the power of written discourse in the historical formation of Latin American societies, and highlights the central role of cities in deploying and reproducing that power. It is the urban nexus of lettered culture and state power that the Uruguayan scholar named “the lettered city.” Rama viewed the city both as a rational order of signs representative of Renaissance progress and as the site where the Old World is transformed—according to detailed written instructions—in the New: There, native urbanistic values were blindly erased by the Iberian conquerors to create a supposedly ‘blank slate,’ though the outright denial of impressive indigenous cultures would not, of course, prevent them from surviving quietly to infiltrate the conquering culture later. (…) Having cleared the ground, the city builders erected an edifice that, even when imagined as a mere transposition of European antecedents, 84 On the genesis and application of the Laws of the Indies, see Dora Crouch, et. al., Spanish City Planning in America, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982. 85 This paragraph copied from my essay, Jean-François Lejeune, “The Ideal and the Real: Urban Codes in the Spanish-American Lettered City,” in Stephen Marshall (ed.), Urban Coding and Planning, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 59-82. Quote from John Charles Chasteen, “Introduction” to Angel Rama, The Lettered City, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1996, p. vii. Angel Rama (1926-1983) was a Uruguayan writer, academic and literary critic. His main work La Ciudad Letrada [The Lettered City] was published posthumously in 1984. 215 in fact represented the urban dream of a new age.86 To some extent, the works of the D.G.R.D. (and in a lesser measure as we will see in Chapter 5 for the new towns of the I.N.C.) could be considered as a “blank slate” operation. If the reconstruction took place “in situ”, i.e. on the very site of the destroyed town, nothing was left of the old ‘dis-order,’ with the exception of the church that was rebuilt in place. Likewise, when the new town was built on another site, the abandonment of the old village reminded of the “new age” in the countryside. Out of one hundred and forty-eight ordinances contained in the Laws of the Indies, the fiftytwo articles that specifically refer to the urbanization process—site selection, layout, plan, square, location of the main buildings—confirmed what had become common practice in the Indies before 1573: the open checkerboard plan generated from the plaza mayor as political and social center and the establishment of secondary plazas for the churches. Urban historian Pierre Lavedan contended that the tenets that were established to found and consolidate the new towns in Latin America met the three criteria which make up the urban principles of the Renaissance: firstly, the organic connection between all parts of the city and the subordination to a clearly established center; secondly, the use of perspective as primary instrument of design, and thus the almost total priority given to the straight street; and, thirdly, the “program” in the sense that each foundation related to a specific number of colonist families and that the public infrastructure was not only defined but situated within the overall plan.87 Those conditions were the primary elements of modernity of Renaissance planning and would be followed, albeit with less precision, by Olavide and his architects during the 18th century. The parallels between De Cárdenas’s principles of the reconstruction and the New World principles as codified and idealized in the Laws of the Indies of 1573 can be outlined as follow: • De Cárdenas’s description of the process of evaluating and choosing the site for the new town to be reconstructed involves the criteria of ordinances 32-41 of the Laws of the Indies that consider the fertility of the soils, the health status, the quality of air, water, accesses by land by way of roads, etc. • Fijada la capacidad de los pueblos y su emplazamiento, viene el estudio de la ordenación (After having determined the size of the towns and their location, one must proceed with the study of the planning arrangement). This passage corresponds strongly to the ordinances 110-111 which read as follows: “Having made the 86 Angel Rama, p. 2. “The Ordered City” is the title of his first chapter. Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l’urbanisme: Renaissance et temps modernes, Paris: Henri Laurens, 1941, p.34. Also see Javier Salcedo Salcedo, Urbanismo Hispano-Americano Siglo XVI, XVII y XVIII: El modelo urbano aplicado a la América española, su genesis y su desarrollo teórico y práctico, Santafé de Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 1996; Javier Aguilera Rojas, Fundación de ciudades hispanoamericanas, Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1994; Fernando de Terán (ed.), El Sueño de un orden: la ciudad hispanoamericana, Madrid: CEHOPU, 1989. 87 216 discovery, selected the province, county, and area that is to be settled, and the site in the location where the new town is to be built, and having taken possession of it, those placed in charge of its execution are to do it in the following manner. On arriving at the place where the new settlement is to be founded… a plan for the site is to be made….”88 • El centro del pueblo será siempre la tradicional y genuina plaza mayor. Su plaza mayor, con soportales, en la que estén los edificios representativos del Ayuntamiento, del Estado y del Partido. De ella parten las calles que conducen a los lugares de trabajo del campo o de la industria. (The center of the town will always be the traditional and genuine plaza mayor. The plaza, with its arcades, is faced by the representative edifices of the Municipality, of the State, and of the Party). This prescription follows closely the text of the Laws (Ordinance 110): “On arriving at the place where the new settlement is to be founded… a plan for the site is to be made, dividing it into squares, streets, and building lots, using cord and ruler, beginning with the plaza mayor from which streets are to run to the gates and principal roads and leaving sufficient open space so that even if the town grows, it can always spread in the same manner.” Moreover, the ordinance 115 mentions the portals (“115. Around the plaza as well as along the four principal streets which begin there, there shall be portals, for these are of considerable convenience to the merchants who generally gather there….”).89 • Un segundo centro religioso, formado por la plaza de la Iglesia, con sus anexos de Casa Rectoral y Catequesis, Iglesia con torre, rematada con una cruz, bajo cuyos brazos abiertos se desenvuelva la vida futura del poblado (A second religious will consist of the plaza de la Iglesia, with its attached rectorate and catechesis house, its church and tower, dominated by a cross whose open arms will watch over the future life of the population). This recommendation corresponds to the ordinance 118 of the Law of the Indies, which requires that “Here and there in the town, smaller plazas of good proportion shall be laid out, where the temples associated with the principal church, the parish churches, and the monasteries can be built, ….” It must also be said that this duplication into two centers, one civil, one religious, was also historical 88 For the text of the Laws in English, I use the “Transcription of the Ordinances for the Discovery, the Population and the Pacification of the Indies, enacted by King Philip II, the 13th of July 1573, in the Forest of Segovia, according to the original manuscript conserved in the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla,” in Jean-François Lejeune, Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, p. 21 [pp. 18-23]. The source is the Spanish facsimile edition, El orden que se ha de tener en descubrir y poblar, transcripción de las ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias, dadas por Felipe II, el 13 de Julio en el Bosque de Segovia, según el original que se conserva en el Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla, Madrid: Ministerio de la Vivienda, 1973. 89 Ibidem. 217 evolution of Spanish cities, especially when the concept of the purely geometric plaza mayor was introduced in the 16th century.90 In actuality, one direct reference to the colonial model in Latin America was made by Francisco Echenique, architect of the reconstructed Montarrón (Guadalajara), who in an essay titled “Plazas mayores en las colonizaciones del Nuevo Mundo” published in 1942 made important remarks on the relation between the Laws of the Indies and the program of the D.G.R.D.: "There are many points of contact in the problems presented by the reconstruction of the pueblos of Spain and those that were offered to the colonizers of the New World at the dawn of the sixteenth century. In both cases there was a need to build new towns to replace the destroyed ones or found populations that were milestones of an Empire.“ 91 He commented on the plazas mayores of America, which “represent a new concept and respond to the most refined urbanistic instinct ... ”92 He expressed his thoughts on the individualism of the colonists, for whom ”the most important is the work and the farm, and the least important, housing”—a paradox given that the quality of the dwelling was at the forefront of the preoccupations of the architect-urbanists in charge of the projects.93 Nuevas Poblaciones (18th century) Another program of particular importance in the planning history of rural Spain was the Nuevas Poblaciones of Andalucía and the Sierra Morena. Put in place by Kind Carlos III from 1767, the plan of interior colonization had a primary objective. It was to secure the transit of travelers and merchandises along the Camino Real de Andalucía (between Madrid, Seville, and Cádiz) in some dangerous and unpopulated areas where attacks were frequent: the desert of Sierra Morena (Province of Jaén), the desert of La Parrilla between Córdoba and Écija, and the desert of the Monclova between Écija and Carmona. The foundation of rural towns and villages would not only increase the security but jumpstart the agricultural and preindustrial development of large territories, thus marking what could be considered the first large-scale program of interior colonization since the end of the Reconquista. Don Pablo Olavide was commissioned to direct the program that settled, with successes and failures, six thousand catholic German and Flemish as farmers and artisans in a series of new towns and hamlets.94 The ordinances of Nuevas Poblaciones gave little detail regarding the layout of the 90 Ibidem. Francisco Echenique, "Plazas mayores en las colonizaciones del Nuevo Mundo," Reconstrucción, III, no. 25, August-September 1942, p. 299 [299-310]: “Existen muchos puntos de contactos en los problemas que presenta la reconstrucción de los pueblos de España y los que se ofrecían a los colonizadores del Nuevo Mundo en los albores del siglo XVI. En ambos casos hubo necesitad de levantar pueblos nuevos para sustituir a los destruidos o fundar poblaciones que fueran jalones de un Imperio.” 92 Francisco Echenique, op. cit., p. 309: “constituyen una novedad y responden al más depurado sentido urbanístico…”. 93 Francisco Echenique, op. cit., pp. 305-306: lo principal es la labor y la hacienda y lo de menos la vivienda.” 94 Jordi Oliveras Samitier, Nuevas poblaciones en la España de la ilustración, Barcelona: Fundación Arquia, 1998; José L. García Fernández, Urbanismo español e hispanoamericano 1700/1808, Madrid: Ministerio de Vivienda, 2010; Cipriano Juárez Sánchez & Gregorio Canales Martínez Gregorio, 91 218 towns, but, in line with the eighteenth century rationalism and the experience of Latin America that Olavide knew well, being born in Lima and having worked on the reconstruction of the Peruvian capital after the earthquake of 1746, the towns were planned on irregular grid patterns with a plaza mayor of approximate square dimensions. The capital of La Carolina showed a strong Baroque influence, characterized with a regular grid, a strong axial organization in two directions, two rectangular plazas, two circular and one hexagonal plazas, and the presence of important fountains at both entrance of the main street. The other towns and villages were more informal and usually consisted a somewhat geometric nucleus of two or four blocks from which a small plaza would be carved out by removing the corners (La Isabela, Carboneros, Magaña). The poblaciones established in the province of Córdoba demonstrated that “the authorities of the Absolutist regime did not only intend to demonstrate the expression of the courtly splendor” but also reflected the “fundamental desire to improve the conditions of the country, to search for the well-being of their subjects, to attend to their matters with modern institutions of beneficence, to impulse commerce with good roads, to increase wealth with the development of the agriculture, to put into cultivation wasted fields and facilitate a better distribution of property.”95 The foundations of Andalusia reflected flawlessly those aspirations, with a generosity of ideas and spaces. Even in very small pueblos, the design of a simple terminated vista or the presence of a small hexagonally organized plaza gave “beauty and artistic dignity” to the most modest settlement. La Carlota as capital was the ultimate model: it featured an enclosed square plaza (averaging 50-meter square) terminating a short axis with the church and integrated in an unusually irregular grid. The real Baroque feature was usually the main road—becoming a street within the urbanized area—which was planned as a wide planted paseo or boulevard. The towns hosted all the public buildings and were surrounded by smaller hamlets located strategically in relation to the topography and the quality of the terrain. Houses were simple, usually two-story high with a central passage to lead to the patio/corral with one house or two dwellings on each side as in the town of El Arrecife. Agricultural workers got no corral but a simple house divided into two dwellings. This policy emphasized the colonization as concentration and urbanization in contrast to the dispersed habitat that was, in this period of Enlightenment, a synonym of poverty.96 Moreover, in contrast with existing towns and villages, the order that governed the planning of the towns—checkerboard or irregular grids, straight streets, geometric plazas, axis and double axis —could be identified with the process of urbanization. Urbanizing the countryside "Colonización agraria y modelo de habitat (Siglos XVIII-XIX)," . http://www.mapama.gob.es/ministerio/pags/biblioteca/revistas/pdf_ays/a049_09.pdf : 333-51. 95 Leopoldo Torres Balbas, Luis Cervera Vera, Fernando Chueca Goitia, and Pedro Bidagor, Resumen histórico del urbanismo en España, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local, 1954, and the chapter III by Chueca Goitia, “La época de los Borbones.” 96 Cipriano Juárez Sánchez and Canales Martínez Gregorio, “Colonización agraria y modelo de habitat (Siglos XVIII-XX),” at: . http://www.mapama.gob.es/ministerio/pags/biblioteca/revistas/pdf_ays/a049_09.pdf: p. 335. 219 eventually meant bringing the signs of order as expression of the Enlightenment and the desired modernization of the countryside under Carlos III. 3.6. The Reconstructed Towns: Grid and Plaza Mayor The codification of the reconstruction as interpreted from De Cárdenas text, its strong analogies with the Laws of the Indies and their physical resemblance to the Nuevas Poblaciones embodied a project of reconstruction and modernity that implied new practices of architecture and urbanism as much as a new way of life or new habits. Paradoxically, it was the destruction of the local order—the ravages of the Civil War and the decision to rebuild on the site but with a very different urban form or to move the town in a more favorable location—that sped up the process of modernization and the search for an urban form that would embody the new power of the State and the Church and be responsive to the functions and requirements of the modern bureaucratic structure. Within the Renaissance context of the early sixteenth century, urban modernity meant, not only to erase material evidence of unknown cultures and pagan religions and idols, but also to leave “behind the distribution of space and the way of life characteristic of the medieval Iberian cities, “organic” where they were born and raised, in favor of the “ordered city.”97 In similar fashion, four centuries later, one can thus logically argue that the post-Civil War reconstruction implied the erasure of the old organic village, not only destroyed by the war but also now considered as an unacceptable model for reconstruction. This process of eradication and modernization introduced a new order, based on a higher level of hygiene, the ease of circulation, the functionalism of the street network, and the improvement of the rural typologies. It represented the end of the organic historical process and its replacement by a clearly ordered product that would be a reflection and mirror of urban progress, with the avowed goal that the emigration toward the big centers would not be necessary or would not appear—at least for a decade or two—necessary for the socio-economic and cultural well-being of the residents. The modernization of the countryside was thus equivalent to its “urbanization,” intended as the process to bring to it the elements that made urban life easier and more comfortable. As the architect of the reconstruction of Guadarrama commented, “With these towns that the D.G.R.D. reconstructed, it can be said that the maximum aspiration to make ‘cities in the countryside’ has been achieved.”98 At the same time, it must be emphasized that the new rural order remained grounded on the concept of the tight community whose public spaces— the plaza, the streets, the arcades—remained critical to the daily life of the residents. In contrast with other urban strategies such as the garden city or garden district, which emphasized front gardens, setbacks, and landscape, the reconstruction—and in the following 97 Ángel Rama, p. 1. José Martínez Cubells, “Reconstrucción del pueblo de Guadarrama,” Reconstrucción, nº 23, May 1942, p. 210: “Con estos pueblos que reconstruye la Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas podrá decirse que se ha conseguido la aspiración máxima de hacer “Ciudades en el campo.” 98 220 chapter, the colonization—maintained the familiarity and the characteristics of the traditional urban spaces, albeit modernized. As in the colonies of America and the Peninsula, the geometric plan and the plaza were the effective solution to and the result of the political, religious, social, and bureaucratic needs of the new regime. In Franco’s Spain, the plaza mayor was to embody the political ideal of civil life under the national-catholic regime. The latter could be summarized in the triad family/work/town and it was logical that the plaza became the point of crystallization of the reconstructed urban context and of its ideological substrate. Once again, I will show in the following pages that the introduction of the geometric grid and the orderly plaza mayor marked another level of ‘urbanization of the countryside.’ Those morphological elements of the Spanish grammar of making cities were essentially associated with the city. Bringing them in the reconstructed countryside, and in the very place of the destroyed organic order, could not but be seen as a deliberate and strong spatial affirmation of Spanish national identity. Whereas the garden city model was proposed and used to “ruralize the city,” the traditional forms of city making were clearly applied to “urbanize the countryside.”99 Although the political ambitions of the program of reconstruction—and the parallel one of interior colonization—were quite obvious, it would be problematic to overemphasize the political motivations of the plaza at the center of the urbanization pattern. For centuries, the presence of the plaza mayor in the towns and cities of Spain had been a genuine cultural artifact that was indispensable to the Spanish way of life, as Erwin Gutkind has deftly commented: Above all, there was the greatest gift of Spanish city planning: the plaza mayor, which has no equivalent in other countries. It was the most accomplished expression of the longing for absorption of the isolated home life into the gregariousness of the street, an irresistible urge to make streets and squares open-air interiors.100 Selection of the site A study of the reconstructed towns, from the air but also as a townscape, confirms the reality of those “tratados genuinamente españoles” in the definition given by De Cárdenas. First, considering the small scale of the settlements—scale which was in many cases not substantially different from many foundations in America—the towns of the reconstruction could be read as one organic whole, clearly subordinated to the plaza mayor as the main focal center but not always at its geometric center. As such the plaza was the point of departure of the most important streets, and the secondary squares, if any, were clearly interconnected. Secondly, as the grid was the dominant morphology used in the reconstruction, perspective was fundamental for the design. There was no trace of the Baroque type of long axis, but short terminated vistas were a current feature of the planning. 99 See César Cort, Campos urbanizados y ciudades ruralizadas, Madrid: Yagües, 1941. Erwin Anton Gutkind, International History of City Development, Volume 3: Urban Development in Southern Europe, Spain & Portugal, New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1967, p. 291. 100 221 Thirdly, each reconstructed town had to abide with a very specific program, dealing not only with the number of houses but also with their ascribed typology. Likewise, the public programs were carefully defined and positioned, with the town hall, the church, and the sport fields among the most important. Based upon the analysis of the destruction patterns, the topography, the accessibility of the town to and from the fields, and other factors such as connection to main roads, the first decision was, either to rebuild the town on top of the ruins, or to relocate it and rebuild it at a certain distance from the past location. The first option was complex to achieve and was only implemented in five cases of complete reconstruction: Brunete (Madrid), Las Rozas (Madrid), Titulcia (Madrid), Majadahonda (Madrid), and Masegoso de Tajuña (Guadalajara). In case of partial destruction, this option was clearly the easier and most economical to achieve and was realized in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), Guadarrama (Madrid), Los Blazquez (Cordoba), Pitres (Granada), Teresa and Viver (Valencia), Hita (Guadalajara), Lopera (Jaén). The second option of total reconstruction in a new location was the most often implemented: Seseña (Madrid), Villanueva del Pardillo (Madrid), Villanueva de la Cañada (Madrid), Aravaca (Madrid), Belchite, Gajanejos, Montarrón, Llers and Masegoso (all in the province of Guadalajara), and Villanueva de la Barca (Lérida). The Grid In all regions, whether the town was entirely rebuilt adjacent to the destroyed settlement or superimposed over it, the orthogonal or, less frequently, a distorted grid (Titulcia, Llers) or a hybrid combination of two grids (Belchite) was the common feature of the reconstructed towns by the Department of the Devastated Regions. The gridded morphology strongly contrasted with the medieval, often irregular and chaotic, organization of the blocks and lots in the destroyed towns and cities. Streets were wider, straighter, usually planted and allowing for better movement of air and ventilation. The blocks were functionally oriented according to modern solar charts; they were divided and dimensioned to accommodate a limited number of housing typologies that fit the needs of the agricultural or industrial population. An efficient system of land redistribution, inspired from the Belgian experience of reconstruction after WWI, permitted this complicated process of urban re-platting or transfer of property rights from the destroyed area to the new town.101 However, the various grids of Brunete, Gajanejos, Montarrón, Villanueva del Pardillo, Villanueva de La Cañada and others eventually differed greatly from each other. The grids were not generic templates as in Latin America or in the Nuevas Poblaciones of Andalucía but quite idiosyncratic in terms of urban form, size and disposition of the lots. Architects used the terminated perspective very often, particularly within the interior of the town, whereas many streets opened to the countryside on its edges. Contrary to the Latin American or eighteenth century model, the grid was not systematically deployed with a system of identical 101 See José Moreno Torres, unpaginated. 222 blocks; indeed, the architects used the various typologies to vary the size and form of the blocks, thus creating more variety and less monotony. However, the regular grid was used in Titulcia (slightly curvilinear), in Masegoso, in Seseña Nuevo, and in a polygonal way in Llers. At the same time, the towns were built as if they were “a single edifice,” that had a limited and fixed size and reflected the precise quantitative conditions of the reconstruction project. When available, the precise models and perspective drawings drawn and built in the early 1940s allowed for the ‘vision from afar’ that eventually reinforced the finite and autonomous edge of the foundations. Accordingly, the revalorization of the town’s silhouette was a concept introduced by Pedro Bidagor. In his opinion, the peripheral blocks should acquire the characteristics of genuine urban façades, thus expressing, from the very outskirts, the essence of the town’s content and identity epitomized in the emergence of the reconstructed church tower. At the same time, the town edges provided spaces for new programs such as parks, sport fields, small hospitals, and other necessary amenities for modern life. In line with the anti-urban diatribes of the recent victory, Gutiérrez Soto wrote: We must think about giving the masses the means to entertain their hours outside of work, by means of spectacles and amusements for the youth, oriented in an instructive, moral and patriotic sense, and separating them from the pernicious influence of bars, cafes, taverns and other absurd places, which are unhygienic, decadent and immoral; to make man understand his role as a firm and vital agent of the transformation of the country, in which the human spirit affirms itself in collaboration with the forces of nature. We create sports and cultural circles, Casas de España that gather and guide the desires of our youth; we create healthy men of body and spirit, fit for work, for study and meditation.102 The plaza mayor Based upon the analysis of twenty fully or partially reconstructed towns across the whole territory of Spain, we can identify two major categories of plazas.103 The first one was the regular plaza mayor conceived as a highly geometric, symmetrical, and articulated ensemble, the type which will be indicated here as plaza mayor. The other and less frequent type consisted of a geometric but less rigid plaza, oftentimes made up of distinct and hierarchically diverse sections. Within both categories, even if the squares were placed on an axis, the latter was not necessarily the structuring element of the plan. Moreover, squares were often placed asymmetrically within the plan, most often than not in order to have a more direct 102 Luis Gutiérrez Soto, Sesiones de la I Asemblea, p. 52: “Hay que pensar en dar medios a las masas para entretener sus horas fuera del trabajo, por medio de espectaculos y diversiones propias de la juventud, orientadas en sentido instructivo, moral y patriótico, apartándole de la influencia perniciosa de bares, cafes, tabernas y demás lugares absurdos, por antihigiénicos, decadentes e inmorales; hacer sentir al hombre al convertirse en agente firme y vital de esta transformación del país, en los cuales el espíritu humano se afirma en colaboración con las fuerzas de la naturaleza. Creemos círculos deportivos y culturales, Casas de España que recojan y orienten los anhelos de nuestra juventud; creemos hombres sanos de cuerpo y de espíritu, aptos para el trabajo, para el estudio y la meditación.“ 103 This analysis does not constitute the entire spectrum of the reconstructions, but covers the most significant cases of new town planning. 223 access from the access roads and to open directly to the surrounding greenbelt and countryside. The geometric plaza mayor that appeared in Latin America, then in Spain during the reign of Philip II, was, by conception and functional organization, completely distinct of previous periods. 104 Following its destruction in a fire (1561), the plaza mayor of Valladolid was reconstructed as a large unified and arcaded rectangle, with the proportions proposed by Vitruvius and by the Laws of the Indies, i.e., 3 by 2 or in real size, 125 meters by 80 meters. From Valladolid, the type expended to Madrid, Salamanca, onwards to the 19th century. In the words of Antonio Bonet Correa, the plaza mayor “continued, with its unified space, to be the great urban theater, the place where the city, through time, conceptually recognized itself.”105 That new morphology of the Spanish plaza mayor was usually carved out of the urban fabric and separated from the main transit streets, in contrast to the Latin American model which was created by the simple removal of a block from the grid. Moreover the Latin American square had no axial relationship to the town. The 18th century plaza of the Nuevas Poblaciones was a Baroque version of the Latin American one as it was organized symmetrically around a central axis terminating with the church or a municipal building, a feature that was absent from the cities founded in Latin America but can be found in the towns of the Reconstruction. At the beginning of the war, when reconstruction was already a critical question for the future, D’Ors already discussed the type of square that would be most appropriate to be designed. For him, the Madrid-inspired plaza mayor was the most adapted type to the new and reconstructed towns: This traditional Spanish urban component, which achieved creations of such high beauty, can be adjusted to the needs of today's life and consolidated in the new environment … It adapts better than any other kind of plaza to public life and to the habits of our people ... The magnificent reconstruction that we foresee has to be carried out in a new architectural style, both Spanish and modern.106 Accordingly and in light of its appropriate reference to the “imperial” past, this type of square was predominantly used. In the region of Madrid, it can be found in Brunete, Villanueva del 104 Resumen histórico del urbanismo en España, Madrid: Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local, 1954, and the chapter II by Cervera Vera,“Epoca de las Austrias,” pp. 150-151. 105 Antonio Bonet Correa, Antonio, “Concepto de Plaza Mayor en España desde el siglo 16 hasta nuestros días,” Storia della città 15,nº 54-56, April-December 1990), p. 94: “con su espacio unificado continuó siendo el gran teatro, el lugar en donde la ciudad a través del tiempo, conceptualmente se reconocía a si misma.” 106 Victor d’Ors, “Hacia la reconstrucción de las ciudades de España,” in Vértice, June 1937, reprinted in Gabriel Ureña, Arquitectura u Urbanística Civil y Militar en el Período de la Autarquía (1936-1945) – Análisis, cronología y textos, Madrid: Ediciones ISTMO, op. cit., p. 252: “Este elemento urbano tradicional en España, que consiguió creaciones de tanta belleza, adaptado a las necesidades de la vida actual y refundido en el nuevo espíritu debe constituir el tipo de núcleo central en los centros cívicos. Se adapta mejor que cualquier otro género de plaza a la vida pública y a las condiciones de nuestro pueblo… Esta magna reconstrucción que preveemos tiene que realizarse en un estilo arquitectónico nuevo. A la vez español y moderno.” 224 Pardillo, Las Rozas, Majadahonda, and in Guadarrama in a somewhat more open configuration. Other examples in the Guadalajara and Lérida regions include Masegoso de Tajuña, Gajanejos, Montarrón, and Villanueva de la Barca, whereas the plans for Aravaca and did not materialize. The squares built in those reconstructed towns follow the model that d’Ors referred to, i.e., they form a geometrically defined square, usually symmetrical relatively to two orthogonal axes, enclosed with a continuous sequence of mixed-use buildings, two to three floor high, and arcaded on most sides.107 Most squares are U-shaped with shorter wings on the fourth side that allows for a larger entrance and open it toward the countryside. Their architecture is usually regular and integrates a public building as termination of one of the axis. In some cases, the building is a municipal one in the tradition of the Renaissance-born, municipal plaza mayor (Brunete, Las Rozas, Villanueva del Pardillo, Guadarrama). In other cases, it is the church that stands at the end of the entrance axis (Gajanejos, Montarrón). In many cases, the square is elevated on a small plinth with connecting steps; some squares are paved, others have a garden. However, in spite of their morphological connection to the historic type of plaza mayor, all those squares are fundamentally new and modern creations. Indeed, they are made up of thin “bar-like” structures, attached together and following a similar architectural order. They were not created by carving the square out of the fabric (Renaissance plaza mayor as in Madrid, Salamanca, or Valladolid) or by making the sides of the squares function like the edges of the adjacent blocks (Baroque type of the Nuevas Poblaciones). On the contrary, they appear within the city fabric as “articulated buildings.” To some extent, the square is a building—a forum as a building as Vitruvius defined it. 108 Historically, this mode of constructing a square was rare. The most representative examples come from Germany and, in particular, the Baroque form of square making that created the three squares of Friedrichstadt in Berlin (Pariserplatz, Leipzigerplatz, Rondellplatz) and other cities like Stuttgart and Dresden. In Spain, an interesting precedent for such a building-like plaza mayor is the Plaza Nueva of Vitória, built by Juan Antonio de Olaguibel (1781-1791), 65-meter square, with two stories over the arcaded ground floor. It is the best example of neo-classical square designed as a building and as a square together, isolated on the edge of the historic city core as a large urban object. Actually, the first half of the 20th century offers the most appropriate examples of the design method. As many of architects and planners of the reconstruction studied in Madrid under professors such as César Cort, Torres Balbás, and others, they were unambiguously aware of modern European planning, particularly of the Garden City movement, the Siedlung realizations of Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner in Germany, as well as the Fascist new towns in Italy. The horseshoe square of the Hufeisensiedlung (Berlin, Bruno Taut, 1926) and more 107 Victor d’Ors, op. cit. On issues of typology in Fascist new towns, see Jean-François Lejeune, “Guidonia città aerofuturista: A Fascist and Rationalist Company Town“ in Proceedings of ACSA International Conference 1997—Architecture as Politics, Washington DC, ACSA, 1998, pp. 73-78. 108 225 importantly the new foundations of Sabaudia and Aprilia and under Mussolini exhibited, albeit in a very different language and morphology, the strategy of creating a square by manipulating and assembling simple linear and thin buildings. The manner with which Luigi Piccinato and his colleagues used the thin bars typical of the Modern Movement to create well-defined public spaces was unique and distinguished their works from most of their European counterparts during the period. They shaped modern public spaces in a typologically new way, i.e., not as carved spaces out of a dense fabric but as skillful assemblages and articulations of thin and interconnected linear buildings. In the context of the Reconstruction, the morphological modernity of the squares was, to some extent, masked by the architectural references to classical precedents, or to what early critics and historians of the period qualified as “imperial” aspirations. The plazas built in the periphery of Madrid with Brunete as its symbolic center were built in the classical style, the one seen in this first phase of the dictatorship, as the most appropriate to define the grandeur and unity of Spain. The Escorial and the historic plaza mayor became the paradigm of the very first years of the Reconstruction. To some extent, the Escorial was “vernacularized” and the first reconstructed squares appeared like a modernized recreation of the late sixteenth century classical type later established by the same Juan de Herrera in Valladolid. Yet, if one considers that the Herrerian style relies on a use of materials such as stone and brick, a detailed analysis reveals that only three towns—Brunete, Las Rozas, and Guadarrama— responded to that definition. For all the other reconstructed squares—see Villanueva del Pardillo, Villanueva de la Cañada, Titulcia, etc.—the architects adopted a more vernacular language and, in particular, the application of white stucco, at times outlined on the building angles with other materials. These differences in architectural language were particularly noticeable between two towns planned and built at the same time in the same area near Madrid, Brunete and Villanueva del Pardillo: the Herrerian one in the first case, a vernacularized version in the second whose architecture bore much similarity with the cover drawing of the Arquitectura issue of October 1934 dedicated to the results of the 1932 competition. As Diego Reina de la Muela argued, “an imperial style, though founded in an unique and essential idea, may present a grand plastic variety, or, simultaneously, as accidental forms of the same mode of expression, or through the influence of progressist factors: the communications, the technical progress, and the changes in ways of life….”109 Other Squares In order to understand the other morphologies and their differences with the plaza mayor type, it is important to distinguish between the squares that were created anew and those that were partially reconstructed. The first group includes Villanueva de la Cañada, Titulcia, Seseña Nuevo, Llers, and Belchite, all examples where the square was planned geometrically as a different type of place than the examples just studied. The second group 109 Diego Reina de la Muela, “Divagaciones arquitectónicas – los imperios y su estilo," Reconstrucción, nº 23, Mayo 1942, p. 194. 