SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: FROM A TO Z AND BACK AGAIN

SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: from A to Z and back again SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: from A to Z and back again Joana Cunha Leal Maria Helena Maia Begoña Farré Torras Editors CEAA - IHA Project Southern Modernisms (EXPL/CPC-HAT/0191/2013) CEAA I Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo and IHA - Instituto de História de Arte, 2015 -1- 1 2 3 SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: from A to Z and back again Joana Cunha Leal Maria Helena Maia Begoña Farré Torras Editors 4 Title SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: from A to Z and back again Editors Joana Cunha Leal, Maria Helena Maia and Begoña Farré Torras © 2015 by authors, CEAA and IHA Graphic design Jorge Cunha Pimentel and Joana Couto Typesetting Joana Couto Edition CEAA | Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo, CESAP/ESAP IHA | Instituto de História da Arte, FCSH-UNL Print SerSilito, Empresa Gráfica Lda 1st Edition, Porto, May 2015 Print run: 500 copies ISBN: 978-972-8784-66-9 Legal Deposit: 398572/15 This publication was conducted under the project Southern Modernisms (EXPL/ CPC-HAT/0191/2013), funded by national funds through FCT under Project 3599 - Promoting the Research Production, Technological Development and Innovation. The authors of the texts have the exclusive responsibility of image copyrights printed in the correspondent texts. The editors do not accept any responsibility for any improper use of images and any consequences following. Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo Escola Superior Artística do Porto Largo de S. Domingos, 80 4050-545 PORTO, PORTUGAL Tel: (+351)223392130; Fax: (+351)223392139 e-mail: [email protected] www.ceaa.pt Instituto de História da Arte Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas Universidade Nova de Lisboa Av. de Berna, 26-C 1069-061 LISBOA, PORTUGAL Tel: (+351)217908300; Fax: (+351)217908308 e-mail: [email protected] https://institutodehistoriadaarte.wordpress.com/ 5 INTRODUCTION Joana Cunha Leal, Maria Helena Maia and Begoña Farré Torras THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES Anat Falbel and Gustavo Peixoto CATALONIA AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE. AN UNFINISHED TALE Antoni Remesar Betlloch A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS Concha Diez-Pastor e Iribas MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY OF MEDITERRANEANNESS OVERSEAS FROM 1935 TO 1940 George Epolito URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER Gerbert Verheij FROM THE POPULAR TO THE SUPER NORMAL Iván Yllera 9 13 35 53 79 99 125 CONTENTS 6 MODERNISM AND THE PORTUGUESE TEATRO DE REVISTA Jorge Palinhos MODERNISM IN LATIN AMERICA: THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN AESTHETIC REPERTOIRE Maria José de Azevedo Marcondes JOSÉ-AUGUSTO FRANÇA’S ‘QUIET MODERNISM’ AND THE WORK OF ARCHITECTS CARLOS AND GUILHERME REBELO DE ANDRADE. INSTANCES OF SURVIVAL AND PERMANENCE IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PORTUGUESE ARCHITECTURE Mariana Mata Passos THE VERNACULAR TRADITION IN THE ART OF NOUCENTISME Mercè Vidal i Jansà HISTORICAL PRECONDITIONS OF “GREEK MODERNISM”: THE CASE OF VISUAL ARTS Nikos Daskalothanassis VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE IN CRETE: CONTINUITIES IN CONCRETE Nikos Skoutelis HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ESTADO NOVO’S AFFORDABLE HOUSES PROGRAMME Sérgio Dias Silva and Rui Jorge Garcia Ramos PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE – A LOOK AT MODERNISM IN THE SCULPTURE OF SOUTHERN EUROPE Sílvia Vieira de Almeida THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM AND ITS CONNECTION TO THE INTERNATIONAL STYLE Susanne Bauer AUTHORS ABSTRACTS CONTENTS 141 161 181 203 223 243 255 275 299 325 329 7 SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: from A to Z and back again 14 ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO modern architects, proposed a seminal construction with lasting effects on Brazilian modern architecture and its historiography until the 1980s. Costa established a figural relationship between the colonial past and modern architecture, the latter understood as completing the former. In his Depoimento (1948), he extended the argument even further proposing the same relationship between architect sculptor Antonio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, and his figura Oscar Niemeyer: “...our own national genius that was expressed through the elected personality of this artist, in the same way it has been in the 18th century, under very similar circumstances, through the individuality of Antonio Francisco Lisboa, o Aleijadinho...”.3 Lucio Costa’s figural relationship between past and modern was founded on two main hypotheses. The first was the environmental and functionalist approach which associated the modern program and forms to the vernacular or traditional architecture4 - understood as the result of exigencies of climate and situation, the nature of the materials and the means of execution at the command of the builder - as revealed by two of Costa’s writings “Documentação necessária” and “Mobiliário luso-brasileiro” in which the author unfold his argument through the evolvement of the local architecture and furniture since colonial times.5 If, in fact, the vernacular architecture had already been observed under a functionalist key by the 19th century’s architecture historians and theorizers such as Viollet Le Duc6 and Horacio Greenough7 - whose work Costa probably knew as an architecture student – his elaboration was also in tune with the contemporaneous 3 Costa, Lucio Costa Registro de uma Vivência, 198-199; Anat Falbel, Arquitetos imigrantes no Brasil uma questão historiográfica. Anais 6 DOCOMOMO arquitetura e urbanismo (Niteroi, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 1-20. http://www.docomomo.org.br/seminario%206%20pdfs/Anat%20Falbel.pdf; Anat Falbel, “Immigrant Architects in Brazil: A Historiographical Issue,” in: DOCOMOMO Journal 34, 5865. 4 Liane Lefaivre and Alexandre Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, London 2012. 5 Lucio Costa “Documentação necessaria”; “Mobiliario luso-brasileiro,” in: Lucio Costa Registro de uma Vivência, 457-462 and 463-471. 6 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc, L’Habitation humaine depuis les temps préhistoriques jusqu’a nos jours, Paris 1875. 7 Horatio Greenough, Form and Function. Remarks on Art, Oakland 1962. 15 THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES inquiries carried on by modern architects searching for new possibilities of architectural expression. In fact, during the 1930s while Le Corbusier was using stone and wood to create new contrasts and spatial effects in the Swiss Pavillon, at the Cité Universitaire (1930-1932) and Vila Mandrot (1932), Alvar Aalto was operating new spacialities and materials in Finland in the same way that Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra in California, Gropius and Marcel Breuer in New England confront and conform the European modern vocabulary to the American local specificities. In addition, the teleological nature that provides the background for the Brazilian modern architecture narrative proposed by Costa in the 1930s, could also be identified during the interwar period. Other new regimes and diverse political systems had embraced the Modern Movement from Fascism in Italy, with Marcello Picentini’s, Giuseppe Terragni’s and Giuseppe Pagano’s Italian discourse on mediterraneità, to zionism in Israel, then under British Mandate, with the unique elaboration on modern and tradition by Erich Mendelsohn, as well as kemalism in Turkey.8 Costa’s second hypothesis addressing the manifestation of a national character - later defined as the national soul or spirit9 - through race and language had its sources in 19th century European nationalistic literature. This had identified the people’s character with its architecture and traditional dwellings following Jean Phillippe Schmidt’s expression in the middle of that century, “… language and architecture are indeed the two representative signals of all nationality…”.10 If the analysis of an architecture language using the concept of race, similar 8 Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism – Alternative Modernism Erich Mendelsohn and the Tel Aviv Chug in Mandate Palestine,” in: Architectural History, 39 (1996), 147-180. Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building. Turkish Architectural Cultural in the Early Republic. Seattle 2001, 5. 9 Lucio Costa “O Aleijadinho e a arquitetura tradicional,” in: Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lúcio Costa: Sobre Arquitetura, Porto Alegre 2007, 15. 10 Jean Philippe Schmit, Nouveau manuel complet de l’architecture des monuments religieux, Encyclopédie Roret, Paris 1859, 23. 16 to that used by Daniel Ramee in his Histoire générale de l’architecture (1860),11 seems in our times to be extremely problematic, Costa’s elaboration avoided the expression and contemplated the issue of race considering the Brazilian people as an independent unit: “...our unique, unmistakable, Brazilian way of being...”.12 Thereby, nationalizing - or ethnicizing - the original bedrock made up of Portuguese, Africans, and the indigenous element, Costa suggested the existence of a natural community13 which maintained its continuity and distinctiveness despite later waves of European and Oriental immigrations. To address the matter of language, Costa chose to investigate the origins of the national architecture language for the immutable element, the one responsible for the historic coherence.14 He claimed the emergence of a ‘legitimate’ Brazilian language during the colonial period in the works of the early Portuguese settlers. Having adopted an ambiguous, but continuously reiterated argument, Costa claimed that the architectural production in the colony could not be 11 Daniel Ramee, Histoire générale de l’architecture, Paris 1860, vol. 1, 20-21. ‘’...il y a eu et qu’il y a toujours de puissantes et d’indestructibles différences entre les dispositions naturelles des races humaines... Si ces différences sont prouvées para la religion, la politique, les moeurs et les langues, elles le sont enconre davantage par les beaux-arts, et surtout par l’Architecture...’’. 12 “Assume and respect the original bedrock – Portuguese, African, indigenous. Recognize the great importance for today’s Brazil of the contribution of the European migrations, Mediterranean and Nordic, as well as those from the Near East and Far East. Accept the results of this merging as both legitimate and fruitful, but consider as fundamental to this absorption the contribution of our unique, unmistakable, Brazilian, way of being. Preserve and cultivate those differentiating and unique characteristics. Resist subservience, including cultural, but absorb and assimilate foreign innovation”, Lucio Costa, “Recommendations,” in: Lucio Costa Registro de uma Vivência, 382. On the affinities between Costa’s elaborations and writer and literary critic Silvio Romero, see Silvio Romero, “Literatura y nacionalismo,” in: Ensayos Literarios, ed. Antonio Candido, Caracas 1982, 35-36; Antonio Candido, “Introdução,” in: Silvio Romero Teoria, crítica e história literária. LTC/EDUSP, 1978, ix-xxx. On the contribution of each ethnic group to the establishment of a Brazilian architecture, Lucio Costa also seems to echo the racial theories of Silvio Romero, which in turn evoke the formulation of Gobineau on “mestizaje”: “...not that the works lose their quality or connotation of Portuguese works – the indigenous and African contribution was too fragile in this case to denaturalize it...” See Lucio Costa, “Introdução à um relatório,” in: Lucio Costa Registro de uma Vivência, 456. Both authors, Costa and Romero pointed out the Inconfidência Mineira, the tentative colonial independence gesture aborted in 1789, as the emergence of a national consciousness. 13 Étienne Balibar, “La forme nation: histoire et idéologie,” in: Race, nation, classe. Les identities ambiguës, 130. 14 Margaret Olin, “From Bezal’lel to Max Lieberman. Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art-Historical Texts”, 21. ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO 17 considered an imitation of the works of the mother country. On the contrary, it was as legitimate “... as those (works) from there, because the colonist, par droit de conquête, was ‘at home’… just as in speaking Portuguese he was not imitating anyone, but speaking, whether with or without an accent, in his own language...”.15 Hence, still before his more systematic studies on the vernacular Portuguese architecture developed during his three journeys to the old continent (1948, 1952, 1962),16 Lucio Costa identified the Portuguese architectural culture, and particularly the vernacular language including its regional variables, as the first and only source of Brazilian architecture. Accordingly, Costa was echoing the elaborations of the Brazilian intellectuals of the early decades of the 20th century including historians such as Oliveira Viana,17 Gilberto Freyre,18 Sergio Buarque de Holanda,19 and the writer and critic Silvio Romero on the Portuguese Brazilian dimension of the colonial origins. Not by chance, he observed the emergence of a national character during the second half of the 18th century in Minas Gerais, from where the first political ideas of colonial 15 Lucio Costa, “Tradição local,” in: Lucio Costa Registro de uma Vivência, 454. 16 José Pessoa and Maria Elisa Costa, (eds.) Bloquinhos de Portugal – a arquitetura portuguesa no traço de Lucio Costa, Rio de Janeiro 2013; Madalena Cunha Matos and Tania Beisl Ramos “Um encontro, um desencontro. Lucio Costa, Raul Lino e Carlos Ramos”, Proceedings of the 7th DOCOMOMO Brasil (Porto Alegre, UFPA, October 22-24, 2007) URL: http://www.docomomo.org.br/seminario%207%20 pdfs/034.pdf (accessed 27 February 2015). 17 José Francisco Oliveira Viana Populações meridionais do Brasil: história, organização, psicologia, Rio de Janeiro 1952 (1920). 18 Gilberto de Mello Freyre, Casa-Grande e Senzala, Rio de Janeiro 1978. (1933). Freyre associated culture and ethnicity, considering the Brazilian people as an extension of the Iberic population assimilated with indigenous and African elements. However, he also identified the Portuguese psychological profile as shaped by the miscegenation of Arab and Jewish elements. See Elide Rugai Bastos, “Gilberto Freire. Casa – Grande & Senzala,” in: Lourenço Dantas Mota (ed.), Introdução ao Brasil. Um Banquete no Tropico, São Paulo 1999, 225; Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre. Um vitoriano dos trópicos, São Paulo 2003. 19 Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, São Paulo 1995 (1936), 172-173. THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES 18 independence had spread.20 Therefore, from within the particular nationalistic cultural conjuncture of the Estado Novo, the Brazilian architecture historiography construction revealed itself as mono-national refusing to acknowledge the dialogue common to what could be defined as the interfaces of other cultural planes, represented either by a larger number of cultural sources or, in particular, by the work of foreign professionals and immigrants. Apparently, the only exception admitted by Costa beyond the closed space of his definition of an authentic Brazilian expression was the contemporaneous influence of Le Corbusier whose impact on the Brazilian modern architecture would be also explained using a figural relationship in Costa’s Depoimento (1948): “...the pioneering work of our beloved Gregório and the unique personality of Flávio avail us nothing, because what happened here would had happened without altering even one line, even though the former had carried out his work elsewhere, and the latter had spent his time in exile, since newborn, in Paris or in Passárgada. And this is because the achievements following the “coming” of the architect...Oscar Niemeyer ...are directly linked to the original sources of the global renovation movement aim at restoring architecture to its legitimate functional foundations. It was not through second or third hand due to the work of Gregório that the process operated. The authentic seeds planted here at just the right time by Le Corbusier, in 1936, have borne fruit…”.21 Nevertheless, a close analysis of Costa’s historiographical construction suggests yet another important source. Indeed, despite his criticism toward the 20 The reference to Minas Gerais as the cradle of the Brazilian political and cultural independence movement in the 18th century was a consensus in the intellectual milieu during the first decades of the 20th century. Regarding the field of architecture, Myriam Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira suggested that the hypothesis that considers the Baroque expression in Minas Gerais as the first evidence of a national artistic identity is an anachronism. It shows that the studies on geography of art, especially in Portugal, confirmed that the architectural scene in Minas Gerais during the 18th century was related to the emergence of the Rococo. See Myriam Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira, O Rococó Religioso no Brasil e seus antecedentes europeus, São Paulo 2003. 