226 consists of Pitres, Teresa, Viver, Hita, and Los Blazquez. In all those cases, the square displayed a hybrid morphology resulting of the reconstruction and transformation of an existing public space. In Belchite, Villanueva de la Cañada, and Titulcia, the main square presents a L-shaped form, arcaded on the ground floor, and usually up to two or three floors containing retail, dwellings, and administrative spaces. In most cases, the square was slightly elevated on a plinth, thus contributing to spatially enclosing the space. In Belchite, the L-shaped plaza contains the town hall; within the gentle curving grid of Titulcia, the town hall and the rebuilt church form the square.110 In Llers, the original masterplan made extensive use of bar-buildings to define not one but three very different plazas, yet only one square was built as a three-sided juxtaposition of a church and two groups of rowhouses. The original project for Villanueva de la Cañada was a hybrid version of the square as a building but eventually was not built. The existing and elegant square consists of three separate buildings or groups of buildings articulated as an irregular U around a slightly elevated public garden on one side of the main road. As for Masegoso and Los Blazquez, the squares are essentially open and rectangular, with free movement of traffic on some or all of their sides, and a large public space in the center. Finally, it must be noted that De Cárdenas’s injunction to separate the main church from the new Francoist civic square was very often part of the original project, but many masterplans (Villanueva de la Cañada, Gajanejos, Aravaca are good examples) turned out to be too complex to implement. In Brunete, Las Rozas and Villanueva del Pardillo, the church was reconstructed in its original location and separated from the plaza mayor; likewise in Montarrón, the plaza mayor was left incomplete with the town hall on the main axis, but the church maintained its location on a separate axis. The same situation is to be found in Gajanejos where the church was constructed on the side of the plaza mayor and attached to the town hall, which terminates the entrance axis. In Belchite, the church stands on the side of the civic plaza, but connects to its own elevated public space. In many cases, particularly those related to the Madrid region and Castile in general, the church was placed independently from the square even though a visual connection was usually maintained. In Llers, Pitres, and Los Blazquez, the church faces the square directly. From an architectural point of view, none of the examples within this second category displayed the “new-Herrerian” image, a reality that demonstrates that the so-called “imperial” vision established in Brunete and the northern ring of towns around Madrid was essentially regional in vision and origin. Once distant from the center of power and the reference of the Escorial in proximity, the architects developed new forms that reflected the vernacular of the 110 The plaza is in fact part of a larger block which contains some houses and the school; the school recreation grounds and the garden behind the church form a second square within the block. 227 region, including in the architectural expression of the town hall, as can be seen in Villanueva de la Cañada, Titulcia, Seseña, and the reconstructed towns in Andalusia.111 3.7. National or Foreign Influences As we have just seen in this section, the morphological study unambiguously shows that the towns of the Reconstruction were absolutely Spanish creations. In particular, I have demonstrated that the use of the grid and the model of the enclosed square—plaza mayor— were definitive reflections of Spanish urban history and form. In my opinion, the intellectual position taken on this matter by Carlos Sambricio cannot be maintained. Although he was one of the first historians to recognize the importance of the Reconstruction led by the D.G.R.D., one of his arguments was to deny the authenticity and reality of the Spanish sources and to emphasize the process of borrowing and adapting foreign forms, which, as we have just seen, were authentically Spanish: “In the layout of cities, the design of a finished and organic city is of Central European influence; the civic center, converted into a hierarchical center, where the church, the town hall, the social services and the Guardia Civil barracks are grouped, derives from the Italian schemes, and the housing studies have as reference the work of architects before the war, reflection of a republican tradition.”112 In other instances, Sambricio made reference to the rural population centers designed by Sverre Pedersen as well as the plans for the Die neue Stadt (1939) by Gottfried Feder.113 Those plans were well known to Spanish architects and urbanists as they were published in German periodicals like Der Städtebau or Baumeister, which were the primary reference for the Madrid circles.114 Undoubtedly, the organic city proposed by Pedro Bidagor—and in particular his concept of the autonomous neighborhoods (órganos) interconnected by green fingers and economically linked to the countryside—showed direct influences from Northern European examples, from 111 This commentary is quite critical, given that the average opinion is the opposite. See Serrano, p. 80. Quote taken from F. Samaniego, “Debate sobre las iníluencias alemanas e italianas en los proyectos urbanos del franquismo", El País, 7 febrero 1987, at the occasion of the exhibition Arquitectura en Regiones Devastadas. Sambricio is correct when he mentions the Republican origins of the dwelling studies, which contributes to the weakness of his argument. The Reconstruction is a Spanish process. Sambricio has also made serious arguments regarding the German influences on Pedro Bidagor’s Plan for Madrid: “En el trazado de las ciudades, el diseño de ciudad acabada y orgánica es de influencia centroeuropea; el centro cívico, convertido en centro jerárquico, donde se agrupan la iglesia, el ayuntamiento, los servicios sociales y el cuartel de la Guardia Civil procede de los esquemas italianos, y los estudios sobre viviendas tienen como referencia la obra de arquitectos anteriores a la guerra, reflejo de una tradición republicana.” 113 Carlos Sambricio, “On Urbanism in the Early Years of Franquism,” in Harald Bodenschatz, Piero Sassi and Max Welch Guerra (eds.), Urbanism and Dictatorship – a European Perspective, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2015, pp. 117-34. 114 In his article “Hermann Jansen y el concurso de Madrid de 1929” in Arquitectura 303 (1995): 8-15, Carlos Sambricio demonstrated the high readership of German periodicals such as Baumeister in Spain from the late 1920s. It is important to remember that Albert Speer presented the exhibition of the new German architecture in Madrid in 1941. The connection with Italy was equally important, particularly through the figure of Marcello Piacentini. According to historian Lluís Domènech, this “contradiction” resulted in fact into a long lasting but covert internal conflict between proponents of the populist trend and supporters of rationalist criteria closer to the Nordic and German experiments of the 1920s. 112 228 Theodor Fritsch to Bruno Taut to Gottfried Feder. 115 Those schemes were somewhat interchangeable and deployed neo-Baroque features common to the Garden City movement, the presence of a higher density core, a semi-radial layout, wide landscaped axes, and a welldefined neighborhood structure tied together by a system of parks. Interestingly, the new town of Afuleh in Palestine, designed by Richard Kauffmann in the mid-1920s, anticipated most of Feder’s proposals, both in terms of general urban design layout and its neighborhood structure. To some extent, this was a logical consequence of the predominance of German urban design theory and practice in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is also a demonstration that the references carried by Bidagor’s projects were fundamentally related to the contemporary culture of urban design more than any specific ideological influence on Francoist planning during the first phase of the dictatorship.116 International exchanges of planning ideas and concepts were very important both before and after WWII, thanks to international actors such as Raymond Unwin and Werner Hegemann. Spain did not differ and logically adopted the most recognized urban practices. On the one hand, it must be said that the civic centers mentioned by Sambricio and that were to articulate the organic districts in the Plan Bidagor did not follow the Italian or German patterns, but were precisely modeled on the modernized concept of the homogenous, dense and urban plaza mayor. On the other hand, even though the cities of the Reconstruction presented very variable geometries and did not respond to a urban design template as simple as the one in Latin America and the Nuevas Poblaciones, the deployed forms of rational planning by the D.G.R.D. architects had no or very little connection with Italian experiments in the new towns of the 1930s, or Central European and Scandinavian plans by Feder, Pedersen, et al.117 Their limited size, the absence of suburban typologies and the equal density from center to periphery, as well as their enclosed plazas mayores were all features that could not be found in those international examples and were arguably the result of Spanish tradition and culture. 115 See Gottfried Feder, Die neue Stadt ; Versuch der Begründung einer neuen Stadtplanungskunst aus der sozialen Struktur der Bevölkerung, Berlin Springer, 1939: Gottfried Feder, one of the original members of the National Socialist German Workers’s Parti, published a 480-page volume titled Die neue Stadt where he proposed and showed the design for model cities of 20000 residents organized as groupings of smaller agricultural districts that ranged from 3000 to 5000 people. Each city was to be fully autonomous and self-sufficient, with precise detailed plans for daily living and urban amenities. Feder’s new city was founded on the decade-old concept of unifying the city and the village. Its core would be urban and concentrate public buildings and apartments, whereas single-family houses would make up the agricultural neighborhoods. Eventually the design became the staple for Himmler’s Guidelines for the Planning and Design of Cities in the Annexed German Territories in the East. This policy was put into action in the middle of the war under the direction of Konrad Meyer, head of the SS planning division. It resulted in modern slavery, devastating massacres and genocide, but no real urban realizations. Based upon the central place theory by Walter Christaller, Die neue Stadt was instrumental in projects for regional planning across Germany after 1945 as well as for the reconstruction of Japan (cfr. Carola Hein, “Visionary Plans and Planners,” in Nicolas Fiévé and Paul Waley (eds.), Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power, and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo, London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003. 116 Nevertheless it is important to recall the exhibition of National-Socialist architecture that was presented in Madrid and Barcelona in 1942: see for instance Francesc Vilanova I Vila-Abadal, “Bajo el signo de la esvástica. La Exposición de Arquitectura Moderna alemana en España (1942),” in Diacronie – Studi di storia contemporanea, nº 18, 2/2014, accessed on the internet (November 2018) at https://journals.openedition.org/diacronie/1521 117 See Chapter 5 and the discussion of foreign influences on the I.N.C. 229 Details in some plans (most often unrealized as the radial system proposed in Brunete) were common features of the garden city, but they were very rare and accessory to the overall urban form. As for the plaza as civic center, we have shown that the squares of the Reconstruction were clearly influenced by historic examples of historic colonization. If there was a formal relation between the towns of the reconstruction and the Fascist new towns, it was, as I explained earlier, similar mode of defining urban space with new typologies. A case in point is the article published in Reconstrucción of June-July 1950, signed by that the Peruvian architect and urbanist Emilio Harth-Terré (1899-1983), who defended the “Cartesian ideal” in urban design, basing his reasoning upon the Discours de la Méthode by Descartes. For the architect, the “ideal of geometry and orthogonal order” was under attack and that a “new geometry of curves and loops” were increasingly seen as “a pseudo-modern solution for the layout of the new cities.”118 Harth-Terré proposed that the virtues of rational planning as “lieu commun” be rethought and refreshed, as Miguel de Unamuno suggested to be the best way to free ourselves from inertia. Harth-Terré recognized the importance of Camillo Sitte but rejected its traditional interpretation, arguing for a renewal of rational order, for the “modernity of Descartes,” and insisting on the significance of Latin American cities. It was probably not a coincidence that his article in Reconstrucción was followed by the presentation of Masegoso de Tajuña, perhaps the closest example of a rational new town according to the Latin American model. In the towns of the Reconstruction, entirely regulated by geometry in contrast to the parallel experience of the colonization, there was no declared attempt to produce picturesque effects. For Joaquín Vaquero, the picturesque value of the traditional village was essentially linked to the anarchy of a construction and transformation process, which often took place over centuries. In other cases, quite frequent, the topography was the cause of the picturesque appearance of the town. Hence it would not be adequate to pursue, in the reconstruction of the devastated regions, the same type of picturesqueness. He argued in favor of a more balanced beauty, coupled to a major social purpose: “It will be necessary to pursue another kind of beauty, more balanced, achieved by the rational organization of constructions and free spaces, adapting the whole to the climate and landscape of each place and to the means of life not only of each town, but also to the future … and at the same time with a better social purpose ... after studying the right type of room and the general layout, defining the situation of public buildings, ... well subject the plan to these already invariable conditions, we still have some slack to move lines, volumes and colors; work that would be necessary to do always in the field and on the progress of the work, as painting a picture.”119 118 Harth-Terré 1950, p. 185. Emilio Harth-Terré was a prominent Peruvian architect and researcher, historian of ancient, colonial and republican Peruvian art, urban planning theorist. An expert in urban planning, he was very involved in the development of Lima. As an architect he was involved in the reconstruction of the Palacio Municipal of Lima, as well as in the restoration of various historic buildings in the colonial center. 119 Joaquín Vaquero Palacios, “Pintoresquismo en la Reconstrucción," Reconstrucción, nº 17, November 1941, p. 12: Será necesario perseguir otra clase de belleza, más equilibrada, lograda por la 230 In 1950, Cecilio Barberán, a writer and art critic, wrote an interesting essay titled “El concepto de lo cinematográfico en las construcciones urbanas modernas.”120 Illustrating the essay with images of the reconstruction of Guernika, Las Rozas, Guadarrama, the Zocodover in Toledo, Almería, Guadix and Belchite, he wrote: Architecture has been captured by the cinematographic dynamism. Most neighborhoods and towns in construction nowadays in the regions of the Peninsula appear like movies sets, through which the architect can show to the world the singular character that distinguishes each of those people: nothing more joyful, more replete of gleaming whiteness than the small Andalusian houses; more nostalgic and more majestic than the residences of the northern regions; more suggestive of quiet sturdiness and peace than new constructions in the Castilian country. Who inspired these works? Without doubt the movie pictures, the mentors of the synthesis and dynamism of modern life; these are the cities of the “movies epoch. (…) We do not ignore that these works have a lot of detractors. Suffice to us to record their existence, anticipating the attention that scholars of the future will likely give to the urbanistic enterprise of our time.”121 3.8. Typology and style Carlos Sambricio was one of the first to dismantle the comfortable myth of a fundamental rupture between the Republican period and Franco’s regime.122 He put into question the studies led in the 1960s by Oriol Bohigas, Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, or Antonio Fernández Alba, who argued that the architecture of the 1930s had been marked by an orthodox avantgarde, which was culturally monolithic, formally coherent, and politically correct.123 He argued that the different architectural options proposed at the beginning of the 1940s were “the fruitful outcome of heterogeneous ideas, whose gestation can be traced back to the decade preceding the Civil War.”124 Likewise, in an important article of 1976, Ignasi de Sola-Morales wrote that the Spanish situation of the immediate post-Civil War corresponded in fact to a “reinterpretation of the methodological postulates and goals of the ‘principles of modern ordenación racional de construcciones y espacios libres, adaptando el todo al clima y paisaje de cada lugar y al medio de vida no solamente actual de cada pueblo, sino también al futuro….y a la par con mejor finalidad social… después de estudiar el tipo de habitación adecuada y el trazado general, definiendo situación de edificios públicos, … bien sujeto el plan a estas condiciones ya invariables que se establezcan, aun tenemos una cierta holgura para mover líneas, volúmenes y colores; labor que sería necesario hacer siempre en el terreno y sobre la marcha de la obra, como se pinta un cuadro. 120 Cecilio Barberán, “El Concepto de lo cinematográfico en las construcciones urbanas modernas,” Reconstrucción, nº 97, January 1950, pp. 23-30. 121 Ibidem. 122 See for instance Carlos Sambricio, “L'architecture espagnole entre la Deuxième République et le Franquisme,” in Les années 30 – L'architecture et les arts de l'espace entre industrie et nostalgie, Paris, Editions du patrimoine, 1997, p. 181. 123 Ibidem. 124 Ibidem. 231 architecture,’ [mostly] in matters of housing.” 125 The autarchic regime inherited both the situation and the ideology based upon the social-democratic reformism of Germany and Central Europe: building in the periphery, cooperativism, architectural alternative to the bourgeois residence both in terms of type and methods of construction, modernization and rationalization of the urban and rural dwelling, as well as state and municipal control on the urban and rural development.126 In April 1939 the National Institute of Housing / Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda (I.N.V.) was created under the direction of the engineer Federico Mayo Gayarre with José Fonseca as director of architecture. This appointment signaled a high degree of continuity with the preCivil War Republican strategy. In particular, Fonseca’s interest for the study and evolution of the rural dwelling was now institutionalized and codified as essential references for the work of the D.G.R.D. and later in the 1940s of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. The same year, the I.N.V. enacted the Ordenanzas de la Vivienda, a set of regulations based upon preCivil War research that established all technical conditions necessary for the new rural dwelling unit and colonist house, including number and dimensions of rooms, orientation, preferred materials, and ventilation systems.127 The D.G.R.D. adopted the ordinances of the I.N.V. and as a result the projects was strictly regulated. Floor areas, floor to ceiling heights, openings, and building types were standardized. Likewise, all basic constructive elements like windows, bars, balconies, and urban furniture were also codified and most of the times their construction was standardized. Houses were rationally conceived behind a vernacular mask. Generally speaking, the types, whether urban or rural, were the equivalent of the typical modern apartment type in the Siedlungen of Germany, with thin buildings and all rooms lighted and ventilated. At the Second Assembly of Architects of 1940, Fonseca explained the ordinances as both economic and architectural tools, while criticizing some of the modernist principles advocated before the Civil War: Writing ordinances is something that is fundamental in Spain. We have no objection that the struggle between economy and minimum welfare should be required for [rural] housing…. We have tried to look for the minimum comfort; in order that homes have a technical isolation that ensures that they can be lived in winter and in summer (...) We have reduced, above all, and this has been a real fight against the spirit that was there before, the dimension of windows.128 125 Ignasi de Sola-Morales, “La arquitectura de la vivienda en los años de la Autarquia, 1939-1953,” in Arquitectura 199, April 1976, p. 20. 126 Ignasi Sola-Morales, p. 22. 127 José Fonseca, Director of the National Institute of Housing, was an important link between the preCivil War era and the reconstruction: see among others José Fonseca, “La vivienda rural en España: estudio técnico y jurídico para una actuación del Estado en la material,” Arquitectura XVIII, nº 1, 1936, pp. 12-24. On the Housing Ordinances of 1939, see Manuel Calzada Pérez, “La vivienda rural en los pueblos de colonización,” PH. Boletín del Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico XIII, nº 52 (2005): 55-67; Ignacio de Sola-Morales, “La Arquitectura de la Vivienda en los Años de la Autarquia, 19391953,” in Arquitectura 199, April 1976, pp. 19-30. 128 Quoted from Fonseca, 1940, in ph52, Calzada Pérez, p. 059. 232 Designers systematically documented the architectonic elements of tradition (ironwork, balconies, doors, arches, etc.), and catalogued the different typologies in relation to the climate and other regional characteristics. At the same event of 1940, De Cárdenas makes clear the logic and rationality of the typological decisions: These buildings and the dwellings will shape the general masterplan. Different types of houses will be studied, according to the function and profession of the families that should inhabit them. It is important to remember that each region has its characteristic type of housing, which depends, most of the time, on the kind of cultivation of the land. The houses will always consist of, as a minimum, of the kitchen-dining room and three bedrooms, so that there may be a proper separation of sexes.129 This scientific labor was supported by a series of essays in Reconstrucción, the periodical that the D.G.R.D. published between 1940 and 1956 and, in spite of its propagandistic overtones, provided a well-documented review of the entire program. The 130 monthly issues of the periodical published detailed plans of major reconstruction projects and photographic reportages of the process of planning and construction. Examples of modern or foreign architecture were relatively few, but over the years, the editors increased their geographic gaze, particularly toward the end of the 1940s, in an obvious reflection of the changing nature of the architectural debate.130 Whereas the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura of the early 1940s emphasized the urban endeavors of the regime, Reconstrucción emphasized narrative and photographic essays about popular architecture, which relied heavily on the seminal texts produced before the war, such as La casa popular (García Mercadal), Arquitectura civil española (Victor Lampérez), La vivienda popular en España (Torres Balbás). The focus was regional and corresponded to the decentralization of the Department into regional offices across the country. Clearly, the message was not, as Mercadal or Sert would have it in the 1930s, to use the rural vernacular to develop a modern Spanish architecture, but rather to make traditional architecture the expression of the new regime. This direction was exemplified in the beautifully drawn construction details, realized using the same graphic technique, and that were published on a quasi-monthly basis and printed on special paper within the periodicals. Their function, beyond documentation, was to serve as direct source of linguistic material for the architects of the Dirección General.131 129 Quoted by De Terán, Planeamiento, p. 138 from Gustavo de Cárdenas, “La Reconstrucción Nacional vista desde la DGRD,” II Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectura, Madrid, 1941, pp. 145-55, here p. 151. 130 See Chapter Four. 131 See for instance, Gonzalo de Cárdenas, “Arquitectura popular española. La casa,” Reconstrucción I, nº 8, 1941; Gonzalo de Cárdenas, "Arquitectura popular española. Las cuevas," Reconstrucción I, February 1941; Gonzalo de Cárdenas, “Arquitectura Popular Española. La casa de un pueblo andaluz," Reconstrucción II, nº 10, March 1941, pp. 26-34; Alejandro Allánegui, "Arquitectura popular del Alto Pirineo Aragonés,” Reconstrucción II, nº 11, April 1941, pp. 15-28; Gonzalo de Cárdenas, “Arquitectura Popular Española. Las casas en la montaña leonesa," Reconstrucción II, nº 18, December 1941, pp. 310; Francisco Prieto Moreno, "Arquitectura Popular Mediterránea: Mojácar," Reconstrucción III, nº 19, January 1942, Francisco Prieto Moreno, “La vivienda en Andalucía Oriental,” Reconstrucción, nº 30; José Rodríguez Mijares, "Arquitectura popular en Ibiza," Reconstrucción V, nº 40, February 1944, pp. 233 In the first years following the Civil War, Pedro Muguruza Otaño, actual director of the Dirección General de Arquitectura, led a major research and documentation team to investigate the traditional pueblos de pescadores [fishermen’s villages] along the thousands of kilometers of Spanish coasts and islands.132 Published in three volumes (1942-1946) of exceptional graphic quality and density, the Plan Nacional de los Poblados de Pescadores studied the fisherman’s dwelling and the urbanism of the pueblos along the entire Spanish littoral.133 Texts, photographs, urban plans, figure grounds, and typological studies (plans, sections, elevations) provided a completely new mode of representation of a vernacular environment that had not been studied as well as the interior of the country—in the words of Sambricio, “a grand catalogue that summarized a singular part of Spanish architectural history.”134 During the process of documentation, a series of projects for new fishermen’s districts were studied, published, and partially implemented.135 Rationalism Period aerial photographs clearly make explicit the strong correspondence between the rational town layout and the housing typologies. A limited amount of party-wall types, generally with a patio or corral enclosed by high walls, established the fabric of the towns. In order of decreasing size, they were destined for farm owners, farm administrators, and agricultural workers. Other special types were planned around the squares and at some significant street corners, often with commercial ground floors. Those same views and plans show how the repetition of the types created an urban fabric that alluded to a quasimechanization of the typologies. Plans and volumes reveal that, behind the familiar and reassuring vernacular and regionalist architecture, the designers expressed a clear awareness of Spanish urban history and modern European planning. The result was, in some 53-60: “espíritu de maravilloso primitivismo” (p. 53), José María Ayxelá, “Arquitectura Popular Española. La vivienda modesta en Cataluña," Reconstrucción IV, nº 38, December 1943, pp. 421-26. 132 As early as 1918-19, Muguruza published a series of essays on the rural constructions in the Basque country, see Pedro Muguruza, "Las construcciones civiles en el País Vasco", en Arquitectura, nº 7, Año I, noviembre 1918, pp. 199-202; Construcciones civiles. I Congreso de Estudios Vascos. Bilbao, Bilbaína de Artes Gráficas, 1919, pp. 772-773. 133 AA.VV under the direction of Pedro Muguruza, Plan de mejoramiento de la vivienda en los poblados de pescadores, 3 vols, Madrid: Dirección General de Arquitectura, 1942-46. 134 Carlos Sambricio, Cuando se quiso resucitar la arquitectura, Murcia:Comision de Cultura del Colegio Oficial de Aparejadores y Arquitectos Tecnicos/Consejeria de Cultura y Educacion de la Comunidad Autonoma, 1983, pp. 220-221: “un gran catálogo que resumía una parte singular de la historia de la arquitectura española.” 135 See for instance Pedro Muguruza Otaño, “Proyecto de poblado. Residencia de pescadores en Fuenterrabia. Arquitecto Pedro Muguruza," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura 2, nº 10-11, 1942; Carlos de Miguel, "Poblado de pescadores en Maliaño," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura 2, nº 10-11, 1942; "Anteproyecto de poblados de pescadores en Pasajes de San Pedro, Pasajes de San Juan, Orio, Guetaria, y Motrico," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura II, nº 10-11, 1942; "Poblado de pescadores en Moaña (Pontedra), " Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 21-22, 1943, pp. 328-32; "Poblado de pescadores en Lequeitio," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 21-22, 1943, pp. 333-35; Carlos López Romero, “Proyecto de poblado de pescadores en Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz)," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura IV, nº 42, June 1945; Pedro Muguruza Otaño, "Grupo de casas para pescadores en Fuenterrabia," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura VII, nº 64, April 1947. 234 sense, the expression of a fruitful compromise within the administration of Regiones Devastadas, between a rather populist architectural trend and the application of rationalist criteria applied to the urban form of the new settlements.136 Moreover, those new building types—and this is valid for the D.G.R.D. as well as for the INC as we will see in Chapter Five—applied the concept of modern functionalism to an extreme rarely achieved elsewhere in Europe at that time. First of all, the modern Spanish rural house was not only a house, but rather a productive unit. Based upon years of discussion during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the Second Republic—see for instance in Chapter 2 the analysis of the competition of 1932—the rural house was seen as a fundamental element of the productive system: The essence of the rural housing technique of Devastated Regions—that is, of the articulation between certain conceptions and mentalities and their practical expression through the project—falls within a broad functionalist vision, where the interest in the rationality of the plan converges with a concern of geographical particularity and agronomic economy already outlined in previous years [before the Civil War].137 To some extent, the rural house served as a mini-farm, absolutely essential to the functioning of an agricultural system that rejected the isolated farm within the fields and promoted it as part of an urban core, complete with its patio, corral, grain storage, etc. Animals, machines, food, and all sorts of material were kept in the corral, which could also serve as productive garden. Contrary to the organization and economy of the large city that implied a separation of work from home (with exceptions of professional groups and small commercial owners), the modern village implied that dwelling and working were intricately interconnected. The patio house and its typological variations were the instruments of such as functional economy and system. The depth and the width of the lot implied a typological and dimensional systematization, which searched for the maximum functionality within the assigned budget. 138 In an article of Reconstrucción published in 1941, de Cárdenas exposed its conception of the rural dwelling, a product of region and function: [The rural house is] the reflection of people's way of life, of their needs and their work; it responds to the physical conditions of the locality [...], the climate, the materials of 136 Ignacio de Sola-Morales, "La arquitectura de la vivienda en los años de la autarquía, 1939-1953,” Arquitectura 199, April 1976, pp. 19-30. 137 José Rivero Serrano, "Regiones Devastadas: figuración, morfología y tipología," in Carlos Sambricio (ed.), La Vivienda Protegida, Madrid: Ministerio de la Vivienda, 2009, p. 86: “Lo esencial de la técnica de la vivienda rural de Regiones Devastadas—esto es, de la articulación entre determinadas concepciones y mentalidades y su plasmación práctica por medio del proyecto—cae pues dentro de una visión funcionalista amplia, donde el interés por la racionalidad de la planimetría confluye con una preocupación de particularidad geográfica y de economicismo agronómico ya esbozados en años anteriores.” 138 Ibidem. 235 the country and the constructive means. It is an integral part of our agricultural economy … an instrument of work.”139 “Tiempo productivo” and “Tiempo Histórico “ In an interview realized late in his career by Juan Daniel Fullaondo for the periodical Nueva Forma, Luis Gutiérrez Soto summarized the stylistic directions that the architects agreed to follow during the first years of the new regime: first, an architecture directly inspired from the popular and regional traditions of the countryside, and secondly, a more formal, even though simple, architecture to be used for the State architecture inspired by Juan de Villanueva and the Escorial: During the war we came back to Spain again, to its battlefields, along its roads, in the drama and beauty of its towns and its Castilian churches, and we feel more than ever the full weight of the glory of a tradition and a history that, unfortunately, we had almost forgotten. Logically, at the end of our war, at the time of the reconstruction, this nationalist and traditionalist sentiment prevailed over all other considerations; two trends marked this period: one was based on popular and regional traditions, and the reconstruction of the destroyed villages; another was inspired by the architecture of the Habsburgs and Villanueva, and found in the Escorial a precursor of simplicity, that mark the path of a purely Spanish architecture of the State, exact exposure of the spiritual and political feeling of the nation.140 Gutiérrez’s comments about the “rediscovery” of the countryside and its architecture were, to some extent, inaccurate. I have shown, in Chapter First, how critical the study, documentation, and dissemination of the vernacular had shaped the architectural discourse and practice of the first decades of the twentieth century, from the regionalist movement to the vernacular as source of modernity in the case of Mercadal and the GATEPAC. The vernacular architecture was a major component of the movement of the casas baratas and it 139 Gonzalo de Cardenas, “Arquitectura popular española. La casa,” Reconstrucción 8, 1941, p. 116: “…reflejo del modo de vivir de las gentes” de sus necesidades y de su trabajo, y responde a las condiciones físicas de la localidad [ ... ], al clima, a los materiales del país y a los medios constructivos. It is “una parte integrante de nuestra economía agrícola..., un instrumento de trabajo.” The essay that introduced a series of “regional studies” of rural housing also masked a contradiction between the socalled “innate talent” of the campesino and the deplorable conditions that were reported everywhere. 140 Declaration to architect Juan Daniel Fullaondo, in Nueva Forma, December 1971, also collected in La obra de Luis Gutiérrez Soto, Madrid: COAM, 1978: “Durante los tres años de duración de nuestro Movimiento Nacional, este sentimiento nacionalista fue incrementándose, hasta culminar en la más bella exaltación de nuestros sentimientos históricos y tradicionales. En la guerra volvimos a conocer nuevamente España, en sus campos de batalla, en el andar de sus caminos, en el dramatismo y belleza de sus pueblos y de sus iglesias castellanas, y sentimos más que nunca todo el peso de la gloria de una tradición y de una historia que, por desgracia, casi habíamos olvidado. Lógicamente, al fin de nuestra guerra, a la hora de la reconstrucción, este sentimiento nacionalista y tradicionalista se impuso a toda otra consideración; dos tendencias marcan este periodo, una se apoya en las tradiciones populares y regionales, en la reconstrucción de pueblos destruidos, y otra, que inspirándose en la arquitectura de los Austrias y de Villanueva, y en el Escorial como precursor de la sencillez, ha de marcar el camino de una arquitectura estatal netamente española, exposición exacta del sentimiento espiritual y político de la nación... porque a fuerza de sinceros, sentimos como un poder obsesionante de hacer una arquitectura ´Así´, a la española, en abierto contraste con aquella otra que nuestros sentimientos, quizá equivocadamente, consideraron falsa y apátrida....”. 236 was also, although in a more bourgeois approach, a major part of the garden city image across the country and the world. Moreover, regionalism was an international movement during the 1920s-30s and it impacted Italy, Belgium, France, Germany, and the United States to mention only a few, as much as Spain. What was new after the Civil War was that the lessons and examples of popular architecture were not used in the suburbs of towns and cities, but in the very places where they were born, created, and studied, i.e., the countryside itself. This was a new territory that, with very rare exceptions, had not been touched earlier. The countryside was the locus of the “architecture without architects” and, suddenly architects were called on to reconstruct and, as will be analyzed in Chapters Five, Six and Seven, to colonize the postwar countryside. Notwithstanding the amount of criticism that the actuation of the D.G.R.D. has received over the years, there was in fact no alternative but to apply the lessons compiled by Lampérez, Torres Balbás, or Mercadal, and to build, from scratch and with limited materials available, the new places in the countryside. In his essay on the work of the Regiones Devastadas, José Rivero Serrano asked the question, alluded to by Gutiérrez in the paragraph quoted before, of the discrepancy between the official and “casticist” architectural image of the plaza mayor, and the vernacularregionalist image of the streets and blocks. He emphasized what he called the “latent conflict between the productive actions and the symbolic proposals, as physical expression of the inconsistency between Economy and Language" or “the existing conflict between a Productive Time that counts and passes, and an arrested Historical Time that does not count.” 141 Applied to the most published and discussed cases of Brunete, Las Rozas, Majadahonda, all examples where the plaza mayor appears as U-shaped form that at time seems to be imposed on the rational grid, Serrano emphasizes correctly the symbolic differences between the efficiency of the grid and the closed square in its relation to a conservative vision of imperial power. However, this reflection already seems less appropriate when the same plaza was not built in stone in the so-called style of Juan de Villanueva, but with simple masonry and white stucco, without any decorative apparatus like in Villeanueva del Pardillo, Llers, Los Blazquez, and others. Even in the often-mentioned case of Belchite, the brick construction of the plaza has no connection to an Herrerian language but more to a modernized brick-based Mudéjar idiom. As a matter of fact, there was fundamentally no real difference in the projected architectural images between the projects of the Reconstruction and the main results of the Concurso de anteproyectos realized in 1932. A case in point is indeed the cover of Arquitectura where the projects were published at the end of 1934. It exhibited a homogenously designed, two-story high, arcaded square, whose regular and simple architecture with balconies and grills can be compared with the squares in Villanueva del Pardillo, Llers, Titulcia, and others. Even most striking, the administration building represented in the rendering of 1932 was very similar to 141 Serrano, p. 84: “conflicto latente entre las actuaciones productivas y las propuestas simbólicas, como parte del desajuste final entre Economía y Lenguaje” or “el conflicto existente entre un Tiempo productivo que se contabiliza y pasa, y un Tiempo Histórico detenido y que no cuenta.” 237 the town halls in Villanueva del Pardillo and Titulcia, with the same emphasis on a slightly projecting volume inserted between simple side wings and endowed with a small heraldic sculptural piece in its center. As architects from all political tendencies participated in the competition and that none of them included a church (not required in the program), one might assume that the process of design during the Republic and the early Franco years was, from the point of view of the discipline, analogous and independent from a political point of view. However, within the propagandistic framework of the period and the unavoidable subjective and personal reactions carried by the consequences of the war, questionable references to the Republican or “Red” period were inevitable. As the Aragón architect A. Allánegui wrote in 1941, If for the architects of the D.G.R.D. the question of the external appearance of the houses never went beyond being a secondary issue that was only alluded to once the program, distribution and functionality had been demonstrated, it is no less true that the same technicians were also children of their time. It is well known that the historical spirit of the 1940s was especially reluctant to use bare volumes and reminiscences of rationalist architecture for the simple fact that they were associated with the Republican period. 142 To be sure, the criticism toward the functionalist approach to housing as developed in Central Europe had been widespread during the late 1920s and the 1930s, as part of an international movement of “return to order.”143 Although it was launched as a direct reaction to the traumas of the First World war and to the perceived excesses of avant-garde modernism, the contemporary return to order in architecture has more often than not been associated with the conservative and dictatorial regimes that used and manipulated the original ideas in favor of nationalistic causes in Italy, Germany, Russia, and in the early years of Franco’s Spain. Yet, the movement was at once more open, more democratic, and more complex in terms of its premises, sources, and production. On the one hand it had its equivalent in democratic Scandinavia with the Nordic Classicism epitomized by Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz and others like Ivar Tengbom, as well as in North America with the abstract classicism that characterized the Depression era under the impulse of architects and educators such as Paul Cret. The modernist tenets of the avant-garde were thus under attack everywhere, for various and complex reasons, and the reaction increased at the end of WWII. Hence I argue that the anti-modern arguments made in Spanish context and which were primarily explained by the 142 Quoted by Oyon, p. 119 from A. Allánegui, Reconstrucción, nº 11, p. 16: “Si para los arquitectos de Regiones la cuestión de los signos externos de la vivienda no pasó casi nunca de ser una cuestión secundaria a la que siempre se aludía una vez justificadas las soluciones de programa, distribución y funcionalidad, no es menos cierto que los mismos técnicos fueron también hijos de una época. Y la especial coyuntura histórica de los cuarenta era, como se sabe, especialmente reacia a los volúmenes desnudos y a desear nada con apariencia de la arquitectura racionalista por el simple hecho de que ésta se asociaba al período republicano.” 143 See Jean-François Lejeune, “A Short History,” in Carie Penabad (ed.), Call to Order, New York: ORO Editions, 2017, pp. 16-29; Les Réalismes : entre révolution et réaction, 1919-1939, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1980. 238 ideology of the regime were in fact identical to the developing trends in international architecture during the 1930s-40s. On the other hand, the return to order did not strictly oppose modernism but attempted to expand the language of classicism by embracing the vernacular and by renewing its primary tenets associated with rhythm, proportions, and composition. Return to order meant to achieve a dialectic synthesis between tradition and modernity beyond the revolutionary declarations of GATEPAC. In the January 1941 issue of Reconstrucción, titled “Brunete: reconstrucción del hogar”, the author affirmed that the house had to be the material and spiritual center of the family, itself at the center of the new State. In the autarkic period, the small house often became a fully integrated dwelling unit where detached and integrated furniture, beds, kitchen, and objects of all sorts, were produced regionally and participated of the spirit of the place. Summarizing the debate about the modern dwelling, he added: We cannot deny that in our Homeland, where the infrahuman condition of humble housing is too frequent, we would have achieved much if we could simply extend to the needy the benefits of a hygienic room; but yes, we affirm that we would not have achieved enough. We aspire to something more, that does not suppose greater luxury nor excessive expenses; we intend to replace the housing model that seems to symbolize the inexorable vicious circle of materialism—to live to eat and eat to live— for the broader and more human spirit of the ‘home.’144 3.9. The Village in the City: the Case of Almería Far from Madrid, on the edge of the Mediterranean, the construction of the Regiones District (1943-1944) marked a unique moment in the history of Francoist urbanism. Indeed, all the ambitious plans, designed by the architects of the D.G.R.D. for the Junta de Reconstrucción de Madrid, of building “satellite” cities and neighborhoods in the periphery of Madrid ended up as failures. Those plans followed the concept of “ciudad orgánica” developed by Pedro Bidagor and were centered on a geometric plaza mayor primarily anchored by the church. In the early 1950s, the plans were modified to reduce the ideological content of the projects and to adapt them to more modern housing typologies, but they remained based upon the principles of streets, blocks, and squares. It is only in the 1950s that those districts were eventually built following entirely different urbanistic modernist concepts.145 Hence, Regiones, 144 "Brunete: reconstrucción del hogar,” Reconstrucción, nº 13, June 1941, p. 12-14: "No podemos negar que en nuestra Patria, donde la condición infrahumana de la vivienda humilde es demasiado frecuente, habríamos conseguido mucho si pudiéramos extender a los necesitados los beneficios de una habitación higiénica; pero si afirmamos que no lograríamos bastante. Aspiro a algo más, que no supone mayor lujo ni dispendio económico; pretendemos sustituir ese modelo de vivienda que parece simbolizar el inexorable círculo vicioso del materialismo “vivir para comer y comer para vivir: por el más amplio y humano del “hogar”. 145 See Pedro Bidagor, “Primeros problemas de la Reconstrucción de Madrid,” Reconstrucción I, nº 1, April 1940, pp. 22-27; Pedro Bidagor, “Urbanización del barrio de Extremadura,” Reconstrucción I, nº 2, May 1940, pp. 34-40; Gaspar Blein, “La unidad urbana de Madrid, por Gaspar Blein,” Reconstrucción I, nº 3, December 1940, pp. 16-23; Pedro Bidagor, “La ordenación de las zonas adoptadas de Madrid,” 239 realized and designed by the D.G.R.D., was the only complete and auto-sufficient neighborhood, conceived urbanistically and architecturally as a ‘village in the city,’ that was built in Spain according to Bidagor’s concepts. Although ninety per cent of its vernacular residential architecture—in continuation of Almería’s image of a ‘horizontal city’—has been lost to unsympathetic mid-rise development, the urbanism and the public buildings of Regiones remain as witness of the utopia of the urban village in the 1940s, the symbol of the “unión de campo y ciudad” [union of countryside and city] aiming at recreating the ideal community of the pueblo within the city. A short distance away, Guillermo Langle Rubio, the municipal architect of Almería, conceived and built the Ciudad Jardín Almería. Urbanistically, the district was very similar to its contemporary Regiones: both displayed the same small blocks, the irregular grid, and the civic center in connection with a paseo. However, Ciudad Jardín displayed very different residential typologies, which consisted of a Mediterranean variation of the garden city image, comparable in volume and architectural style to the oldest section of El Viso in Madrid. Notwithstanding, the rich network of public spaces and the combination of vernacular Arab-influenced architecture with a subdued rationalism achieved the same objective to create an “urban village,” trait d’union between city and country. Regiones A deep social emergency impacted the Mediterranean city of Almería at the end of the Civil War. During the war the German Navy repeatedly shelled the city, and it surrendered in 1939, being the last Andalusian capital to fall to Franco’s forces. In addition to these destructions, multiple factors accentuated the crisis: the 1930s exodus that saw the city grow from 54000 in 1930 to 79000 in 1940 as the urban environment appeared to offer more security, the postCivil War rural-urban exodus, the overall aging of the residential fabric, and the necessity to end the precarious conditions of life within the cuevas and other poor areas around the city. The cueva or cave dwelling was a unique building type that could be found throughout Spain, with a special focus on the region of Levante and between Murcia and Granada, with a large concentration in Guadix. During the Moorish time, Guadix was an important trade town, as it was midway between the sea and the city of Granada. When the Catholic monarchs took Granada in 1492, many Moors were displaced and fled to the surrounding mountains and the town of Guadix. More people fled from 1568 to 1571 during the War of the Alpujarras. When they arrived and had nowhere to live, many refugees decided to build their homes Reconstrucción I, nº 3, December 1940, pp. 35-44. Also see Carlos Sambricio and Concepción Lopezosa Aparicio (eds.), Cartografía Histórica – Madrid Región Capital, Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid Consejería de Obras Públicas, Urbanismo y Transportes / Arpegio, 2002; “Plan de creación de núcleos satélites para la edficación de vivienda modesta,” Gran Madrid, nº 11, 1950; “Proyecto parcial de ordenación de Villaverde,” Gran Madrid, nº 14, 1951. The radical change that took place in the Junta de Reconstrucción can be seen in “Plan parcial de ordenación del barrio de la estrella, Madrid,” Gran Madrid, nº 21, 1953. 240 underground, primarily to escape the heat. Far from being natural caverns, the cuevas in Guadix, Purullena and other towns were actually chiseled out of the earth.146 The article in Reconstrucción written by Gonzalo de Cárdenas as part of the series Arquitectura popular española gave a precise description of the geometry and section of the houses, lighted and ventilated, when they were deep in the ground, by tall chimneys that give a unique image to the hills where they stand. Originally built for mostly short-term protective reasons, they were progressively enlarged and improved to become a genuine vernacular type. Construction generally started with one main room later connected to a kitchen and to dormitories on the other side; a simple façade and front patio usually established the identity of the house. De Cárdenas emphasized the rationality of the housing typology, its flexibility for addition and transformation, and the overall climatic control that they provided: "When thinking about making a genuine national architecture, founding it in the essence of our tradition, we will have to turn our eyes towards these houses that constitute one of the most characteristic exponents of our popular architecture."147 The origin of the D.G.R.D.’s involvement with Almería was the Governor’s report about the living conditions in the cuevas, resulting in the adoption of the city by Franco and his first visit on May 9, 1943. The Francoist authorities intended to erase the image of the caves as fast as possible, and, in the press of 1943, one could read such titles as “The caves that surround the capital, subhuman dwellings, will be demolished, and healthy and cheerful homes will be built on their rubble. It is the end of the caves, the result of social injustice.148 In June, Reconstrucción published the statistics that more than 18000 people lived in 2520 cave dwellings in the suburbs of the city, often in very difficult conditions. The article announced the construction of a new district of 800 dwelling units located to the northeast of the city and complete with a town hall, school, church, and other commercial and civic services. The schematic plan showed a hybrid grid of straight and curved streets, with all the public functions located along the perimeter of the neighborhood.149 146 See Alfonso Ruiz García, Arquitectura, vivienda y reconstrucción en la Almería de posguerra (193959), Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses/Colegio de Arquitectos, 2007. 147 Gonzalo de Cárdenas, “Arquitectura popular española: las cuevas,” Reconstrucción, February 1941, pp. 30-36, p. 36. It is noteworthy that the tradition influenced the municipal architect Guillermo Langle Rubio for the underground war protection system that he designed under one mile of streets in Almería. See http://www.culturandalucia.com/GCE/Guerra_Civil_Almer%C3%ADa/Refugios_de_la_ciudad_de_Almeri a_INDICE.htm, last accessed September 5, 2018. 148 Yugo, March 3, 1943, quoted by Ruiz García, p. 92: “Las cuevas que circundan la capital, viviendas infrahumanas, serán derribadas, y sobre sus escombros se edificarán hogares sanos y alegres. Es el fin de las cuevas, resultado de la injusticia social.” The contradiction between the positive evaluation of de Cárdenas and the decision to solve the “social injustice” of the cuevas was essentially political and part of the modernizing propaganda of the regime. Thousands of cuevas remain inhabited today in Andalucia, mostly in the provinces of Granada and Almería, and some areas have become important tourist attractions. 149 Antonio Cámara Niño, “Nuevas viviendas en Almería,” Reconstrucción, nº 34, June-July 1943, pp. 221-28. 241 The same year and in the record time of nine months, a new district of 317 dwellings rose from the ground in 1943-1944 on a smaller site under the direction of Carlos Fernández de Castro, Francisco Prieto-Moreno Pardo, Antonio Cámara Niño and José Luis Fernández del Amo, all architects of the D.G.R.D. Delimited by the suburban road to Ronda and Níjar and the Avenida del Mediterráneo, the district was designed to be auto-sufficient. The smaller size of its blocks and the patio-based compactness of its urban fabric contrasted dramatically with the checkerboard districts, which had emerged years earlier on its western and southern sides. The results were urbanistically important and architecturally unique.150 The final plan of what will be named Barrio Alto or more often Regiones, consisted of a hybrid ensemble of eighteen blocks, most of them rectangular and 26-meter wide by 70 to 80-meter long. The northern limit of the barrio formed a quarter of a circle boulevard, paralleled by a curved street—Calle Redonda—along which a series of covered passageways opened and connected to the boulevard and to the inner streets of the district. Streets were an average of 5 meter wide with the exception of the central paseo along which the church of San Isidro was built with its high tower-campanile and a large patio area to connect with the adjacent schools. On the southern side of the paseo, a rectangular market with a large interior courtyard occupied one of the blocks with a small square in its front. The symmetrical structure had an open ground floor with flat, quasi-Rationalist arcades that created a full transparency, from front to back and side-to-side, with a central fountain, and the second floor being occupied by services and administration. The flat roofs, the arcades, and the four cupolas on the corners of the structure made a direct reference to North African architecture on the other side of the Mediterranean. Likewise, the original architecture of the 317 homes was highly reminiscent of the districts climbing the hills of the Alcazaba in Almería and the Arab-inspired vernacular of the countryside. The pure and cubical houses, with their alternation of one and two floors, their large patios, and their Mediterranean facades, made of Regiones a neighborhood where light played with architecture, colors, and volumes. The flat roofs, the terraces, the narrow streets, and the covered passages brought glimpses of NorthAfrican urbanism and sustained, for the last time before the 1960s onslaught of speculative development, the unique image of Almería as ‘horizontal city’. The outdoor staircases located in the courtyards and the outdoor ovens capped with the futuristic pyramidal chimneys brought ideal and practical traits of rural life for the populations transplanted from the cuevas to the growing city. The neighborhood was the work of a team of architects, but many architectural moments from the rationalist arcades of the market to the curved alignments of oven chimneys suggest the hand of José Luis Fernández del Amo and his capacity to abstract the vernacular to the essence of postwar Spanish modernity.151 In his article of 1945, Antonio Cámara praised the works, the joyfulness of the layout and of the design, the 150 Antonio Cámara Niño, “El ejemplo de Almería,” Reconstrucción, nº 57, November 1945, pp. 277-84; Francisco Prieto Moreno, Carlos Fernández de Castro and José Luis Fernández del Amo, “Iglesia, mercado y escuelas en el Barrio Alto de Almería,” Reconstrucción VII, nº 65, August 1946, pp. 237-48. 151 See Chapters Five and Seven. 242 whiteness of the houses, the better life of the “same day laborers, farmers, masons or fishermen, yet more cheerful, coming back from work to a real living place:152 The nucleus of new housing is being completed; the public buildings already finished have been added to the perspectives of its streets, without mud, animated by the composition of heights, projections, corners, louvers and colors. The church with its slender tower presides over the composition of the whole; the domes of the market cut pure whites and ceramic finials on the indigo sky ... The neighborhood has been created with all the services need for the urbanization. It can already be lived! ... The stimulus for work is being born; discipline and order as well.153 Ciudad Jardín Built from 1941 to 1946, the district of Ciudad Jardín was entirely designed by municipal architect Guillermo Langle Rubio, one kilometer east from the city center and a short distance from the Mediterranean Sea.154 Promoted by the municipality and the Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda (I.N.V.), the 245 housing units were theoretically planned, like the Regiones district, to accommodate residents of the cuevas but, in actuality, they were designed, in terms of density and size of houses, for middle-class residents. The heart of Ciudad Jardín was the 150-meter long and 40-meter wide paseo terminated by the district’s civic building, originally the headquarters of the Falangist party and hosting administrative functions as well as the post office. Langle Rubio designed a building characterized by a subtle mix of modernity and tradition, particularly the superposition of the horizontal line of simple arcades on the ground floor, and the long horizontal window on the second floor. In section, the upper floors were setback and thus created a small accumulation of masses reinforced by the protruding short tower beautifully breaking the symmetry. The link with prewar rationalism was obvious, and the use of the simple arches wrapping the ground floor on three sides referred to an idealized rural image and to the Casa de las Flores by Secundino Zuazo in Madrid. On the left side of the paseo, on axis with a street leading to the sea, Langle designed a traditional church with a short clock tower and an arcade surrounding the main nave on three sides: 152 Cámara Niño, “El ejemplo de Almería,” p. 279. Ibidem: “El núcleo de viviendas se completa; a las perspectivas de sus calles, sin barro!, movidas por la composición de alturas, salientes, rincones, celosías y colores, se unen los edificios públicos ya terminados. La iglesia con su esbelta torre, preside la composición del conjunto; las cúpulas del mercado recortan blancos puros y remates de cerámica sobre el cielo añil…. Se ha creado el barriado con servicios completos de urbanización. Ya puede vivirse!… Nace el estímulo por el trabajo; nace la disciplina y el orden…” 154 Alfonso Ruiz García, Ciudad Jardín, Almería, 1940-1947: Guillermo Langle Rubio, Almería Colegio de Arquitectos de Almería, 1998; Alfonso Ruiz García, “Arquitectura y vivienda en Almería: urgencia social y compromiso político," in M. Gutiérez Navas and J. Rivera Menéndez (eds.), Sociedad y política almeriense durante el régimen de Franco, Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, 2003, pp. 89-113. On the importance of Langle Rubio, see Juan Manuel Bonet (ed.), Guillermo Lange Rubio: arquitecto de Almería (1895-1981), Sevilla: Consejería de Obras Públicas y Transportes, Dirección General de Arquitectura y Vivienda, 2006. 153 243 I have tried to give some local flavor to the style of these constructions by developing large white surfaces with Arabic tile roof that remind of the small churches of the villages of this province, oftentimes of a naive and great rural beauty.” 155 The paseo formed the central spine of the irregular grid of long rectangular blocks that connected to the seafront avenue. The civic building served as hinges for a smaller section of the neighborhood parallel to the railroad lines and itself centered on a large market building. Typologically and architecturally, the arcaded patio-based structure, transparent front and back, was similar to the project designed by Fernández del Amo and his colleagues in the Regiones neighborhood. Behind the market, Langle designed the public college as a long and thin building whose horizontal window frames made direct reference to prewar Spanish rationalism. The Almería Ciudad Jardín demonstrated that, like in the case of the reconstruction of the Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid, early Francoist ideology was not incompatible with the rationalist esthetics, particularly if mixed with popular components. Amidst the four building types that constituted the neighborhood, the types A and B were assembled as rowhouses, setback from the street edges with small-enclosed gardens. Designed for the middle-class category of civil servants—even though the propaganda mentioned that they provided much needed alternatives to the ring of cuevas—they were generously dimensioned and reached between 120 to 140-meter square. The Type A was a 2-story rowhouse entered through an open porch giving access to the living room with three bedrooms, bath and terrace on the second floor. The Type B was a townhouse, with two separate apartments on top of each other, and streets on both sides: the ground floor apartment can be entered though an elegant arcaded porch, whereas the top floor was accessed through a staircase tower reached from the back street. This unique solution provided large inner spaces and a minimum of circulation. All together, these building types and their variations defined a very modern landscape, one that was at once suburban—the setbacks on all fronts—and urban by virtue of the groupings of houses and the clear delineation of the public spaces. The overall esthetic was fully Rationalist with horizontal proportions, and the roof terraces on the second floor and on the top roofs as well, The Art Deco oculi for service rooms, and the vertical circulations created a rhythm of vertical volumes, contrasting with the continuous horizontal windows.156 Ruiz García summarized the concept of the neighborhood: [The architects] combined Falangist urbanism, popular architecture (church and market), the architectural avant-garde (school and housing, with exposed brick, the 155 Ruiz García, Ciudad Jardín, p. 197: “El estilo de estas construcciones se ha procurado darle algún sabor local a base de grandes superficies blancas con tejado de teja árabe recordando las pequeñas iglesias de los pueblos de esta provincia, algunas de una ingenua y gran belleza rural.” 156 Guillermo Langle Rubio designed the extension of the district toward the east in the 1950s. Even though it lacked the public quality of the original section, the extension prolonged the urban strategy and, to some extent, the residential typologies. Some streets maintained the section with trees and setbacks; another section develops as a more basic grid but maintains the idea of the two-story building types, therefore in a somewhat more urban landscape. The large roundabout functioned as an urban node, from which the most important direction made the connection to the neo-classical soccer stadium. 244 oculus, the continuous window, the horizontal rhythms...), and finally the Ebenezer Howard’s utopia, in a mixture that reflects the accommodating character of the Francoist culture.157 Although I cannot but agree with historian Ruiz García’s overall interpretation of the district, I cannot but ask the question: what in the urban design of the district can be really catalogued as “urbanismo falangista”? 157 Ruiz García, “Arquitectura y vivienda en Almería,” p. 98: Se ha combinado el urbanismo falangista, la arquitectura popular (iglesia y mercado), el vanguardismo arquitectónico (colegio y viviendas, con el ladrillo visto, los óculos, la ventana continua, los ritmos horizontales…), y la utopia howardiana, en una mezcla que refleja el carácter acomodático de la cultura franquista.. 245 3.10. Reconstruction around Madrid 1. Brunete Brunete was a small medieval town, located in the midst of a farming region, thirty-one kilometers west from Madrid, at the crossing of two major roads. It lived a poor and languid life until its name entered history with the battle that led to its total destruction in July of 1937. At the time of the battle it counted about 1400 residents within 340 houses. Its organic medieval plan formed a system of four more or less radial roads terminating into streets and converging toward the triangle-shaped plaza mayor or de la Constitución, dominated by the Plateresquestyle facade of the church and the town hall. As the town expended and grew closer to the main road, a chaotic system of streets was generated around a large depression, a sort of natural pond where running waters flowed and which served as water source for the cattle and other domestic uses. However, the floods that regularly filled the so-called plaza de la Laguna caused serious health hazards.158 At the end of the Civil War, ninety-five per cent of the town fabric was destroyed, and the church was the only major structure to remain standing. In the meantime, a large section of the population had left or lived in improvised barracks. It took fifteen hundred days to rebuild the town. The new Brunete was inaugurated on the tenth anniversary of Franco’s uprising, on 17th of July 1946. For functional reasons that included an advantageous topography, a good solar orientation, the abundance of water, and the proximity with regional roads, it was decided to reconstruct the town upon the very ruins of the former one. The organic and medieval plan of old Brunete was totally erased and, in its place, the architect Menéndez Pinal and Quijada laid out a rationalist grid of rectangular blocks, oriented NW-SE/SW-NE, with the U-shaped plaza mayor (37 x 46-meter in dimensions) slightly out-centered and open onto the landscape and the fields.159 The only reference to the past was the church, which was severely damaged but rebuilt in situ. Whereas the former plaza marked the intersection of the main roads, the new square appeared like an idealized and modernized vision of the late sixteenth century classical plaza mayor first established by Juan de Herrera in Valladolid and then later in Madrid and other cities.160 Built of local granite from the Sierra de Guadarrama, it featured a continuous arcade on the ground floor and boasted a “makeup of imperial tradition.”161 Around the plaza were the town hall, the post and telegraph office, dwellings and some commercial spaces. A terraced 158 See J. Menéndez Pidal and J. Quijada, “Estudio de un pueblo adoptado: Brunete," Reconstrucción I, nº 2, May 1940, pp. 25-33; Manuel Moreno Lacasa, “Brunete," Reconstrucción, IV, nº30, February 1943), pp. 57-64; the special issue, "Brunete." Reconstrucción VII, nº 67, November 1946, pp. 331-71; also see Esther Almarcha Núnez-Herrador, “Aproximación al urbanismo y arquitectura de Brunete (1939-1946): Lo pragmático y lo simbólico,” Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños XXX, 1991, pp. 679-97. 159 The half-circular section of radial streets focusing on a monument to the Brunete battle as a votiv chapel in its center was never built and eventually developed as a large park. 160 See earlier in this chapter and for instance Catherine Wilkinson-Zerner, Juan de Herrera, Architect to Philip II of Spain, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 161 Luis Domènech, p. 23. 246 staircase interrupted the northern side and gave access to the church, accessed across a patio and fronted by an informal square elevated as a terrace over the adjacent street. The concept of town façade, proposed by Pedro Bidagor as a fundamental element of the national strategy of reconstruction, was here carefully delineated by the architects and published in Reconstrucción. It included the elevations of the blocks, of the public buildings, and the gardens and sport fields around the town. Emerging out of his new façade, the church was completely reconstructed and redesigned by the architects to fit the new aesthetics of the town. The perimeter walls and the Renaissance portals were restored, but the nave and the transept were reconstructed. The Mudejar cupola of the tower was replaced by a pyramidal roof in the manner of the Escorial, much higher than the original one to make it more visible from all places in the municipality and around. The church and the plaza served as departing points of the bi-directional grid of narrow streets, along which the houses were built according to plot dimensions in relation with the functional necessities of the residents.162 In replacement of the informal typologies of the pre-war houses, four building types were originally based upon the norms of the Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda, varying from 75 to 140-meter square. Houses for laborers were 9-meter wide and between 20 and 30-meter deep, with a patio-corral at the back; they included the kitchen-dining room, three bedrooms and outbuildings in the small back patio. Houses for farmers were wider, and organized around a courtyard with agricultural outbuildings. They had a large kitchendining, seen as the focus of the family life, and four bedrooms. The first version of the project included mostly one-story houses with a highly repetitive grouping of facades that distinguished the habitation volumes from the entrances. Eventually, the typological plans were revised and eight types of houses were included within the grid. As built, many of the lower types of the first planning, presented in 1941, were replaced by a more urban version where primary street corners were developed with two-story high houses and with prominent projecting balconies. The resulting effect of these changes was to increase the ‘picturesque’ and regionalist image of the town. Tapial, adobe, and brick reinforcements were used for the basic construction. All building elements (such as windows and doors) were standardized and fabricated in series: Its architecture does not respond to any particular style, but is an original creation inspired by the traditional elements of the region; it resuscitates with full success an genuine Spanish type, at the opposite of the wrongly labeled rationalist or functionalist architecture and constitutes an ensemble commonly known as “the style of the devastated regions.”163 Contemporary photographs of the reconstructed town were impressive. They exposed the powerful contrast between the proto-rationalist morphology of the new town, and the populist interpretation of the vernacular of the region described in Reconstrucción. This contrast continues to fascinate today in a town that has maintained a beautiful balance between the formal but elegant plaza mayor and the simplicity of its streets. 162 163 “Brunete,” Reconstrucción, 1946, p. 360. Ibidem, pp. 365-369. 247 2. Villanueva del Pardillo Like Brunete, Villanueva del Pardillo was completely destroyed. 164 Yet, in this case, the D.G.R.D. decided to rebuild the settlement in front of the abandoned ruins on the other side of the road Majahonda/Valdemorillo. This decision was meant to facilitate the process of reconstruction and avoid the prewar situation of the highway crossing in the middle of the town. Brunete was a regular grid, Villanueva was planned by architect Felipe Pérez Sommariba as an irregular grid based upon two perpendicular axes. In so doing, he created a discontinuous urban system that “avoided monotonies and multiplied the terminated vistas, obtaining in such a way variety and at the same time acknowledgement and protection from the dominant winds.”165 Blocks varied in size and orientation in order to limit traffic movement. The plaza “responding to the traditional character of the Castilian square, eminently popular, with its arcades” followed the layout of Brunete. 166 It formed a small (22-meter x 30-meter) Ushaped plaza mayor with a larger opening on its fourth side and the town hall on axis. As in Brunete, the square was completely arcaded and, as rendered in its original architecture, presented a relatively severe architecture of stone and adobe. Interestingly, it was eventually redesigned as a more vernacular ensemble, with whitewashed walls and simplified architectural details. The balcony, originally reserved to the town hall, became a vernacular element that, repeated all around, humanized the overall image of the square. As often in the works of the D.G.R.D., the plan was modified, simplified, and eventually left incomplete. Here, the main axis was prolonged past the plaza mayor and the perpendicular street leading to the small church of San Lucas was widened to accommodate a narrow alameda and to have the church tower terminate the street. Six blocks of houses were eventually built by the D.G.R.D. with a rare typology of back-to-back L-shaped building with access to the patio-corral from the streets. As the architect wrote during the ideologically driven first years of the dictatorship, “one has completely rejected the internationalist architecture, so much in vogue during the harmful Republican period; to the contrary, one has renovated, at the time of studying them attentively, the glorious traditions of the country in order to be able to continue them without copying them.”167 The town and its plaza took a long time to build. It was inaugurated only in 1955, a fact that might explain the radical and felicitous shift in the architectural image of the plaza as a bright and actively used space.168 164 Felipe Pérez Somarriba, “Estudio y reconstrucción de un pueblos castellano, Villanueva del Pardillo,” Reconstrucción III, nº 27, Noviembre 1942, pp. 389-98; “Villanueva del Pardillo,” Reconstrucción XVI, nº 130, 1956, pp. 1-14. 165 Pérez Somarriba, p. 391. 166 It is the image that would become the norm across the country within the first generation of towns by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. See Chapter Five. 167 Pérez Somarriba, p. 398. 168 "Villanueva Del Pardillo." Reconstrucción XVI, nº 130, 1956, pp. 1-14. 248 3. Villanueva de la Cañada Villanueva is another municipality whose history and historic heritage is now limited to the twentieth century and more specifically to the process of reconstruction that took place after the Civil War. The town, whose first mention appears in the fourteenth century, was totally destroyed in 1939, including town hall, church, and all local archives. Right before the war, about 700 hundred residents lived within 135 residential buildings, mostly one-floor high. Some houses had a separate corral but the majority showed no hygienic separation between the residents and the animals. As the old village was heavily destroyed and its old main street in ruins, the D.G.R.D. and its architects Juan Castañón de Mena and Alfonso Fungairiño Nebot decided to rebuild the town on the west side of the new highway Brunete-Valdemorillo, with the intention to establish a ‘propaganda’ façade facing the ruins of the abandoned town.169 According to the first project presented in September 1942, the new town was strictly orthogonal, oriented E-W/N-S, and planned “with the predominance of a linear character.”170 The fifteen blocks designed to contain 162 houses had different sizes and orientations, in order to “closing the perspectives of some of its streets and thus protecting them from the dominating winds.”171 Contrary to Brunete or Villanueva del Pardillo where the central plaza corresponded more or less to one block in the grid, the original plan of the plaza mayor was here more complex. As originally planned, the square occupied the equivalent of two blocks in the grid and functioned as an asymmetrical super-block accessible from the road through a short street. Projecting into the space created by a long U-shaped building, the church separated the plaza itself into two fully arcaded sections, the civic one to the south with the town hall and the religious one to the north with the schools. A processional and religious axis, now the Calle Real, was traced parallel to the road and densely planted. It connected to the old chapel, the only witness of the former town. As happened in many pueblos that were ambitiously planned, perhaps more as an ideal village rather than the real one necessitated by the demography and intensity of potential activities, the masterplan was dramatically changed and reduced in scope. A new version was reflected in a plan of 1945 whose public program and urban spaces were simplified. It is only in 1952 that the final plans were signed by Manuel Moreno Lacasa and published the following year in Reconstrucción.172 The series of blocks that separated the plaza from the road were eliminated and replaced by a green front. The plaza itself was fully redesigned and moved toward the north of the two housing blocks built in 1942, in the location of a seasonal 169 Castañon de Meña and Alfonso Fungairiño Nebot, “Villanueva de la Cañada [Madrid],” Reconstrucción III, nº 29, December 1942, pp. 451-460. On the architects and the reconstruction, see Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo Capdevila (ed.), Villanueva de la Cañada: Historia de una reconstrucción, Villanueva de la Cañada: Ayuntamiento, Concejalía de Cultura, 2001. 170 Castañon de Meña and Alfonso Fungairiño Nebot, p. 451 171 Ibidem. 172 Manuel Moreno Lacasa, “Plaza Mayor de Villanueva de la Cañada [Madrid]," Reconstrucción, nº 119, May 1953, pp. 171-82. 