21 Lucio Costa, Lucio Costa Registro de uma Vivência, 198. ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO 19 neocolonial ideas, Costa’s main arguments were profoundly embedded in their conceptions and particularly in the writings of Ricardo Severo (1869-1940), the Portuguese-born engineer, recognized as the first leader of the neocolonial movement in Brazil. In fact, Costa’s involvement with that movement dated back to his formative years because of the initiatives of José Marianno Carneiro da Cunha Filho (1881-1946), the movement’s promoter in Rio de Janeiro. It was José Marianno Filho who, as the director of the Sociedade Brasileira de Belas Artes (SBBA), funded the survey of Brazilian traditional architecture by commissioning young artists to inventory the colonial buildings of the former gold mining towns in the state of Minas Gerais. Among them Lucio Costa, in 1924 while still a student, was sent to the city of Diamantina. Later on, already an architect, Costa continued to operate the neocolonial until the end of the 1920s.22 Apparently, Ricardo Severo’s thought on Brazilian traditional architecture had a lasting impression on Costa’s own developments concerning the Portuguese dimensions of Brazilian architecture, including his rhetorical artifice apropos the national identity of the colonizer - that for the historian was due par droit de conquête -, as well as the recognition of the environmental and functionalist character of the colonial architecture that enable its association with modern architecture. Effectively, in two different lectures (1914, 1917), Ricardo Severo praised the Portuguese colonizer suggesting that his vicissitudes in the new country “nationalized him”: “…the colonizer …adapted himself to the environment and established the national tradition that he had inherited from his ancestors and is characteristic of the race…”.23 “ …(the colonizer) organized the colony and explored it following his resources 22 Maria Lucia Bressan Pinheiro, Neocolonial, Modernismo e Preservação do Patrimônio no Debate Cultural dos anos 1920 no Brasil, São Paulo 2011. 23 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil. A casa e o templo”, lecture given on 20 July 1914, in Conferencias 1914-1915. Sociedade de Cultura Artistica, 1916, 47. THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES 20 and needs… the cosmovision and the stage of civilization… no one colonized better… occupied the land, populate it… defended it… a population fixed to the ground, in which in a moment the Portuguese blood dominate, in the other it merged into a mestizaje of steady adaptation to ambiance, one language uniting all the habitants of this colonial country and one tradition that connect them all more intimately under the same sky and ground… the scenario of the Brazil colony is transformed… the colonizer ancestor, unfairly maligned in memoriam, is with full justice reinstated in the real stage of his natural ambience, in the political and historical cycle of his social environment: from a tyrant to a victim, from a martyr to a national hero…”.24 The issue of the essentiality of forms and elements of the colony’s architecture as developed by Lucio Costa in order to justify the pre-figuration of the modern architecture vocabulary and ethics in the already-mentioned “Documentação necessaria” and “Mobiliario luso-brasileiro”, were also mentioned by Severo in his 1917 conference following the regionalist approach of his: “…the dwelling was reduced to the home shelter, conforming its forms to the nature of the materials and climate; the population snuggled around the primitive temple, whose protection was for a long period the only guard of the first colony, being distributed according to the layout of the terrain, snaking their alleys in the valleys or surrounding the slopes, achieving this picturesque character, the result of a perfect cohesion between the work of man and nature, the harmony that constitutes the regional character of architecture of a village or town…”.25 And yet, the research carried out in the last twenty years showed that the cultural sources that operated in the colony were way beyond the 24 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil” (originally published in Revista do Brasil, year II, vol. 4, jan-abr, 1917, 394-424), in: 19&20, Ed. Alessandra Xavier dos Santos; Andressa Amaral Da Silva e Wesley Nunes Dantas, Rio de Janeiro, v. VII, n. 1 jan/mar. 2012. Available on: <http://www. dezenovevinte.net/txt_artistas/rsevero_atb.htm>. 25 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil” (originally published in Revista do Brasil, year II, vol. 4, Jan-Apr, 1917, 394-424), in 19&20, Ed. Alessandra Xavier dos Santos; Andressa Amaral da Silva e Wesley Nunes Dantas, vol. VII, 1 Jan/Mar. 2012. Disponivel em: <http://www.dezenovevinte.net/txt_ artistas/rsevero_atb.htm>. ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO 21 exclusiveness of an alleged Portuguese traditional architecture, in the same way that the settlements founded in the colony were not simply conformed to the topographical, climactic and material conditions to which the colonizer was submitted. They were the result of a European architectural and urban culture matured through transfers and exchanges over centuries, crossing the Atlantic by way of religious orders such as the Jesuits or Franciscans who carried in their luggage the architectural treatises of Serlio, Alberti, Vitruvius or Vredeman de Vries, building manuals and all kinds of iconographic documentation.26 Even the Portuguese professionals engaged in the colony’s royal projects as at the time of the Treaty of Madrid (1750) were followed by a number of Europeans who engrossed demarcation missions in Brazil.27 In this context, the mono-national historiographical approach suggested by Costa and Severo is closer than the Brazilian historian would have recognized. Severo’s appeal for a traditional art expressing “…the evolutionary history of a social organism and preserving the indelible imprint of its ancestry, the dominant character of his moral being… an art that is not the one of historical monuments in which foreign influences may have predominated…, but an art of more rudimentary expression forms presenting itself in the modest extensions of the popular soul”.28 Ricardo Severo’s elaborations were permeated by the nationalist atmosphere and discourse that covered Europe after the wave of the 1848 uprisings, the ‘Spring of Nations’. These led to a redefinition of the concept of regionalism under an array 26 See Hanno-Walter Kruft, “The Theory of fortification,” in: A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, Princeton 1994, 110-117; Nestor Goulart Reis, Imagens de vilas e cidades do Brasil Colonial, São Paulo 2000; Beatriz Piccolotto S. Bueno, Desenho e Desígnio. O Brasil dos Engenheiros Militares (1500-1822). Ph. D dissertation, Universidade Estadual de São Paulo/FAUSP, São Paulo, 2001; Nestor Goulart Reis, As Minas de Ouro e a formação das Capitanias do Sul, São Paulo 2013; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America,” in: Joseph J. Rishel and Suzanne StrattonPruitt (eds.), The Arts in Latin America 1492-1820, Philadelphia 2006, 57-69; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America 1542-1773, Toronto 2001. 27 Benedito Lima de Toledo, O Real Corpo de Engenheiros na Capitania de São Paulo, São Paulo, 1981; Myriam Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira, O Rococó Religioso no Brasil e seus antecedentes europeus, 298. 28 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil. A casa e o templo”, 43. THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES 22 of contradictory agendas that pervaded the 20th century and the interwar period. From Viollet-le-Duc’s modern environmental and functionalist approach to the nationalistic and xenophobic “regionalist engagement” of the French architects who followed the leadership of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, in the last quarter of the 19th century, to the German regionalist-nationalist Heimat movement, or even the English developments and the vernacular regionalist movement inspired by John Ruskin’s writings.29 In this sense one can also understand his assertion considering the traditional art as ethnographical “… being intimately close to the way of being of peoples, from their origins to their primitive habits and customs…”.30 Accordingly, using the same argument used by the Brazilian modern architects31 to criticize their European and American colleagues who had embraced the regionalist approach, Severo described the 19th century and its eclectic architecture as the age of fashion and pastiche.32 In this sense, his assertion of a Brazilian traditional architecture challenged what he called “the damaging effect of this cosmopolitan and de-nationalizing chain”,33 with disastrous consequences “…for its being phony and a lie in the form of a definitive and lasting architecture..”.34 For Severo traditional architecture, that which maintained its Latin character,35 was a promise of a Rebirth Age, an expression that would be used as well for arts 29 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Peaks Valleys in the Flat World, London 2012, 94. 30 Ricardo Severo “A arte tradicional no Brasil. A casa e o templo”, 44. 31 Architect Henrique Mindlin (1911-1971) also defined the arrival of the royal family to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 in a very similar way considering it as a disruption to the continuity of the authentic Brazilian architecture: “…An artificial and supervised Europeanization was hurriedly introduced into a provincial capital… But this new and alien movement, completely rootless, boasting a history and a culture very different from the Portuguese, could not help but be a disintegrating force. The art of building in Brazil was split in two. On one side, building of Portuguese origin, but bearing a genuinely ‘native’ stamp, went on, and on the other, under the regulating and rationalizing French influence, a more erudite and sophisticated architecture appeared…” Henrique E. Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil (preface by S. Giedion), Rio de Janeiro/Amsterdam 1956. 32 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil. A casa e o templo”, 79. 33 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil. A casa e o templo”, 80. 34 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil. A casa e o templo”, 79. 35 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil. A casa e o templo”, 78. ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO 23 and literature at the beginning of the 20th century. However, it should be pointed out that although he was critical of academicism, Severo recognized the importance of the so-called French Mission in the creation of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts as well as the Brazilians attempt to create a new nationality, one that could be “…different for the colony and the metropolis… a new fatherland, with no trace of the ominous times of the Portuguese domain, a unique Brazilian fatherland”. Among the French Mission's main protagonists, Severo recognized the importance of Jean-Baptiste Debret and his short study on Brazilian colonial architecture published in Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil (1834), which he used as an historical source in his own writings. 2. Effectively in April 1831, the first Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro I36 abdicated because of a strong anti-Portuguese movement that included serious street riots between Brazilians and Portuguese. Public opinion was armed against the foreigners. The Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was then five years old. The teachers were French artists connected to the Revolution and to Napoleon who arrived in Brazil after the second fall of Napoleon in 1816. As an architect, Grandjean de Montigny was responsible for the architects’ formation within the Academia and the professor of historic painting was Jean-Baptiste Debret (17681848). Other important names were Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and Joachim Lebreton. All of them graduated from the Parisian Beaux-Arts at the end of the 18th century involved by the atmosphere of revolutionary classicism, and therefore engaged to an internationalist ideology against the ancien régime and the absolute monarchy. Immediately after the abdication and the return of Dom Pedro to Europe, Debret decided to go back to France. He took with him the young Manuel 36 Dom Pedro was born in Portugal in 1798. THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES 30 gneiss form the Serra do Mar) and Brazilian woods that were left unpainted as a manifestation of regional magnificence. The façades of many of his works showed wide surfaces of elaborately cut stone. Between his most important projects were the parish church of São João Batista da Lagoa, the primary schools of Glória and Harmonia, the former Caixa Econômica and the Bourse of Commerce. Bethencourt da Silva not only innovated over the classical models, but also constituted a new, essentially Brazilian, style through shapes and materials using references from the traditional religious architecture of Rio de Janeiro. The larger and luxuriant expressions of his initiatives were embodied in one of the most significant buildings erected in Brazil by the end of the 19th century: the third Bourse of Commerce of Rio de Janeiro which he designed in 1880. One technical dispute at the construction site provoked a major and important debate in the architectural milieu concerning the issue of a national expression in buildings. The Associação Comercial, the league formed by the local traders, hired the contractor Moraes & Mello to build Bethencourt da Silva’s project and commissioned the engineer Luiz Schreiner (1838-1892) to supervise part of the works. The dispute between the architect and the engineer over the composition of a stucco coating ended with the dismissing of Schreiner who, feeling offended in his professional pride, presented four lectures at the Instituto Polytechnico Brazileiro between 1883 and 1884.50 In those sessions he discussed architectural theory and addressed different aspects of Bethencourt da Silva’s architectural work, arguing the Academia Imperial de Bellas-Artes’s teaching. One of his arguments interests us directly. Schreiner began praising Grandjean de Montigny for his teaching and architecture which recognized the Academia as a noble foundation. Nevertheless, without mentioning Bethencourt da Silva’s name, he inquired: “…However, how have his successors carried on? Immediately when they reached the Master’s chair, they emphasized their individuality; wanted to show 50 Luiz Schreiner, As obras da Praça do Comércio, Rio de Janeiro 1884. ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO 31 that they are more artists than him and intended to invent a new essentially Brazilian architectural style…”.51 The engineer not only denounced the Academy and Bethencourt da Silva, but the architect’s project of a national architecture. Schreiner’s allegation developed through a long historically led discourse including two lines of reasoning: first, it is impossible create a style out of individual will; and, second, our time requires an international style because we live the age of communications between peoples and not of isolation. “…To better appreciate the absurdity of that pretension we will investigate the origin of the main styles, and through this study it strikes the eye that only the lack of communication among peoples in Antiquity could favor the partial development of a style that one could then consider national; however as communications were wide open, with the contact between people, architecture is so generalized that – mainly from the Chrisitan age on, it ceased presenting the character of nationality, like among people of earlier times, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians and – to a certain point – Greek. But the Romans, by their cosmocracy and collective acceptance of other architectural forms, had prepared the soil for the cosmopolitan importance of the future reigning styles. And, if in those epochs already art started to be cosmopolitan, what should we say of today, in this century of steam and telegraph, in which distances that once separated people are shortened day after day? To create an essentially Brazilian architecture is equivalent to isolate Brazil from the whole world through a Chinese wall...”