249 pond that was reclaimed and sanitized. Moreno Lacasa adapted the plans of the church, town hall and school as designed by Castañón de Mena and Fungairiño. Reduced in scope, the plaza remained a quite elegant complex made up of the three public buildings facing each other around in a depressed garden that reflected the former topography of the pond: the church for 1000 attendants, the town hall facing the road, and the school to the north. From an urban design point of view, the final plaza had a unique design, as the three structures were freestanding and not connected by arcades or any other device. In that sense, the plaza of Villanueva de la Cañada worked more as a large garden. As built, it is only a fraction of the original masterplan and yet, the beauty, quality and homogeneity of its architecture continue to make it the genuine center of the modern Villanueva de la Cañada.173 4. Las Rozas Before the war, the small agricultural town of Las Rozas, halfway between El Escorial and Madrid had started to evolve as a summer recreational area with a variety of small hotels and restaurants catering to Madrid residents. As a result, the town counted about 375 buildings for rural housing, agricultural work, and recreation. Although destroyed at about eighty per cent, Las Rozas was reconstructed according to the plans of architect Fernando García Rozas in 1941 “on its primitive location, for reasons of favorable situation, orientation and facility of communication with the capital.”174 García Rozas maintained the former Calle Real, widened as a paseo, as the structuring axis of the town. It was terminated on its western end by the new plaza mayor, designed on the model of Brunete and Villanueva del Pardillo, with continuous arcades but in this case entirely open on its fourth side. Beyond its administrative, commercial and residential functions, the plaza also accommodated a cinema, whose volume projected out of the plaza and terminated the axis of the Calle Real, as well as a traditional fronton and associated summer gardens on its backside. The church, located on a small elevation, was rebuilt in situ and some of its adjacent structures demolished to improve its view and access. A large staircase linked it to the grid of six new blocks of one-story rural houses with patios, while a series of steps and terraces connected it to the Calle Real. The masterplan—which was very partially followed—also included large green areas for sports and recreation in the prospect of an increased attraction for regional tourism. Three housing types were deployed to provide the new dwellings for the modest farmer, the agricultural worker, and the artisan. All dwellings were organized around an agricultural corral and their architecture followed the Castilian vernacular with limited ornamentation. 173 On the particular use of the Catalan vaults during the first phase of the reconstruction, see José Maria De Churtichaga, “Uso de los sistemas de bóvedas tabicadas y su perspectiva histórica: Aspectos constructivos de la reconstrucción de Villanueva de La Cañada,” Conarquitectura, nº 8, June 2003, pp. 81-93. 174 Fernando García Rozas, “Estudio de un pueblo adoptado, Las Rozas de Madrid," Reconstrucción II, nº 8, January 1941, pp. 7-16, here pp. 13-14. 250 5. Guadarrama Located in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama and at little distance of the monastery of El Escorial, the town of Guadarrama was, before the war, a small agricultural center as well as a growing resort area for tourism. Located at an important crossroads of the sierra, the town grew slowly from the mid-13th century, with the railway connecting it in the late 1880s. The organically grown center, with its two squares—Plaza de las Cinco Calles and Plaza de la Fuente—was almost completely destroyed and, after adoption, reconstructed according to the plans of José Martinez Cubells. The area involved in reconstruction had a complex geometry and could be inscribed within a perimeter of 350-meter by 230-meter, anchored by the main road along which the town developed, the church, and a couple of blocks rescued from demolition. The masterplan focused on restoring the historic Fuente de los Caños (built under Carlos III to provide water to the travelers), building a new and more orderly square, reconstructing the church of San Miguel, and building an educational center. In between, Cubells planned a large green space to interconnect the new public buildings. Additionally, he included the renovation of the housing blocks and laid out two new blocks with a type of agricultural rowhouse to be built in local stone.175 The symbolic heart of the plan was the half-decagonal plaza mayor with the city hall in its center. The paved square was two story high and fully arcaded, with the exception of the city hall which provided symmetrical passages to the streets at the back. With its three-story towers surmounted by the traditional Castilian pyramidal roof, the square definitely carried the style of the Escorial and of the “imperial” architecture to which the ideologue Diego Reina de la Muela was making reference in the same issue of Reconstrucción: “in summary, an imperial style must express, with majestic impetus, with a spirit of unity and sober directness, the ideal that projects his banners in the wind and the spirit which animates its creators.”176 Stylistic considerations apart, the architect clearly strove to upgrade the rural town into a more urban center—i.e, a “city within the countryside” that would be capable of growing as a major tourist center. As he wrote, With these towns that the D.G.R.D. reconstructs, it can be said that the maximum aspiration to make "Cities in the countryside" has been achieved. 177 175 José María Martínez Cubells, “Reconstrucción del pueblo de Guadarrama,” Reconstrucción, nº 23, May 1942, pp. 195-210. 176 Diego Reina de la Muela, “Divagaciones arquitectónicas – los Imperios y su estilo,” Reconstrucción, nº 23, May 1942, pp. 193-94. 177 Martínez Cubells, p. 210. 251 6. Aravaca The small town of Aravaca, now a district of Madrid adjoining the Moncloa area and the Ciudad Universitaria, was totally destroyed during the Civil War. In consultation with César Cort, the architect Mariano Nasarre elaborated the plan of reconstruction in close proximity to the old center. As published in Cortijos y Rascacielos in 1945, this project, built in an area away from the destroyed village and “which Camillo Sitte would not have neglected to reproduce in his book, now a classic, Construcción de ciudades según principios artísticos,” was the most sophisticated and the most ambitious to be designed within the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas.178 The master plan was organized around two main squares. The first—and the only one very partially built—was the rectangular and arcaded plaza de la Iglesia facing the church, itself as an isolated monument within a large urban space. A main street, arcaded on its eastern side was to connect the church complex to the plaza mayor facing the sinuous Calle Real.179 That plaza followed the traditional type in the Reconstruction, a three-sided rectangle with arcades on the ground floor. By building a market hall building within a block between two streets and connecting it to the main street with two arcades, the architects proposed a third square, plaza del Mercado. The eastern section of the town, heavily damaged, was to be rebuilt along existing streets with a very large park in its center. The latter was divided into three classical designed sections, each containing a public structure in its center. Considering that the town was not really agricultural but inhabited by industrial and construction workers, it is not surprising that the plan showed rowhouses with gardens and not the traditional courtyard type. Moreover, the introduction of isolated houses or villas pointed out to a potential transformation of the town toward a more suburban residential future. The plan of the new Aravaca displayed numerous “street intersections forming, in general, squares and terminations of perspectives, as well as green spaces and various groups of rowhouses and single-family houses.”180 Although the overall urban structure of Aravaca shows similarities with the masterplan, only the church and its surroundings were realized within its spirit. Nowadays, they constitute the “historic” area of a town that has grown exponentially and without any architectural distinction during the last thirty years. 178 "Resurrección del pueblo de Aravaca," Cortijos y Rascacielos: arquitectura, casas de campo, decoración, nº 30, July-August 1945, pp. 15-20. 179 Ibidem. In spirit, the plan of Aravaca showed a very clear influence from Camilo Sitte’s and his son Sigfried’s development plan for Marienberg (1904-1909). See Marco Pogacnik, “Camillo Sitte, Architect and Planner: The Project for the Civic Center of Privoz/Oderfurt, Moravia,” in Charles Bohl and JeanFrançois Lejeune, Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis: Modern Civic Art and International Exchanges, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 53-68. 180 “Resurrección del pueblo de Aravaca," p. 17. 252 7. Titulcia The small town of Titulcia, to the south of Madrid in the direction of Aranjuez, was fully destroyed in the bombings of February 1937. In 1940, architects Luis Díaz Guerra and Luis Prieto Bances proposed to reconstruct the town on its original site for a program of 170 families. The masterplan responded to two basic criteria: to adapt the edification to the topography and to conserve the church as symbol and basis of the composition. Accordingly, they kept the existing and gently curving Calle Grande as main axis and laid out fifteen rectangular blocks on both sides of the four-block long and beautifully planted main street. At the heart of the town (the western side was cut short and never completed according to plans), the architects interrupted the grid and left a super-block open to create a unified civic and religious center. Like in Brunete, the small 16th century church of Santa Maria Magdalena was restored in place, including its three-bay open loggia on the side. Adjacent to the main street, it divided the block in two main public areas.181 The first one, the Plaza Mayor formed a L-shaped urban space, elevated in terrace over the street. It was anchored by the church on its short side and by a two-story structure containing the town hall, shops, and the doctor’s house on the long one. At the back of the elegant and partially arcaded building, Díaz Guerra located the houses for the teachers and the school, whose ensemble faced another square, less formal and designed as a garden. The looser combination of spaces and structures, associated with an architecture that was definitely more rural, broke away from the rigid type seen in Brunete, Guadarrama, and Las Rozas, and announced the type of ‘organic’ urban form that would eventually become the global norm for the new villages of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. All housing blocks were one-story high with a characteristic typology of a recessed porch marked by three classical columns at the center of the unit. The only two-story section was built alongside the main street, exactly opposite to the civic center, thus contributing to its urban quality and definition. 181 See Arquitectura y desarrollo urbano: Comunidad de Madrid, volume 13, Madrid: Dirección General de Arquitectura y Vivienda/Fundación COAM: Fundacion Caja de Madrid, 1991-2008. 253 8. Seseña Nuevo Although the medieval town of Seseña was not fully destroyed, the decision not to restore it and choose another location for the reconstruction was debated. As architect Luis Prieto Bances argued in his essay in Reconstrucción, the town presented so many urban issues that it would have been economically unsuitable to reconstruct and improve it on its own site: “The fabric appears without order nor clear concept, along sinuous and hilly streets lacking in interest and, in most cases, impossible to rectify. It is Seseña, a town without character.”182 Unhealthy, without the modest privilege of a spectacular location dominating the fields, Seseña also missed “the plaza, the arcades, the nucleus by excellence of social life.”183 Eventually, the new location was selected for its hygienic conditions and its proximity to the roads, railroad, and the most fertile fields in the valley. Along with the nearby Titulcia, the plans of Seseña Nuevo, signed by Luis Prieto Bances in collaboration with Luis Díaz-Guerra and Antonio Cámara Niño, displayed the most rational urban structure of the reconstruction. On a flat terrain without any topography or previous traces, “the orthogonal layout imposed itself as the simplest and most economical.”184 It consisted of a regular grid of eighteen identical rectangular blocks aligned along eight parallel streets ranging from the buffer park along the road to the soccer fields at the other end. A central street, perpendicular to the access road and oriented East-West, led to the church placed on axis at the center of a garden. One block to the south, the architects laid out the civic center or plaza mayor. One housing block separated this rectangular square from the town’s axis, but a short street, arcaded on both sides, connected it to the Plaza de la Iglesia and served as a commercial and service center. The southern end of the town would have hosted an arcaded market, while, on the northern side, a bus terminal anchored the town. However, this sophisticated urban design project was overly ambitious in regard to the proposed size of 1500 inhabitants. As a result, the masterplan was simplified and only one square at the end of the main street was built. As an extended version of the Plaza de la Iglesia, Luis Prieto designed the church with its porticoed front and central tower; the two arcaded sides now housed the town hall, the shops and other social services. Traffic was eliminated and the whole square densely planted along with the main street and the edges of the town. The architects developed a prototypical housing block made up of twelve contiguous patio houses, but commented that variations were possible in order to avoid potential monotony. The wider streets of 12 to 15-meter were built with two-story houses and landscaped, whereas the narrower ones were lined with one-story structures. A recessed front delimited by columns and arbors gave access to each group of two houses, with the advantage of widening the sidewalk area and creating a protected space where residents could work without impeding pedestrian movement. In absence of service streets, large doors and passages offered independent and direct access to the agricultural corrales between the houses. 182 Luis Prieto Bances, “Estudio de un pueblo adoptado: Seseña,” Reconstrucción II, nº 9, February 1941, pp. 18-29, here p. 18. 183 Prieto Bances, op. cit., p. 23. 184 Prieto Bances, op. cit., p. 29. 254 3.11. Reconstruction in the North (Guadalajara and Lérida) 1. Belchite I swear that on the ruins of Belchite a beautiful and spacious city will be built as a tribute to his heroism unparalleled. 185 The old town of Belchite was laid out on both sides of the Calle Mayor, which connected the two main gates, Arco de la Villa to the North-West to the Puerta del Pozo, which marked the southeastern entrance. At its heart were two quasi-identical triangular-shaped squares, the Plaza Vieja marked by the Torre del Reloj, the surviving section of a church transformed into a theater, and the Plaza Nueva with the Town Hall. Three other squares fronted the church of San Agustín, the former mosque, and the Mudéjar church of San Martin de Tours. The town was immersed in a beautiful countryside of orchards and fruit trees.186 Belchite’s character— according to architect Antonio Cámara Niño in Reconstrucción—was in urban form and details definitely Mudéjar, as a reflection of the Arab civilization that impregnated Spain with its culture and life: “The reason for the triumph and the survival of the Muslim art can be traced in its adaptation to the environment and to circumstances.”187 In absence of expensive material, brick and adobe were the most logical means of construction, and “the Moor, with his legendary sobriety, worked more economically than the Christian man, thus imposing his technique and artistic sensitivity.”188 Such a statement clearly reflected how much, even in Franco’s Spain, the heritage of Islamic Spain was integrated within the culture and collective memory. Even more so, many architects saw in Mudéjar Spain an expression of constructive rationalism and functionalism that supported the thesis of the Falange. Yet, for all his praise, Cámara also made clear that the housing conditions were really inhuman, with small and lowceiling rooms, few natural light, no separation of sexes in the houses, and unhygienic barn spaces on the third floor. The battle of Belchite lasted from August 24 to September 7, 1936. The Republican army, strong of 80,000 men, 90 planes and more than one hundred tanks, launched the attack toward Zaragoza and took over Belchite in early September. One year later the town fell back to the Francoist forces. The density of the ruined town (more than 80% of built area), the difficulties at removing the rubble, and the ideological statements of Franco about the ruins as symbol favored the reconstruction on an nearby site, where “new towers will be erected, and farm houses of enjoyable layout, and parks and gardens, and sports fields, and squares….”189 185 General Franco, quoted by Antonio Cámara Niño, “Reconstrucción De Belchite,” Reconstrucción I, nº 1, April 1940, p. 10. 186 On Belchite, see Pedro Gómez Aparicio, “El símbolo de los dos Belchites,” Reconstrucción I, nº 1, April 1940, pp. 6-9; Antonio Cámara Niño, “Reconstrucción de Belchite,” Reconstrucción I, nº 1, April 1940, pp. 10-16.; “La reconstrucción de Belchite,” Reconstrucción II, nº 16, October 1941, pp. 21-32. 187 Cámara Niño, p. 13. 188 Ibidem. 189 Gómez Aparicio, p. 9. 255 Any visitor of the reconstructed town would clearly realize that the new Belchite has nothing of a “mausoleum that perpetuates the figure of the New Power” as Carlos Sambricio wrote in Que coman República.190 For its modest size (1600 residents in 2015), Belchite is a modern town, equipped with all necessary infrastructures such as school, town hall, church, sport fields, public garden, and a good diversity of commercial spaces. Belchite’s masterplan— designed by Antonio Cámara Niño and the first project to be published in Reconstrucción— was one of the most complex of all reconstructed towns. Its plan deployed a hybrid system of streets that integrated a grid-like central section and two long curving streets that deformed the overall urban structure and adapted it to its geographic contours and the adjacent creeks. The streets of the town “were well proportioned, with an allusion to the Mudéjar spirit that knew how to adapt them to the climate, how to orient them to cut the winds and close the street perspectives.“191 The curved streets, the subtle shifts in their alignment, the ambitious town center, and many other details such as the bridge at the entrance of the central square, clearly reflected the influence of Camillo Sitte. At the heart of the town, Cámara designed two adjacent squares separated by a street. The L-shaped civic center consisted of the town hall, an open-air dance courtyard, a cinema, and a fronton, all connected by a continuous arcade. On the other side of the street, the religious center integrated two courtyards separated by the large church and connected by arcades as well. Across the Calle Mayor, he placed the Casa de España and a porticoed mixed-use building front. Next to the town hall, the bank building was meant to terminate Belchite’s main street. As built, the town center and the overall structure of the city were eventually simplified, but Cámara and the other architects involved achieved a unique urban project, distinct in almost all aspects, from other centers built by the D.G.R.D. The two squares displayed a quite civil architecture of simple brick buildings, with little reference to the Herrera-influenced plazas around Madrid. Even though most of the blocks were built with one- and two-story rural patio houses, Belchite was the only agriculture-based new town, which displayed genuine urban typologies. Around the center, various three-story buildings and blocks without private courtyards give to the town the most urban character of all the reconstructed projects of the regime. 190 191 Sambricio, “Que coman República,” in Cuando se quiso resucitar la arquitectura, p. 209. Cámara Niño, p. 16. 256 2. Llers On 8th of February 1939, the Republican troops that occupied the historic town of Llers near Figueras in the province of Gerona came under attack by the Nationalist troops. As they were forced to retreat they decided to set fire to a big charge of explosives warehoused in the late 18th century church of Sant Juliá, causing the complete destruction of the church, the town, and major damages to the medieval castle. The event was amply reported in the press and became a symbolic moment in the last phase of the ideological and propaganda war between the Falangist and the Republican sides. Llers was one of the first towns adopted by Franco who requested that some of the houses be left in ruins as part of the memory of the destruction. The ruins were initially conserved as monument, but eventually the old village was reconstructed. In August 1941 the construction of the new town, Nuevo Llers also known as Poblenou, started at about 500 meters of the old center.192 The masterplan, designed by Antonio Cimadevila, formed an asymmetrical fan-like figure, made up of five angled streets on both sides of an ambitious civic center. The central street of the figure, or Calle Mayor, crossed the civic center in front of the church and between the two proposed arcaded squares: one on the side of the church, the other one in front of it and defined by a S-shaped assemblage of thin buildings with a continuous arcade. On the back of the square two long bars of housing with a central green led to the sport fields and the countryside, a unique urban idea that can be related to German planning of the 1920s. Typologies were unique. With the exception of the linear rows facing the various sides of the civic center, none of the building types addressed the street directly: every house was setback with a garden on one side and a patio closed by outbuildings on the other side, in such a way that the garden faced the outbuildings and vice-versa. Of great plastic interest were the exterior staircases, some of them semi-circular as in type C as well as the large second-floor open loggias of type D. Eventually, only one half of the housing fan was built while the civic center was only partially realized on the side of the church. Even though it was not completed, the design of Llers was remarkable for its unique layout and its typological and morphological innovations within the context of the D.G.R.D. 192 A. Cimadevila, “El Nuevo pueblo de Llers, [Gerona],” Reconstrucción V, nº 40, February 1944, pp. 69-80. 257 3. Montarrón Located in the province of Guadalajara, on the slopes of a hill, the old village of Montarrón had a typical medieval configuration with a central triangular plaza mayor. Following its complete destruction, the village plan was rebuilt a couple of hundreds of meters away in the plain, close to a main road, on a flat terrain better oriented to the sun and the winds. Designed in November 1940 by architect Francisco Echenique, the town, planned for 100 households, has “as fundamental structure of its layout, and in the antique Roman manner, two main streets perpendicular to each other.” 193 The plaza mayor and the town hall terminated the first axis coming from the entrance street; the other one led to the church along a densely planted alameda before reaching the sport facilities and the fields. The main plaza, in the traditional semi-enclosed U-shaped morphology familiar to the D.G.R.D. architects, contained, almost as a single urban object, the town hall, the house of the Falange (functioning as a hinge with the alameda), commercial and recreational spaces. If it had been built entirely, it would have resulted into a harmonious ensemble complete with a fronton in one of its backsides. On the other axis, at the end of the alameda, the church with the priest house and other locals were organized around a large patio, with a continuous arcade serving as front porch and screen to the ensemble made up of local stone recuperated from the ruins of the former village. All the blocks that surrounded or were inserted between the two civic centers had different dimensions but shared a small number of typologies. The modern farmhouse was the “expression of the soul and lifestyle of the town” with the kitchen at the center of family life and the agricultural patio immediately connected as a L-shaped unit.194 The two major types of farmers’ houses were, on the one hand somewhat archaic as they put the house and the agricultural structure next to each other on the street. On the other hand, they were among the most rational to be planned by the D.G.R.D., avoiding any ‘picturesque’ assemblage in favor of the systematic repetition of tall dwelling volumes and lower service wings. As Echenique wrote, “the new Montarrón, with its modesty and simplicity, responded to the traditional expression of the Spanish pueblo, giving the necessary importance to the social life between the humans—the church and the plaza—and to the family—the house as sanctuary—where man offers to God the homage of tradition and virtue.” 195 The town, however, was very partially built, and its few structures—the only existing part of the plaza is the town hall—give but a vague reflection of the ambitious foundational plan. 193 Francisco Echenique, “Estudio de un pueblo adoptado: Montarrón,” Reconstrucción II, nº 14, JulyAugust 1941, pp. 8-22, here p. 11. 194 Francisco Echenique, p. 15. 195 Francisco Echenique, p. 22. 258 4. Gajanejos At short distance of Montarrón and close to the highway linking Madrid to Zaragoza, the small town of Gajanegos (350 habitants in 1935) was destroyed during the battle of Guadalajara in March of 1937. In 1940, the D.G.R.D. embarked on the reconstruction of a complete new town in walking distance of the destroyed area. The new Gajanejos was located on a quasihorizontal terrain, close to the fields, and a shorter distance from the road. The original plan, signed by the architect Miguel Angel Ruiz Larrea, showed a somewhat confused design with two awkwardly articulated squares, the plaza mayor for the town hall and a religious square for the church, and a park-like area for the school along the main street. This scheme followed the instructions of the D.G.R.D. to build the church on a separate site but in light of the program, it would have been a difficult solution to build and to finance.196 The realized plan of October 1943 simplified the scheme by putting all the main functions around one single square-shaped plaza mayor located at the very back, between fabric and fields. Contrary to many other towns (Brunete, Villanueva del Pardillo, Montarrón), the square did not present a uniform architecture but was made up of an assemblage of individual pieces, each one reflecting its specific function. The classical town hall stands at the end of the 150-meter long Calle Mayor and faces the square with a three-arch loggia. On its eastern side stands the new church of San Pedro Apóstol. The old Romanesque church whose ruins could be found north of the village served as model for the reconstruction in the new location. With its stone façade, its central semi-circular entry door and oculus, as well as an elegant front portico that frames the countryside, the church offered a renewed sense of history to the small village. The school and two L-shaped buildings for retail and housing completed the 30 x 30-meter square. Overall, the town was made of four rectangular blocks, two on each side of the asymmetrically planted main street. Two types of houses with patio and outbuildings, entered through a recessed area, created a lively experience along the streets for 90 families. Both types of houses, in spite of their socio-economic disparities, aimed at “the revalorization of moral and material life in the fields, designing pleasant places with a minimum of habitable cells, and that permit an enjoyable life while resolving the old problem of gender promiscuity within the houses.”197 Eventually, the simple character of the place was according to the architect “joyful and traditionally Spanish… without trying to convert a simple village into the caricature of a city.”198 196 Miguel Angel Ruiz Larrea, "Estudio de un pueblo adoptado, Gajanejos (Guadalajara),” Reconstrucción I, nº 4, August-September, 1940, pp. 19-27. 197 "Un pueblo de nueva planta. Gajanejos (Guadalajara)," Reconstrucción VI, nº 56, October 1945, p. 266. 198 Ibidem. 259 5. Masegoso de Tajuña Planned for 150 residents, the small village of Masegoso de Tajuña stands in the province of Guadalajara. The original village, completely destroyed, was rebuilt according to a quasisymmetrical orthogonal plan, conceived by Antonio Labrada Chércoles, architect and collaborator of Leopold Torres Balbás. Located on a sloping terrain and measuring 180 meters by 150 meters, in close proximity to the former site, the town centers on an elegant and arcaded plaza mayor, which is slightly elevated on a low plinth and connected through gates to a short paseo. Across the street, the school closes the plaza and is surrounded by a large rectangular garden. Interestingly, the church terminates one of the streets, but it is not located within the plan itself. It stands at the top of a small and planted hill, looking away from the town and surrounded by a wall-enclosed cemetery—the only reminder of the destroyed village. 199 Fully symmetrical and made up of six housing blocks with the plaza at the center, the plan of Masegoso de Tajuña was the simplest of all the projects of the reconstruction. The rationality of its plan was definitely emphasized by the architect who explicitly made reference to the Latin American concept of the town as plaza: It is the plaza that gives value to an urban ensemble; within it public services are exercised. It is the seat of authority, assembles the commercial life, and its scale establishes the most permanent relationship between neighbors ... it can be said that this village constituted a true foundation in the style of our American conquerors.200 199 Antonio Labrada Chércoles, "Masegoso del Tajuña - Un nuevo pueblo en la provincia de Guadalajara," Reconstrucción, June 1950, pp. 189-96. 200 Antonio Labrada Chércoles, p. 190. 260 6. Villanueva de la Barca Situated at ten kilometers of Lérida, Villanueva de la Barca stands twenty meter above the banks of the Rio Segre, on a plateau that was logically used by the Republican forces to control the region. Counting more than 200 houses, the town was completely destroyed and quickly adopted for reconstruction. Given the state of the ruins and the lack of urban interest of the former layout, the new town was located on the side of the destroyed village which was to be left in ruins as can be seen on the photograph of the model of the proposed new village. A new bridge was part of the plan signed by architect Antonio Pineda in September 1940. Designed for a population of 1000 to 1500 residents, the masterplan showed a compact town surrounded by green spaces and organized on two orthogonal axes intersecting at the arcaded U-shaped plaza mayor, on the model of Las Rozas with the church protruding slightly on the main axis. Around the square were planned the town hall, the post office, a cinema-theater with garden, and some dwellings. On the other side of the plaza mayor was to stand a triangular block consisting of shop fronts on the street sides and an arcaded market square in the inner side of the block. This elegant arrangement and the housing blocks that were to sustain it were not built as most residents eventually stayed in the older part of town.201 201 Antonio Pineda, Antonio. "Estudio de un pueblo adoptado: Villanueva de la Barca, por Antonio Pineda, arquitecto," Reconstrucción I, nº 5, October 1940, pp. 8-15. 261 3.12. Reconstruction in the South (Andalusia) 1. Los Blázquez (Cordoba) Located in the province of Córdoba in Andalusia, the town of Los Blázquez (about 2000 residents) was the focus of intense battles during the whole period of the war. It was half destroyed in the spring of 1939 and promptly adopted by Franco for reconstruction. The project was presented in October 1940 and quite fully implemented. The western section of the old town was relatively “regular and with a certain urbanistic sense” whereas the eastern one was less orderly and “more anarchic in its structure and relation to topography.”202 The architect Francisco Hernández-Rubio, working with José Rebollo Dicentea and Daniel Sánchez Puch, decided to keep the structure of the western section by rebuilding the damaged houses and adding some new linear streets. For the eastern section, more heavily destroyed, they decided to redesign it entirely with a small regular grid that adapted itself better to the sloping terrain. In-between they planned a new organization of the plaza mayor as a large agora faced by the town hall, the church and its adjacent structures, the house of the Falange, and the market, all connected by a continuous arcade. To recuperate the difference in level, the lower part of the plaza was elevated on a plinth. The sport fields and a paseo serving for fiestas and market were located in the southern section of the town. In April 1944, Reconstrucción published the details of José Rebollo’s project of reconstruction of the plaza mayor: “We want the plaza to be just that: that of a town of small importance, a little isolated from the world, hardworking and lively.”203 In its final form, the hierarchies were clearly expressed. The church, reconstructed with some modifications, displayed the traits of an elegant Andalusian Baroque, with a new brick tower. The town hall presented a more classical image with its arcaded and symmetrical façade, halfway between domestic and civic.204 The market and continuous arcade that were to complete the composition were never built, and the plaza was raised on a plinth to make up for the topography. The simple houses that border the plaza on its eastern side completed an ensemble of great harmony and simplicity, which contrasted strongly with the works realized around and north of Madrid. While the older section of the town was eventually restored with a variety of building types, the new gridded section to the east displayed two specific house types, both with access to a corral for animals and agricultural equipment. The house for agricultural workers is one-story high whereas the houses for farmers, coupled two by two present the usual H-type with access to the full patio on either side. Unique to Los Blázquez is the architectural expression, 202 Francisco Hernández Rubio, “Estudio de un pueblo adoptado, Los Blázquez [Córdoba],” Reconstrucción II, nº 10, March 1941, pp. 8-16. 203 José Rebollo Dicenta, “Proyecto de nuevo Ayuntamiento y ordenación de la Plaza Mayor de Los Blázquez (Córdoba),” Reconstrucción V, nº 42, April 1944, pp. 145-148. 204 On the architect José Rebollo Dicenta, see La Vanguardia Imposible, pp. 290-311. See photographs pp. 296-297. Also see Reconstruction no. 63, 1946. 262 in the façade, of the Catalan vaults (bóvedas tabicadas) that structured the ground floor, with the upper floor slightly setback, thus giving a strong and quasi-expressionist image to some of the new streets.205 2. Pitres (Granada) The small town of Pitres, located at 1250 meter of altitude within the region of La Alpujarra, counted about 750 residents at the time of the war. Built in masonry with terrace roofs, the white houses were typical examples of Mediterranean architecture in Andalusia. They have sun terraces or balconies that tend to take place at street corners, between bedrooms, and constitute a particular typological element of the region. At the end of the war, about half of the town was destroyed or strongly damaged, in particular the entrance from the west around the plaza where the sixteenth-century church once stood. In light of the difficult topography, the lack of alternative terrain and the proximity to a new provincial road, the D.G.R.D. decided to rebuild the village in situ. The masterplan published in Reconstrucción in 1941 and signed by architect Francisco Robles Jiménez maintained the character and the general organization of the town, with the principal streets parallel to the contour lines, and a small amount of transversal streets or staircase connections between the different levels. The main street known as Calle de Palenque remained the principal artery with new connections to the provincial road running at a lower elevation. Aiming at improving the hygienic conditions of the fabric, the original plan included the reconstruction of the houses situated higher than the church and the main street as a series of parallel terraced streets and rows of houses. All those streets were to be arcaded and varied from 7.5 to 10 meters, arcades included. This arrangement—which would not be concretized—was presented in a beautiful rendering of the town.206 Eventually, about 50 new houses were built in the lower section and consisted of two types: a 3-story structure with arcade on the ground floor, dwelling and large terrace on the second, and storage on the top; the other one was two-floor high, similarly endued with a terrace and sun roofs. The parish church of Pitres originally built in 1530 was devastated in the War of Alpujarras and repaired later. Destroyed again during the Civil War, it was rebuilt in 1945 according to the plan in Latin cross by Robles Jiménez. The patio/plaza of the church opens on the main street and is separated from the U-shape plaza of the town hall by one of the arcaded wings of the municipal complex. On the other side of the street, Robles situated a more informal market square which today works as the entry space to the town. The main school building was also built along the Calle de Palenque and marked by a setback central section to form a small plaza. 205 “Viviendas en Los Blázquez (Córdoba),” Reconstrucción VIII, nº 71, March 1947, pp. 107-08. Francisco Robles Jiménez, "Estudio de un pueblo adoptado: Pitres, por Francisco Robles Jiménez, arquitecto," Reconstrucción II, nº 15, September 1941, pp. 30-40. 206 263 3. Tablones (Granada) About 10 kilometers southwest of Pitres, the old Tablones was a hamlet of Orgiva. Counting a little more than 500 residents, its habitat was entirely organic and unusually dispersed on very steep land facing some fertile slopes. Before its quasi-total destruction it had neither church nor chapel, and the one-story houses, made of cheap and unadorned materials, provided very inferior comfort and hygiene. As the topography of the existing site made it inadequate to the reconstruction in situ, architect Francisco Robles moved the new settlement on a lower slope near the river, at the very heart of the Alpurrajas on the southern side of the Sierra Nevada. From the urban point of view, Tablones stands in definite contrast with the traditional organic village of the region. 207 Designed around 1941 to house the sixty families and respond to the requirements of both their private, civil, and religious way of life, Robles challenged the steepness of the site to design the modern village “in its minimal dimensions and as a complete and orderly ensemble.”208 At the highest point, he located a U-shaped pedestrian plaza, organized as a series of interconnected terraces and surrounded by the single-nave church in its center, the village hall to the east and the school on the other side. The well-designed ensemble developing along the street recalled the rebuilt center of Pitres, but here the new houses were organized rationally as a four-block grid. The three parallel streets that form the village were laid out according to the contour lines, and thus present a slight curvature that provides changing perspectives. They intersect in their center with the main street, on axis with the church entrance and cascading down toward the river and the fields. Compositionally, the grid is thus made up of two 80 x 80-meter squares on both sides of the central axis. Typologically, Robles used two simple and economically viable building types. Both share the same two basic elements: the residential section itself accessed through an open-air patio and the outbuildings for agricultural uses entered from the same patio. At the intersection of the axis with the three parallel streets he placed two-story houses (type A, about 100-meter square) with prominent double-sided roofs. All other houses respond to the one-story type (type B, 63-meter square). In order to introduce movement in the succession of the houses, Robles grouped the entrances (one small and one large door) to adjacent patios in a recessed area that creates a plaza-like widening of the street, “which avoids the monotony that the aligned repetition of the same house would eventually create.”209 Like Los Blázquez, the towns of Pitres and Tablones marked a radical shift from the Madrid or even the Zaragoza regions. Here were put into experimentation the models, the types, and the stylistic direction that would mark the enterprise of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización south of the Madrid line in the regions of Extremadura, Andalusia, Murcia, and Valencia.210 207 Francisco Robles Jiménez, “El nuevo pueblo de Tablones,” Reconstrucción VI, nº 53, May 1945, pp. 145-50. 208 Ibidem, p. 147. 209 Ibidem, p. 150. 210 See Chapters Five, Six, Seven and Eight. 264 SUMMARY OF CASE STUDY ANALYSIS / RECONSTRUCTED TOWNS BY THE DIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE REGIONES DEVASTADAS (D.G.R.D.) DIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE REGIONES DEVASTADAS (D.G.R.D.) REGION GRID in situ Madrid BRUNETE GRID relocated DEL PARDILLO VILLANUEVA DE Madrid ARAVACA* LAS ROZAS TITULCIA (Distorted) Madrid SESEÑA NUEVO Madrid Madrid Destruction PLAZA MAYOR U-shaped D l D l D LA CAÑADA Madrid Madrid OTHER in situ VILLANUEVA Madrid Madrid HYBRID relocated GUADARRAMA MAJADAHONDA PLAZA Other l D l D l D l D l P l P l Guadalajara BELCHITE D l Guadalajara LLERS D l Guadalajara MONTARRÓN** D l Guadalajara GAJANEJOS** D l D l Guadalajara MASEGOSO DE TAJUÑA Guadalajara Lérida HITA VILLANUEVA DE P D LA BARCA l l Granada PITRES P l Córdoba LOS BLAZQUEZ P l Granada LOS TABLONES D l REGIONES (relocation of Almería New l cuevas) Valencia TERESA P l Valencia VIVER P l D: Complete Destruction P: Partial Destruction New: New District (*) Unrealized (**) Partially Realized *** 265 D.G.R.D. Photos of the Exposition of the Reconstruction, Madrid, 1940. From Reconstrucción 3, June-July 1940. 266 Top: D.G.R.D. Photo of the Exposition of the Reconstruction, Madrid, 1940. From Reconstrucción 3, June-July 1940. Bottom: Mode of the new Brunete within the exposition. © AGA. 267 Top and bottom left: Pedro Bidagor. Masterplan for the Gran Madrid, 1946. General organization of the new satellite districts for low-cost housing and perspective view of the proposal for San Blas. From Gran Madrid, 11 (1950). Bottom right: Model of the plaza at San Blas. From Gran Madrid. 268 Top: Pedro Bidagor. District of Usera, Madrid. Plan of the proposed Plaza Mayor. From Reconstrucción 10, March 1941. Middle and bottom: Plan and perspective of the Civic center for the District of Argüelles, Madrid. From Reconstrucción 7, December 1940. 269 Top: Cover of the first issue of Reconstrucción, April 1940. Franco on the ruins of Belchite: from Reconstrucción 1, April 1940. Bottom: View of the model of the new Belchite within the Exposition of the Reconstruction. © AGA. 270 Diagrams of the Laws of the Indies. From La Ciudad Hispanoamericana: El Sueño de un Ordén, Madrid: CEHOPU, 1989, p. 51. 271 Top: Pages of from Juan Cano Lasso, “La Carolina.” From Arquitectura 53, May 1963. Bottom left: Example of project for Die neue Stadt, 1930s. From Gottfried Feder, Die neue Stadt, Berlin: Springer, 1939. 272 Bottom right: Richard Kauffmann. Project for the new town of Afuleh, Palestine, c. 1925. From The Town Planning Review 12, no. 2 (November 1926). Top: D.G.R.D. Perspective view of the reconstruction of Brunete, 1940. © AGA. Bottom: Aerial views of the ruins of Brunete, 1939. © AGA. 273 Top: D.G.R.D. Plaza Mayor of the reconstructed Las Rozas. © AGA. Middle: D.G.R.D. Model and view the Plaza Mayor of the reconstructed Brunete, 1940 & c. 1944. © AGA. Bottom: D.G.R.D. Perspective of the Plaza Mayor of Majadahonda, 1940. Plan of the reconstruction (only red and orange were realized. © AGA. 274 Middle: Plaza in Titulcia, c. 1945. Photo J.F. Lejeune. Top left: Plaza in Gajanejos, c. 1945. © AGA. Top right: Plaza in Seseña Nuevo, c. 1945. © AGA. 275 Bottom: Plaza in Los Blazquéz, c. 1945. Photo J.F. Lejeune. Top left: Building type in Villanueva de la Cañada. From Reconstrucción 29, December 1942. Middle left: Street in Brunete. © AGA. Bottom: Panoramic view of housing blocks. © AGA. Top right: Building type in Montarrón. From Reconstrucción 14, July-August, 1941. 276 Examples of covers of the periodical Reconstrucción. 277 Pages of Pedro Muguruza (under the direction of), Plan de mejoramiento de la vivienda en los poblados de pescadores. 3 vols, Madrid: Dirección General de Arquitectura, 1942-46. 278 Top: Period photographs of the cuevas de Almería and their residents. © AGA. Bottom: D.G.R.D. Axonometric and elevations of the first version of the Regiones district in Almería. From Reconstrucción 34, June-July 1943. 279 Top: D.G.R.D. Market in the new district of Regiones, Almería, 1943-46. © AGA. Bottom: D.G.R.D. Model of the new district of Regiones, Almería, 1943-46. © AGA. 280 D.G.R.D. Streets in the new district of Regiones, Almería. 281 © AGA. Top: Map of Almería with Regiones (top right) and Ciudad Jardín (bottom right). From Alfonso Ruiz García, Ciudad Jardín, Almería, 1940-1947: Guillermo Langle Rubio, Almería Colegio de Arquitectos de Almería, 1998. Middle: Four views of Ciudad Jardín, Almería, c. 1945. From Ruiz García. Bottom: Plan of Ciudad Jardín. From Ruiz García. 282 D.G.R.D. The new Brunete: plan, views of the ruins with surviving church, model of the Plaza Mayor. © AGA. 283 D.G.R.D. The new Brunete: view of the Plaza Mayor, elevations of the city, street corner. © AGA. 284 D.G.R.D. Villenueva del Pardillo. Reconstruction: plan, plan of the Plaza Mayor, aerial view of ruins, contemporary view of the Plaza Mayor (photo J.F. Lejeune). © AGA. 285 Top: View of the Plaza of Villanueva de la Cañada. c. 1950. Middle right: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstructed town (second version). From Villanueva De La Cañada: Historia de una reconstrucción, Villanueva de la Cañada: Ayuntamiento, Concejalía de Cultura, 2001 Middle left: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstructed town (first version). From Reconstrucción 29, Dec. 1942 286 Bottom: Catalan vaults in the reconstruction of Villanueva de la Cañada. © AGA. D.G.R.D. Reconstruction de Las Rozas: plan, aerial view of the ruins, aerial view of the new Plaza Mayor, aerial view of the new rural units. © AGA. 287 Top and bottom: ruins of Guadarrama and view of the reconstructed Plaza Mayor. © AGA. 288 Middle: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstruction of Guadarrama. From Reconstrucción 23, May 1942. Top and bottom right: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstruction and street views of Aratvaca. From Cortijos y Rascacielos 30, July-August 1945. Bottom left: View of the new square. © AGA. 289 D.G.R.D. Plan and aerial view of the reconstructed Titulcia, c. 1945. On the hill to the right, one can see the ruins of the old village. © AGA. 290 D.G.R.D. Plan and view of the model for the reconstruction of Seseña, 1941. © AGA. 291 Top: Street in new Belchite, c. 1945. © AGA. Bottom left and right: D.G.R.D. Plan of New Belchite with plan of the ruins (in black). Plan of the reconstruction. From Reconstrucción 16, October 1941. 292 Top: Views of the Plaza in Belchite. Photos J.F. Lejeune. Bottom: Frescoes in the Town Hall of Belchite. © AGA. 293 Top: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstruction of Llers. © AGA. Middle left: The new square of Llers. Photo J.F. Lejeune. 294 Bottom left and right: Examples of building type. From Reconstrucción 40, February 1944. D.G.R.D. Montarrón. Plan of the reconstruction, aerial view of the ruins. © AGA. Montarrón. Section and plan of the square as planned (incomplete). From Reconstrucción 14, 1941. 295 Top left: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstruction of Gajanejos (first version). From Reconstrucción 4, Aug. Sept. 1940. Top right and bottom: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstruction of Gajanejos (final version) and street elevation. From Reconstrucción 56, October 1945. Middle: View of the plaza. © AGA. 296 Top and middle: D.G.R.D. Final plan of the reconstruction of Gajanejos, ruins of the town, view of the new square. © AGA. Bottom: Perspective of the final version of the reconstruction. From Reconstrucción 56, October 1945. 297 D.G.R.D. Plan and photographs of the reconstruction of Masegoso de Tajuña. © AGA and Reconstrucción 101, June-July 1950. 298 D.G.R.D. Plan, axonometric view, and view of the square of the reconstruction of Villanueva de la Barca. © AGA. 299 This page: D.G.R.D. Plan of the reconstruction of the Plaza of Los Blázquez. From Reconstrucción 42, April 1944. Next page: Facades of the town hall. From Reconstrucción 42, April 1944. Photo J.F. Lejeune. The square. Photo J.F. Lejeune. Housing type. © AGA. 300 301 D.G.R.D. Reconstruction of Pitres. New square, proposed new facade, plan, and typologies. The plan was only partially followed. © AGA and Reconstrucción 15, September 1941. 302 D.G.R.D. The reconstructed town of Tablones. Street and sections from Reconstrucción 53, May 1945. Aerial view. Wikipedia. 303 Top: José Antonio Coderch and Manuel Vals. Apartment Building, Calle Sebastian Bach, Barcelona, 1958. Detail of the louvered facade. © Museo Nacional Reina Sofía. From: J.A. Coderch de Sentmenat, Barcelona: Editorial Gili, 1990. 304 4: The Modern and the Vernacular: Postwar Continuities We would arrive at the archetype of the Pueblo Español, whose power of attraction is today higher than when it was done in 1929. People go to experience it, fleeing our dehumanized and soulless residential developments. Here they encounter the scale of the man-person, not of the man-mass. The different places welcome him, but they do not shut him up, because they all have their escape to other areas and other perspectives. These perspectives are always limited, because the streets are curved to avoid excessively long views.1 Popular architecture is the architecture that the people make. With greater rigor one could say that it is the architecture that the people and time make. Because popular architecture is the result of a unitary set of structures, enclosures, spaces and constructive solutions that through many generations of users have given testimony of their goodness. And the anonymous passing of many generations, with common idiosyncrasies, with common desires and aspirations, is what has brought out the hidden singularity of a social community, apparently gregarious, but which has, however, a pronounced personality.2 1 Oriol Bohigas, “Comentarios al ‘Pueblo Español’ de Montjuich,” Arquitectura, nº 35, November 1961, p. 16: "Se llegaría así a este arquetipo de Pueblo Español, cuya atracción se ejerce ahora más que cuando se hizo en 1929. Las gentes van a él huyendo de nuestras urbanizaciones deshumanizadas y desangeladas. Aquí se encuentra la escala del hombre-persona, no del hombre-masa. Los distintos ámbitos le acogen, pero no le encierran, porque todos ellos tienen sus escapes a otros ámbitos y otras perspectivas. Estas perspectivas son siempre limitadas, porque las calles se curvan para evitar las vistas desmesuradas.” 2 Miguel Fisac, “Arquitectura Popular Manchega,” Cuadernos de Estudios Manchegos, nº 16, 1985, p. 17: “La arquitectura popular, es la arquitectura que hace el pueblo. Con mayor rigor se podría decir que es la arquitectura que hacen el pueblo y el tiempo. Porque la arquitectura popular es el resultado de conjunto unitario de estructuras cerramientos, espacios y soluciones constructivas que a través de muchas generaciones de usuarios, han dado testimonio de su bondad. Y el pasar anónimo de muchas gentes, con idiosincrasia común, con deseos y aspiraciones comunes, es el que ha hecho aflorar esta oculta singularidad de una colectividad social, aparentemente gregaria, que tiene, sin embargo, una acusada personalidad.” 305 The Fifth National Assembly of Architects, held from the 10th to 18th of May 1949 in Barcelona, Palma de Majorca and Valencia, marked a seminal date for the Spanish architectural world. It opened to an international forum after ten years of isolation, and is generally seen as the starting point for the revival of modern architecture.3 In his speech “Las fuentes de la nueva arquitectura” [The sources of the new architecture], guest lecturer Alberto Sartoris (1901-1998) argued for a new architecture of “mediation” whose modernity would reflect “the rational and functional concept of the art of building… as old as the world and born on the coasts of the Mediterranean,” thus reconnecting with the pre-Civil War debates.4 Sartoris, who was familiarized with the Spanish context during the 1930s through an exchange of publications with Fernando García Mercadal, delivered a second lecture “Orientaciones de la arquitectura contemporánea” [Orientations of contemporary architecture) that reflected his recent publication Ordre et climat méditerranéen (1948) and that presented together the architecture of Pier Luigi Nervi, Carlo Cattaneo, and Antoni Gaudí along with the Romanesque Monasterio de Santa María de Pedralbes near Barcelona and sketches of houses in the Catalan fishing villages of Garraf. Sartoris warned about a purely technical approach to the new architecture and urbanism, and in particular that of the reconstruction, while advocating a healthy regionalism. For the Italian, the geographical differences should be at the basis of a functional and rational approach to modern architecture and construction. Hence, prefabrication and standardization should be approached with care and precaution.5 Sartoris prolonged his analysis in an important discussion of “La nueva arquitectura rural” [The New Rural Architecture]. Whether a productive unit as a farm or a residential country house, the rural house was well fitted to adopt the principles of the functional architecture: “The rural architecture, with its clearly regionalist tendency, finds in the rationalism of today the ideal environment and develops in practical forms those functional criteria that constitute the most important characteristic of the modern constructive methods.”6 With examples ranging from Greece (Aris Konstantidinis) to Switzerland (Sartoris) to Spain (Coderch, de Moragas) and a project for a farmer house in Estremadura (Carlos de Miguel), he advocated the use of modern systems of construction while encouraging the use of traditional materials when appropriate esthetically and economically. 3 Cuadernos de Arquitectura, 1949, nº 10, pp. 2-5. The conference was accompanied with an exhibition of the works of the D.G.R.D. and the I.N.C. along with works from Latin America. A section of this essay was published in Jean-François Lejeune, “The modern, the Vernacular, and the Mediterranean in Spain: Sert, Coderch, De la Sota, Fernández del Amo, Bohigas,” in Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (eds.), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 65-94. 4 Antonio Pizza, “The Tradition and Universalism of a Domestic Project,” Antonio Pizza and Josep Rovira (eds.), In Search of Home: Coderch 1940/1964, Barcelona: Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña, 2000, pp. 89-90. Quote from Alberto Sartoris, Cuadernos de Arquitectura, nº 11-12, 1950, p. 40. 5 Alberto Sartoris, “Orientaciones de la Arquitectura contemporánea,” Cuadernos de Arquitectura, nº 1112, 1950, pp. 48-55. 6 Alberto Sartoris, “La nueva arquitectural rural,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, December 1949, p. 513. 306 During the same event and on the invitation of Francisco Prieto Moreno, head of the Dirección General de Arquitectura and the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, the Italian architect Gio Ponti (1891-1979) spoke about Antoni Gaudí and the traditional Catalan rural architecture—“the primitive popular house of Catalonia… that sprouts a fruit of spirituality of the greatest and most sacred importance”—as precursors and paradigms of a new modernity.”7 He expressed optimism and invited Spanish architects to “bring a noble contribution to modern architecture without having to follow the style that dominates in the world.”8 He urged them to “make quietly, serenely and honestly, the architecture that comes out of yourselves.”9 Back in Italy, he wrote in the November 1949 issue of Domus a reportage titled “Dalla Spagna”: At times, thinking back to Ibiza and Benicarló, I ponder with some affliction how difficult it is for us architects, in spite of all our theoretical and polemical baggage, …to achieve a result as natural as that “architecture without architects,” that farmers and men of sea have always built with content unawareness. But Ibiza is a fascinating lesson for all and a reference for all the young Spanish architects who aspire at a pure expression of our architecture….”10 4.1. Coderch: from Rural to Urban Vernacular It is during the Fifth Assembly that José Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat (1913-1984) first met with Ponti. This encounter marked the grand entrance on the national and international scene of a Spanish architect of the post-Civil war era. Born in Barcelona, Coderch worked in Madrid from 1940 to 1942 for Secundino Zuazo. Back to Catalonia where he started his collaboration with Manuel Valls Vergés (1912-2000), he worked in Sitges and acquainted himself with the problems involved in the design of subsidized housing, an issue that will be at the heart of both his theoretical work and his professional activity. In 1945 he was appointed municipal architect in Sitges. During this period and often with major bureaucratic and financial difficulties, he designed a series of subsidized housing projects (viviendas protegidas) for the Obra Sindical del Hogar in Sitges (1944), La Roca del Vallès (1945), and Montcada i Reixach (1945), to mention a few. With the volumetric clarity, the repetition of the type, the placement of roofs parallel to the streets, and the absence of any ornament, Coderch’s grouping of 7 For this section, see Josep M. Rovira, “The Sea Never Had a Dream,” in In Search of Home, pp. 73sq. On the relationship between Spain and Italy, see Antonio Pizza and Josep Rovira, In Search of Home, op. cit., and María Isabel Navarro, “La crítica italiana y la arquitectura española de los años 50. Pasajes de la arquitectura española en la segunda modernidad,” Modelos alemanes e italianos para España en los años de la posguerra, U.N.A.V. 4, Actas del Congreso Internacional, March 2004, Pamplona, T6 Ediciones, 2004, pp. 61-100 (Internet edition). 8 Gio Ponti, “El arquitecto Gio Ponti en la Asamblea,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura IX, nº 90, June 1949, p. 269. Also see the ambitious article that Gio Ponti published in Reconstrucción: Gio Ponti, “Política de la arquitectura,” Reconstrucción X, nº 95, October 1949, pp. 301-08. 9 Ibidem. 10 Gio Ponti, “Dalla Spagna,” Domus nº 240, 1949, quoted by Luigi Spinelli, José Antonio Coderch: La cellula e la luce, Torino: Universale di architettura, nº 134, 2003, p. 14. 307 houses made the more substantial reference to popular architecture of the Mediterranean since the concept arose in the late 1920s. These were not vacations houses for the bourgeoisie but real houses for farmers and fishermen. Not very well known and not always easy to identify following the transformations they have endured, the projects realized in the 1940s for the Obra Sindical del Hogar anticipated, by ten years, the best architecture of the pueblos de colonización. In 1945 he designed an ambitious project for a terrain overlooking the Mediterranean just outside of Sitges, the Les Forques housing development (1945). Conceived as a mini-utopia of sort, the project was supposed to contain houses for fishermen mixed with artist houses and richer families. In one suggestive aerial perspective that reminds of Ponti and Rudofsky’s own project for a hotel in Capri, Coderch and Valls revealed the essence of a unique synthesis. On a series of terraces cascading down toward the sea, they combined the plans made up of thin and long rectangles—a system similar to the contemporary Case Studies houses in Los Angeles— with a volumetric architecture that undoubtedly suggests the houses of Ibiza. The project was never realized, with the exception of an elegant Mediterranean pavilion for a soccer field, but the overall architectonic composition anticipated their most significant architecture in the following decade. At a larger scale, the fishermen houses designed for the Instituto Social de la Marina in the harbor of Tarragona built (1949, in collaboration with the architect Juan Zaragoza) were built as a four-story high, crescent-shaped segment of street with great formal economy and conceptual urban clarity.11 Likewise, Coderch and Valls’s most ambitious housing project of the period, a large group of viviendas protegidas (social housing) designed in 1950 for the town of Hospitalet de Llobregat outside of Barcelona, was unfortunately not pursued. A combination of three articulated barres of apartments, six-story high, with twelve circular buildings, eight-floor high and organized in three rows, created an irregular pentagonal superblock, which in spite of the disconnected building types, maintained an astonishing urban quality. Continuous articulated barres of housing defined two sides of the project, whereas the three other edges were marked by a highly plastic succession of volumetric objects. Moreover, asymmetrical interior streets maintained the flexibility of the urban structure while defining a series of topographical terraces: Since the terrain is high, irregular, and sloping to the south, elongated blocks have been arranged to follow the contour lines. This configuration achieves, not only a large variety of points of view from all the entrances, but also create many varied views from inside the homes.12 11 On Coderch’s early work, see Antonio Pizza and Josep Rovira, In Search of Home, and Luigi Spinelli, José Antonio Coderch, op. cit. 12 José Antonio Coderch, “Viviendas protegidas,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 116, August 1951, p. 26. 308 In the 1949 issue of Domus, Ponti published the Les Forques project along with their first family houses, the white and abstract patio of the Casa Perez Mañanet (1946), the housestudio of Coderch in Sant Gervasi (1946), and the Garriga-Nogués house in Sitges (1947), the latter illustrated with a detailed photograph of the wooden louvers that Coderch will use characteristically during his career. In May 1951, the IXth Triennale of Milan opened, with the Spanish pavilion designed by Coderch and Santos Torroella, “an exercise in synthesis intended to demonstrate the quintessence of Spanish ‘modernity….”13 The left wall of the Ushaped 70-square-meter pavilion, painted green, was made of a structure of wood shutters, within which Coderch inserted three rows of photographs of minor Ibiza architecture mixed with details of Gaudi’s buildings, all of them by photographer Joaquín Gomis in association with Juan Prats Vallés. The opposite wall was covered with straw and displayed a painting by Ángel Ferrant, Muchachas, a Composition by Miró, along a selection of objects (glass vase, popular ceramics and maiolicas, etc.) selected by Santos Torroela, one of the artisans of the renovation of Catalan art. The red center wall held a Romanesque painting of the Catalan School, a wooden Virgin Mary, and on an amoeba-shaped low table were exhibited the illustrated edition of García Lorca’s works by Guinovart, ceramic pots, mantillas and other handicraft objects. This return to the abstraction of the vernacular, the organic nature of typology and construction, and the use of traditional craft connected the pavilion back to the Republican period of the 1930s and especially to the article and essays published in A.C., the periodical of the GATEPAC. According to a report written by Coderch, the pavilion generated a strong interest among the architects and artists from other countries, even those from “extremist” political sides: “With its shapes, colors and particular design, the pavilion denoted a strong Spanish and Mediterranean spirit, in stark contrast to other countries, both Nordic and Latin.”14 In the columns of Spazio, Luigi Moretti argued that “the vigor but also the terror and the liberating vehemence of Gaudí live from the same blood, and from the same substance that the men who have put up the walls of the houses on Ibiza.” And he added: Both architectures are the extreme poles, linked by countless continuous passages, of the same drive that leads one to detach from, and to renounce, the things that are not completely controlled; in the case of Gaudí, renunciation to the voluble casuistry of nature, and refuge within the controlled world of the spirit; in the case of Ibiza, abandonment of the intellectual and spiritual casuistry in favor of traditional, as solid as the objects of nature… In sum, a particular architecture rejects what the other one 13 For this section, see Antonio Pizza, “The Tradition and Universalism of a Domestic Project,” p. 92ff, quote on p. 94. 14 José Luis Coderch, “Informe” on the Spanish pavilion, Triennale of Milan 1951, typewritten manuscript, p. 3, Museo Nacional de Reina Sofía (formerly at ETSAV, Sant Cugat). 309 assumes. This is in fact the law of true architecture in all the places, which truly bear the mark of the individual and the collective.15 Following the Triennale, the first iconic phase of Coderch-Valls’s oeuvre involved a series of relatively small vacation residences on the Catalan coast. The first one, Casa Ugalde en Calldes d’Estrac near Sitges, whose first sketches date from October 1951, became an instant icon of Spanish modernity. Ponti wrote in Domus about its “informal and disjointed plan, in which the Mediterranean principle of the encounter with the landscape has been pushed to its limits: almost a labyrinth.”16 Casa Ugalde was followed by the Casa Esteve (1953) in Garraf, the extension of Casa Torrents in Sitges (1954), and the Casa Catasús (5659) also in Sitges, all projects that show an increasing typology-driven approach to the program and site, and the continuing influence of Richard Neutra’s Californian houses. Beautifully photographed by Francesc Català-Roca, these buildings acquired an iconic aura that was for the early 1950s in Barcelona what the photographs of Julius Shulman were for the California of the Case Study Houses. With their white walls, their large glass sliding glass doors and shutters, and their “cell-like” typology (not unlike the way Ibiza houses grew by addition of well-defined rooms) those houses exalted “the syncretism they longed to illustrate between Mediterranean tradition and avant-garde culture.”17 However, Coderch’s work was not limited to the ‘recreation’ of the Catalonian bourgeoisie along the Mediterranean shores. To the contrary, during the same period, the firm pursued various works, in the very core of Barcelona, whose importance cannot be overemphasized. At a time of general urban crisis in Europe and the United States, Coderch-Valls’ works respected the urban traditions and rules of the city, while at the same time developing a unique urban approach to the modernization of the vernacular. Their first building was a project of 150-working class units for the Instituto de la Marina in the popular district of La Barceloneta. On the site, bordered by very narrow eighteenth century streets, they designed an urban block centered on a large planted courtyard. In order to provide views toward the sea, the court, faced by the living rooms, was partially open on one of its narrow sides while the bedrooms facing the narrow streets projected out as triangular loggias with their windows oriented to the water. For the same Instituto de la Marina, Coderch and Valls built their masterwork in 1952-1953: the apartment house for Institute’s employees, again at the heart of 15 Luigi Moretti, “Tradizione muraria a Ibiza,” Spazio II, 1951, pp. 35-42. It is interesting to note that Sert, from the other side of the Atlantic, was equally interested in Gaudí, see José Luis Sert and James Johnson Sweeney, Antoni Gaudí, London, Architectural Press, 1960. Two years earlier, Le Corbusier prefaced a book dedicated to the Catalan architect with photographs by Joaquim Gomis and Joan Prats, Gaudí, Barcelona, Editorial RM, 1958. 16 “Casa sulla costa spagnola,” Domus 289, December 1953. 17 Carlos Flores, “La arquitectura de José Antonio Coderch y Manuel Valls, 1942-60,” in De Roma a Nueva York: Itinerarios de la nueva arquitectura española 1950/1965, UNAV 1, Actas del Congreso International, October 1988, Pamplona, T6 Ediciones, pp. 67-77, quote on p. 69. On Català-Roca and architectural photography in Spain, see Iñaki Bergera Serrano, Photography & Modern Architecture in Spain, 1925-1965, Madrid: Museo ICO, 2014. Also see Julius Shulman, The photography of architecture and design : photographing buildings, interiors, and the visual arts, New York: Whitney Library of Design; London: Architectural Press, 1977. 310 La Barceloneta on the Passeig de Joan de Borbó. In response to the tight site, a double street corner with three short facades, the architects made the upper floors float and ‘undulate’ freely above the ground floor aligned with the rest of the block. With its glazed plinth, its light facades of wood louvers and ceramic tiles, and its projecting attic, the apartment house was praised by Gio Ponti for its architecture “born from the interior" which proceeds from rational necessity and not from “odd and imitative spirits.”18 Coderch & Valls’s apartment house at La Barceloneta, and many other works that will follow, can thus be seen as a kind of environmental manifesto which inaugurated Coderch and Vall’s approach to dealing with modern materials—large glazed windows—while responding to the extreme conditions of the climate. Whether in the city—see the apartment building at Calle Bach of 1958, the house for Tapiés of 1958, or Coderch’s own townhouse in Cadaqués of 1956—or in the countryside—Casa Urlach, Casa Ugalde, etc.—they did use, repeatedly and for almost two decades, the so-called Llambí shutters to screen the interiors from the sun, and thus develop a sort of modern ‘vernacular skin’ whose combination of vertical divisions and horizontal louver lines permitted a capacity of integration in many historic contexts independently from the structural system and materials. As a matter of fact, Coderch, Valls, and Juan and José Llambí, the owners of the Llambí Company, filed the patent for the modern persiana in March 1953 by. Originally founded in 1940 as a wood carpentry shop, the Llambí company gradually evolved towards what became its main activity from 1950: the manufacture of wooden shutters, with both fixed and movable horizontal wood slats.19 Although used in many southern countries, the persiana had a rich Hispanic and HispanoAmerican tradition that originated in part from the Arab moucharabieh origins. The landscape of persianas was in fact a critical element of the urban vernacular of Spain and Hispanic colonies, creating “a metaphysic of the Mediterranean notion of intimacy.”20 The vernacular peasant houses documented in A.C. by Hausmann, Baeschlin and others did not use them, as they employed small openings, very thick walls, loggias and terraces to screen the rooms from excessive light. Interestingly, A.C. had precisely documented those differences in the 1930s, particularly in the issue 18. For instance, a set of six photographs from the streets of Tarifa and San Fernando in Andalusia emphasized the variety, rhythm of the large and screened windows of the streets: 18 Gio Ponti, “Casa a Barcelona,” Domus 306, May 1955, p. 7-10. The concrete engineer for the project was Eustequio Ugalde, owner of the Ugalde house. On the entire career of Coderch and Valls, see Anton Capitel y Javier Ortega (eds.), J. A. Coderch: 1945-1976, Madrid: Xarait, D.L., 1978; Coderch de Sentmenat: Exposición en el Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1980; Carlos Fochs (ed.), J. A. Coderch de Sentmenat: 1913-1984, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1989. 19 See http://llambi.com, last accessed August 2018. On Coderch and Llambi, see in particular Antonio Armesto and Rafael Diez, José Antonio Coderch, Ediciones de Belloch, 2008. 20 Carlos Garrido, “Paisaje de persianas,” Diario de Mallorca, Feb. 21, 2008. 311 The standard elements, repeated to the infinite, instead of creating monotony—the one for which the professors of academic schools are so afraid—give a great impression of unity and ensemble to the Andalusian towns.21 4.2. Modernity in Madrid Unsurprisingly, the visit of Alvar Aalto in Barcelona and Madrid marked another turning point for the architectural world. In April of 1951, invited by the Catalan architect Antoni de Moragas Gallissà, Aalto lectured at the Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña and at the Colegio de Arquitectos in Madrid.22 He stayed in Madrid for some time, visited the region, and participated in an important Sesión de Crítica de Arquitectura organized by Carlos de Miguel, director of the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura. In an anecdote largely discussed after a trip to the Escorial with Miguel Fisac, Luis Gutiérrez Soto, and others, he allegedly turned his back to the Escorial and refused to look at it. Fernando Chueca Goitia commented later that, during a conversation, the Finnish architect “told me that, in Italy, he closed his eyes when he passed in front of Renaissance and Baroque monuments, and that he was looking only for the essential Mediterranean architecture of the small peasant villages.”23 Interestingly, the Finnish Museum of Architecture has conserved an important album of drawings made during his travels in Spain. Like in Italy, Morocco, Greece or Egypt, his focus was to understand and reveal the territory as a “cultural landscape”, i.e., the forms of nature as context of the human constructive activity.24 His drawings showed villages, assemblages of buildings, gates and walls, and many other details—all elements of popular architecture and urbanism that “could not be indifferent to those [Spanish architects] who were also exploring the paths of vernacular architecture as an anti-monumental and sensitive way from which to operate.25 The same year, another important event took place in Barcelona: the foundation of Grup R. The group was made of a loose association of two generations of architects—the first one around Coderch and Valls, Joaquim Gili, Josep Maria Sostres, and Antoni de Moragas; and the younger one around Oriol Bohigas, Josep Maria Martorell, Josep Pratmarsó i Manuel Ribas i Piera Ribas. It was essentially an intellectual center of resistance, whose members, politically oriented in very diverse directions, intended to re-connect with the spirit of GATCPAC but were deeply indebted to Catalan gothic architecture, Gaudí, and the 21 See A.C. 18, 1935, p. 19. De Moragas was instrumental to invite Sartoris (1949), Zevi (1950), Pevsner (1952), Gio Ponti (1953) y Alfred Roth (1955). 23 Eduardo Delgado Orusco, Alvar Aalto en España, p. 56: “me dijo que en Italia cerraba los ojos cuando pasaba delante de monumentos renacentistas y barrocos, y que él iba buscando solo la esencial arquitectura mediterránea de los pequeños poblados campesinos.” 24 Delgado Orusco, p. 11. 25 José Luis Mateo, "Alvar Aalto y la arquitectura española,” La Vanguardia, November 18 1982, pp. 12: "no podían resultar indiferentes a aquellos [Spanish architects] que entonces también estaban explorando los caminos de la Arquitectura vernacular como vía antimonumentalista y sensible desde la que operar.” See Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto Sketches, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979. 22 312 Mediterranean vernacular. Grup R never issued any theoretical platform or manifesto, but organized various architectural exhibitions, the first one in December 1952, that presented photographs of Catalá-Roca, models, drawings, and in some cases ceramic, sculptures, etc. Next to the works of Coderch & Valls already cited, the Casa Moratiel (Barcelona, 19561957), the Casa Agustí (Sitges, 1953-1955) by Sostres, and the Casa Guardiola (Barcelona, 1954-1955) by Bohigas & Martorell displayed the clearest Mediterranean-modern image marked by clear white volumes and the intensive use of louvers. In the heart of Barcelona, the Ciné Fémina (1949-1951) and the Hotel Park (1950-1953), both by de Moragas, were representative of a modern esthetic that complemented the existing city fabric.26 The Catalonian sphere, however, did not have the monopoly on modernity. In his Fifth Assembly speech of 1949, Madrid architect Miguel Fisac (1913-2006) paralleled the declarations of Sartoris and Ponti when he stated: We all agreed on the necessity to abandon the road that we had been following, because it lacked any vital content… To copy the popular or classical Spanish art leads us to folklore or ‘espagnolades.’ To pull out its essence, to be able to extract the ingredients of truth, of modesty, of joy, of beauty—that is the way to open the path to a New Architecture.”27 With Rafael Aburto, Secundino Zuazo, Rafael Aburto, José Luis Fernández Del Amo, Alejandro de la Sota, Francisco de Asís Cabrero—to name a few—Fisac belonged to the informal group of regime-supporting Catholic-oriented architects who had moved to Madrid to work on the reconstruction. As Gabriel Cabrero wrote: A very strong link united them: they all belonged to one precise faction among the many that had constituted the self-styled “national” camp. These were the Catholics, who had taken arms to defend their religion, interpreting the war as a crusade, and emerged from it convinced that only on the basis of a Catholic perception of life could society be regenerated. For them, architecture was above all an instrument for building the spaces in which society’s ethical necessities could be renewed.28 Fisac, known for his Swedish-influenced organic approach to architecture, also wrote an important essay, “La arquitectura popular española y su valor ante la del futuro” (The Popular Architecture in Spain and its Value for the Future) that was published in Madrid in 1952.29 He contended that it was in popular art and architecture that Spanish craftsmen, artists and 26 See Gabriel Ruiz Cabrero, The Modern in Spain after 1948, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001; Carmen Rodríguez and José Torres, Grup R, Barcelona: Gili, 1994. 