.52 This is only a short extract of a much longer speech which went through different ages demonstrating Schreiner’s thesis and showing off his encyclopedic historical knowledge. The passionate dispute that took place during the last quarter of the 19th century testified to the contemporary debate on the pertinence of a national 51 Luiz Schreiner, As obras da Praça do Comércio, Rio de Janeiro 1884, 78 (author’s emphasis). 52 Luiz Schreiner, As obras da Praça do Comércio, Rio de Janeiro 1884, 90. THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES 32 architecture, and the actors involved in both sides: the Academia, the architects and the artists under Bethencourt da Silva’s leadership championing for a national architecture, and the engineers and the Polytechnica school representing the counter-force for an international style. The reception of Schreiner’s ideas among his contemporaries can be measure by the edition of the Novo vinhola brazileiro53 (the ‘New Brazilian Vignola’) published by Alexandre Speltz six years after Schreiner’s death. In this, Speltz not only incorporated many of Schreiner’s concepts on architecture and stylistics, but also pasted entire pages of the engineer’s lectures, with no mention of the author, in order to advocate the absurdity of proposing a national style as the world moved into the 20th century. 3. The search for a Brazilian expression in arts and architecture saw its first awakening in the beginnings of the 19th century with a small group of professionals debating ideas and a few practices. Porto-alegre recognized the idea of a Brazilian art as a project for the future. Bethencourt da Silva and (one can suppose) some of his partners in the Academia and the Liceu conceived and practiced an eclectic architecture based on fragments of the Portuguese/Brazilian architectural tradition. Schreiner and (one can suppose) some of his partners in the Polytechnica aligned against it. After the First World War, the ‘Missions Style’ – invented in California – started spreading throughout the Americas. In Brazil, it was converted into a nationalist movement championed by architects Ricardo Severo and Jose Marianno da Cunha Filho around the symbolic year 1922 when the country celebrated the first centenary of its Independence. The patriotic feelings of the Romantics and the nation-orientated system of political, sociological and historical thinking that spread throughout western 53 Alexandre Speltz, Architectura clássica no Brazil: tratado elementar das 5 ordens da arquitetura classica – ou Novo vinholabrazileiro, Rio de Janeiro 1898. ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO 33 civilization from 1848 on the issue of nation, gained the creations of painters, musicians, writers and architects. Those 19th century seeds germinated in Brazil during the 1920’s and 1930’s with vigorous force of thought and through a plain and somehow puerile stylistic manifestation. While neocolonial plastic options deeply differ from modernist ones, the feeling of love for Brazil and the will to give it an artistic expression seems to have unified theoretical discourses casting a dark shadow over the different worldviews and antagonistic political orientations among the protagonists. Effectively Carlos Kessel54 quotes the restlessness of Mario de Andrade, one of the main modern intellectuals in 1929: “…in my view Modernist architecture will not remain, in its present anonymity and internationalism. If it normalizes it will have … to distinguish itself between ethnic factions and to depreciate its individual function. If so, there is nothing more correct than the search and appropriation of the elements of Brazilian architectural constancy. It is with them that, from within modern architecture, Brazil will give the contribution which it must give…”.55 And, on the other hand, traditionalist Ricardo Severo had written one decade earlier: “Traditional art does not mean, thus, literal reproduction of traditional things… of houses made out of mud …Traditional art is the stylization of former artistic forms that integrate in a particular time the local milieu, the moral character of a people, the imprint of a civilization… [the] rhythmic evolution of successive cycles of art and styles and a collective expression… determinant in peoples of definite tradition in which the aesthetic feeling is stable like the feeling for patriotic nationality… instead of copying, try to imitate them only by adapting them… to the traditional character of the people… you will have done…traditional art..”.56 54 Carlos Kessel, Arquitetura neocolonial no Brasil entre o pastiche e a modernidade, Rio de Janeiro 2008. 55 Mario de Andrade, “Arquitetura colonial,” in: Diário Nacional (23 August 1928). 56 Ricardo Severo, “A arte tradicional no Brasil”. THE QUEST FOR A BRAZILIAN CHARACTER: DIACHRONIC DIALOGUES 34 Among the debates between our main protagonists around the first decades of the 20th century, one can feel the need for national roots acting together with international contemporary expression. Regionalism and universalism are not necessarily opposites, but frequently appear as twin aspects of the anguish to find one’s position in the vast globe of our planet. Under the soil of the main achievements of modern architecture, lie the consistent bed of tradition, as suggested by Lucio Costa’s confession concerning his contribution to two other colleagues engaged in the invention of Brasilia during the 1950s at the highest peak of the modern consecration: “...Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares, architect artist: master of plastics, of spaces, and of structural flights… – the creator. João da Gama Filgueiras Lima, the architect who brought … together art and technology – the builder. And I, Lucio Marçal Ferreira Ribeiro de Lima e Costa, carrying a bit of both of them … I am after all the link with our past, the foundation, – the tradition...”57. From today’s point of view, we must conclude that for them all the deep dive into regional roots was a means to communicate to the world. To radically state local architectural tradition in the new architecture constituted the only possible way for Brazilian architecture to have its voice heard all around the world. 57 Costa, Lucio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, 434. ANAT FALBEL and GUSTAVO PEIXOTO 35 CATALONIA AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE. AN UNFINISHED TALE ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH As Sambricio1 points out, when focusing our analysis on the perspective of the housing problem, we should note that it has to be analyzed in two distinct phases. The first, which began in the late 19th century and is framed in the general European context of providing housing for workers in crowded cities, was to be implemented in Spain through the development of various “Casas Baratas” (1911; 1921) regulations.2 The second phase of analysis refers to the more general problem of “city organization” derived from the influences of thinking about Municipalism3 (even during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera) and of territorial planning, a thought that represents the emergence of the role of the state as a regulatory body on urban problems. This line of thought led to planning proposals for Madrid and Barcelona, and to the development of various laws. These not only regulated the problem of providing affordable 1 Carlos Sambricio, Cuando se quiso resucitar la Arquitectura, Murcia 1983. 2 Casas baratas is a name for low cost dwellings. Both from the perspective of the influence of the legislation of other countries (France, UK ...) on this type of housing, and for the underlying organizational models (Garden City, Lineal City ....). 3 As is well known, the first phase of the welfare state starts with the transfer to municipal ownership of some urban infrastructure developed since the late 19th century. Public transport and, in part, housing will be some of such ‘municipalized’ infrastructures. To a large extent, the development of modern architecture (especially in Germany) cannot be understood outside the framework of the processes of municipalization. 36 ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH housing, but also addressed the more general problem of Spain’s modernization and reorganization of the production system, especially since the economic crises of the 1930s. “Our age is characterized by a large universal renewal movement. New social structures appear. Modern societies tend to be governed by the same collective needs for all civilized countries. Factories, Schools, Sports. Housing, Leisure. Transport, Roads. URBANISM”.4 In brief, following Flores5 and Bohigas6, I argue that the flourishing Spanish ‘rationalism’ / ‘functionalism’ is articulated in relation to two positions in principle, antagonistic to each other. On the one hand, in Madrid and Barcelona, architects such as Lacasa, Fernández Shaw, Rubio i Tudurí, without giving up rationalist thought, avoided the mimetic ism of a certain stylistic trend or fad that would configure the repertoire of modern architectural language. As Lacasa7 suggests: “(…) Now, the issue is just the plastic and aesthetic aspect of architecture, after having witnessed the spectacle of post-expressionists, who consider Cezanne as remote as Amenhotep the IVth. One can but smile seeing a new group that believes they get their hands on the true truth. As for the list, Oud, Poelzig, Le Corbusier, etc., contain very different qualities, it is not the same Taut, rationalist, Hoffmann, artist and Le Corbusier, journalist and charlatan. (...) However, rationalism is not there in the intellectualized circles but in the work. British architects have absolutely no willingness for the architecture of the cubes, but, instead, have a very solid understanding of what architectural rationalism is. I believe in the current rationalist architecture as a moment of eternal evolution of ideas, even if you will, a radical change in direction, but later 4 GATEPAC, “Editorial”. AC (Actividades Contemporáneas) year 1, 1 (1931). 5 Carlos Flores, Arquitectura española contemporánea, Madrid 1961. 6 Oriol Bohigas, Arquitectüra española la Segunda República, Barcelona 1970. 7 Luis Lacasa, “Respuesta a la Encuesta sobre la Nueva Arquitectura confeccionada por Fernando García Mercadal,” in La Gaceta Literaria 32 (15 April 1928). 37 CATALONIA AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE. AN UNFINISHED TALE other ideas will displace the present, because the technicians do not have the force of Joshua to stop the race of the sun.” What degree of acclimatization has modern architecture achieved among us? asked himself Rubió i Tudurí8 a couple of years later: “Here is a question - and then an answer - in which we must not waste much time nor deepen. Though I myself cultivate this architecture of Germanic origins, it would be wrong to attribute great importance to it, even less to burn incense in front of its practitioners. No one a better architect because they follow a fad, even if it is a more intellectual one. In fact, as uninteresting is he who copies the Romans as he who mimics Mies Van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, unless he has other qualities other than being a follower and imitator.” The architects who showed some resistance to uncritically adopting some postulates of modern architecture are those who Bohigas (1970) dubbed “the side-lines rationalists”. This trend also kept alive the flame of the role and value of the “regional / vernacular architecture” as a way of experimentation and modernization of Spanish architecture in order to allow it to jump to the modern rationalism / functionalism postulates.9 The other trend would group together architects who assumed the tenets of the CIAM’s New Architecture. In this regard, it is important to clarify that we cannot carry the dichotomy to the extreme. Indeed, two years after the Literary Gazette of Madrid developed its survey on the New Architecture, the Barcelona newspaper Mirador developed a similar survey. One of those who answered was Josep Lluis Sert, for some, the clearest example of the defence of CIAM principles. 8 N.M. Rubió i Tudurí, “L'aclimatació de l'arquitectura moderna a Barcelona,” in Mirador 93 (1930). 9 See Mónica Vázquez Astorga, La arquitectura vernácula como laboratorio de experimentación y vía de modernización para la arquitectura moderna. Universidad Pablo Olavide, 2005 (on-line http://www. upo.es/historia_arte/export/sites/historia_arte/Actividades/Congresos/Publicacion_Arquitectura_ Vernacula_Carmona/ComunicacionesEspana/Monica_Vazquez_Astorga_La_arquitectura_vernacula_ como_laboratorio_de_experimentacion_y_via_de_modernizacion_para_la_arquitectura_moderna.pdf (accessed 12 April 2014); Carlos Sambricio, “La normalización de la arquitectura vernácula: un debate en la España de los veinte,” in Revista de Occidente 235 (2000), 21-44. 38 Sert10 acknowledges that the New Architecture is the only one that “can fully meet the current needs (material and spiritual) of the individual” because it is using the building elements that the industry can provide. Meanwhile he recognizes the value of new materials and new construction techniques: “we have to maintain some traditional building systems that tie in perfectly with the modern ones, such as, for example, the admirable flat brick vaults of our land”, since he recognizes, along with his GATEPAC fellows, that although “we are in the presence of a new state of mind that cancels customs and traditions and that tends to be universal, Contemporary Architecture, must agree with these characters”. Therefore, Sert as leader of the GATEPAC group, emphasizes the role of the vernacular not falling into the mimicry of a badly understood regionalism. "To adapt a historical system is to fake the system, and deny the times. In regional architectures, resulting from weather conditions, local customs and available materials, only the weather has absolute value. What is essential will stand. What is episodic, accidental, must disappear; a division of universal architecture based on the weather conditions can be expected. Southern Architecture, terraces, awnings, flown slabs, filtered light. Northern Architecture, large glass surfaces (...) Architecture responds to a utility, to an end. It must satisfy the Reason. Using elements, program, materials, space, light... going from a rational Interior (function) to the exterior (façade) in a simple and constructive way, seeking beauty in proportion, in the order, in balance. Suppressing the superimposed superfluous decoration. Combating the false use of materials, the architecture of imitation. Bring the architecture to its natural environment, i.e., technical, social and economic, from which it is currently separated is the program (accepted by many, but few trying to make), that the GATEPAC Group intends to implement by coordinating 10 Josep LL. Sert, “Qué Penseu de l'Arquitectura Moderna?” in Mirador 65 (24 April 1930). ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH 39 efforts and working collectively”.11 In this sense and somewhat earlier, Garcia Mercadal,12 one of the founders of GATEPAC wrote: “The climate, materials and also the social structure of every country, greatly influence the arrangement of the floor-plan and its inner structure, which change from a period of history to another, always due to their immediate dependence on social factors”. Furthermore, with respect to the criticisms raised about excessive mechanization, they, the GATEPAC group, warn: “these conditions, of a spiritual nature, are indispensable; without them, we just produce something from a mathematical calculation, the ‘machine à vivre’ too strictly interpreted, and as a result, a miserable architecture; we condemn this architecture”.13 The introduction of the ‘New Architecture’ into Spain must be framed in an eminently political perspective (as happened in Germany and the USSR). The economic boom following Spanish neutrality during the Great War and the consequences of the economic crisis of 1921, in which, from 1923, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera sought to promote the local power of the bourgeoisie, “induces a cultural change resulting not only in a new way of understanding architecture but also in a new vision of the city”.14 On the one hand, different factions of the bourgeoisie competed in the arena of the modernization of Spain. On the other hand, the popular forces demanded a role as transformers of society, overcoming the approaches of the cooperative tradition of the early 20th century. In between, technicians (architects), opted for one or other of the positions. As Sambricio points out, the historiography of architecture has not helped much in the understanding of the phenomenon of architectural avant-garde in Spain. 11 GATEPAC, “Editorial,” in AC (Actividades Contemporáneas), year 1, 1 (1931). 12 Fernando Garcia Mercadal, La casa Popular en España, Madrid 1930. 13 GATEPAC, “Lo que entendemos por vivienda mínima, in AC (Actividades Contemporáneas) 6 (1932). 