27 Miguel Fisac, “Estética de la Arquitectura,” quoted by Antonio Pizza, “Italia y la necesidad de la teoría en la arquitectura catalana de la postguerra: E.N. Rogers, O. Bohigas,” in De Roma a Nueva York: Itinerarios de la nueva arquitectura española 1950-1965, p. 100. In that essay, Pizza stresses the role of Bruno Zevi and Alvar Aalto who both lectured in Spain. 28 Gabriel Cabrero, The Modern in Spain—Architecture after 1948, p. 13. It is worth noting that Coderch also fought on the Falangist side during the Civil War and was a dedicated Catholic as well. 29 Miguel Fisac, La arquitectura popular española y su valor ante la del futuro (Lecture of 1951), Madrid: Ateneo, 1952. 313 builders reached the level of simplicity and abstraction that other countries, like Italy for instance, only achieved in their “high art.” Photographs of Spanish pueblos and houses revealed the special essence of the plazas mayores and other inhabitable urban ensembles; the simplicity of the forms that, at times, border on the schematic; the spontaneity of the buildings and their disposition; the correlation between materials and the essential architectural forms; the harmony of the villages and their surrounding landscape; their dependence on their natural contexts; the respect to the materials of the region, to their colors, to the climate, and to a reality which is neither rationalized nor depersonalized. And he concluded, “in these ways begins the architecture of the future that we are beginning to build.”30 In his first period, Fisac had been primarily active on the Colina de los Chopos in Madrid to develop the Center of Scientific Investigation (CSIC) in a modern-classical style clearly inspired by the Italian works of the 1930s, by Marcello Piacentini, Gio Ponti, and Enrico Del Debbio. Yet, by the end of the decade, Fisac had understood that the classical direction was a no-way street and that, like Coderch, a modern approach to the vernacular held the key to the re-opening of the architectural culture: among his most notable realizations were the Instituto Laboral de Daimiel (1950-1953), the Colegio Apostólico de Arcas Reales in Valladolid (1952-1953), and the Teologado de los PP Dominicos (1955-1958) and the Centro de Formación del Profesorado de la Universidad Complutense (1952-1957) both in Madrid.31 Francisco de Asís Cabrero Torres Quevedo (1912-2005) entered the School of Architecture of Madrid in 1934. During the Civil War, he was a lieutenant in Franco’s army. Helped by his familial situation—he was a nephew of a civil servant in the Spanish embassy in Rome—he travelled to Italy in 1941.32 Rome, Florence, Assisi, Pisa, and Siena were some of the cities where he studied architecture and painting, as he had not yet decided to which activity to dedicate. He met with Giorgio de Chirico in his studio and admired “a mysterious painting, a figurative surrealism of warm colours….”33 Likewise he visited Adalberto Libera and the works of Rationalism in construction at the site of the Esposizione Universale of 1942, which was 30 Fisac, p. 25: “y conjuntos urbanos, en sí mismos habitables; sencillez de las formas, rayana, muchos veces, en el esquematismo; espontaneidad de los edificios y de su disposición; correlación entre los materiales y las formas arquitectónicas esenciales; armonía de los pueblos y el paisaje en torno; dependencia de la naturaleza en que está instalada; respeto a los materiales de la región, a su color, al clima, a la realidad no racionalizada ni despersonalizada en el sentido especial de las plazas mayores y conjuntos urbanos,.… Por vías así comienza a caminar la arquitectura del futuro, que estamos empezando a construir.” 31 See Carlos Asencio-Wandosell and Moisés Puente (eds.), Fisac – De La Sota: Miradas en paralelo, Madrid: La Fábrica/Museo ICO, 2014; Francisco Arques Soler, Miguel Fisac, Madrid: Pronaos, 1996; “Miguel Fisac,” AV Monografías, nº 101, 2003. 32 See the interview: Sara de la Mata y Enrique Sobejano, “Entrevista a Francisco de Asís Cabrero,” Arquitectura, nº 267, July-August 1987, pp. 110-115. 33 Ibidem, p. 110. 314 cancelled due to WWII and is known today as EUR. He praised Italian rationalism for his national modernity: “There, concepts such as the flat roof, the smooth planes and cubic forms are real and adapted to the place, not formalistic and anti-functional as in Germany ... I suppose some of this was later seen in my architecture.”34 Back in Spain he graduated in 1942 and the same year started to work for the Obra Sindical del Hogar, along with Coderch and others like his brother-in-law Jaime Ruiz Ruiz. Logically, the Rationalist Italian influence appeared in most of his works of the 1940s: his self-portrait of 1942, the competition entry for the monumental cross of the Valle de los Caídos with its reminiscence of the Colosseo Quadrato but also of the aqueduct of Sevilla (1941), the housing district in Béjar (1942), the housing block known as Virgen del Pilar (1943), and his prominent masterpiece built in collaboration with Rafael Aburto across from the Prado Museum, the big “cube” and the reticular brick façade of the Casa Sindical (competition of 1949, completion in 1951).35 In the footsteps of the Triennale of Milano, the First Bienal Hispanoamericana (1951) took place in Madrid with projects, among others, by de la Sota, Coderch and Valls, Vázquez Molezún, Francisco Cabrero and Rafael Aburto. In his review for the Boletín de Información de la Dirección General de Arquitectura of February 1952, which he accompanied with his suggestive sketches, Alejandro de la Sota praised the project for the open-air theatre (Monument to Gaudí) conceived by the young Ramón Molezún, but the last words were for Coderch and Valls: Coderch and Valls love the simplicity of the house of the farmer and the fisherman in their works; they love this simplicity and infiltrate it, in order to find everything deep inside. Some of us who believe in this path, that of the lime and the clay, perhaps much more than in other, more read and studied.36 When he wrote, “this candor and cleanliness of forms fills us with happiness,” he could not be thinking about the work that he was designing at that very moment for the Instituto Nacional de Colonización, the new town of Esquivel near Seville.37 34 Ibidem, p. 111: “Allí, conceptos como la cubierta plana, los planos lisos y formas cúbicas son reales y adaptados al lugar, no formalistas y antifuncionales como en Alemania… Supongo que algo de esto se dejó ver posteriormente en mi arquitectura.” 35 See Alberto Grijalba Bengoetxea, La arquitectura de Francisco Cabrero, Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1999; Gabriel Cabrero, Francisco De Asís Cabrero, Madrid: Fundación COAM, 2007. 36 Alejandro de la Sota, Boletín de Información de la Dirección General de Arquitectura, February 1952, p. 18: Coderch y Valls aman la sencillez del campesino y del pescador en sus obras; aman esta sencillez y penetran en ella sabiendo encontrar todo lo profundo que encierran. Somos algunos los que creemos en este camino, el de la cal y del barro, tal vez mucho más que en otros más leídos y estudiados … este candor y limpieza de formas nos llena de felicidad.” 37 See Chapter Five and Six. 315 4.3. The Feria del Campo: Bringing the Countryside to the City The first Feria del Campo took place in Madrid in 1950 on the grounds of the historic Casa de Campo to the west of the city centre and the Manzanares River. 38 The origin of the Casa de Campo goes back to 1519 when the Court decided to build a country residence on the western banks of the river. Later in the 1560s, Philip II put in motion the creation of a landscaped connection between his residence at the Alcázar and the country house. Juan Bautista de Toledo was put in charge of the project and introduced the Renaissance garden to Madrid. During Carlos III’s reign, major engineering works were realized under the direction of Francesco Sabatini; agriculture was introduced, and the recreation and hunting grounds expanded. There were small expositions of livestock in 1925 and 1930, before the Casa de Campo became open to the public under the Republic in 1931. In 1949 under the impulse of Diego Aparicio, the Franco government decided to re-establish the concept of the agricultural exposition and to expand it globally to all products and activities of the countryside. Coordinated from 1948 by the team of architects Francisco de Asís Cabrero and Jaime Ruiz Ruiz, the Feria of 1950 was a somewhat undisciplined but rich assemblage of structures whose architecture reflected various and uneven attempts at modernizing both the classical of the autarky period and the vernacular tradition. Most structures were innovative in form and typology, in many cases quite abstract, but the development of the third dimension often diminished their overall interest. Ten years after the symbolically and politically charged Exposition of the Reconstruction of 1940, the Feria del Campo continued to reflect the agrarian focus of the regime but abandoned any pretence at imperial grandeur. The “ensemble of stands under the pines” as de la Sota described the ensemble was a paradoxical display of tradition and modernity in the middle of the metropolis.39 On the one hand, it recalled rural structures that were familiar to the visitors; on the other hand, everything was reinvented and to a certain sense part of a surrealist game. Modernism at the fair was primarily a ‘plastic’ affair, which, paradoxically, put into question the extreme rationality of both the pre-war modernism and of the ‘imperial’ neoclassicism of the 1940s. Both periods, radically opposed in style, ideology, and image shared in fact a rational system of composition. In architecture but even more so in urbanism, it involved clear geometry, repetition, adherence to axial vision, and assemblage of simple volumes. At the end of the 1940s, architectural modernity was slowly penetrating the environment of Madrid, whose most visible signs of change were Cabrero and Aburto’s Casa Sindical on the Paseo 38 For this section, see the dissertation by José Coca Leicher, “El recinto ferial de la Casa de Campo de Madrid (1950-75),” Doctoral Dissertation, ETSAM, Madrid, 2013. As a counterpoint in the very limited contemporary literature, the article by Josep Rovira in 2008 can be described as a monument of bad faith and critical distortion. It is very aggressive, not only with the character of Francisco Cabrero, but also in the discussion of his works, for instance the housing district of Bejar in which “il ordine politico imponeva la resa all’ordine produttive”: see Josep M. Rovira, "Architettura popolare e fascismo. Celebrazioni franchiste. Prima Fiera Nazionale dell'agricoltura. Casa De Campo. Madrid, 1950," Casabella 771, November 2008, pp. 88-97. 39 For the Exposition of the Reconstruction, see Chapter Three. Alejandro de La Sota, “I Feria Nacional del Campo,” Boletín de la Dirección General de Arquitectura (BDGA), nº 16, 1950, p. 7. 316 del Prado and the early works of Miguel Fisac. What the fair brought to the heart of the capital was a new organic vision of architecture. Coming after a decade of neo-imperial vision, the Fair must have felt like a real liberation for all the architects involved and, perhaps, for the informed public. Cabrero, Ruiz, and their colleagues developed a catalogue of forms and volumes, which proposed a new aesthetic and a new relation to the landscape. Likewise, these new forms distanced themselves from the traditional vernacular. The latter, as we have seen, was primarily studied and promoted in relation to the rural and small-town dwelling. The challenge of the Fair’s architects in 1950 and in the subsequent occurrences of the event was to develop a rural, vernacular-influenced architecture while inventing new forms and compositions for the new programs. At the same time, they anticipated the organic and landscape-related developments that were going to impact the work of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.) through the innovative projects of de la Sota, Fernández del Amo, Arniches, Borobio Ojeda, and others. As its authors Cabrero and Ruiz explained in their description of the fair for the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura (R.N.A.), two large-scale contextual elements influenced the masterplan. The first was “the façade of Madrid” (including the Real Palace and the Cathedral) that dominates the panorama of the city and which dictated the concept of horizontality of the fair with the exception of the Torre Restaurante. The second was the magnificent pine forest that occupied the overall site and that they architects attempted to protect as much as possible. Functionally, as the program of the Fair was not fully set up at the start and developed during the design process, it was necessary to give the plans a special functional and architectural flexibility.40 Modern materials were still sparse and rare. In absence of steel (and in some cases even wood), stone, brick masonry, as well as the brickbased bóveda tabicada (generally known as Catalan vault) were the primary materials and methods of construction used throughout the fair. Passed the unremarkable portal and information office, the visitor encountered the Obras Sindical de Colonización, a complex organized around a U-shaped courtyard that recalled an agricultural farmhouse. Clearly influenced by the Granja Escuela realized by Rafael Aburto in Talavera de la Reina in 1948, the architecture of the courtyard eliminated all regionalist references and used a system of flat lowered arches, counterbalanced by a cylindrical tower that, if one excepted its slightly wider top, brought to mind the rural towers that De Chirico painted in many of his works.41 Combined with simple volumes pierced by horizontal windows, the buildings exhibited a hybrid cohabitation of tradition and modernity. This character was even more apparent in the exhibition General Pavilion (Pabellón General), situated slightly outside of the courtyard. It housed the model of the Feria and various displays of information. Its most significant architectonic element was its single-slope 40 Francisco de Asís Cabrero and Jaime Ruiz Ruiz, “I Feria Nacional del Campo,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 103, July 1950, p. 305. 41 See Rafael de Aburto, “Granja-escuela en Talavera de la Reina,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 80, August 1948), pp. 299-306. 317 concrete roof that projected upwards. Four inclined columns covered with granite stones supported the roof in a manner that suggested distant memories of Gaudí at the Parque Güell. Seen from the sides, two superimposed triangles—one of stone, one of white stucco— created a strong contrast of materials that reinforced the modern and bird-like image of the pavilion. 42 In the words of de la Sota, “the use of dry granite masonry… and the Catalan vaults, the joy of the mural paintings, the graceful central stone fountain and the successful play of lights and shadows, made this square a truly successful set, that served to prepare the visitor well.”43 The heart of the Feria was the circular plaza and the adjacent pavilions of the countryside products. Of an interior diameter of about 27 meters, the circular square was reached with a large set of granite stairs and had a large fountain in its centre. The highly compressed space was urban in nature and gave access through another staircase to the grid—one might use the word “mat”—of the country pavilions. For this section only, Cabrero and Ruiz adopted an urban, souk-like structure, fully orthogonal, and made up of small streets and squares.44 On opposite sides of the circle were the trapezoid-shaped Sala de Convenciones and the Salón de Actos. The Catalan vaults (bóvedas tabicadas) that configured the arcades of the circular plaza and the grid of pavilions had been experimented in Talavera with the Granja Escuela, in Madrid with a housing block by Luis Moya and the thirty-six housing units of the Obra Sindical del Hogar, known as Virgen del Pilar, by Francisco Cabrero, and in Villanueva del Pardillo as part of the reconstruction of the devastated regions.45 However, in all those cases, the vaults were completely or partially hidden, or seen from the interior. Their prominent display at the heart of the Fair marked a definitive moment of paradoxical modernity. On the one hand, the technique of construction was very traditional and had been used for centuries and more recently by Gaudí and Guastavino.46 On the other hand, the circular form of the piazza, the strong expression of the columns as buttresses, the rhythmic repetition of the low arches were a genuine expression of the architects’ desire to go beyond the technique and propose a possible form of modernity that involved the extreme simplification of the techniques. They were the essence of the architectural idea and here they brought an air of lightness and white 42 Coca Leicher, p. 104. De la Sota, Boletín, p. 8: “el uso de mampostería de granito en seco en escalinata, el empleo de la bóveda tabicada de ladrillo repetida, formando el gracioso soportal circular, la alegría de pinturas murales, la graciosa fuente central de piedra y el conseguido juego de luz y sombra, hicieron de esta plaza un conjunto verdaderamente acertado, que sirvió para bien preparar al visitante.” 44 Francisco de Asís Cabrero and Jaime Ruiz Ruiz, “Primera Feria del Campo,” Informes de la construcción III, no. 27, January 1951. 45 On the use of the Catalan vault during the 1940s, see José María de Churtichaga, "Uso de los sistemas de bóvedas tabicadas y su perspectiva histórica: aspectos constructivos de la reconstrucción de Villanueva de la Cañada,” Conarquitectura, no. 8, June 2003, pp. 81-93. See Rafael de Aburto, “Granja-escuela en Talavera de la Reina,” op. cit.; Luis Moya, “Casas abovedadas en el Barrio de Usera: construidas por la Dirección General de Arquitectura, Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 14, February 1943, pp. 52-57; Javier García-Gutiérrez Mosteiro, “Asís Cabrero y las viviendas en la colonia Virgen del Pilar,” in Un siglo de vivienda social: 1903-2003, Madrid: Ministerio de Fomento, 2003, pp. 298-299. 46 John Allen Ochsendorf, Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tiles, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. 43 318 modernity that contrasted with the architecture of the past decade. This quality made them appear as a vernacular element, yet an invented one that suggested the architecture of the countryside but had little connection to it. It is thus interesting to notice that Alejandro de la Sota would soon use a similar but more Cartesian version in Entrerríos (1953) whose arcades around the main plaza used the same technique and aesthetic. The same year, Carlos Sobrini Marín used it and repeated the circular form for the plaza mayor of Sancho Abarca, Zaragoza.47 In the Salón de Convenciones, located to the left at entering the circular plaza, Cabrero and Ruiz made the most spectacular use of the brick-based vaults: the two interiors diaphragms made up of one circular and one parabolic arch, perforated with circular openings, made for an impressive space. This combination of arches and Catalan vaults supported a singlesloped roof and concluded with a large and inclined glass wall divided into nine sections by a thin concrete grid. Nearby, the building for agricultural machines also by Ruiz Ruiz and Cabrero formed an arc of circle made up of seventeen bays whose section, structure, and materials were similar. The curved edifice, entirely built in brick, deployed inclined buttresses to the front, whereas the backside was made of an undulating brick wall accentuating the organic quality of the building and clearly reinforcing its structural stability.48 The ten murals realized around the atrium of the circular plaza, on the blind wall of the reception hall and within the hall itself, were realized by the artists Antonio Lago Rivera, Carlos Pascual de Lara, and Antonio Rodríguez Valdivieso. They embodied a moment of change in the official Spanish art and a clear trend toward abstraction of form and motifs of the deployed natural themes such as flora and fauna. For some artists like sculptor José Luis Sánchez, the new architecture, rational and devoid of ornaments, necessitated the participation of artists who would temper its abstraction and sometimes lack of character.49 Unequivocally, these artistic interventions were the first manifestation in Madrid of the concept of synthesis of the arts. Initiated by architects such as Alberto Sartoris before WWII, it was revived in 1943, when Sigfried Giedion, the painter Fernand Léger, and Josep Lluis Sert wrote the manifesto known as “Nine Points on Monumentality.” The text was, on the one hand, an unapologetic endorsement of modern architecture and “its absence of frontier” with town planning. On the other hand, it addressed a major conceptual deficiency in the Charter of Athens by emphasizing the need for new monuments “that represent social and community life to give more than functional fulfilment.”50 The authors commented further that people want 47 See chapters Five and Eight. For a similar use of the undulating brick wall and Catalan vaults, see the works of Eladio Dieste in Uruguay. 49 Ángel Cordero Ampuero, “Fernández Del Amo – aportaciones al arte y la arquitectura contemporáneas,” Dissertation, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, 2014, p. 139, From an interview with José Luis Sánchez, 23 & 29.07.2010. 50 Sigfried Giedion, Fernand Léger and Josep Lluis Sert, “Nine Points on Monumentality (1943),” in Sigfried Giedion, architecture you and me: the diary of a development, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, point 7, pp. 49-50. See Chapter 7 for Alberto Sartoris. 48 319 more than functionality and that “they want their aspiration for monumentality, joy, pride, and excitement to be satisfied.”51 New modern sites would have to be created to exploit the full potential of the joint work of architects, planners, painters, and other artists. Modern materials but also “the stones which have always been used,” and even more so landscape and elements of nature would be necessary to achieve the new monumentality: “In such monumental layouts, architecture and city planning could attain a new freedom and develop new creative possibilities, such as those that have begun to be felt in the last decades in the fields of painting, sculpture, music, and poetry.”52 At the Feria, as in the parallel works of the I.N.C. under the guidance of Fernández del Amo, Cabrero and Ruiz aimed at creating a modern unity of architecture, planning, and arts.53 In the 1940s, the monuments of the autarky were all mostly about regime celebration and great urban visions. In the 1950s and particularly in the countryside, the monuments, churches, plazas, town halls, towers, would be about expressing the social and political substrate of the post-war rural utopia. The integration of the arts as reflected in the Feria and later on in the countryside itself, involved the creation of new public spaces for the civil society. The spaces and the applied arts were to replace the official art of the 1940s and associate it with “new national values that could be associated with experimentation and abstraction as ideal of modernity.”54 Buried in the pines landscape in the middle of the fair, on axis with the entrance sequence, the Torre Restaurante designed by Cabrero stood at the back of the open-air theatre. Only vertical element of the whole ensemble, the tower rose above the landscape and offered a magnificent view toward the façade of Madrid dominating the Manzanares. Due to its height, the tower was built in reinforced concrete, covered with an apparatus of granite stones—in the description of de la Sota, “huge canvases of dry masonry, beams and slabs of whitewashed concrete, covered in the lower part of the restaurant in straw and brick pavement, all noble materials and perfectly chosen for their link to the composition.”55 Concrete was only apparent in the triangular beams supporting the big cantilevered terrace in a grand engineering gesture of modernity, in the division of the floors, and the large vertical frame that bordered the four-story high vertical window, quasi-industrial in its detailing, that occupied the back of the tower-restaurant. The project showed direct influences from Italian rationalism, and more specifically from the Torre del Partito Nazionale Fascista, realized in 1940 by Venturino Ventura at the Mostra d’Oltremare in Naples.56 Also inspired by Italian Rationalism, the grand concrete arch in front of the pavilion of the Obra Sindical del Hogar— 51 Ibidem. Ibidem, point 9, pp. 50-51. 53 See Chapters Five and Seven. 54 Coca Leicher, p. 138. 55 Alejandro de la Sota, Boletín, p.9: “lienzos enormes de mampostería en seco, vigas y losas de hormigón encalado, cubiertas de la parte baja del restaurant en paja, pavimentos de ladrillo, todos materiales nobles y perfectamente escogidos para su enlace en la composición.” 56 See Prima mostra triennale delle terre italiane d'oltremare, Napoli [9 Maggio-15 Ottobre 1940 XVIII], Napoli: S.A.I.G.A., 1940. 52 320 made of three intersecting vaults of thin concrete—indirectly recalled Libera’s unbuilt grand arch for the E42. Last but not least, the pavilion of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización, “well balanced in its masses and adjusted to its difficult site, succeeded, in spite of its measured size, in calling the attention of the visiting architect.”57 Overall de la Sota praised the fair, in spite of its improvisation and the speed of design and construction that left a lot to be desired. He supplemented his article with a series of black and red pencil drawings that beautifully and with a good dose of visual humour summarized the best of the Fair. Paradoxically, he wrote that the entire project suffered from an excess of abstraction and lacked the presence of the reality of the Spanish countryside: Perhaps we would have found more satisfaction in seeing a little more memory of our fields, the Spanish countryside, well sifted, well elaborated, with all its permanence and elegance… who knows if, by universalizing us in art, we are getting tired of so much abstraction and forgetting the purest and constants topics of healthiest inspiration.58 During the spring of 1952, Francisco Cabrero and Rafael de Aburto were commissioned with the plan for the revision and the new installation of the Fair to open May 1953. As seen on the drawing published in Gran Madrid, the intention was to keep the core of the first Fair and expend it further west along the Paseo de Estremadura. The fair whose completion was once again slowed down by various bureaucratic issues and political indecision opened on time but some of the structures were only completed three years later for the III Feria of 1956. A new linear entrance conceived as an abstract wall gave access to the new grounds and led directly to a large hybrid and multi-functional structure, in the form of an S as it literally embraced an exhibition stadium for machines, animals, and other activities.59 Built mostly of brick and concrete, the Exhibition Pavilion was a daring work by the two architects, which again reflected a modern and abstract interpretation of the rural vernacular. It demonstrated how a vernacular typology—the continuous arcade around the plaza of the pueblo or on the edge of the plaza de toros—could be reinterpreted and re-formed to create a completely new object while maintaining its value as urban structure. The attached tower originally planned for 1953 was not realized until 1956 when Cabrero and Aburto redesigned the project as a ‘metaphysical’ cube, fifteen-meter square with three facades of brick and one entirely glazed. Cabrero called the cube, el Dado, as a translation of Al-Ka’ba, the cube in stone that stands at 57 De la Sota, Boletín, p. 10. According to Fernández del Amo, he was the architect of the structure, see José de Castro Arines, “José Luis Fernández del Amo: una vieja Amistad,” in Fernández del Amo: Arquitecturas 1942-1982, Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1983, p. 7. 58 De la Sota, Boletín, p. 11: “tal vez hubiéramos encontrado mayor satisfacción en ver un poco el recuerdo de nuestro campo, el campo español, bien tamizado, bien elaborado, con toda la elegancia … pues quién sabe si, a fuerza de universalizarnos en el arte, nos cansamos de tanta abstracción al olvidar los temas más puros y constantes de sanísima inspiración.” 59 José María Muguruza, “Sesión crítica de arquitectura sobre la II Feria Nacional del Campo,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 145, January 1954, pp. 28-44. The circular square and the zoco remained. 321 the heart of Mecca as the major pilgrimage place of Islam.60 Other modern structures were of great interest such as the International Pavilion conceived as a vast open exhibition hall of 42 by 82.5 meters, contained between two brick walls that flared open to invite the visitors and supported by circular concrete columns that bear a continuously undulating concrete roof. The representative pavilions were overall regionalist and their ‘picturesqueness’ was strongly criticized by most architects. The white and plastically strong pavilion of Jaén (Guerrero, Iribarren, Prieto-Moreno, Romaní) and even more so, the Pavilion of Ciudad Real, designed by the emerging figure of Miguel Fisac, were the true exceptions. Organized as a sequence of patios and passages of various widths, the pavilion of Ciudad Real was made of lime walls, glass, with some sections covered with straw: What was taken from the tradition is not the shell, but the essential value found in the organization of the patios, the simple order of successive contrasts, and the general human scale linked to a way of living and feeling.61 Next to his own International Pavilion, that of Ciudad Real was for Cabrero, “modern architecture, and a demonstration of how the actual concepts of architecture, which are here particularly valid, point out to the paths that bring to truth.”62 Although Fisac was never involved in the I.N.C., his pavilion to be seen by all at the Feria del Campo reflected the changes that were contemporaneously starting to impact the work developed within the fields and regions of Spain in the hands of de la Sota, Fernández del Amo, Arniches, and others. 4.4. The Manifiesto de la Alhambra (1953) On October 14 and 15 of 1952, a two-day session of discussion and debate took place within the Alhambra in Granada. The periodical Revista Nacional de Arquitectura had previously inquired about the opportunity to organize such a session within the walls of the monument and, in light of the positive response, put in place the organization of the meeting with the explicit goal to produce a written manifesto in relation to the actuality of La Alhambra.63 The convocation was put forward in the Boletín General de la Dirección de Arquitectura of December 1952 under the title “La Alhambra y nosotros” (The Alhambra and us). It stated that, in a crucial moment for Spanish architecture and architects, it was critical to “not stay isolated from the universal modern movement in architecture” while making sure “not to 60 Coca Leicher, pp. 240-sq. Muguruza, 1954, p. 33: “se ha tomado de la tradición no la cáscara, sino su valor esencial en el trazado de patios, con un orden simple de contrastes sucesivos y en una escala humana general supeditada a la función marcada por una manera de vivir y sentir.” 62 Ibidem, p. 43. 63 "Sesiones de crítica de Arquitectura. Sesiones celebradas en la Alhambra durante los días 14 y 15 de octubre de 1952,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura XIII, nº 136, April 1953, pp. 13-49. The Sesiones de crítica de arquitectura became a feature of RNA from 1950 onwards and were signalled by a square Vitruvian logo. One architect or other expert would introduce a specific theme (building, public space, architect, and so on); following that presentation, invited guests would be debating the presentation. The entire event was published monthly in the periodical. 61 322 withdraw from our own personality.”64 The explicit and, in a certain sense, pre-established goal was, first to analyse the Alhambra as an urban artefact from the point of view of modern architecture and urbanism, and secondly, to produce a manifesto that would “establish the spiritual bases of a new architecture genuinely Spanish.”65 To some extent, it was to ask the question in the early 1950s Spain that the GATEPAC members had contemplated in the 1930s: how to be modern and be Spanish at the same time? For the organizers, under the strong influence of the organic movement epitomized in the writings of Bruno Zevi, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the works of Scandinavian architects, the Alhambra contained in itself the fundamental characteristics of modern architecture that could be defined in four groups: I. Human values; II. Natural values; III. Formal Values; IV. Mechanical values.”66 The following architects, educated before or after the Civil War, participated, mostly from the Madrid area: Rafael Aburto, Pedro Bidagor, Francisco Cabrero, Eusebio Calonge, Fernando Chueca, José Antonion Domínguez Salazar, Rafael Fernández Huidobro, Miguel Fisac, Damián Galmés, Luis García Palencia, Fernando Lacasa, Emilio Larrodera, Manuel López Mateos, Ricardo Magdalena, Antonio Marsá, Carlos de Miguel, Francisco Moreno López, Juana Ontañón, José Luis Picardo, Francisco Prieto Moreno, Mariano Rodríguez Avial, Manuel Romero, Secundino Zuazo, and a student at the Escuela de Madrid, José Luis Aranguren. The article published in the Revista Nacional of April 1953 illuminated the methodology that was followed to discuss and analyse the monumental ensemble. Francisco Prieto Moreno, architect in charge of the restoration of the Alhambra since 1937, explained how the first phase of the analysis took place in front of the model of La Alhambra. By virtue of its abstract nature, the model allowed the participants to “focus with absolute objectivity to the general lines of the monument”, leaving aside all historical details and personal assessment.67 Prieto reminded his audience that the Alhambra was built during the last two centuries of Arab domination, that is to say when the Arab and Christians were in constant and intimate contact, thus producing a particular form of Hispano-Muslim art. In his description, he emphasized the significance of the Alcazaba, organized as a medieval castle “whose cubic forms link it to the classical Mediterranean tradition"68; the architectonic identity of the three sections of the Alhambra itself and how their asymmetrical grouping maintained intact the 64 Fernando Chueca Goitia, “La Alhambra y nosotros,” Boletín de la Dirección General de Arquitectura BDGA VI, 1952, pp. 10-13. 65 Ibidem. 66 Ibidem, p. 13. 67 Ibidem, p. 16. 68 Ibidem, p. 17: “pero manteniendo las formas cúbicas, que enlazan con la tradición clásica mediterránea” 323 main axes of the composition; and, eventually, the Alhambra as “a system of buildings that, in spite of their simple cubic forms, adapt themselves with absolute fidelity to the terrain, connect to each other with great spontaneity, and manifest themselves in volume according to their function.”69 Moreover, he insisted on the equilibrium between individualism and collective vision in the development of the ensemble, and illustrated how the existence of multiple small axes shared a modern sensibility in contrast to the grand axis of many other projects of power. The ensuing debate exposed the affirmations, the doubts, and at times the misconceptions of the finality of the enterprise, but overall, as Pedro Bidagor would state it, “in our opinion, in the Alhambra there is a preview of modern architecture.”70 There was a global consensus that the lessons of the monument were invaluable at the particular moment in the development of Spanish architecture. The participants emphasized the introversion of the architecture, as well as the modernity of symmetry as long as it did not prevent the free and good conception of the plans. Paradoxically, it is Bidagor who better than anybody understood the typological and morphological value of the edifice and was able to develop a rational method of spatial analysis. He pointed out that the Alhambra had literally no facades but was organized internally around a series of patios, a century-long tradition in Spain. He argued that the masses of modern architecture conceived as objects could produce important buildings—he cited the O.N.U. headquarters in New York—but their repetition and juxtaposition would have very problematic consequences.71 Likewise, the Palace of Charles V on the Alhambra was highly problematic as its convex architecture conflicted with the rest of the structures. Indeed, the Alhambra formed an ensemble of concave spaces whose organization and spatial succession produced environments of high harmonic quality. In the last section of the discussion, he did bring the issue of the relationships and differences between Northern Europe and the Southern Mediterranean: It is curious to observe that the North has always manifested itself with aesthetic formulas copied from the South. Now that the machinist North has taken over the world, it wants to retaliate and impose its own ideas. And it is curious to see how one of the most fundamental buildings of architecture of these times, the Stockholm City Hall, was built entirely according to Mediterranean formulas, as it should be.72 69 Ibidem, p. 19: un sistema de edificios que, a pesar de sus simples formas cúbicas, se adapta con absoluta fidelidad al terreno, enlazándose entre sí con gran espontaneidad y manifestándose en volumen según su función.” 70 Ibidem, p. 24: “a nuestro juicio, en la Alhambra hay un anticipo de la arquitectura moderna.” 71 Ibidem, p. 24. As Bidagor explained, the traditional street was a concave space defined by lines of buildings, whereas modern urbanism searched to terminate this urban composition in favour of a convex organization of objects. 