14 Sambricio, Cuando se quiso resucitar la arquitectura. CATALONIA AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE. AN UNFINISHED TALE 46 The architects of this period, faced both the consequences of technical changes in construction and their consequences in an urban setting and urban economy. This is evident in two complementary aspects. “On the one hand the deployment of an effort for the technical rationalization of the problem. The definition of the types, plots and urban layout that could combine, in an adequate and economical way, a number of complex factors, is entrusted to specialists and expands their traditional field of project action.(…) However, these technical problems are doubled out of a need for representation summarizing its own ideological language of architecture, the content that these operations have in the field of social relations of production and the culture that emerges. It is worth highlighting this figurative effort as one of the most creative moments and of greater connection with the cultural institutions that diffusely we mean by Noucentisme. (…) This mystified recovery between petty bourgeois and ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH Image 1. GATEPAC, AC 18 Monstrosities of the typical-popular architecture 47 rural that will be called “popular”, will set the mood for extraordinarily simple elements that address the genuine design of the house for the working classes without having to resort to a reduced, kitsch version, of the more or less pompier architecture of public works or of the haute bourgeoisie. There is a whole reflection upon the primary elements of the composition - the gate, the door, the window, the roof, the room where you sleep, the living room - which are redesigned with elements borrowed from the traditional pre-industrial architecture of the country - which would be the more nationalist dimension of the matterwith stylized elements of high architecture or imports of foreign experiences”.27 In this sense it was assumed during early 1930s within the architectural profession, that the theme of ‘low cost houses’ - or housing for the middle-class powered by 27 Solà-Morales, “Sobre Noucentisme y Arquitectura”, 23-28. CATALONIA AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE. AN UNFINISHED TALE Image 2. Sert, J.Ll.; Subirana, J.B; Torres-Clavé, J. AC Project Workers Housing (Barcelona) in AC 1933 48 the Salmon Act of 1935 - would need specific project solutions since, as raised by García Mercadal,28 a “cheap house” was not a bourgeois house in miniature. Its design, with budgetary limits, required rethinking concepts of design and style. This was not only with regard to the built volume and its implantation - gradually abandoning the concept of a garden city to experiment with the building of large blocks, partly following the experiences of the Viennese Hoff or the German Siedlung - but also with regard to the objects that they should contain. This way, Basegoda29 states: “The tendency to even out civic education to consider the house with garden as a relic of the past. Already, in the Brussels Congress, Walter Gropius30 has pointed out the benefits of collective dwellings within the city, economic and with minimal room, helping to suppress a number of causes of wastefulness, centralizing services and ensuring light, air and freedom. The domestic problem of large multi-storey linear blocks - that has nothing to do with the psychosis of skyscrapers - is defended fiercely by the architects of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” In summary, the Spanish architects engaged in urban development and construction of affordable housing for the popular and middle-classes were familiar with the standardized construction elements, while demanding from one relatively undeveloped industry, the manufacturing in large numbers of these standard elements that would allow dry mounting of standardized houses. Likewise, the reaction against Modernisme had gradually introduced an important stylistic simplification regarding the construction of affordable housing. At the same time, a good knowledge of what was happening in Europe 28 Fernando García Mercadal, La vivienda en Europa y otras cuestiones (1926), Zaragoza 1998. 29 Buenaventura Basegoda, “La casa de los más pobres,” in La Construcción Moderna 17, 15 (September 1932), 193-196. 30 Basegoda refers to the Gropius’ talk, “Flach-, Mitteloder Hochbau?” (talk to 3rd CIAM conference, Brussels, 27–30 November 1930), published in Moderne Bauformen (Stuttgart), 30:7 (1931): 321–328, reprinted in Probst and Schädlich, Walter Gropius, vol. 3, 123. ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH 49 enabled the influence of the avant-garde in a context of respect for traditional techniques and materials. In this regard, they respected that the elements of these buildings, to their smallest details, were mass-produced, and had been refined and perfected over the centuries: “doors of accurate width and height, windows, cupboards, furniture, ceramics. The same forms, always with slight variations, which are repeated throughout the Mediterranean coasts. These constructions have nothing to do with what, in the schools of architecture is called ‘regional architecture’.”31 In Mediterranean popular architecture, the facades at midday are protected from excessive sun by bowers or porches, elements that filter the light without obstructing the view of the outside scenery. The roofs are flat, terraced, or in Arab tiles and always with a very gentle slope, so that the prism that sustains them dominates the set, keeping all its strength and purity. “The interesting and vital aspects in this Mediterranean architecture are the primary volumes, large smooth surfaces, clear and bright polychromy, the consistency of buildings with the dominant lines of the landscape in which they are located and that compel to create new forms for each place; to invent new solutions. When comparing the examples of Mediterranean architecture with the best creations of modern architecture, we cannot fail to notice some common characteristics, not in detail but in these ‘constants’ that give spirit to the architectural work. Then, why was Modern Architecture called Germanic?” The GATEPAC group analysis continues to raise the point that this spirit, these constant characteristics, are not typical of Germanic buildings. The 31 GATEPAC, “Número dedicado a la Arquitectura Popular,” in AC (Actividad Contemporánea) year 5, 18 (1935). CATALONIA AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE. AN UNFINISHED TALE 50 technical means at their disposal as well as the climate, did not favour this kind of construction and forced them to cover the houses with slate roofing and other materials, giving them large slopes. Light colours to lime do not resist the persistent rains; the facades of the Nordic popular constructions are blackened by the permanent moisture. “Modern architecture is technically a discovery of the Nordic countries, but spiritually it is the unstylish Mediterranean architecture which influences this New Architecture. Modern architecture is a return to pure, traditional forms; the Mediterranean ones. It's a victory for the Latin sea!”.32 Not only were the architects of the GATEPAC group engaged in the modernization of Spanish society, as seen above, many were also committed to breaking with the tenets of academic and official architecture. They were engaged in constructive rationalization of buildings as well as with the functional reorganization of the city, reworking some of the urban concepts in use, as was the case of the model for garden cities. The housing problem viewed as inseparable from the problem of urban growth pointed to similar solutions to those developed in Northern Europe about the role that large residential blocks could have, in solving both the problem of affordable housing, and that of its impact on the reorganization of the city. However, it becomes apparent that many of these architects, while pragmatic and open to possibilities, even accepting of the structural principles of modern architecture, did not share some of their mechanistic and functionalist postulates. “Are we in the presence of a simple phenomenon of delay or are we facing a case of racial misunderstanding? Is the new functionalism as understandable to us as the Gothic style was for the Florentines? Would the forms of this architecture –decorative/rational - become acclimatized 32 GATEPAC, 1935:1. ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH 51 in Catalonia, or will they be flower of one day and of caprice? Alternatively, will we finally know how to overcome this phase of ‘wanting to make nice things with logic’ and know how to go forward towards the architecture of the utility, leading a purely anaesthetic movement? We cannot answer these questions with words but with deeds. Every architect must consider whether it is fine to continue cultivating hybrid forms of decorative rational plasticism, or whether he tries to stop and jumps to the front lines where the battle is being fought by functional architecture, objective and simply useful. Moreover, every architect should check if, when the time arrives, he has the ability to avoid the aesthetic defect (defect is a virtue when it is exercised out of place), and he has the ability to execute works in which function is the only end and the only concern”.33 Although, at the beginning of the 1930s, some authors34 outlined the development achieved by modern architecture in Spain, subsequent historiography practically ignores them, despite some significant achievements, such as the so-called Macià Plan (GATCPACLe Corbusier 1934) for Barcelona, or the effective implementation of the construction of affordable housing, such as the Block House. Surely, time worked against possibilities. The social, political and economic tensions which define the Second Spanish Republic and the implementation of self-government in Catalonia, culminated in a bloody civil war and the establishment of a dictatorial and autocratic regime, which prioritized the values of the imperial past of a Spain that never existed. Many 33 N.M. Rubió i Tudurí, “L'aclimatació de l'arquitectura moderna a Barcelona,” in Mirador 93 (1930). 34 Sigfried Giedion, “L’architecture contemporaine en Espagne,” in Cahiers d’Art 3 (1931), 157-164. The Nautical Club in San Sebastián by Aizpurúa (founder of the Spanish Falange of José Antonio Primo de Rivera) and Labayen appears as the only Spanish case in H-R Hitchcock and Ph. Johnson, The International Style since 1922, New York 1932. Oddly, S.Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, Harvard 1941 does not mention any Spanish author, or even refer to the GATEPAC group and, what might be considered more serious, in his account of the evolution of urban thinking, no mention appears to Ildefons Cerdà, founder of Contemporary Urbanism. CATALONIA AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE. AN UNFINISHED TALE 52 of the ideals of a country that looked to Europe in all fields and that seemed achievable in the early 1930s, little by little, were blurred through exile. Many architects emigrated; others, in internal exile, were purged. However, the ideas of the modernization of architecture and of urbanism were kept alive until the time when, in the 1950s with economic development and the end of the autarchic period of dictatorship, they gradually emerged again. This work was conducted under the project Southern Modernisms (EXPL/CPCHAT/0191/2013), funded by national funds through FCT under Project 3599 - Promoting the Research Production, Technological Development and Innovation. ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH 53 A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS1 CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS [The avant-garde] felt the yearning for the union of life and art. Octavio Paz2 "For Monstrification" In 1975 Lucio Blanco filmed a twelve-minute short3 as his course theme work at the Faculty of Communication Sciences in Madrid, recently shown to academic colleagues who had the chance to watch a stupefying film. As a continuation of previous research, this is an opportunity to take a renewed look at 20th century Modernist architecture in Spain. The aim being to make sense of people’s beliefs and thoughts about their built environment and what it represented, implies to resort to previous research and writings, and concepts 1 This text is a revised and extended version of the paper “A Critical Approach to Modernist Architecture in Spain. Rumours and Truths.” presented at the international conference Southern Modernisms: Critical Stances Through Regional Appropriations, ESAP, Oporto, 19-21 February 2015. 2 Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo, Madrid 1987. 3 Lucio Blanco, Arquitectura para después de una guerra, Madrid 1975. 54 CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS derived from them.4 Blanco’s ground-breaking short aimed at picturing Spain’s Francoist oppression through the regime’s architectural production. In turn, by mistake, it pictured the architecture produced before and after the Spanish Civil War, rather than during the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1975). Blanco’s summary of forty years thus included many avant-garde and Modernist works,5 not all of which fit within the Francoist tyranny.6 Some relevant works shown had been built before 1939, even under critical principles – considered degenerate afterwards – which had subsisted thanks to the finest intellectual embroidery of architects to skip post-war censorship.7 What Blanco’s 1975 film showed was a melange of the previous fifty years’ architectural repertory, all included, a sort of compendium of the architecture produced in Spain since the mid-1920s. The avant-garde critical regionalism8 4 All by C. Diez-Pastor. For the “1925 Generation”, avant-garde and emergence of Modernist architecture, preceding facts and evolution, see Carlos Arniches y Martín Domínguez, y los demás, Doctorate thesis, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) [Dir. Prof. M.A. Baldellou (summa cum laude).] 2003; and Carlos Arniches y Martín Domínguez, arquitectos de la “Generación del 25”, Madrid 2005. For insight into Modernist landscape, its connection with art and architecture, and the tourist purposes it contributed to, see “Transits into landscape,” in Cultural Landscape, Madrid 2008; and the case-study “Albergues de carretera (Highway inns): a key step in the evolution of Spanish tourism and Modernist architecture”, Journal of Tourism History, 2: 1 (2010) 1-22, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17551821003777832 (accessed on 4th March, 2015). For another case study on Arniches’ contribution to exemplary architecture, see “Carlos Arniches, arquitecto de la Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas,” in: J.M Sánchez Ron and J. García-Velasco (Eds.), 100 JAE: la Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas en su centenario, Madrid (2010). For core aspects of Modernism and their translation into Spain’s reality, see “La vivienda mínima en España: primer paso del debate sobre la vivienda social,” Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales, Barcelona. Vol. VII, (2003) 146(023), http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn/sn-146(023).htm (accessed on 4th March, 2015). For a deeper insight into the cultural intricacies of Modernist architecture, critical architecture, national-folklorism and folklo-regionalist, appropriation and conflicts generated, see “Architectural Koinè and Trans-National Spanish Architecture,” in R. Quek and D. Deane (Eds.), Nationalism and Architecture, London 2012. 5 Oxford Dictionary. modernism: “an artistic style or movement that aims to depart significantly from classical and traditional forms”; and “a movement towards modifying traditional beliefs in accordance with modern ideas, (…) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries“; modern is anything up to date. 6 Juan de Zavala, La arquitectura, Madrid 1945. 7 Diez-Pastor, “Architectural Koinè”, 255-267. 8 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, London 2003. 55 A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS and early Modernist works were all jumbled with the Francoist “aboriginal”9 and uncritical totalitarian works – as denounced by the end of the Spanish War.10 The film was extremely critical of the dying regime, though bearing an unclear idea of the architectural particulars and evolution. All the former posed the question of what might have produced such an ideological muddle where critical architecture was taken for anti-modernist. Blanco’s explanation – that “as somebody nonspecialist in architecture, I was not aware of the architectural truth, I just looked at it from the facts lived”11 – revealed an intriguing chain of events behind a general misbelief. Blanco had courageously spoken aloud, though he was transmitting what was common knowledge – with the authentic and the fraudulent fused. Truths and lies, conveniently administered and expanded by the regime had provoked misled knowledge, a fallacy so masterly worked out that even antiFrancoist students believed that the master buildings of the critical Madrilean avant-garde of the 1920s – the “1925 Generation” – were totalitarian. This totalitarianism even reached the architects of the mid-century’s rebellious “1940 Generation”12 who abhorred the 1953 Alhambra Manifesto.13 The regime had used Modernist architecture as a ready-made palimpsest, terming it “degenerate” while appropriating it to build their own totalitarian style. It was only natural that the youngsters of 1970 to infer that any Modernist building must be totalitarian, even beyond chronology. Modernist architecture became ugly and contemptible to them. Unknowingly, they made Ruskin’s14 words theirs, that Modernist buildings were “ugly things, the expense of which ought 9 Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones, New York 1924. His concept of regionalism, with a critical accent shared with Torres Balbás’s, was of the integrating kind based on perception of place, as opposed to Heimatsil. The latter slavishly following impositions from outside, was plainly called by Mumford “aboriginal”, as was Modernism if aligned with pre-set principles. Concepts formerly discussed in DiezPastor, “Architectural Koinè”; and Zavala, La arquitectura. 10 Zavala, La arquitectura. 11 Discussion with Blanco. 28 October 2005. 12 Miguel A. Baldellou, Alejandro de la Sota, Madrid 1976, 9. 13 Baldellou, Alejando de la Sota, 18. 14 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Orpington 1849, 87. 62 architecture for Arquitectura, started to be followed by other colleagues who would soon try to follow his frenetic activity.37 Criticism gave these men the social capacity to explain the novelties and transformations required. People of their age soon engaged with their discourse. They reckoned that houses ought to evolve and seek comfort through a better distribution and the inclusion of new facilities and materials that would help them to be well-heated in the winter. Health, then a main concern, started to make itself visible in the G25 works, with shelters to protect from the sun while reminding of the need to be outdoors; new mechanisms for doors and windows allowing better ventilation; or new soundproofing materials that eased community life. Still the most difficult part dealt with the deep social transformations required. While Europe had witnessed the loss of their young and productive men, sending their women to work, drastically reducing family size and supressing domestic service, Spain’s middle class was still constituted by well-established families with no less than four or five children and at least three people to service them. Houses were full of bedrooms and large living and kitchen areas 'and' which soon became the G25 target. Social concern remained synonymous with charity work. Making themselves visible represented for the G25 a chance to educate the whole society on the need for those changes, yet also the challenge. Such was, for instance, Arniches and Domínguez’s interest with their weekly column in El Sol, where they discussed issues from “Kitchens” to “Built ensembles” – all of which started new interests in their legions of readers.38 Other colleagues soon followed. 37 Fernando García Mercadal, La vivienda en Europa y otras cuestiones, Zaragoza 1926/1998. 1926 report of his stay at the Academy of Spain in Rome (1923-1926) published in 1998. 38 Diez-Pastor, Carlos Arniches y Martín Domínguez, arquitectos de la “Generación del 25”, 61-63. CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS 63 The avant-garde as a vision of the world The prestige of the G25 grew as their architectural speech was proved to be consistent with their works. By 1935, hardly any reader of the daily press ignored who they were. Between 1925 and 1936 they participated in the most relevant works then started in Madrid,39 from collective works like the Ciudad Universitaria or the JAE campus, to national competitions individually attended – like the new airport and racecourse in Madrid – or relevant private commissions.40 Notwithstanding the number or relevance of the works commissioned, it was the new architectural concept and principles over which it stood that operated the transformation, introducing Modernism to Spain. Shortly after, most of the buildings had become landmarks of Spain’s architecture, even praised abroad. They represented a whole new architectural concept built with new means, materials and techniques, often experimental, reflecting the new panorama. The use of reinforced concrete generalized among these architects who often sought the civil engineers’ opinion to confirm their calculations even if not required.41 Some building companies42 in charge of the works, unexpectedly openminded, were keen to accept new techniques, 39 Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria (1927-1943) early works distribution: Lacasa and Sánchez Arcas were responsible for the Clinic Hospital (1928) and Central Power Station (1932); De los Santos, the Faculty of Sciences (1928) and Faculty of Medicine (1928); Bergamín and Blanco Soler, the Sports Fields and Residence Hall Jaime del Amo (1929); and Aguirre, the Faculty of Philosophy (1928). The JAE appointed (1927) Carlos Arniches as architect, who won the Albergues de Carretera competition with Martín Domínguez. Meanwhile, García Mercadal and Domínguez worked at Secundino Zuazo’s office, and Fernández-Shaw won the Barajas Airport competition (1929). Most G25 architects worked privately and continued public activity – i.e. Aguirre, at the Faculty of Law; De los Santos at the School of Dentistry; or Lacasa and Sánchez Arcas, at the Residence Hall for Teachers and Rectorate. 40 Figueroa’s Apartment Building in José Abascal; Bergamín & Blanco Soler’s El Viso housing estate; García Mercadal’s Villa Amparo, Díaz-Caneja’s House, and Museum of Modern Art; De los Santos’ Apartment Building in Alfonso XI; Zavala’s Apartment Building by Parque del Oeste; Fernández-Shaw’s Apartment Building in Menéndez Pelayo; Lacasa & Sánchez Arcas’ Hospital of Toledo; Sánchez Arcas’ Algeciras Market; and Arniches & Domínguez’s La Zarzuela Racecourse. 41 Diez-Pastor, Carlos Arniches y Martín Domínguez, y los demás. 42 Like AGROMÁN, whose founder followed suggestions to acquire patents on new materials and techniques. A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS 64 materials and means, even aquiring patents abroad.43 The effort made by all the parties involved was coordinated and agreed, offering an unprecedented chance to develop a new architecture. Such a unique oportunity to unleash creativity, so long restrained, spurred the group’s working capacity. Yet the G25’s most genuine contribution materialized in their new concept of architectural space which determined their buildings. Among their strongest influences was Adolf Loos’ idea of space, the Raumplan, described by him as interconnected continued spaces in a way that the changes were functional, though unnoticeable. Like Loos’, the G25’s architecture was not conceived through drawings, but rather through spaces. These concepts evolved from Schmarsow’s theory of dynamic space, with geometrical abstraction and “the modernist preoccupation with shaping internal space to address functional needs”44 as clear outcomes. As a result, their planning started from inside advancing outwards, producing interesting assamblages of volumes never seen 43 Diez-Pastor, “Carlos Arniches, arquitecto de la Junta”, 363. 44 M. W. Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of ‘Raumgestaltung’,” in Assemblage, 15, (1991), 48-61, here 57, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171125, (accessed 3rd March, 2015). CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS Figure 4. Original aspect of the Secondary Education building of the Instituto Escuela – JAE, from the main façade (Madrid), 1932. Carlos Arniches. (Photograph from AGA, use entitled to the author) 65 before. The process, aimed at providing nature with a modernist identity,45 still did not end outside the building in its façades, but rather went on towards the environment and into the landscape,46 producing a series of transitions aimed at integrating architecture with its context – be it natural or built, rural or urban, visitable or habitable. It was an architecture in the line Mumford47 proposed, “based on the perception of ‘place’”.48 However, even though it was highly critical towards any principles of modernity as voiced by the different currents, it cannot be termed “regionalist”, strictly speaking.49 In fact, any regional element or technique they used – from arches to brick walls – was immediately given a wholly new turn: functional and symbolic. Far from the folklorist manners of their elders and their poor sense of regionalism, the G25 architects were self-critical and reflective. Le Corbusier, Gropius and the leading lights of Modernism who visited and lectured in Madrid during those years were enthusiastic about them.50 Renunciation of their culture, time and place, or heritage received was not an option for these men unless the architectural process happened to suggest the opposite – in which case they took up the challenge. Servility to Modernist principles was neither a choice for architects who, if anything, rejected to classify their works or be classified, and in the best of cases defined their style as “reasonable architecture”.51 Only Luis Gutiérrez Soto, a younger colleague of the G25, surrendered to leading trends adopting anyone likely to become popular, rejecting criticism.52 45 O. Spate, “Geography and national identity in Australia,” in Geography and national identity, ed. D. Hooson, Oxford 1994, 277-282. 46 Diez-Pastor, see “Transits into landscape”. 47 Mumford, Sticks and Stones. 48 Lefaivre and Tzonis, Critical Regionalism, 19. 49 Diez-Pastor, “Architectural Koinè”, 258-259. 50 Diez-Pastor, “Architectural Koinè”, 259. 51 Diez-Pastor, Carlos Arniches y Martín Domínguez, arquitectos de la “Generación del 25”, 33. 52 Baldellou, Luis Gutiérrez Soto, 14. Having graduated with remarkable grades, the following generations thought this was reason enough to award him membership within the noblest generation in Spain’s architecture since Juan de Villanueva. A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS 66 The G25, instead, benefited from a society surrendered to their talent and their architecture. Providing their pedagogical deployment to explain Modernism’s benefits to a general audience, people would naturally be eager to adopt a Modernist way life, free from constraints and future oriented. As Octavio Paz described it, “… the avant-garde was not just an aesthetics and a language; it was an erotic, a politics, a vision of the world, an action: a lifestyle”.53 However, demand was still too moderate for the urgency with which most of these young architects had expected the changes to come. Differences between Spanish Modernist and anti-Modernist architecture What is required to draw the line between a Modernist and an anti-Modernist building? In other words, how can we tell that Amós Salvador was Modernist while Pedro Muguruza was not, the former being almost fifteen years older than the latter?54 To be or not to be a Modernist therefore ought to be much more a question of spirit and principles rather than age. In the first place, Modernist architects were committed to subscribing to any advances available in the fields of science and technology applicable to architecture. They were pledged to progress through the use of new materials – like reinforced concrete, isolation materials, compound materials, steel carpentries, continuous floorings, etc. New techniques like new brick layerings or combinations with the new materials, new dispositions of openings, moving walls and panels for interior partitions, changes of spatial dispositions, adoption of their own canon instead of following that imposed by a general trend, and new ideas. Even ideologies – like the scientific discoveries of deadly diseases like meningitis, then hitting Spain, which suggested restricting children’s exposure to direct sunshine when playing in the open, or cross ventilation facilities to renew the air inside buildings. All the former implied significant changes in the 53 Paz, Los hijos del limo, 148. 54 Amós Salvador graduated from Madrid School of Architecture in 1902; Pedro Muguruza, in 1916. CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS 67 architectural solutions offered, if not a complete turnaround. Secondly, Modernist architects believed that any conflict between the former principles and those of form derived from historic canons should be solved in favour of common sense, if they were not clearly won by the newly stated principles. This meant, for instance, that a wall might not look like any previously known wall, yet it might be technically logical, healthier or more useful, any of which would justify it under common sense principles twice as much as if it were built under previous, historically validated canons. In the third place, the aim of the Modernist architectural principles was not so much to produce milestones as to serve a social purpose, solving problems previously detected, improving people’s lives, modestly and unaffectedly in all respects, thinking collectively rather than individually, offering the architectural solution with a future-oriented focus. In other words, they sought for an easier, more comfortable way of life adapted to a changing world. Finally, the Modernist relationship with history and the past was that of grandchildren who love their grandparents, rather than children who must obey their parents and keep to their authority. Architects, therefore, were not going to forget who they were or where they came from. In fact, they would pride themselves on their origins and the place they belonged to. This way, following Torres Balbás’ advice55 instead of subsuming any kind of preconceived ideas or inheriting impositions, they would study the facts and propose new ideas and solutions adapted to each new situation. They treated each case anew to find its specific solution, rather than using master formulas, in the belief that there was no authority to obey other than their own. Anti-Modernists instead believed that any solution offered by the past and historically confirmed need not be changed. They would only accept the new – materials, techniques, etc. – if useful to keep with what had been historically confirmed, in the cases where it did not conflict with the all-time uses and 55 Torres Balbás, “Mientras labran los sillares”. A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS 68 means. That is, any progress should fall into the category of “historical progress”. New needs and problems ought to be given a solution drawn from within the classical. Conflicts between the new and the historic ought to be solved by keeping with the latter, using classical language and canons. The aim of those who opposed the Modernist ideas in Spain was set to produce an everlasting architecture full of paradigms which could perpetuate their leadership as figures of architecture; ones whose memory would be praised by the generations to come. If there was a solution keen to transmit grandeur then that would be the preferred one. Their top-to-bottom attitude towards their society reflected a paternal orientation, not always understanding of the real situations and conflicts to which otherwise they would have been of great help. Their attitude towards history and the past was that of obedient children who will never discuss paternal authority, and rather accept it no matter what it should take. Thus their proposals would never be original and authentic. Their walls and roofs were a series of architectural déjà-vus, already seen and known. There was no room for innovation or creativeness. Rather than looking for inspiration in history and its models, they sought for pieces to mimic, copy and plagiarise. Vertical windows, thick walls, high ceilings plastered inside, classical language, full of columns, pilasters, with or without an order, following a canon or not, coherent or not, with or without a clear syntax.56 Summing up, the result may or may not be coherent. In most cases classicism was only apparent, though this fact was by no means a reason to term them Modernist, which they were not. The pre-war tsunami of renovation, which let the influence of Modernism escalate in social acceptance and popularity, was completely anihilated by the one and only idea of the Francoist regime, the one that informed all its policy and decisions – to 56 Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Classical Architecture. The Poetics of Order, Cambridge-Mass. 1986. CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS 69 fight freemasonry, which stood for “fighting evil in all its forms”.57 The idea was coincidental with that defended by the opposers of Modernism. Therefore, when tough difficult questions appeared drawing the architects on intense discussions and arguments, Modernists would