72 Ibidem, p. 25: “Es curioso observar que siempre el Norte se ha manifestado con fórmulas estéticas copiadas del Sur. Ahora que el Norte maquinista ha tomado preponderancia en el mundo, quiere ir al desquite e imponernos sus ideas. Y es curioso comprobar cómo uno de los edificios más fundamentales de la arquitectura de estos tiempos, el Ayuntamiento de Estocolmo, está edificado todo él con fórmulas mediterráneas, como debe ser.” 324 Bidagor also argued that the concave spatial composition of the Alhambra would have produced a much better Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid than the Beaux-Arts planning of Modesto López Otero and his collaborators—an argument that resonated a couple of years later with new campus projects around the country and the development of modern civic centres at the heart of the new villages of the I.N.C.73 Likewise, he urged Cabrero, who was busy designing the Second Feria del Campo, to apply the lessons of the Andalusian monument. On his side, Cabrero supported the arguments but argued that the architecture of the Alhambra was “primitive” and added that “nowadays the modern architecture has contributed the curved line, which is equally geometric but gives some possible solutions to the most complicated current problems that the orthogonal disposition cannot resolve.”74 Fernando Chueca Goitia (1911-2004) coordinated the writing and the publication of the Manifesto of the Alhambra in 1953, a logical decision as the historian was the prime initiator of the sessions.75 Fifty pages long, it did not pretend to be a traditional manifesto of revolutionary ideas as some of its predecessors in the twentieth century. It was basically an evolutionary document that was theorizing the emerging concepts of modern Spanish architecture, within the Madrid circle with Cabrero, Fisac, and de la Sota, and within the Catalan one with Coderch, Sostres, and the Grup R.76 Whereas the reference to the Escorial had dominated Spanish architecture during the 1940s, Chueca Goitia and his group saw in the Alhambra in Granada a more appropriate historical and multicultural reference to the modern condition and needs of post-war Spain: The relationship between this edifice of the fourteenth century and the most advanced contemporary architecture is, in many ways, astonishing. They concur in their acceptation of human module; in the manner, asymmetrical yet organic, to organize the plans; in the purity and the sincerity of the resulting volumes; in the manner to incorporate the garden and the landscape to the edifice; in the strict and economic use—without any plastic “fat”—of the materials, and in so many other things….77 To be sure, the Manifiesto was written to be a politically acceptable document within the 73 Ibidem, p. 23. On the Ciudad Universitaria, see for instance Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid. Servicio Histórico, Análisis histórico y urbanístico de la Ciudad Universitaria de Madrid, Madrid: COAM, 1985. 74 Ibidem, p. 34: “ahora la arquitectura moderna aporta la línea curva igualmente geométrica, pero que da unas posibilidades de soluciones a los más complicados problemas actuales que no la tienen las disposiciones ortogonales.” 75 Fernando Chueca Goitia was an architect, historian of architecture, and professor of the History of Art at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. For a summary of his works and thinking, see the special issue of Goya: revista de arte, nº 264, May-June 1998, and, in particular, Carlos Sambricio, “Fernando Chueca Goitia, historiador de la arquitectura,” pp. 131-143. 76 Manifiesto de la Alhambra, Madrid: Ministerio de la Gobernación, Dirección General de Arquitectura, 1953; Ángel Isac (ed.), El Manifiesto de La Alhambra 50 años después: el monumento y la arquitectura contemporánea, Granada: Patronato de La Alhambra y Generalife / TF Editores, 2006. It is important to note than no architect from Catalonia signed the official document. 77 Manifiesto de la Alhambra, reprinted in Ángel Urrutia Núñez (ed.), Arquitectura española contemporánea. Documentos, escritos, testimonios inéditos, pp. 356-383, quote p. 361. 325 evolving context of Franco’s dictatorship. Following only a three-line reference to the “internationalist” modernism of the 1930s, the manifesto discussed the “superior prudence” that the architects of the 1940s had shown in their works for the regime, “establishing an equation, somewhat ingenuous, between the current conditions and the spiritual projection of a past style… It was the hieratic attitude, the gravity, and the immobility of the political majesty that had to be restored.”78 At the same time, it was important to reiterate, without continuing in the pathway of nationalism, that Spain had to establish a Spanish way of being modern. Behind those cautious words, there was the honest criticism of a decade of public works, characterized by the unanimity of design, the material dignity of the constructions, and the sincere use of the materials. The reference to the Escorial in the 1940s did not only correspond to an ideological vision: the architecture of the complex was, in fact, a usable model for a ministry building or similar large program, and thus, “the reincorporation of the Escorial into our architecture revolved around substantial assumptions of immediate utility.”79 Almost fifteen years after the end of the Civil War, the Manifesto of La Alhambra reflected the end of an architectural period that could not be sustained further. Making reference to modern art and architecture, the author wrote: In architecture, the essential forms, such as the pyramid and the mastaba, the baptisteries and Romanesque towers, and the white cubes that bloom along the Mediterranean, whether Latin or Islamic, have opened new avenues that stimulate the current architects and provide an exciting and creative impulse.80 Clearly, the Alhambra and other masterworks of Mudéjar architecture had generated a significant number of good and rigorous buildings in neo-Mudéjar style in Spain and in other countries.81 However, the romantic orientalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century had no more place in the modern society, even though the reality of the Arabic influence on Spanish culture, landscape, language, architecture, urbanism and society were and remained undeniable: “... no people are stronger than those who know others better. But, in addition, in Spain being an Arabist is to deepen our history and discover unexplored veins in our own lives.”82 As a result, “if the romantics saw the Alhambra in a troubadour way... we see it in a cubist way and there is no danger that the Moorish attire would make us lose the clear and 78 Manifiesto, p. 5. Manifiesto, p. 24: “la reincorporación de El Escorial a nuestra arquitectura se movía aún sobre supuestos de inmediata utilidad.” 80 Manifiesto, p. 17: “En la arquitectura, las formas esenciales, como la pirámide y la mastaba, lo baptisterios y torres románicas, y los cubes de cal que en el Mediterráneo florecen, sean latinos o islámicos, son otros caminos intactos que estimulan a los arquitectos actuales, excitando un fresco impulso creador.” 81 Let us mention the United States, where the architecture of the Al-Andalus was very influential in the second half of the 19th century and the early 1900s, thanks to the Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving (1832, revised 1851) and the architect’s travels to Spain during World War One (see for instance the writings and works of Bertram Goodhue). 82 Manifiesto, p. 25: “… ningún pueblo es más fuerte que el que conoce mejor a los otros. Pero es que, además, en España ser arabista es profundizar en nuestra historia y descubrir vetas inexploradas en nuestra propia vida.” 79 326 concise vision of the volumes, as happened to the pupils that preceded us.”83 It was simply a question of historical moment, and that moment had now come to re-analyse the monument from the point of view of its formal composition, construction, decoration, and landscape. For Chueca Goitia, Spanish architecture and urbanism represented the fusion of Arabic and Christian culture. However, there was in this attitude no “orientalism” in the sense of Edward Said.84 In his prologue to the second Spanish edition of his book Orientalism, Said acknowledged that the relations between Spain and Islam were exceedingly dense and complex, and that Spain offered a notable exception to his cultural analysis of French, British, and American Orientalism: Islam had for centuries been part of Spanish culture and not an external distant power.85 Spain was different from its European neighbours and, during the first half of the twentieth century, those differences were directly exploited to anchor the national identity of the country. The Alhambra was in fact a pivotal hinge in the development of the Orientalist gaze during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Images of its derelict state spurred the romantic vision of a decadent, romantically cruel, and beautiful place where violence, power, beauty and eroticism co-existed in a titillating melange. Its abstract decoration, ceilings, azulejos, gardens were the real attraction more than the architecture or urban form of the monument. The three generations of the Contreras dynasty (don José, don Rafael, and don Mariano), which were in charge of the restoration of the Alhambra from 1824 onwards, aimed at preserving and restoring a national monument in a dramatic state of abandon at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet, they did eventually “orientalise” it to make it more romantically oriental and increase its fame. Copies of some rooms like the Sala Árabe were made in Madrid at the Cerralbo Palace. The “restorations” realized by Rafael Contreras and his successors were eventually undone in the archaeological work of Leopoldo Torres Balbás between 1923 and 1936 and his followers.86 One of the most influential design theorists of the nineteenth century, the British architect Owen Jones (1809-1874) rose to prominence with his studies of Islamic decoration at the Alhambra, and the associated publication of his drawings. Jones was also responsible for the interior decoration and layout of exhibits for Paxton’s Exhibition building of 1851, and for its later incarnation at Sydenham. Jones passionately believed in the search for a modern style unique to the nineteenth century – one that was radically different to the prevailing aesthetics of Neo-Classicism and the Gothic Revival. He looked towards the Islamic world for much of 83 Manifiesto, p. 18. See Fernando Chueca Goitia, Invariantes castizos de la arquitectura española, Madrid/Buenos Aires: Dossat, 1947. 85 On the issue of Spain and Orientalism, see Anna McSweeney and Claudia Hopkins (eds.), “Editorial: Spain and Orientalism,” in Art in Translation, Volume 9, nº 1, 2017, pp. 1–6. The journal makes clear that Spanish visual representations of Al-Andalus and Morocco, which King Alfonso XIII had dreams of making a new colony after the loss of the American ones, were both a complex and paradoxical phenomenon. Also see Edward Said, “Prólogo a la nueva edición española,” Orientalismo, Barcelona: DeBolsillo, 2008, pp. 9–10. Said’s prolog is dated from 2002 86 See in particular Gabriel Cabrero (ed.), Leopoldo Torres Balbás y la restauración científica: ensayos, Granada: Patronato de La Alhambra y Generalife/Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico, 2013. 84 327 this inspiration, using his carefully observed studies of Islamic decoration at the Alhambra to develop bold new theories on colours, flat patterning, geometry and abstraction in ornament.87 In summary, the Manifesto was organized in four different themes: forms, construction, decoration, and gardens. For the signatories, the Alhambra was, before all, “simple volumes topped in large horizontal lines silhouetted against the sky.”88 As an organic assemblage, volumes were more important than mass; in other words, the three-dimensional presence of the volumes was seen as truly modern. They could be circumnavigated as plastic objects organized together organically. Moreover, those volumes were functionally and organically connected to the terrain and the topography. Their convex organization gave way to a concave inner world where the Islamic/Spanish patio organized all major elements. The Manifesto contrasted those principles with the subordination to the traditional urban elements that dominated architecture and urbanism until then. However, by stating that “the orientation of modern architecture, which advocates the loose buildings with their own personality and unique volume, will necessarily lead to an urban composition that relates the single buildings to each other,” the Manifesto took an ambiguous and problematic position at contrasting the monument with traditional urban space: “The architectural composition will evolve little by little towards the subordination of the convex to the concave. The formulas of the Alhambra will be the end.”89 This plastic emphasis was potentially anti-urban as it tended to reject the street and the block in order to allow the volumes to be expressed. I will argue later (Chapter Five) that it is in the space of the countryside that those principles were easier to follow and to achieve results. It is also surprising that the compositional qualities of the complex, in plan and section, did not accompany the publication of the book. There were no plans, no sections, no elevations, but only relatively traditional photographs to illustrate the conceptual richness of the work. On the construction front, the truth in selecting and applying the materials was the primary lesson of the complex. Each material was “precisely used in its particular location and responded to its function with evident and simple logic.”90 The decoration was essentially a raiment, that is to say one of the most ancient and primitive way to understand decoration in the Semperian way—a decoration fundamentally respectful of the structural will of the 87 Owen Jones and Jules Goury, Plans, elevations, sections, and details of the Alhambra, London: O. Jones, 1842-45; Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, London, 1856. 88 Manifiesto, p. 30: “volúmenes simples rematados en grandes líneas horizontales recortadas contra el cielo.” 89 Manifiesto de la Alhambra, p. 30-31: “La orientación de la arquitectura moderna, que propugna los edificios sueltos con personalidad propia y volumen singular, llevará necesariamente en la composición urbana a relacionar unos y otros edificios, estableciendo entre ellos condiciones de armonía y valorando el espacio libre intermedio, no como espacio inactivo y neutro, sino como lugar de convivencia y de complacencia estética. La composición arquitectónica evolucionará poco a poco hacia la supeditación de lo convexo a lo cóncavo. Las fórmulas de la Alhambra serán el final.” 90 Manifiesto, p. 35. 328 architect.”91 The decoration at the Alhambra fully respected the spatial effect and construction of the rooms. It was not pictorial in the sense of telling a story, but fully abstract. Secondly, and at a certain distance, the decoration acquired a “texture, a quality and special vibration which enriches the surface of the walls,”92 rather than modifying, transforming it. This flatness and adequacy to the surface was of course a reflection of modernity. The final section was related to the garden and more generally to the landscape. The manifesto fundamentally advocated the significance of the Arab garden in its intent to represent Paradise on Earth. Water and geometry were the fundamental ingredients of the Arab way of designing gardens. In absence of the rain-based landscape of Nordic countries, the Arabs had invented the garden of arid regions. Irrigation and control of water were indispensable in contrast with the organic nature of Northern regions. Here water had to be distributed and precisely channelled within the appropriate borders, making geometry a sine qua non condition of design and engineering together: In Spain, we have the irrigation garden, since we do not have the garden of rain. If only for this reason, the Hispano-Muslim garden should be the starting point of our garden design. 93 In that sense, the manifesto re-expressed the theory that had been advanced by Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier and his follower Nicolás María Rubió i Tudurí, in the 1920s-30s.94 4.5. In Praise of the Shanty At the occasion of the First Hispano-American Biennale held in Madrid from October 1951 to February 1952, various architects including Mitjans, Sostres, and Coderch himself addressed the question of low-cost housing within the emerging context of renewed international relations, particularly with the United States. Like in the 1920s and the immediate post-Civil War period, the reality of the economic structure of the country favored standardization and relatively labor-intensive solutions. Acknowledging the reality of the spreading chabolas or slums in the periphery of Barcelona, Madrid and other large cities, Coderch studied a prefabrication system that would modernize and rationalize the future of these neighborhoods. His proposal, detailed in his “Memoria estudio sobre una posible solución 91 Manifiesto, p. 20. Manifiesto, p. 42. 93 Manifiesto, p. 49. 94 Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, Jardins, carnet de plans et de dessins, Paris, 1920; English edition, Gardens; a note-book of plans and sketches, New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1928. Forestier’s Luisa Park in Sevilla was the perfect illustration. Also see Mercè Rubio i Boada, Nicolau María Rubio i Tuduri (1891-1981): Jardinero y urbanista, Madrid: Doce Calles/Real Jardín Botánico, 1993; Helen Morgenthau, Patio gardens, New York: The Macmillan company, 1929. In July 1953 in the Boletín, Alberto Sartoris praised the manifesto and its methodology, in which he saw a welcome, Mediterraneanbased, antidote to the excessively “romantic” influence of the organic architecture. A couple of months later in RNA (December 1953), Carlos de Miguel published the Casa Ugalde (1951) with the photographs of Català-Roca, accompanied by excerpts from the Manifesto. 92 329 del problema de las barracas” [Study report on a possible solution to the problems of the shanties] consisted of a housing unit in pre-stressed concrete. In section, the unit formed a Ushaped structure that included, in one single module, the ground slab, the vertical back section, and the inclined roof. The residents, in collaboration with the architect, were asked to build the side and front facades in masonry blocks, covered with colored stucco and windows of reduced size, “which would constitute an element of indubitable esthetic value.”95 In doing so, Coderch attempted to recreate the articulated image of a traditional village, evoking echoes of “primitive culture” in his vision of combinatory assemblages of volumes that he illustrated in a famous photomontage he presented at the 1962 Team X meeting in Royaumont. The montage, also published in a special issue of Arquitectura dedicated to the anonymous architecture of Spain as well as in the Chilean periodical Auca nº 14 (1969), was a composition utilizing various and repeated photographs of shanties in the periphery of Madrid: Some time ago I participated in a congress and presented a photograph, in fact a photomontage, … there were houses in a small town outside of Madrid, whose name I do not remember, very humble houses, all of one floor; all had a large window, a small window and a door. I liked that very much, they were all the same; but, nevertheless, there was a great variety, they did not have this monotony of what we architects do, and it occurred to me that, perhaps, the changes that we introduce to the houses we design to create more variety and to avoid the monotony, result to be wrong; on the other hand, those that have been done with complete arbitrariness by those who were going to inhabit these houses, turned out very well; then I asked (because I supposed that this poetry could come from the interrelation of some houses with others) to cut all the photographs and I had them assembled, and it turned out to be a beautiful photograph.96 On the 27th of January 1957, the young architect and critic Oriol Bohigas (1925-) wrote in Solidaridad Nacional his famous manifesto Elogio de la barraca [In praise of the shanty]. In this polemical text, he argued that the shanties had made it possible for waves of immigrants to settle in the periphery of Barcelona. They generated a spontaneous urbanism, rough and instable, but one that permitted the development of urban solidarity and neighborhood integration. He intuited that the “dormitory-type” housing projects (polígonos in Spanish) put in 95 José Antonio Coderch in Nueva Forma, November 1974, pp. 65-66. José Luis Coderch, Auca, quoted by Carlos Flores, vol.1, p. 74: Hace ya tiempo presenté a un congreso una fotografía, un fotomontaje, que hice hacer por un no arquitecto porque había unas casas en un pueblecillo de las afueras de Madrid, cuyo nombre no recuerdo, casas muy humildes, todas de una planta; todas tenían una ventana grande, une ventana chica y una puerta. Aquello me gustaba mucho, todas eran iguales; pero, sin embargo, existía una gran variedad, no tenían esta monotonía de lo que nosotros hacemos, y se me ocurrió pensar que quizá los cambios que nosotros introducimos, en general, en las casas, por conseguir variedad, por evitar la monotonía, resultan falsos; en cambio, las que se han hecho con completa arbitrariedad por los que iban a habitar las casas, resultaban muy bien; entonces hice recortar (porque suponía que esta poesía podría venir de la interrelación de unas casas con otras) todas las casas y las hice montar, y resultó una fotografía preciosa.” 96 330 place by the developers in connection with the regime, segregated, badly built, with minimum infrastructure, and the absence of any genuine public spaces, were worse than the autoconstruction neighborhoods. The latter should be maintained unless they could be replaced by superior projects: We think that it is possible to ‘redeem’ the space of the shanties and add some value to it—an impossible task in our inorganic groups of mass housing. Likewise, we believe that the genuine qualities to be found in the shanties could offer lessons to our urbanists, and make them understand what are the authentic foundations and the sociological premises of a new neighborhood. 97 Three years later, in another manifesto titled Elogio del ladrillo (In praise of the brick, 1960), Bohigas provocatively ennobled both traditional construction techniques and self-construction process in contrast with the speculative blocks of the periphery. In practice, he suggested that traditional construction materials should be preferred to industrialization, particularly in a country where labor shortages and cost of labor made the use of the brick, a social, economic, and architectural alternative: One must remember that the immediate problem is to provide houses for the countless families that have been rejected by our social structure. And, for the sake of those families, it is critical to renounce, at least for the time being, to our constant discussions: what style, opinions, principles, forms, etc. Including, if necessary, step down from the pedestal of the technicians of the industrial era, in order to work, manually, with “medieval” craftsmen and craftswomen.98 To be sure, this theoretical position about urbanism and construction was not unprecedented. It took shape polemically at the CIAM IX held in Aix-en-Provence in 1953 under the impulse of a group of young architects working in Morocco and Algeria. The group CIAM-Morocco (among which were Michel Ecochard and Georges Candilis) and the group CIAM-Algiers under the direction of Roland Simounet and Michel Emery displayed investigations of various bidonvilles in Northern Africa in the format of the CIAM-grid. Sketches, photographs, collages, and other graphic analysis took the audience by surprise. As Tom Avermaete commented, “in these grids there was no reference to pure forms, appealing aesthetics, and rich architectural traditions, but rather to the messy everyday urban environment—the bidonville—that emerges from poverty and necessity.99 The heated discussion that ensued, combined with the radical investigation of African vernacular in the Dogon villages by Aldo Van Eyck and friends, eventually led to the breakdown of CIAM and the creation of Team X in 1959.100 There were 97 Oriol Bohigas, “Elogi de la barraca,” Barcelona entre el Pla Cerdà i el barraquisme, Edicions 62, Barcelona, 1963, pp. 154-155. 98 Oriol Bohigas, "Elogi del Totxo, in Barcelona entre el Pla Cerdà i el barraquisme, p. 147. 99 Tom Avermaete, “CIAM, Team X, and the Rediscovery of African Settlements between Dogon and Bidonville,” in Jean-François Lejeune & Michelangelo Sabatino, p. 253. 100 See Max Risselada, Dirk van den Heuvel, Tom Avermaete, et.al., Team 10: 1953-81, in search of a utopia of the present, Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2005. 331 no Spanish architects involved in the general debate, with the exception of Josep Lluis Sert who, two years earlier in the CIAM VIII in Hoddesdon, introduced the concept of the Heart of the City and presented his Latin American projects, such his masterplan for Chimbote, Peru. In these works, he veered away from the modernist typologies to embrace a high-density fabric of patio houses, an approach that he developed in his well-known essay Can Patios Make Cities? To some extent, although he did not embrace Team X, Sert pioneered a revision of the housing tenets of the modern movement and anticipated projects such as ATBAT-Afrique’s patio-based housing masterplan for the Carrières Centrales in Casablanca (1951-1955). Echoes of these discussions reached Spain in no time, but surprisingly the patio-based alternative did not really succeed outside of the colonization projects and some rare projects of social housing (see Chapter Five).101 Like his Italian mentor Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Bohigas believed in a double historical continuum: the tradition of the modern masters, and the spontaneous and popular tradition that forms the cultural structure of the large lower-class masses that were becoming the new protagonists of history in the post-war era.102 His realist position was also a response, or rather an extension, of the vernacular discourse that had until then concentrated on the countryside or the remote peripheries. His aim was to define a vernacular for the city, whose principles would oppose the ideological tenets of the modern movement. Buildings would take place within the traditional fabric of streets and blocks, use traditional materials like brick, and favour a labour intensive building process to advanced technological structures and methods. In parallel with the works of Coderch in Barcelona, Bohigas’s buildings took place in the very context of the metropolis. The apartment building at Calle Pallars (1958-59) for metallurgy workers consisted of 130 low-cost housing units of 60 square meter each. In order to break the full length of one Cerdà block, including the chamfered intersections, the architects divided the complex into a rhythmic series of six attached buildings connected together by the open-air vertical circulations. Interior patios provided light for two bedrooms, an antimodernist solution which he commented as follows, “in spite of the clichés that modern architecture carries, and, in particular, its propaganda in favour of the isolated blocks and the absolute necessity of linear arrangements with direct ventilation for all rooms, a concentrated type of housing can still be developed and continues to provide many advantages.”103 If the Casa Pallars made indirect references to the pre-WWII Amsterdam School, Casa Meridiana 101 Paul Lester Wiener and José Luis Sert, “Can Patios Make Cities?”, Architectural Forum 99, nº 2, August 1953), pp. 124-131. Also see Carola Barrios, Can Patios Make Cities? Urban Traces of TPA in Brazil and Venezuela,” ZARCH (Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies on Architecture and Urbanism), nº 1, 2013, pp. 70-81. 102 See Antonio Pizza, “Italia y la necesidad de la teoría en la arquitectura catalana de la postguerra: E.N. Rogers, O. Bohigas,” p. 107. 103 Oriol Bohigas and Josep M. Martorell, "Grupo De Viviendas Obreras," Arquitectura, nº 28, April 1961, p. 20: “a pesar de los tópicos que maneja la arquitectura moderna y su propaganda en favor de los bloques aislados y de la necesidad absoluta de los conjuntos lineales con ventilación directa para todas las habitaciones pueden todavía mantenerse y facilitan un tipo de vivienda concentrada que tiene muchas ventajas.” 332 (1959-65) was more specifically related to the idea of the Viennese worker’s citadel. Socioeconomically, it was planned to shelter the immigration from the countryside. Typologically, it was a linear bar-building, placed parallel to the Avenida Meridiana, the grand entrance artery coming from the north, and organized in two identical sections separated by the vertical circulations and four patios. The apartments were customized through alterations of the type that resulted in various arrangements of windows and rooms, achieving seven different types of facade for each dwelling. The planned disorder and vibrancy of the facades—that can be read as an urban reinterpretation of Coderch’s photomontage discussed earlier—reflected the economy of resources in a positive manner, away from the repetitive typologies and compositional banality of typical low-cost housing. Those realizations, along with others for the low and the middle classes, were Bohigas’s and his partner Martorell’s answer to the Italian neo-realism movement and to his interest in Rogers’s approach to architecture as defined in the editorials and projects published in Casabella-continuità. Entirely built in bricks and traditional bearing walls, destined to immigrant classes as happened in Rome with projects like Quaroni’s Tiburtino and others, they nevertheless rejected the building-block as object to embrace and inscribe themselves into the traditional city of streets, blocks, and patios. In a long article of 1962 titled “Granada hoy,” Bohigas asserted that the Alhambra was of extreme utility in the definition of the new “realism“: In the new path of realist architecture there are two important themes: on the one hand, that of modesty and ‘anti-polemic’ and ‘anti-dogmatic’ authenticity in the architectural approach, and, on the other hand, the possible integration within modern architecture of those elements of the tradition that are still valid and have been displaced by rationalism only for controversial and dogmatic reasons. In the meditation of these two themes, the Alhambra in Granada lends us extraordinary possibilities.104 Bohigas distinguished between the “idealists” who continued to believe in the rationalist tenets of the 1920s-1930s and the potential of industrialization, and the “realists” which intend to build within the exact conditions and possibilities of the moment. The latter were searching for an “integral” reality that involved not only the constructive aspect, but also the social and the political context and conditions.105 Attacking the dogmatic, rigid—I would add to Bohigas’s adjectives, puritan—tenets of rationalism and charging against all the architects who piled up prisms of glass on the entire Germany and London, he saw in the Alhambra the fields of freshness and passion of genuine architecture. Calling the 1953 Manifiesto de la Alhambra a 104 Oriol Bohigas, “Granada hoy,” in Arquitectura 4, nº 45, September 1962, p. 2: "En el nuevo camino de la arquitectura realista hay dos temas importantes: por un lado, el de la modestia y la autenticidad “antipolémica”, “antidogmática” en el planteamiento arquitectónico, y, por otro, la posible integración a la arquitectura moderna de aquellos elementos aún válidos de la tradición que habían sido desplazados por el racionalismo solamente por motivos polémicos y dogmáticos. En la meditación de estos dos temas, la Alhambra de Granada nos presta unas extraordinarias posibilidades.” 105 Bohigas admitted that the industrialization process could eventually succeed but the social and technological conditions in Spain were not appropriate for its intensive use. 333 “text extraordinarily suggestive,”106 he asserted that the manifesto had “more cultural transcendence” a decade later than at the time of its publication. 107 Continuing his attacks against “open urbanism,” he accused the architects and developers of new neighbourhoods in and around Granada to lack any realistic vision of life in a region where “the tradition of the street, of the patio, of the walls, and the flower pots are totally operant.”108 It is interesting to reflect on how much the urbanistic interpretation of the Alhambra and its lessons for the future differed over the ten years. Chueca Goitia and the signatories used the Alhambra to position themselves against the traditional street, whereas Bohigas, well aware of the dramatic consequences of the open block and the refusal of the street, used it to propose a return to the century-old principles of Western urbanism. Likewise, it is important to point out that the new realism for Bohigas was both architectural and urbanistic. If it accepted the conditions of construction as they were, it did as well for the urban environment as it was, i.e., with its streets, alignment codes, etc. Ernesto Rogers and Giancarlo de Carlo were certainly sensitive to dismantling the simplistic urban tenets of modernism; yet, in practice it never formally advocated the principles of streets and squares in the same realist way than Bohigas. One year earlier (1961), Bohigas had published his provocative Comentarios sobre el Pueblo Español in the periodical Arquitectura.109 Let us recall that the exhibition village was the work of two architects, Ramón Reventós and Francisco Folguera, the painter Xavier Nogués, and the art critic and first proponent of the project, Miguel Utrillo.110 Following its initial success, both public and touristic, but also from the specialized critic, the reputation of the Pueblo Español expectedly collapsed under the indirect attacks of the functional city, the new traffic systems, the rejection of the rue-corridor, and of the so-called ‘scenographic’ design. Attacking modern urbanism for the built “realities where to suffer,” Bohigas set up to dismantle the tenets and even more so the results of the functionalist urbanism and its hygienic, anti-urban, and technological biases. In his article, the Pueblo became the symbol of all the pueblos of Spain, many of which were either abandoned or submitted to an uncontrolled abuse of modernization. Most significantly and coming from an architect with modern credentials, the essay was an advocacy in favor of the street and the block—two 106 Oriol Bohigas, “Granada hoy,” p. 6. Even though Coderch and Grup R were certainly influencing the Madrid scene, this absence reflected the division line between the capital and the Catalonian region. Likewise, architects from the region were primarily absent from public works such as the DGRD and the INC. Bohigas pointed out and lamented the depreciation that the text had given to both the Modernism and the experiments of the GATEPAC, while regretting that the sessions did not include any architect from Catalonia 108 Oriol Bohigas, “Granada hoy,” p. 11. 109 Oriol Bohigas, “Comentarios al "Pueblo Español" de Montjuich,” Arquitectura nº 35, November 1961, pp. 15-23. 110 See Jordana Mendelson, “El Poble Espanyol/El Pueblo Español (1929),” Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-39, University Part, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005, pp. 1-37. 107 334 fundamental tenets of urban design which he would use for the program of the Olympic Games of 1992: We are convinced that its most spectacular accomplishment [of the Pueblo Español] can be found in the successful weaving of its streets and that, on the other hand, the absence of streets is one important reason of the formal and psychological failure of the modern urbanism.111 As for the traditional urban block, he lamented its unjustified abandon and praised, at the same time, its unmatched capacity to serve as the “basis of human attraction on our Mediterranean cities.”112 Here was the key of his argument: Mediterranean cities and their residents had another relationship to public space and public life than in northern European and American ones, and as such it was entirely conceivable, in fact necessary, to develop a Mediterranean vision of modern urbanism. That is what, to some extent, the GATEPAC and Zuazo/Jansen had imagined for Barcelona and Madrid in the 1930s. That is what Bohigas would eventually achieve and demonstrate in the Renaissance of Barcelona as Olympic city and further. 4.6. Villages in the City As I have discussed in Chapter One, the Zuazo-Jansen Anteproyecto del trazado viario y urbanización de Madrid placed first in the competition of 1929 for the planning of Madrid. In contrast with the Plan Macià in Barcelona, the Anteproyecto clearly limited the extension of the city with the use of a large green belt and “the development of satellite-cities which, new or superimposed on existing urban or rural nuclei would absorb the surplus of urban growth.”113 Those satellite-cities would be built between the greenbelt and the countryside, usually in connection with important access roads, and a system of parks would make connections between all the areas and the consolidated city. At the end of the Civil War, at the occasion of the First Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectos in October 1939, Chief Planner Pedro Bidagor presented the urban principles that were at the basis of the Plan General de Ordenación de Madrid. He conceived an organic vision of a Gran Madrid structured as an archipelago of rural-based towns or poblados around the historic city. The city was to become multipolar in its conquest of the countryside, which, on its own turn, would penetrate into the urban core in a reinterpretation of the system of parks developed in the United States, Germany and France. All together city and country would 111 Oriol Bohigas, “Comentarios sobre el pueblo español,” p. 21: “Estamos convencidos que en el acertado tejido de calles se encuentra uno de sus más espectaculares éxitos y que, en cambio, en la ausencia de calles está uno de los aspectos de fracaso—formal y psicológico, por lo menos—del nuevo urbanismo.” 112 Oriol Bohigas, “Comentarios sobre el pueblo español,” p. 22. 113 Lilia Maure Rubio, Lilia, Anteproyecto del trazado viario y urbanización de Madrid: Zuazo-Jansen, 1929-30, Madrid: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, 1986, p. xxiv. 335 thus form “an organic whole.”114 The beautifully drawn plan maintained the principles of the continuous city of streets and blocks, but with potential typological innovations deriving mostly from German examples of the 1920s. The plan was completed in 1941 but his approval delayed until 1946. In the early 1950s, detailed plans and models for the new poblados of Manoteras, Canillas, San Blas, Palomeras, and Villaverde were elaborated and published in the periodical Gran Madrid.115 Consequence of these constant delays, political and bureaucratic, but also urbanistic as the chorus of dissenting voices in favor of a more modernist urbanism got louder, Madrid faced a major housing crisis in the early 1950s. On the one hand, the consolidated center of the city was slowly revitalized and the real estate speculative forces were recuperating a level of activity equivalent to the 1930s. On the other hand, the chabolas or bidonvilles were growing quickly in the outskirts of the city, a situation that the activism of a local Jesuit priest helped denounce. The link between these two realities was the rural immigration, in great part driven by the construction market that demanded cheap labor in Madrid and thus spurred the arrival of thousands of rural residents looking for better opportunities and social integration in the city.116 1954 marked the beginning of a radical change in urbanistic concepts. Until then, under the leadership of Pedro Muguruza, director of the Dirección General de Arquitectura and Francisco Prieto Moreno, Comisariato General para la Ordenación Urbana de Madrid, with the technical direction of Pedro Bidagor, the concept of streets and closed blocks had dominated Spanish urbanism even though one could observe a subtle evolution within the new ordinances toward higher structures, the consideration of the open block, etc. That year, Prieto Moreno asked Julián Laguna, an architect but also a private developer, to take over the Comisariato. Laguna’s main task was to start confronting the serious housing crisis and launch the program of large-scale social housing that Madrid had been expecting for quite some years. He accepted the mission with the expectative that he would be able to act “efficiently, brutally, and solve a problem that is a shame for a regime and for the professionals who are called to fix it.”117 His brash style, his pragmatic approach to the social problems which he definitely intended to solve, and his modernist agenda shouldered by the generation of young architects that he would empower clashed dramatically with Bidagor, 114 See Pedro Bidagor, “Plan de ciudades,” Sesiones de la I Asamblea Nacional de Arquitectos, Madrid: Servicios Técnicos de FET y de la JONS, 1939, p. 57-67. 