propose solutions while anti-Modernists would reject the very question. The solutions proposed often showed how conflictive certain concepts were, even to those who had not always favoured anti-Modernism. That was the case, for instance, with the minimum 57 Franco’s pretension “was not limited by a transcendental ideological vision, as happened in the cases of Hitler or Mussolini … For reasons not based upon rationality, [Franco] blamed the freemasonry for Spain’s decline and following disgraces”. Paul Preston, Las tres Españas del 36, Barcelona 2010, 39. The “evil” to be fought included “separatism, communism and freemasonry. Regardless of the human cost, [Franco] was determined to eradicate them, together with socialism and liberalism. This meant the annihilation of the legacy of the Illustration, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution so as to return to the glories of Medieval Spain,” Preston, Las tres Españas del 36, 39. Stanley G. Payne, Franco, Madrid 1992, gives more details of the dictator’s inconsistency and lack of a political plan. As an example, Payne refers to an interview with The Times on 11 August 1936, where Franco states that “Spain is republican and will remain as such. Neither the regime nor the flag have changed”. Payne, Franco, 42. A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS Figure 5. La Zarzuela Racecourse (Madrid), 1934. Carlos Arniches and Martín Domínguez. (Photograph from AGA, use entitled to the author) 70 size dwelling issue.58 The debate, brought to Spain by Fernando García Mercadal after the 1929 CIAM in Frankfurt, soon took the form of an architectural competition of ideas among the most renowned young architects. The results, however, were discouraging to the convinced Modernist García Mercadal as to the solutions proposed and the winning projects. These, as the jury wrote in their final statement, clearly showed “the evident disorientation of most of the projects presented which lack the first principle of the competition; that is, the need that it be a minimum size dwelling”. The winning project, by José María Rivas Eulate, had been awarded the first prize “due to the reduced size of the rooms”, the jury said. It is worth noting that the project consisted of a four-bedroom type dwelling with a hall, dining room and living room, thus remarking that the problem lay on the very concept of what was meant and understood by “minimum size”. However, what is most relevant and determining of the Modernist condition must be read from the works. Architects were often faced with diminutive budgets as an added difficulty to the usual ones. The crucible consisted of keeping with Modernist principles while using old materials, techniques, etc., which was solved using what was available in a Modernist way. Such was often the case with public administration buildings. As the most used building material in Spain, and also standardizable, thus the best known, brick was often the cheapest option. However, soon it became Modern due to the new techniques of use and dispositions, the different possibilities it provided to allow both a vertical and a horizontal architecture, or just because it was easily combined with other materials such as steel and concrete. It afforded large, tall, small, wide and narrow spaces, thick and thin walls, endless and finite spaces, arched and lintelled elements; all at the same time, in the same place. It remained a cheap alternative to the then more expensive reinforced concrete. 58 Diez-Pastor, “La vivienda mínima en España”, 1-2. CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS 71 Spain’s Modernist architecture, and clearly that of the G25, often used brick as its core material in the same way it used arches, arcades, or tiled roofs. Those were the elements through which architects showed their connection with their time, place and culture and which they never renounced.59 What made them Modernist was the new sense given to those elements, the functions assigned to them, the richness of spaces thus generated, the way these helped to transform as much the element as the resulting place so conceived. The connection between all the functions taking place within the new buildings, as projected by the G25, was soon translated into connection of spaces specifically conceived for the purpose, each of them different and adapted to a certain function. That is, following a carefully planned concept of the spatial environment to be occupied and used comfortably by people for a meticulously planned function. A relation was then established between the general and the particular by connecting the scales of the smallest and closest with those of the biggest and more general. The result was a spatial richness of places and contexts, simplicity of use, identification of users with background suppressing the need to think about purely practical issues. Such kinds of places left the senses free to enjoy the beauty of simple and unaffected architecture. Colours were often used, starting with those of the materials as a means of being true. However, instead of the ‘modest poverty’ often reported by public authorities, spaces so conceived distilled newness as they combined a variety of new materials with a clear concept of light, providing users with references to understand their purpose and move about freely. It all seemed familiar, yet new, preparing the perceiver to expect more novelties, even surprises. Modernist buildings were expected to give an answer suited to their time and place, whereas anti-Modernist buildings stood as if expecting place and time to provide the answer, something that rearely happened. While Modernist 59 That was Torres Balbás’s advice, who believed architects could be Modernist and future oriented, yet bear their roots in mind. Torres Balbás, “Mientras labran los sillares”. A CRITICAL INSIGHT INTO MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN. RUMOURS AND TRUTHS 78 prolific since Juan de Villanueva’s time.86 Once again, architecture took the lead, seeking out the general benefit. The wave involved architects as much as other professionals. However, the social and political agitation of the times, the Civil War and the turn to the “folklorist ‘aboriginal’”87 currents imposed by the Francoist regime, later confirmed by the Alhambra Manifesto (1953), made it even more difficult to tackle the historical facts. The truth being that history is told by the winning party, also in charge of the evidence, made Spain’s Modernist Movement a tough case. Evidence was often lost, if not conveniently burnt or made to disappear from the archives. The validity and reliability of the [few] remaining direct sources relied on the ideology of both interviewer and interviewee as much as on memory, good will and courage to tell the truth. In such circumstances, deep serious research seldom occurred unless it might produce a scoop, save for the case of those deeply committed to unveil the truths, which were sure to be considered politically incorrect. In the end it used to be more gratifying for researchers to look forward than to try to disentangle rumours and misunderstandings going over the old scars even if theirs was a noble prospect. It may still take a few more decades to settle the facts of the Spanish architectural avant-garde and Modernism, though no doubt they meant the great rupture. However, the work ought to continue since, as Ruskin88 once said, “… [a] rchitecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her”. 86 Juan de Villanueva (1739-1811) was the leading figure of Spain’s Neoclassicism and key intellectual of the Spanish Illustration, among whose buildings were the Royal Astronomic Observatory and Museo del Prado buildings. His style has marked the evolution of Spanish architecture. He is the oldest of the remarkable Neoclassical architects, with Soane and Schinkel. 87 Mumford, Sticks and Stones. 88 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 147. CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS 79 Italianità (Italian-ness) or mediterraneità (Mediterranean-ness) were the two terms most frequently used to describe the formal qualities of a design identified as distinctly Italian. Dennis P. Doordan Architecture was born in the Mediterranean and triumphed in Rome in the eternal monuments created from the genius of our birth: it must, therefore, remain Mediterranean and Italian.Florestano di Fausto Introduction: Mediterranean = mare nostrum Much is written about Mussolini’s attempts at creating a global fascist empire, one based upon, or justified by, the idea that Italians were the rightful heirs of the former Roman Empire. Most accounts focus on specificities pertaining to particular countries and/or colonies. The focus of this essay, however, 1 This text is a revised and extended version of the paper “Mediterraneità oltremare: Assimilation, Appropriation, or Rejection? The Imposition of the Fascist Aesthetic Ideology of Mediterranean-ness Overseas from 1935 to 1940” presented at the international conference Southern Modernisms: Critical Stances Through Regional Appropriations, ESAP, Oporto, 19-21 February 2015. MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY OF MEDITERRANEAN-NESS OVERSEAS FROM 1935 TO 19401 GEORGE EPOLITO 80 attempts to show in general terms how an overarching strategy of mediterraneità (Mediterranean-ness) was implemented in both realised and desired colonies. North and East Africa exemplify the former, while parts of South America represent the latter. Interwoven throughout the essay are recurring polemical themes which confronted the fascists: 1) unity versus diversity at the scale of the nation and its colonies, political control, aesthetic direction, climate, and races of peoples, etc.; 2) public image versus private reality; 3) the desired versus the realised; 4) the general versus the specific; and 5) purity versus hybridisation/ syncretism, etc. The terms of italianità (Italian-ness), mediterraneità (Mediterranean-ness), romanità (Roman-ness), and latinità (Latin-ness), for instance, were generally viewed as interchangeable tools of propaganda by Italian fascist ideologues. They gave a public image of unifying diverse parts at the regional scale within the nation or at the trans-regional scale extending to the colonies. The specific implementation of each term often depended on the context in which the fascist promoters were trying to prove their point or justify their actions to diverse peoples such as Italians, leaders of powerful nations, or natives in both her realised and desired colonies. As scholar Sean Anderson concurs: “Invariably, notions of italianità and mediterraneità shifted according to colony and region”.2 The public image of the propaganda, which routinely projected the appearance of success and progress, often masked the private reality of intentions and actions, where substance and actual achievements were few and far between. Part of the political rhetoric argued that Italy had the right to (re)conquer former lands of the Roman Empire such as North Africa. In this case there was a logic, however misguided it may have been. After all, the region did contain Roman ruins and was referred to as the Fourth Shore implying that its coast was an 2 Sean Anderson, “The Light and the Line: Florestano Di Fausto and the Politics of 'Mediterraneità',” in California Italian Studies, 1(1) [2010], http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hm1p6m5 (accessed 9 January 2015). GEORGE EPOLITO 81 extension of the Italian one. When applied to East Africa and South America,3 however, the logic became increasingly convoluted. Fascists had to adapt their overall strategy in order to transform the desired into the realised. In the case of the desired, a soft rhetoric was employed, giving a public image of gentility. The private reality behind the rhetoric, however, was that it was masking the true malevolence of fascism. In the case of realised colonies, the strategy was to utilise a harder, more direct rhetoric accompanied by blatantly inhume actions.4 Attempts at implementing any kind of unified strategy over such diverse lands and the people who inhabited them proved problematic for the fascists. The complexity of the situation led to polemical questions arising in both the desired and realised colonies. How would people in the colonies, particularly those who did not fit into the ethnic and racial categorisations of a common Roman ancestry, receive the constant onslaught of fascists’ propagandising of Italian superiority, particularly in regards to architecture and aesthetics? Would the displacement of Italian cultural capital needed to implement said superiority have to be fused with localisms, resulting in hybridised products in order to mitigate said colonised peoples? If so, would acknowledgement of said localisms be deemed a sign of weakness by fascist ideologues? After all, how could any other culture produce anything comparable to the grandness of Roman-ness? “Italy certainly has a colonial past, albeit one that is often described as rimosso (“repressed” or “displaced”) ….” Mia Fuller 3 More specifically, the desired colonies, to which I am referring, are Argentina, Uruguay, and (southern) Brazil. 4 When analysing the terms of mediterraneità and italianità in relation to the arts and architecture produced during the fascist period, it is important not to merely focus on aesthetic qualities, but also to remember the brutality of the regime’s actions. MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY ... 82 Time Frames In her book, Modern’s Abroad, scholar Mia Fuller outlines three specific time frames in regards to Fascism and its relationship to the arts and architecture: 1) early 1920s into the early 1930s; 2) early 1930s to 1936; and 3) 1936 to the early 1940s.5 The first period was characterised by competing approaches to aesthetics - Futurismo, il Novecento, and Razionalismo. Each approach differed in its relationship to the stoic history of the peninsula and also in its link to the Modernism espoused by northern Europeans. Various advocates were fighting for their preferred approach to be designated as the official aesthetic of the fascist state. In spite of their differences, all the approaches commonly held the belief that they were the appropriate aesthetic to help modernise Italy whilst serving to transform her regionally diverse cultural identities by unifying them on a national level.6 The second time frame was defined by debates both at home and abroad over the appropriate direction to take aesthetically as the fascist state remained relatively neutral towards promoting any one particular approach. As a result, pluralistic approaches to design continued, much to the chagrin of each approach’s particular advocates. Also during this period, the fascist regime increased spending on major public works. The third period was characterized by a tightening of aesthetic expression both at home and abroad, accompanied by an increase in inhumane and authoritarian policies. This essay is focused roughly on the last period, more precisely from 1935-1940. First, however, key events from the prior two time frames are highlighted in order to contextualise what happened during the latter part of the 1930s.7 “This imperial expansionism of Italian culture, which, like a river that never stagnates but is fed by other rivers, gives and takes, universally 5 Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: architecture, cities and Italian imperialism, London 2007, 88. 6 Previously, promoters of medieval revivalisms, Neoclassicism, and the Liberty Style (known more commonly outside of Italy as Arte Nouveau) dominated similar debates. 7 As 1935 is a pivotal year, I wish to include this in the main body of text, not merely as a point of reference. GEORGE EPOLITO 83 assimilates and is assimilated, is a spiritual attitude characteristic of fascism and its ever intensifying revival of the universal and imperial ancient tradition”. Margherita Sarfatti Early 1920s – mid 1930s - Italy and Her Realised Colonies in Africa Part of the harder, more direct rhetoric employed by fascists in the 1920s was aimed at Italians; it told ordinary citizens to sacrifice immediate material gain for the promise of reaping the rewards of a soon-to-be-realised global fascist empire. For some Italians, this meant transferring to lands that once fell under the jurisdiction of the former Roman Empire. Italians were asked to relocate to the New Towns constructed on the reclaimed swamplands known as the Agro Pontino in the Lazio region of central Italy, as well as to the realised colonies in Africa. In the case of the latter, fascist propaganda called upon Italians to establish agricultural communities in the 1920s. The initial involvement of the fascist regime at this stage was more indirect, assisting individual entrepreneurs in process.8 Also during this decade, many of the built works formally reflected a negotiation of revivalisms such as neo-Renaissance or neo-Moorish. Although he would take the opposite stance years later, Roman architect Marcello Piacentini himself was involved in the design of similar eclectic works such as the Teatro Berenice in Benghazi, Libya. Towards the latter part of the 1920s, various fascist intelligentsia and cultural promoters were campaigning for the implementation of a specific form of Italian cultural expression. Filippo Marinetti was continuing to support for his own vision, Futurismo; Margherita Sarfatti personally was endorsing il Novecento; and Pier Maria Bardi was supporting the principles set forth by Razionalismo. Piacentini was arguing that Razionalismo was too closely aligned with the 8 Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 177. MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY ... 