115 See Grand Madrid, nº 11, 1950; Carlos Sambricio and Concepción Lopezosa Aparicio, Cartografía Histórica – Madrid Región Capital, Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid Consejería de Obras Públicas, Urbanismo y Transportes / Arpegio, 2002. 116 Rafael Moneo, “Madrid: los últimos veinticinco años,” Hogar y Arquitectura 75, p. 57. 117 See Luis Fernández Galiano, Justo F. Isasi, and Antonio Lopera. La quimera moderna: los poblados dirigidos de Madrid en la arquitectura de los 50, Madrid: Hermann Blume, 1989, p. 19. 336 whose concept of urban form was radically different. Soon Laguna went to search for a more adequate director for his vision and it is Antonio Perpiña, winner of the competition for a new commercial center at the Paseo Castellana (Avenida del Generalísimo) with a modernist civic center design, who took the place of Bidagor in 1956.118 The first phase of the emergency reaction to the increasing crisis (1955-1956) consisted in building a series of poblados de absorción (villages of absorption) to relocate the residents of the chabolas after demolition.119 Although eight were built, two of them—Fuencarral A by Francisco Sáenz de Oiza and Fuencarral B by Alejandro de la Sota—exemplified the dilemma and the urbanistic choices that the program managers were eventually confronted with. De la Sota’s project consisted of 532 dwellings organized in blocks of back-to-back single-family houses (some one floor, some one floor and a half), small five-story high towers and linear bars of the same height. When he described them later, he alluded to “the popular architectural influences of his previous work, dedicated to the construction of villages for the National Institute of Colonization of the Ministry of Agriculture; the plastic period of the author, with esthetic preoccupations.”120 The overall arrangement followed the topography, but in contrast to his works at the I.N.C., the streets virtually disappeared and the whole ensemble appeared more like a collage of buildings rather than a real plan. However, the clever articulation of the single-family blocks along the access street created a series of small plazas, which served as entrance to the houses in the manner that he was experimenting in the contemporary pueblos of Valuengo and La Bazaña.121 Displaying “the plastic of a village,”122 the small houses looked definitely rural with the white lime walls, the corral at the back, the tiled roofs, and the colored wooden doors. In contrast, the collective buildings displayed the economy of construction epitomized by the use of brick and small windows, and the modernity of their typologies and collective circulation. Overall, they recalled the neorealist Italian projects in Tuscolana by Mario Ridolfi and Adalberto Libera, but some of the sketches by the architect reflecting the stepped up topography brought to mind Coderch’s photomontage mentioned earlier. Sáenz de Oiza’s scheme included 500 housing units, sixty per cent of them being one-family houses and the rest in four-story towers and bars. Like de la Sota, he used the collective buildings to mark the edges of the site and, to some extent, “protect” the individual houses, which he laid out on a two-axis perpendicular system. Here however, the articulation of the 118 See Gran Madrid, nº 28, 1954. See Luis Fernández Galiano, Justo F. Isasi, and Antonio Lopera, La quimera moderna: los poblados dirigidos de Madrid en la arquitectura de los 50, Madrid: Hermann Blume, 1989. 120 See the quote on the website of the Fundación Alejandro de la Sota: . https://www.alejandrodelasota.org. Also see Teresa Couceiro, Urbanización y poblado de absorción Fuencarral B, Madrid: Fundación Alejandro de la Sota, 2006. 121 See Chapter Six and the potential influence of Alejandro Herrero’s article, “15 normas para la composición de conjunto en barriadas de vivienda unifamiliar,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 168, 1955, pp. 17-28. 122 Hogar y Arquitectura, March-April 1956, p. 14. 119 337 blocks did not produce genuine public spaces, even though the publication in Revista Nacional de Arquitectura compared, quite misleadingly, the groups of brick houses with the vernacular fabric of Mojácar. At Fuencarral A, Saenz de Oiza substituted de la Sota’s poetics of rural dwelling with a technical and mechanical approach that conformed better with the techno-bureaucratic evolution of the regime and the growing desire of the young architects to be, without further delay, as modern as their colleagues on the other side of the Pyreneans.123 Second phase of the emergency program designed by Julian Laguna and Luis Valero, director of the I.N.V., the seven Poblados Dirigidos (Directed Districts) were built from 1957 to the early 1960s. Mixing vernacular-based techniques of auto-construction for single-family units and standardized typologies of multi-family mid-rise blocks, the seven teams of young architects exhibited a lot of talent and imagination in the design of modern typologies of social housing. To some extent, they were model neighborhoods designed to create alternatives to the standard housing projects enshrined in the Charter of Athens and its multiple applications around Europe. However, the social experience resulted in problematic urban districts, dominated by an abstract urbanistic approach that produced an alienating environment mostly devoid of any genuine public spaces. Of the seven poblados, Caño Roto (1957-1963) was the only district to succeed in developing an urban and architectural identity beyond the quantitative and qualitative response to the housing program. Here, José Luis Iñiguez de Onzoño and Antonio Vázquez de Castro attempted to create a new type of modern village for the immigrants from the countryside. Like Mario Ridolfi and his team ten years earlier in the Tiburtino quarter in Rome, they looked for an urban model that would sociologically and urbanistically function as transition from country to town. In that sense, the district of Caño Roto was the best translation of Italian neo-realism in a Spanish periphery. The 1600 housing units were distributed on a north-south grid in small blocks of single-family houses, cascading down the hill along narrow pedestrian lanes, combined with 4-story high linear blocks and small towers of apartments. Unfortunately, the planned civic center at the heart of the village was never built, which resulted in a lack of civic activity and identity beyond the small plazas primarily designed for children. The brick facades of the two-story houses, the pedestrian alleys, and the ’metaphysical’ playgrounds populated by the sculptures of Ángel Ferrant made it the most village-like and the most photogenic of all the districts—it is not surprising that its best interpreter was Joaquín del Palacio Kindel, who was also the official photographer of Fernández del Amo’s works for the I.N.C.124 Beyond its urbanistic appeal, Caño Roto was morphologically and typologically the most innovative project of the 1950s. Iñiguez de Onzoño and Vázuez de Castro introduced the 123 “Poblado de absorción "A": Fuencarral, Madrid (España),” Hogar y Arquitectura, nº 6, SeptemberOctober 1956, pp. 3-10. 124 See chapter 7. On Caño Roto, see Andrés Cánovas Alcaraz and Fernando Ruiz Bernal, Poblado dirigido de Caño Roto (fases I y II): Vázquez de Castro e Iñiguez de Onzoño / proyecto y edición, Madrid: Centro de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas (CEDEX)/Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Departamento de Proyectos, 2013 338 concept of the ‘carpet settlement’ or ‘mat-housing’ by grouping patio-based houses into dense clusters separated by pedestrian alleyways. To be sure, the architects of the D.G.R.D. and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización used the patio-house type repeatedly in the countryside from the early 1940s. Yet, given the large size of the parcel and the primary agricultural use of the corral/patio, the typology itself rarely integrated the patio within its architectural distribution. At Fuencarral B, de la Sota designed blocks of single-family houses with corrals but here as well they were not genuine patio houses. At Caño Roto, the 80 square meter patio houses were L-shaped and embraced the courtyard enclosed by a high wall. Both the house plan and the layout of the “carpet” clusters resembled the structures designed and developed from the early 1950s by Adalberto Libera at the Tuscolana in Rome, Josep Lluis Sert in Latin America, and Michel Ecochard in Casablanca, among others. Iñiguez de Onzoño and Vázquez de Castro designed other projects with the same morphology—they were invited to participate in the Previ District competition in Lima—but, overall, the experiment remained isolated and did not have a real follow up. In spite of its faults and partial incompletion, Caño Roto was the last link in a continuous 60-year chain of projects and experiments that connected the rural vernacular to the modern.125 In 1958, the last remnants of the Falange’s utopia of a corporatist city were removed in a major governmental reshuffling. Julián Laguna resigned. Under the influence of the Opus Dei, the responsibility to implement the Plan de Urgencia Social was transferred to the private sector through a system of State subsidies. The Francoist regime, now out of its international isolation, would soon embark upon a frenzy of modernist mass housing that would irremediably endanger the urban peripheries and damage the Mediterranean shores. 4.7. Diffusion, Dissemination, Expansion The critical importance that this chapter has given to the most significant events and moments of reflection regarding the relationship between the modern, the vernacular, and the Mediterranean from the late 1940s onwards, should not make us forget the long-distance work of dissemination realized by the professional architectural press. As we have seen in the Chapter Three, the periodical Reconstrucción, organ of the D.G.R.D. published from 1940 to 1956, dedicated substantial editorial space to the analysis and the promotion of popular architecture, often through the lens of the regional approach corresponding to the organization of the reconstruction process. On the contrary, the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, which replaced Arquitectura from 1941, consecrated most of its articles to largescale urban planning often in the neo-classical or neo-Herrerian style, although one has to mention the specific focus on the projects of fishermen villages promoted by Pedro Muguruza.126 125 See Peter Land, The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima: design and technology in a new neighbourhood, Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes: Universidad de los Andes, 2015. 126 See Chapter 3. 339 In the mid-1940s, when the classical tides were starting to recede, the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura followed by the Boletín de Información de la Dirección General de Arquitectura and Cortijos y Rascacielos implemented a major editorial shift. They started to embrace the vernacular and popular architecture as a politically correct strategy to open architecture again to modernity. Essays, debates, and publications of modern projects strongly influenced by popular architecture, brought the issue to the forefront in repeated fashion.127 Among the most relevant was the essay of 1953 by Gabriel Alomar, “Valor actual de las arquitecturas populares (Aplicación particular a la arquitectura popular de los tipos mediterráneos).”128 Alomar, an important urbanist born and active professionally in the Baleares made a clear distinction between popular architecture of mountainous areas (North Mediterranean) built in stone with sloping roofs versus the Southern Mediterranean of Arab and African origin of which Ibiza was an extreme representative limit. He argued for a rational, simple, and esthetic approach, because “the villages are beautiful until the cinema and the architect arrive.”129 Fernando Chueca Goitia went further and contended that, “it is possible to write off an artistic style, because it is history; but one cannot cancel what is intrahistory.”130 The discussion also focused on the issue of southern light and the systems of solar protection known as blinds, shutters, or brise-soleils.131 A key character in this effort was certainly Alberto Sartoris who regularly contributed in the early 1950s:132 The history of architecture, which began in Libya sixty centuries before our era, does not end with the neurosis of nineteenth-century styles, but continues its geometric and linear potential with the functional architecture, i.e., the architecture that has found its development on the shores of the Mediterranean: the architecture of genius and the sun, the architecture of light and intelligence.133 In this essay, Sartoris continued his role of instigator of a return to the primacy of the Mediterranean in the development of modern architecture. He argued for the synthesis of the arts, the coexistence of styles within modernity, and for the use of mathematical proportions 127 See the publication of the early works by Coderch and Valls, such as "Casa en Cala D'or (Mallorca)," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura VII, nº 67-68 (July-August 1947); Carlos de Miguel, "Villa en Caldelas (Casa Ugalde)–Coderch and Vals," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, December 1953, pp. 25-29; and the critical session about the Alhambra, "Sesiones de crítica de Arquitectura. Sesiones celebradas en La Alhambra durante los días 14 y 15 de octubre 1952." op. cit. 128 Gabriel Alomar, “Valor actual de las arquitecturas populares (Aplicación particular a la arquitectura popular de los tipos mediterráneos),” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, May 1953, pp. 35-50. 129 Ibidem, p. 41. 130 Ibidem, p. 49. For the concept of “intrahistory,” see Chapter One. 131 Ibidem. 132 Alberto Sartoris, “Ir y venir de la arquitectura,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, nº 146, February 1954, pp. 10-19. 133 Sartoris, p. 19: "La historia de la arquitectura, que comenzó en Libia sesenta siglos antes de nuestra era, no se termina con la neurosis de los estilos del siglo XIX, sino que continua su potencial geométrica y lineal con la arquitectura funcional, la arquitectura que ha encontrado su desarrollo en las orillas del Mediterráneo: la arquitectura del genio y del sol, la arquitectura de la luz y de la inteligencia.” 340 such as the Golden Section. He used illustrations of modern Brazilian work, Luigi Moretti, Paul Rudolph in Florida, and more. In parallel to the discussion of vernacular architecture, director Carlos de Miguel extended the reflection to the urban context with important Sesiones de Crítica about Plazas, the Barrio de Santa Cruz, and many others.134 Another example was his essay “Patios de vecindad” of November 1955, where he advocated the continuing use of patio-based urban blocks in contrast with the isolated bars, “beautiful in models,” in use in Nordic countries and the Italy of the 1950s.135 Likewise, after many articles emphasizing the “white” modernity of the Mediterranean, in June 1954, Carlos de Miguel extended the debate relative to the urban context and the definition of the “street architecture” of Madrid and other cities like Toledo. Following a debate about whether brick could be used as facing material, Catalan architect Mariano Guarrigues brought the core of the question, i.e., the architectural making of the urban environment, and anticipated the issue of “realism” that Oriol Bohigas brought forward a couple of years later: It is amusing to think that, in these times of vaunted standardization and industrial prefabrication, brick remains the most human and rationalized building material, perhaps because it is more ancient and humble. Its size is determined by the size of our own hand and the strength of our own arm.136 Among many examples of modern works directly derived from an abstraction of the vernacular, the publication of the new towns of Esquivel, Villafranco del Delta, and especially Vegaviana were instrumental to propagate the evolution of the work of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización toward a more radical understanding of traditional urbanism and architecture.137 Likewise, photographs of vernacular architecture and traditional towns, many of them by photographers like Palacios Kindel, occupied the front covers of the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura (R.N.A.). The R.N.A. ceased to exist at the end of the 1958 and January 1959 saw the first issue of the reborn Arquitectura, now again under the leadership of the Colegio de Arquitectos and with Carlos de Miguel continuing as editor. The new periodical diversified its architectural and urban interests, but the emphasis on arquitectura popular continued throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. A case in point was the exceptional issue on the Arquitectura anónima de 134 See for instance, Carlos de Miguel, “El barrio de Santa Cruz en Sevilla,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura XIII, nº 136, April 1953, pp. 9-11, an article about the urban vernacular which will lead to the discussed Sesión de Crítica, "Posibilidades que tienen los barrios típicos andaluces para el urbanismo actual,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura nº 155, 1954. 135 Carlos de Miguel, "Patios de vecindad." Revista Nacional de Arquitectura XV, nº 167, November 1955, pp. 22-26: “Much of the success of the neo-realist Italian films is due, putting aside the indubitable and efficient collaboration of Gina Lollobrigida, to the grime of the lonely isolated blocks” (p. 22). 136 Carlos De Miguel, et. al., "Sesión de crítica: defensa del ladrillo,” Revista Nacional de Arquitectura XIV, June 1954, pp. 19-31, quote on p. 31: divierte pensar que, en estos tiempos de tan cacareada tipificación y prefabricación industrial, sea el ladrillo el material de construcción más humano y racionalizado, quizá por más antiguo y humilde. Su medida está determinada por el tamaño de nuestra propia mano y la fuerza de nuestro propio brazo. Al mismo tiempo que plantea a la inteligencia del hombre la geometría de su aparejo, razonado en la necesidad constructiva de quebrar la junta.” 137 See Chapter Five, Six, Seven, Eight in this dissertation. 341 España (October 1962), edited by architects of the new generation Antonio Fernández Alba and Francisco de Inza Campos, along with the veteran Luis Moya, and with a spectacular cover image by Kindel and the photomontage of vernacular houses by Coderch discussed earlier in this chapter. Moreover, the new medium continued the practice of devoting the periodical covers to suggestive images of popular architecture.138 Interestingly, in August 1960, Arquitectura published a short essay by Josep Lluis Sert describing his private house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In “Una casa con patio,” he wrote in perfect alignment with the Spanish discourse: “it is increasingly necessary to pay more attention to the concepts of the Mediterranean house."139 Developed as a debate and commentaries on a series of impactful photographs of popular architecture in the La Mancha region, the essay of 1963, “Laguardia, pueblo manchego” repeated, with the arrival on the scene of younger architects such as Javier Carvajal, the same arguments about the beauty, functionality, and modernity of popular architecture and urbanism in the Spanish pueblos. Carvajal placed them in the context of rural emigration and the need to imagine a compatible modernization of an old fabric. At the same time he criticized the influence of the Nordic open patterns of urbanization, alien to the Spanish spirit and tradition: The Nordics are people who live in and have always related to the forest... then why do the Latin copy urban schemes that go against their pure essence? ... Another Finn praised the narrow streets of our old neighborhoods. I found them delicious and functional, he said. And we, our new neighborhoods, we build them in the Nordic Way!140 In 1961, the young architect, critic, and historian of architecture, Carlos Flores López (1928-) published his seminal Arquitectura española contemporánea. With this work he contributed not only to reinforce an emerging modern architecture in the context of Franco regime, but also to open the new Spanish modernity to the attention of the international milieu.141 The 138 Antonio Fernández Alba, Luis Moya, and Francisco de Inza Campos, "Arquitectura anónima de España," Arquitectura 4, nº 46, October 1962, pp. 6-47. Among other articles, let us mention Carlos de Miguel, Carlos. "Arquitectura Popular: Arcos De La Frontera." Arquitectura 3, nº 18, June 1960, pp. 4446; José M. Sostres, "Casa en Sitges," Arquitectura 3, nº 35, November 1961, pp. 2-4; Secundino Zuazo, "La Casa De Las Flores (reprinted from Arquitectura XV, January 1933)," Arquitectura 1, nº 12, December 1959, pp. 29-35. 139 Josep Lluis Sert, "Una casa con patio," Arquitectura, nº 20, August 1960, pp. 7-13, here p. 7. The first article on Sert in a Spanish periodical was Josep Lluis Sert, “Taller del pintor Joan Miró [Palma de Mallorca],” Cuadernos de Arquitectura, nº 33, 1957, pp. 29-31 (445-447). 140 AA.VV., “La Guardia: Pueblo Manchego,” Arquitectura 5, nº 53, May 1963: “los Nórdicos son gentes de vida y tradición de bosque… por qué los latinos copian unos esquemas urbanísticos que van contra su pura esencia?… Otro finlandés elogiaba nuestras calles estrechas de nuestros barrios antiguos. Las encontraba deliciosas y funcionales. Y nosotros, en los barrios nuevos, a lo nórdico.” 141 On Carlos Flores, see the important essay by María Ángeles Layuno Rosas, “La historización de la arquitectura del movimiento moderno: Carlos Flores,” pp. 203-38, read at: . https://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/31/29/11layuno.pdf, last accessed October 4, 2018. As reported by Layuno Rosas, see for instance “The Spain of Carlos Flores” in The Architectural Review, nº 781, London, 1962, pp. 187-189. 342 book was divided into two sections. The first one was a history of Spanish and modern architecture abroad organized in nine chapters, a vision relatively orthodox of Northern inspiration—his major references were Pevsner, Giedion, Behrendt, and Zevi—but that opened a narrow window toward a more Southern vision and interpretation. In particular, he praised Fernando García Mercadal and Torres Balbás, not only for their role of divulgators of European modernism, but also for their efforts to ascertain the vernacular as the starting block of a new Spanish modernity.142 The second section presented in a serial manner, a “iconographic catalogue of projects,” with no and very little commentaries, all relevant in the last ten years of Spanish modern architecture between 1950 and 1960.143 Among the suggestive black & white images, the projects by Fernández del Amo, Fisac, Bohigas, and Íñiguez de Onzoño and Vázquez de Castro—some of them made even more iconic by Kindel’s photography—demonstrated the interrelation between the first decade of postwar modern and popular architecture. Over the years, his first interest in the preservation of that heritage will evolve into the advocacy of interrelations between the "popular architecture and the modern cultured architecture, with the aim of seeking alternative and valid solutions to the housing problem, following a tradition led by architects such as Torres Balbás, Fernández Balbuena, Ámos Salvador, Anasagasti, Mercadal or Sert, who, like Flores, saw in the invariants of this architecture a catalog of lessons that inspire the modern project both at the conceptual and formal level.”144 From the 1960s onwards, Flores embarked on a two-decade-long investigation and documentation of Spanish popular architecture across all regions of the peninsula. His encyclopedic research was published from 1973 to 1977 in five volumes, a titanic work resulting in more than 2300 pages and 5000 illustrations, mostly his own.145 Luis Martínez Feduchi (1901-1975), architect of the Edificio Capitol on the Gran Vía (with Vicente Eced, 1931-33) and the Castellana Hilton (1953), undertook a similar enterprise of research and documentation, which will be published, partially posthumously from 1974 to 1984. Feduchi’s approach was more technical in the sense that he, with the help of his students, accompanied his photographs with hundreds of urban plans and typological studies of towns and 142 Layuno Rosas, pp. 213-sq.: the author stresses the importance of Torres Balbás’s articles in Arquitectura as Flores’s fundamental references for his introduction to Spanish modernity. 143 Quoted from Layuno Rosas, p. 229 with reference to Javier Martínez González, Historiografía de la arquitectura española moderna (1945-1978), Dissertation, ETSA de Navarra, pp. 203-209. 144 Layuno Rosas, p. 225: arquitectura culta moderna y la arquitectura popular, con el objetivo de buscar soluciones alternativas y válidas al problema de la vivienda, siguiendo una tradición encabezada por arquitectos de la talla de Torres Balbás, Fernández Balbuena, Amós Salvador, Anasagasti, Mercadal o Sert, quienes, como Flores, vieron en las constantes de esta arquitectura un catálogo de enseñanzas tanto a nivel conceptual como formal para inspirar el proyecto moderno.” 145 See Carlos Flores, Arquitectura Popular Española (5 vols.), Madrid: Aguilar, 1973-1977; Volume 1. General y Pirineo / Prepirineo (1973, 428 pages); Volume 2: País Vasco, Cantabria, Asturias, Galicia (1973, 542 pages); Volume 3: Meseta Norte, Meseta Sur, Sistema Central, Extremadura (1973, 553 pages); Volume 4: Andalucía, Murcia, Valencia (1976, 403 pages); Volume 5: Valle del Ebro, Cataluña, Baleares, Canarias (1977, 427 pages). Other works by Flores López include: La España popular: raíces de una arquitectura vernácula (1979), Gaudí, Jujol y el modernismo catalán (1982), Introducción a Gaudí (1983), Pueblos y lugares de España (1991), La Pedrera: Arquitectura e historia (1999). 343 villages. 146 Unsurprisingly, these monumental editorial ventures echoed in both exceptional issues of Arquitectura (December 1974 and January 1975), titled Arquitectura popular en España, with the participation of, among others, Luis Feduchi, Carlos Flores, Fernando García Mercadal, Junio Cano Lasso, Fernández del Amo, and Juan Daniel Fullaondo.147 In 1968, the young architect Lluìs Domènech Girbau (1940-) extended the survey of the new Spanish architecture in another important work to which he gave the same title than Flores’s: Arquitectura Española Contemporánea, the Spanish equivalent of the Italy Builds published in 1955 by G.E. Kidder Smith.148 Whereas the architecture of cal [lime] and white-washed walls dominated the new modernity of the 1950s in Flores’s book, the 1960s edited by Domènech mirrored a shift toward more urban interventions in Madrid, Barcelona, and the Basque Country. The exposed brick became the mode of expression of a new vernacular, the one announced by Oriol Bohigas in the 1950s and now in full development—an architecture that dared not to hide the roofs, single or double sloped, and used them to create new rhythms and new modes of inscription in the urban and natural landscape. Buildings like the Maravillas Gymnasium by Alejandro de la Sota (Madrid, 1960-62), the Casa Tapies and its facades entirely louvered by José Antonio Coderch (Barcelona, 1960-63), the plastic Unidad Vecinal Pío XII that inscribed itself beautifully in Segovia’s skyline (José Joaquín Aracil Bellod, Segovia, 1963-66), two modern but urbanistically coherent neighborhoods in the suburbs of Madrid—Barrio Loyola (Francisco Sáenz-Oiza, Madrid, 1960-62) and Barrio Juan XXIII (José Luis Romany, 1962-63)—, the Colegio Monfort by Antonio Fernández Alba (Madrid, 196365), and the Fábrica de Embutidos in Segovia by Francisco de Inza (1962-66) were great examples of this Spanish architectural iconicity. Domènech also included examples from the new generation of architects, like Ricardo Bofill and the apartment building Calle Nicaragua (Barcelona, 1962-64), the powerful Fábrica Diestre by the young Rafael Moneo (1964-67) that already showed his ability at dealing with zenithal light, the Unidad Vecinal de Absorción Hortaleza (1961-63) and the Wright-inspired concrete Casa Lucio Muñoz by Fernando Higueras (1962-63), and Brutalist experiment by Francisco Sáenz-Oiza, the Torres Blancas (Madrid, 1961-68). The last generation of pueblos de colonización (see Chapter 5) was notably absent, but the author published the 916-unit Unidad Exa, an avant-garde prefabricated village in the outskirts of Granada conceived as a series of interconnected hexagons that created a radical interpretation of the traditional village and its open patios.149 146 Luis Martínez Feduchi Ruiz, Itinerarios de arquitectura popular española (5 volumes), Barcelona: Blume, 1974-1984: La Meseta septentrional (1974); La Orla cantábrica: la España del hórreo, 1975; Los antiguos reinos de las cuatro barras: Cataluña, Aragón, Levante y Baleares (1976); Los pueblos blancos (1978); La Mancha, del Guadiana al mar (1984). 147 See Arquitectura 16, nº 192 (Special issue: Arquitectura popular en España, Part I), December 1974, and Arquitectura 17, nº 193 (Special issue: Arquitectura popular en España, Part 2), January 1975. 148 Lluìs Domènech Girbau, Arquitectura Española Contemporánea. Barcelona: Editorial Blume, 1968. 149 Seven architects were involved: José Antonio Alba Carreras, José Luis Aranguren Enterría, Santiago de la Fuente Viqueira, Luis Regidor de Vicuña, Cruz López Müller, Miguel Seisdedos González, and Antonio Vallejo Acevedo. On the Unidad Exa and its genesis, see Tomás Andreo Sánchez, “La 344 Boldly asserting that the economic and social conditions of the third world were ideal starting points for an avant-garde architecture, thus implying that Franco’s Spain was closer to these conditions than to the northern part of Europe, Oriol Bohigas rightly wrote in his introduction to the book that in the last ten years, Spain had succeeded in developing a new architectural culture: It is not risky to say, therefore, that perhaps Spain presents currently an exemplary architectural panorama, in spite of all the brakes and the apparently negative circumstances. And that it is a germ of positive revision in the midst of the stationary crisis in which the architecture of the whole world finds itself, with questionable exceptions.150 From the mid-1960s onwards, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre had extensive exchanges with Spanish architects. The context was the last period of Franco’s regime and the speculative and functionalist state of urban planning and architecture dominant in the country. In collaboration with sociologist Mario Gaviria, he set out to analyze the urbanism of tourism along the Mediterranean Coast as a critical response to the failure of the purely pragmatic and functionalist configurations that the intense capitalist development of the 1960-70s (known as desarrollismo or Spanish miracle) made surge all over Spain in the formless character of the peripheries and their absence of public urban space. For Lefebvre and Gaviria, the “urbanism of leisure” embodied both promises of social modernity and imminent dangers of alienation. It is within this intellectual context that Ricardo Bofill (who participated in seminars led by Lefebvre) and his Taller de Arquitectura embarked on projects of tourism and multi-family housing along the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to Alicante.151 Highly influenced by the Mediterranean vernacular, the built complex of La Manzanera in Calpe near Alicante—including the Muralla Roja (Red Walls, 1966-68) and Xanadu (196870)—formed a set of variations on the spaces of leisure, destined not only to exalt a postproductivist and hedonist “architecture of enjoyment,” but also to suggest new directions for the growth of the city. This “tourist utopia” spurred the Taller’s theoretical investigations in new forms of planning for social housing as experimented in El Castell (1966-68) and Reus (Barrio Gaudi, 1964-68). The conceptual and mathematical/geometrical fusion between Virgencica: una intervención de urgencia para un urbanismo vivo,” Dissertation, Universidad de Granada Facultad de Bellas Artes Alonso Cano, 2015. 150 Oriol Bohigas, “Prólogo,” in Domènech Girbau, p. 9: “No es aventurado decir, por tanto, que quizás ahora España presenta un panorama arquitectónico ejemplarizante, a pesar de todos los frenos y las circunstancias aparentemente negativas. Y que hay un germen de revisión positiva en medio de la crisis estacionaria en que se encuentra, con excepciones discutibles, la arquitectura de todo el mundo.” 151 Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, Lukasz Stanek (ed.), Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014; Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space – Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Space, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Also see “De la utopía a la realidad: La Ciudad en Espacio, una respuesta española a los problemas urbanos,” Triunfo, 14 December 1968: pp. 39-51. 345 Islamic-Mediterranean morphology and typology, the structuralist vision of megastructure, the research into flexible forms of industrialization, and the reigning libertarian spirit culminated in the research Hacia una formalización de la Ciudad en el Espacio [Toward a Formalization of the City in Space, 1968-1970]. Developed in collaboration with Anna Bofill’s theoretical research, the City in Space was the culmination of years of typological and geometric experiments to reproduce, within a single structure, the experiential and spatial qualities of traditional Mediterranean towns, what Bofill also referred to as the “pueblo vertical” (vertical village). The theoretical project was the conceptual framework for the politically aborted urban planning project for the district of Moratalaz (Madrid, 1970-74), and the futurist Kasbah of the Walden 7 social complex, designed and partially built between 1970 and 1975 in the outskirts of Barcelona.152 4.8. A Mediterranean Epilogue In 1959, Coderch became a member of CIAM on the recommendation of José Lluis Sert, who had just initiated his return to the Mediterranean with the design of the Joan Miró studio in Palma de Majorca. He attended the 11th Congress of Otterlo and immediately joined the ranks of the newborn Team X. In the issue nº 9 of the Dutch periodical Forum, director Aldo van Eyck published a selection of the projects displayed in Otterlo, including the ambitious project of Urbanization Torre Valentina on the Costa Brava by Coderch & Valls.153 Referring to this unbuilt design for 131 patio houses and a 80-room hotel laid out as an intense urban experience according to the mat-building strategy, Ignasi de Solà-Morales wrote that “when José Antonio Coderch signed the Team X program in 1962 ... he was not a mind-blowing character or a gentleman who builds second homes for bourgeois families in Barcelona, but rather an architect who shares his friends' preoccupation with re-founding the shape of the modern city, technologically complex, massive, and dynamically growing.”154 152 Antoni Banyuls i Pérez, “Arquitectura per al turismo: la utopia urbana de Bofill i el Taller d’Arquitectura a La Manzanera (1962-1985),” Aguaits, no. 19-20, pp. 129-61; Anna Bofill Levi, Generation of Forms: Space to Inhabit, Time to Think. The Schelling Lectures, Berlin Munich: Deutsche Kunstverlag – Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, 2009; Ricardo Bofill and Taller de Arquitectura, Hacia una formalización de la Ciudad en el Espacio, Barcelona: Blume, 1968; Ricardo Bofill and Warren A. James, Ricardo Bofill: Taller De Arquitectura – Edificios Y Proyectos 1960-1985, Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1987; Ricardo Bofill, Espaces d’une vie, Paris: Editions Odile Jacobs, 1989. 153 José Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat and Manuel Valls, “Hotel y apartamentos en Torre Valentina (Costa Brava), España,” Arquitectura, nº 15, March 1960, pp. 47-56; Gerardo García-Ventosa López, Xavier Llobet Ribeiro, and Isabel Ruiz Castrillo, José Antonio Coderch – Torre Valentina: Un proyecto de paisaje, 1959. Arquitecturas Ausentes Del Siglo XX, Madrid: Editorial Rueda, 2004; Pizza, In Search of Home: Coderch 1940/1964, op. cit., pp. 136-sq.; Luigi Spinelli, José Antonio Coderch. La cellula e la luce, op. cit., p. 74 & sq. 154 Quoted by Luigi Spinelli, p. 75 from Ignasi Solà-Morales, “José Antonio Coderch en la cultura arquitectónica europea,” in Carles Fochs (ed.), J. A. Coderch de Sentmenat: 1913-1984, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1989, p. 6-7: “Quando José Antonio Coderch firma il programma del Team X nel 1962… non è un personaggio strabiliante o un signore che costruisce seconde case per borghesi barcellonesi, ma un architetto che condivide la preoccupazione dei suoi amici a rifondare di nuovo la forma della città moderna, tecnologicamente complessa, massiva, dinamicamente crescente.” 346 In 1961 he sent a manifesto-letter to the Team X mailbox in Rotterdam (Post Box for the Development of Habitat, B.P.H.) at the attention of secretary Jacob B. Bakema: in it he manifested his pessimism in front of the increased commercialism, the destruction of the coasts, and the degenerating quality of the urban and rural environment. Under the title No son genios lo que necesitamos ahora, [It is not geniuses that we need nowadays] he wrote: No, I do not believe that it is geniuses that we need today. I believe that geniuses just happened, they are neither means nor ends. Neither do I think that we need Popes of architecture, nor great doctrinaires and prophets (I am always doubtful of those)…. I think that above all we need good schools and good professors. We must take advantage of what remains of our constructive tradition, and particularly of our moral one, in this epoch when our most beautiful words have lost their true meaning… We must make it so that thousands and thousands of architects think less about Architecture, money, and the cities of the next millennium, and more about the very fact of being an architect. We need them to work with a rope attached to their feet, so that they cannot drift too far away from the land in which they have roots, nor from the men and women that they know best….155 With this statement, a disillusioned Coderch summed up and reiterated the constant and critical role played by Spain’s ‘constructive tradition’ in order to frame an architectural modernity that challenged the status quo and the looming architectural prospects in the new capitalistic phase of Franco’s regime.156 Likewise, even though Spanish architecture would soon enter a period of qualitative and programmatic effervescence that would propel it to major international fame, the 1970s were not exempt of pessimistic prospects, particularly in regard to the touristic explosion.157 In 1969, on the other side of the ocean, Sert stepped down as Dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. His practice was thriving. In the following years he designed the large-scale housing projects for Ithaca, Yonker