84 concepts of northern European Modernism and therefore inappropriate for Italy. Carlo Enrico Rava, one of the founders of Razionalismo, attempted to counter Piacentini’s argument by trying to contextualise his preferred movement at the trans-regional scale of the Mediterranean or what he called mediterraneità. His concept was introduced in a series of essays he published in Domus in 1931 where he countered that “… it is in this ‘Mediterranean spirit’ that we should then look for the characteristic italianità that is still lacking in our new rational architecture”.9 Rava found potential of this ‘spirit’ in the local forms of North Africa, but any incorporation of them into italianità had to be justified by linking their origins, and therefore their worth, back to Roman-ness. As the years progressed into the 1930s, the scale of resettling Italians into the realised colonies increased, as did the financial commitment of the regime to do so. The public image of this propaganda led Italians to believe that fulfilment of this important mission would help to bring prosperity to all of Italy. Of course the fascists had an ulterior motive, one that was masking a more cynical reality. The physical displacement of Italians to rural lands abroad was part of a greater social policy that had the general aim of reducing the number of landless, often unemployed labourers. In the case of Libya, scholar Vittoria Capresi elaborates on how this fascist social policy was in fact an attempt to demonstrate the regime’s capacity to solve specific problems and to gain more general support in the process: “Mass demographic colonization10 was planned under the Fascist regime precisely because it offered an outlet for the violent political desire to transform the presumed solution to internal social problems into visible work, which was to be displayed in order to increase public support for 9 Vittoria Capresi, “Architectural Transfer, Italian Colonial Architecture in Libya: 'Libyan Rationalism' and the Concept of 'Mediterraneity', 1926 – 1942,” in Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories, ed. Fassil Demissie Farnham, Surrey 2012, 33 -66, here 59. 10 Mia Fuller clearly defines demographic colonisation as “the state-sponsored settlement of Italian farmers on a grand scale.” See Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 177. GEORGE EPOLITO 85 Mussolini’s policies”.11 Concurrently, many designs in the realised colonies reflected a Mediterranean spirit by attempting an eclectic negotiation of ancient Mediterranean or local vernacular forms and modern forms. Anderson points out how the works of Florestano di Fausto, one of the most prolific architects in realised colonies,12 had his own interpretation of negotiations: “His numerous government commissions assumed a commanding role, producing an architecture that supplemented italianità while masking the rationalist intentions of a bespoke mediterraneità”.13 Two particular works of di Fausto that were designed during this period, I would argue, reflected this “bespoke mediterraneità” of which Anderson was speaking. First, in the case of the Artisanal Market, Souk al-Mushir he fused modern forms with ancient Mediterranean ones. The project even received the approval of the fascist regime: “Cubist and rational in its conception, the market-place satisfied the claim of Italian authorities both to modernize and support local traditions”.14 In the second case, the Uaddan Hotel and Casino, he syncretised modern forms with various aspects of a local architectural vocabulary. Were these various eclectic and flexible design approaches simply a matter of aesthetic preference or could they have been veiling a political motive? Had the fascist regime used such syncretism as a soft rhetorical means of appeasing indigenous peoples? In the case of North Africa, scholar Krystyna von Henneberg provides the possible answers: “Keen to the need to put a benevolent face on Italian rule, many architects developed an uncharacteristically eclectic and flexible approach to questions of design. The militant anti-regionalism of Italian Rationalist 11 Vittoria Capresi, “The rural centres of Libya. Reading tools,” in The Built Utopia The Italian rural centres founded in colonial Libya (1934–1940), ed. Vittoria Capresi, Bologna 2009, 32. 12 In addition to his numerous works in North Africa, di Fausto had previously been responsible for many important designs in the realised colony of the Aegean Islands. 13 Anderson, “The Light and the Line”. Rava did not agree with di Fausto’s bespoke mediterraneità, feeling that it contained too much Arab picturesque-folklorism. 14 Krystyna von Henneberg, “Imperial Uncertainties: Architectural Syncretism and Improvisation in Fascist Colonial Libya,” in Journal of Contemporary History, 31(2) (1996), 373–395, here 386. MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY ... 86 and fascist architecture was frequently eclipsed by a more syncretic style that incorporated 'orientalizing' and local elements”.15 Not everyone, however, was convinced that pluralistic approaches and/or their resulting hybridised forms, particularly when derived from eclectic revivalisms, were of any merit. For example, important Italian architects such as Rava and fellow rationalist Luigi Piccinato thought neo-Moorish buildings in North Africa were inappropriate.16 Many architects felt there was a need to find a unified colonial architectural language, which in turn could benefit the regime by leaving a strong impression on colonised peoples and neighbouring European powers alike.17 Yet, would the implementation of a singular approach abandon or incorporate localisms? The answer, in the opinion of von Henneberg, was more complex: “Eclectic or neo-Moorish structures proved difficult to reconcile with an official architectural discourse based on unity and order. Diversity, after all, had been clearly identified with liberal rule, and with weakness”.18 Early 1920s – mid 1930s - The Desired Colonies in South America The fascist regime utilised the general concept of mediterraneità, more specifically Roman-ness and/or Latin-ness, in both its cultural and political rhetoric pertaining to South America. Contrary to logic, there were significantly more people of Italian decent already living in the desired colonies than in the realised ones during this period. The tactics that the regime needed to implement, therefore, had shifted in order to reflect this demographic difference between the desired and realised colonies. First the regime aimed to gain the support of the Italian citizens, who it viewed, happened to be living abroad.19 It then sought 15 Von Henneberg, “Imperial Uncertainties,” 377. 16 Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 118. 17 Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 15. 18 Von Henneberg, “Imperial Uncertainties,” 378. 19 This was the viewpoint of the fascist regime which refused to acknowledge the expatriates and their offspring as Argentines or Brazilians who happened to be of Italian descent. Those displaced to South America, tended to view themselves as Argentines or Brazilians. GEORGE EPOLITO 87 to convince these expatriates and people of Iberian ancestry that they all shared a common Roman heritage - Roman-ness and/or Latin-ness.20 In its quest to accomplish its goal of ‘imperial expansionism of Italian culture’ into the region, the fascist regime assumed that the displaced Italian citizenry would act as intermediaries. Private impresarios, cultural institutions, and government agencies sponsored and hosted cultural events in which soft, persuasive rhetoric espoused the virtues of italianità. Italian art, architecture, literature, and language21 were promoted in said events with each containing a varying degree of political propaganda. Some of the key events included: Marinetti’s 1926 lecture tour to promote Futurismo in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Córdoba, Rosario, Buenos Aires and Montevideo;22 Sarfatti’s 1930 Novecento Art Exhibition in Buenos Aires and Montevideo; and Bardi’s 1933 Architettura d’oggi Exhibition in Buenos Aires which featured the architectural works of Razionalismo. Contemporaneously, the soft rhetorical argument of Roman-ness was advanced specifically in Argentina to the point of linking the country historically to Italy. As Argentine scholar Finchelstein states: “Between 1922 and 1931, the fascist regime wanted to convince the Argentines that their history, or part of it at least, was a direct outcome of Italian historical agency”.23 Their claims that Italians had played key roles in the development of Argentina dating back to even before the time of Garibaldi were accurate, but the fascists wanted to embellish these facts. In addition to offering their own interpretation of Argentine history to the general populace, the fascists understood that that they also had to specifically 20 In this instance, the terms Mediterranean-ness and Italian-ness were most likely avoided as the former could have been easily interpreted differently by both the Portuguese and Spanish creoles; the use of the latter would have overtly exposed the fascists’ (offensive) belief in Italian superiority. 21 Literature and language were also important parts of the soft rhetorical campaign, but they are not the main focus of this essay. The following literary cultural events took place: Mussolini confidant, Franco Ciarlantini’s 1927 book fair in Argentina; Piero Parini’s 1931 lecture tour, aimed at spreading the Italian language and nationalism throughout Argentina; and noted Italian author, Massimo Bontempelli’s 1934 tours in South America. 22 Except in the case of Rio, the cities chosen for the tour were ones which had large Italian expatriate populations, ‘Italians who happened to be living abroad’ in the eyes of the Italian fascists. 23 Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945, Durham, NC 2010, 87. MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY ... 94 scholar Zilah Quezado Deckker attests of Piacentini: “His fee was paid by the Italian government, with a nominal sum from the Brazilian government”.38 His involvement in the project was not that straightforward. Carioca architects, such as Lucio Costa, were not accepting of the Italian architect’s proposal and wanted Le Corbusier’s inclusion in the project. The controversy surrounding the university project was part of a greater debate in Brazilian architecture that tried to reconcile modernisation, localisms, and national identity, brasilidade. Costa acknowledged “that the new architecture was international, but emphasised its Latin roots, which would make it more acceptable for Brazil…”39 In this case, the specific meaning of terms such as Latin-ness and/or Mediterranean-ness varied depending on the nation concerned. Costa’s interpretation of the term Latin-ness was not directly related to the fascist’s promotion of italianità. Mediterranean-ness for many Brazilians was defined by brasilidade and, although it had its origins in Roman-ness, it was more aligned with the historic period of Portuguese Colonialism. These differences in defining terms fuelled the national debates that led in part to the fascist architect not receiving the commission for the campus. Perhaps Piacentini, and by extension fascism, would have more success in São Paulo which had a very large Italian ‘colony’.40 Piacentini’s design of the Edifício Conde Matarazzo, 1935-1939,41 was an example of pure “italianità, as it appropriated few localisms, and thus appeared more like an Italian building strangely misplaced. Matarazzo retained Piacentini’s services to reconfigure his villa, 1939–1941,42 and to design the Universidade Commercial Matarazzo which he began in 1938.43 38 Zilah Quezado Deckker, Brazil Built – The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil, New York 2001, 50. 39 Quezado Deckker, Brazil Built, 17. 40 In Italian, the word for ‘colony’ can also be applied to a large group (of Italians) living abroad. It does not necessarily mean that said group is under the jurisdiction of the Italian government. 41 Tognon, Arquitetura italiana no Brasil, 182. 42 Tognon, Arquitetura italiana no Brasil, 189. 43 Tognon, Arquitetura italiana no Brasil, 193. GEORGE EPOLITO 95 Piacentini’s initial proposals in Brazil took place whilst he was trying to take command of the regime’s design direction in East Africa. During the latter part of the 1930s, he was clearly trying to exercise his architectural authority in Italy as well as in both the realised and desired colonies. There was, however, no real breakthrough for fascism to take hold. Would De Bono’s persuasive rhetoric be more convincing in neighbouring Argentina? Many intellectuals felt that decades of heavy Italian immigration had been undermining the essential Hispanic character of the nation. Mediterraneanness to this group of creoles was aligned more specifically to hispanidad, which represented an attempt at reclaiming the Hispanic roots of the country. Instead of Mediterranean-ness being seen as an overarching concept connecting creoles of Spanish descent with Italians, this group’s preference of identifying with hispanidad drew a distinct line separating the two groups. At the same time, this group of creoles was denouncing the cosmopolitanism that was being promoted by other European (Italian inclusive) and North American influences in the country.44 Architectural design in Argentina reflected pluralistic approaches – from those advocating the appropriation of elements from a Hispanic colonial past to the various proponents of cosmopolitanism. Fresco himself employed architects with varying approaches. Commissioning Salamone for a series of public works, however, would appear on the surface to demonstrate Mussolini’s success in cajoling Fresco. This appeared evident in Argentine scholar Ramón Gutiérrez’s account of Salamone’s works: “the conservative governor Manuel Fresco populated the province of Buenos Aires with town halls that, in the rationalist language, recalled the medieval palazzi comunali with towers as much as the designs of Mussolini’s fascism”.45 It is true that many of Salamone’s works 44 Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism, 145. 45 Alberto Belluci, “Monumental Deco in the Pampas: The Urban Art of Francisco Salamone,” in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 18: Argentine Theme, (1992), 90-121, here 91. Originally taken from Ramón Gutiérrez, Arquitectura y Urbanismo en Iberoamerica, (1983), 575. MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY ... 96 contained quasi-fascist formal and spatial content, but according to Argentine professor René Longoni, the architect was not a fascist, but someone who was politically shrewd in his ability to gain commissions through Fresco. Salamone, like many Argentines - especially those of Italian origin - did not necessarily embrace fascism or his Italian-ness wholeheartedly. Instead, he appropriated various architectonic elements, like most Latin Americans did at the time, when they suited his needs. Once again, what appeared to be a breakthrough in the eyes of Italian fascists, in reality led nowhere. Conclusion: Mediterraneità (Mediterranean-ness) and all its variants were used by Italian fascists as means of propaganda aimed at convincing various groups of people that Italy had the right to reinvent herself as the modern day version of the Roman Empire. The strategy was to employ both hard and soft forms of rhetorical arguments and actions to try to achieve an imperial expansionism in both her realised and desired colonies, such as North and East Africa and parts of South America, respectively. Aesthetics, particularly in the form of the arts and architecture, played a key role in the fascist propaganda machine. Yet how did the people in both the realised and desired colonies receive the constant onslaught of fascists’ propagandising of Italian superiority in aesthetics? What is the legacy that resulted in the transference of Italian cultural capital to her realised and desired colonies? In the case of the former realised colonies of North and East Africa, the legacy depended on the specific context. North Africa, which was the inspiration for Rava’s concept of mediterraneità, for example, experienced a deliberate dismantling and categorical rejection of said concept under the four decades of rule of Colonel Gaddafi. For East Africa, however, the legacy left behind from decades of Italian rule is more complex. The atrocities carried out by the ruling fascists have left enduring, painful memories for the generation that experienced them. For others however, the legacy of Italian cultural capital is more positive. GEORGE EPOLITO 97 Through the act of appropriation by present day Asmarini, buildings originally intended only for Italians to use, now give meaning to the locals: “For many Asmarini the cultural capital attached to the Italian past provides them with a claim to a long-standing cosmopolitanism”.46 In the desired colonies the results were also mixed. The initial attempts at promoting imperial expansionism of Italian cultural capital, italianità, into the region masked in the guise of a shared heritage of Roman-ness and/or Latinness did not produce the results that the fascist regime had anticipated. The endless lecture tours sponsored by private impresarios, cultural institutions, and government agencies had no transformative effect. The Novecento Exhibition of Sarfatti did have an impact on the aesthetics of painters in the desired colonies, but her political agenda did not. According to Argentine scholar, Diana Wechsler, there was an appropriation of the works exhibited, but it came as a result of a rupture between, not an embrace of, fascist politics and aesthetics. With the passage of anti-Semite laws in Italy in 1938, Sarfatti herself experienced a similar rupture as she went into exile in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.47 The legacy of the intersection of politics and aesthetics in the form of architecture also varied based on the specific context. Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro at the time rejected the proposals of the most powerful architect of the fascist regime, Piacentini. In São Paulo, however, a city where displaced Italians had more political and economic clout, his signature stripped-down classical design for a private commission was built. Despite its odd displacement of italianità, the building today has been appropriated by the local government and converted into the Prefeitura or city hall. Are contemporary paulistas even cognisant of the link of their city hall to Italian fascist ideals? 46 Mia Fuller, “Italy's Colonial Futures: Colonial Inertia and Postcolonial Capital in Asmara,” in California Italian Studies, 2(1) [2011], http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4mb1z7f8 (accessed 16 January 2015). 47 Sarfatti had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, but feared that this would not matter in the eyes of her former fascist compatriots. MEDITERRANEITÀ DESIRED AND REALISED: THE IMPOSITION OF THE FASCIST AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY ... 98 In Argentina, some success seemed to occur in the symbiotic relationship put forth by the political wills of Manuel Fresco and Italian-born/Argentine-raised architect and engineer, Francisco Salamone. The major public works constructed by the two in the Province of Buenos Aires paralleled chronologically those being built by the fascists in Asmara. Some regard these Argentine works to be imbued with fascist meaning, while others claim that they were a result of political shrewdness, but devoid of any true link to italianità. It is interesting to note that the attempts at imperial expansion of Italian cultural capital were viewed at least in two cases as containing the gravitas of Italian cosmopolitanism. In one case, it appeared negatively as posing a danger to hispanidad in the desired colony of Argentina in the 1930s. In the other case, in the former realised colonial city of Asmara, present day Asmarini have appropriated it as a means of differentiating themselves from their less-worldly African neighbours.48 Rejection or acceptance of Italian cosmopolitanism, it appears, was based on its ability to threaten or enhance one’s own modern cultural identity. The traces of displaced Italian cultural capital into either realised and desired colonies did not translate into the prosperity that a global fascist empire was supposed to bring. Contemporary prosperity, however, can be found in a form of displaced Italian cultural capital in aesthetics. Its success in the world is still due in part to soft forms of rhetorical arguments, except this time the source is not fascism but capitalist marketing machines. The seemingly limitless appetite for Italian cultural capital in the form of luxury designer products takes place in developing markets such as China. By embracing the contemporary rhetoric of consumerism, said markets ensure that the transference of Italian cultural capital, devoid of political propaganda, will live on into the 21st century. Italian cosmopolitanism lives on today in contemporary desired consumer colonies. Viva italianità! 48 Fuller, “Italy's Colonial Futures,” 15. GEORGE EPOLITO 99 URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER1 GERBERT VERHEIJ The Portuguese architect Miguel Ventura Terra (1866-1919)2 was a member of a Lisbon town council elected in November 1908 and in this function became heavily involved in town planning.3 This town council was the first entirely Republican council to manage the city’s affairs. Elected almost two years ahead of the Republican revolution of 5 October 1910, and less than a year after the king’s murder (1 February 1908), it worked in a predictably hostile political context.4 1 This paper is based on PhD research funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/ BD/85324/2012). It develops a paper with the title “Ventura Terra, modern town planner?”, presented at the Southern Modernisms conference (19-21 February 2015, Porto, Portugal). All translations are mine. 2 On the architect and his work, see Tereza Xardoné, Rui Costa, and Maria de Lurdes Rufino, eds., Arquitecto Ventura Terra, 1866-1919, Lisbon 2009. 3 I will use the designation ‘town planning’ throughout this article, as it was the most current British expression at the time. I will use it in Unwin's general sense as the “art of designing cities” (Raymond Unwin, Town planning in practice: An introduction to the art of designing cities and suburbs, London 1909), covering the whole spectrum of city-building being cultivated around Europe and the USA during the early 20th century. For an overview see, among others, Wolfgang Sonne, “'The entire city shall be planned as a work of art.' Städtebau als Kunst im frühen modernen Urbanismus 1890-1920,” in Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte 66 (2003), 207-236, and Charles C. Bohl and Jean-François Lejeune, eds., Sitte, Hegemann and the metropolis: Modern civic art and international exchanges, London and New York 2009. 4 See Lisboa e a República: Centenário da vereação republicana em Lisboa, 1908-2008. Actas do Colóquio Nacional Lisboa e a República, Lisboa, 2008, Lisbon 2010, and António Reis, ed., Lisboa republicana: Espaço e memória, 1910-1926, Lisbon 2010. 100 GERBERT VERHEIJ Though in a certain way instrumental in the Republican victory in 1910 and notwithstanding much initial enthusiasm, the council grew increasingly disillusioned with the politics and priorities of the new Republican State. After voluntarily resigning, the council was substituted on 1 February 1913 by an Administrative Commission. Officially the council claimed fatigue and the continual postponement of municipal elections, but it was also involved in a series of wearing conflicts. A painting by Veloso Reis Salgado (A cidade de Lisboa elege a primeira vereação republicana [The city of Lisbon elects its first Republican town council], 1913) seems to picture the difficult relationship between the new state and the town council. It was commissioned in 1912 for a newly decorated meeting room destroyed in a 1911 fire. The subject was the victory at the 1908 municipal elections, but only two of the councillors make a modest appearance: its president Braamcamp Freire and Ventura Terra. The other figures are all important national politicians, whose the images of which in a sense hijacked the scene.5 Why is Ventura Terra there, but none of his fellow councillors except the president? Perhaps it indicates his public visibility during his years as town councillor. Maybe the friendship between both artists played a role. Possibly it was also a way of the painter acknowledging the architect’s services to the cause of the arts. For this short detour through painting introduces a somewhat obscure entity: the Commission of Municipal Aesthetics. This Commission, created by Ventura Terra, was responsible for the commissioning of the painting,’ and also the main user of the room in which it was hung.6 As will be seen, this commission played (or was supposed to play) a relevant role in planning projects and the production of urban space. It is this relationship 5 On the painting and its history, as well as the identification of its characters, see A cidade de Lisboa elege a sua 1.ª vereação republicana. Comemoração do 1.º Centenário 1908-2008, 2nd ed., Lisbon 2008 (published on the site of the Museu da Cidade, http://www.museudelisboa.pt/; at the time of writing this publication was not accessible). 6 For the involvement of this commission in the room's restoration, see Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1912, 53. 101 URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER of planning to arts, and this strange concept of municipal aesthetics, which will structure my discussion of Ventura Terra’s municipal activity. With this I hope to offer a new perspective on his work in Lisbon,7 as yet little studied. Especially, I want to counter the idea that his proposals were strictly utopian. None of his projects were executed in the end and his overall program is difficult to reconstruct. This has facilitated its qualification as one more project in a line of failed urban modernizations.8 Though there are many arguments for such a reading, this characterization produces an apparently easy legibility of Ventura Terra’s projects, which fails to recognize the way they articulate with and work 7 After his planning activity in Lisbon Ventura Terra also produced an 'improvement plan' for Funchal, capital of the Madeira archipelago. See Teresa Vasconcelos, O Plano Ventura Terra e a modernizaçao do Funchal (primeira metade do século XX), Funchal 2008. 8 This idea is present in different senses in: A. Vieira da Silva, “A ligação costeira da Baixa com a parte ocidental da cidade”, in Dispersos. Volume I, 2nd ed., Lisbon 1968, 113-134; José Manuel Fernandes, Arquitectura modernista em Portugal (1890-1940), Lisbon 1993, 74; Ana Martins Barata, Lisboa, 'caes da Europa': Realidades, desejos e ficções para a cidade (1860-1930), Lisbon 2010. Figure 1. The new meeting room in the town hall of Lisbon. Salgado’s painting is on the right. The caption calls it the ‘Room of the Commission of Aesthetics and others’. Source: “Sala da Comissão de Estetica e outras, na Camara Municipal de Lisboa,” in O Occidente: Revista illustrada de Portugal e do estrangeiro 1248 (1913), 257 102 within a highly complex context. Culturalists and progressives in Portuguese art history In the background is an idea suggested by the art historian Raquel Henriques da Silva in what is, to date, the most informed study on Ventura Terra’s planning activity.9 One of Silva’s arguments is that Ventura Terra’s town planning is founded on an idea of the city which simultaneously respects history and is open to expansion and modernization. For this reason, she suggests it can be interpreted as a synthesis of Françoise Choay’s opposition between “progressive” and “culturalist” attitudes towards planning and urban heritage.10 This reading of Ventura Terra’s work against an international context is especially relevant in light of a persistent historiographical bias towards the insularity of this time and place.11 But, if Silva’s reading is very useful for revisiting Ventura Terra’s planning activity and placing it within an international (architectural and planning) culture, this particular hypothesis of a synthesis of Choay’s opposition poses some problems. Before exploring these it may be useful to briefly outline the genealogy of the use of this opposition in Portuguese art history. One of Silva’s fundamental references is Pedro Vieira de Almeida’s work, particularly his understanding of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century in Portugal, not as a rupture, 9 Raquel Henriques da Silva, “Ventura Terra em contexto,” in Miguel Ventura Terra. A arquitectura enquanto Projecto de vida, ed. Ana Isabel Ribeiro, Esposende 2006, 10-30. The text is reproduced in Xardoné, Costa, and Rufino, Arquitecto Ventura Terra, 276-307. 10 Françoise Choay, ed., L’urbanisme: Utopies et réalités. Une anthologie, Paris 1965. 11 Silva's suggestion was not followed when a Colloquium on the first Republican town council, organized by the Municipality of Lisbon, provided the opportunity for further study. Here Ventura Terra's work was described as “intensely utopian”, ahead (and consequently outside) of his time. Jorge Mangorrinha, “À esquina de Lisboa: O perfil dos vereadores da mudança e a política urbanística (1908-1913),” in Lisboa e a República, 125-155. Though no interpretative model is explicitly mentioned, Mangorrinha's reading implies the dichotomy between visionary exceptions and a provincial, backward and limiting cultural context which does not allow these exceptions to fructify. For a critique of such models in Portuguese art history, see Mariana Pinto Santos, “'Estou atrasado! Estou atrasado!' Sobre o atraso na arte portuguesa diagnosticado pela historiografia,” in Representações da Portugalidade, eds. André Barata, António Santos Pereira and José Ricardo Carvalheiro, Alfragide 2011, 231-242. GERBERT VERHEIJ 103 but as a continuity increasingly questioning its tradition.12 It was precisely Almeida who first introduced Choay’s terminology into Portuguese architectural history.13 Almeida did so not in the context of planning, but rather in that of architecture, proposing a fresh reading of the first decades of the 20th century as a time marked by modernity rather than its absence. Ventura Terra was the architect he elected to represent, what he called, the progressive model in Portuguese architecture (Raúl Lino exemplified the cultural model). This original appropriation or detour brought to light the complex temporalities of architectural production at that time, providing Almeida with the conceptual instruments to revisit both architects beyond the problem of style in which, until then, their work had often been confined.14 If Almeida considers Ventura Terra to be quintessentially progressive, the fact that Silva proposes to consider the architect-planner as having surpassed Choay’s opposition, signals a certain discomfort in turning the latter’s model back to its original context of town planning and heritage. Hence we come back to the two problems I consider this hypothesis to pose. Firstly, an important argument Silva makes is that Ventura Terra’s understanding of heritage is as something to be preserved, but which should not thwart urban development.15 Choay herself notes her models are only to be found in their pure form in discourse, as they consider the city as a reproducible object and not as a process or a problem.16 Both models deny the existing city by calling either on the past or the future, that is, by invoking a normativity based on either tradition or modernity which is their necessary utopian element. Any 12 Silva, “Ventura Terra em contexto,” 17; Pedro Vieira de Almeida, “A noção de 'passado' na arquitectura das décadas difíceis. O caso de Lisboa,” in Rassegna 16 (1994), 52-63. 13 Pedro Vieira de Almeida, “Modelo progressista, modelo culturalista,” in História da arte em Portugal: A arquitectura moderna, eds. Pedro Vieira de Almeida and José Manuel Fernandes, Lisbon 1986, 72-89. 14 See Rui Jorge Garcia Ramos, “Disponibilidade moderna na arquitectura doméstica de Raul Lino e Ventura Terra na abertura do século XX,” in Revistas de arquitectura: Arquivo(s) da modernidade, ed. Marieta Dá Mesquita, Lisbon 2011, 78-111. 15 Silva, “Ventura Terra em contexto,” 17. 16 Choay, L'urbanisme, 26. URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER 110 its general meeting board. He was thus well aware of these aspirations and it can be presumed that he took this programme in favour of aesthetic control of public space with him when he was elected town councillor in 1908. The issue of aesthetics is precisely one of the main points in the general outline of proposals Ventura Terra presented during one of the first municipal sessions.38 It figures prominently among the study of a general “improvement plan” (plano de melhoramentos) of the city focusing on the river and strategic urban projects such as the execution of the Eduardo VII Park, the solution of a traffic bottleneck (Rua do Arsenal) or the creation of a green belt around the city.39 The ideas about the waterfront have drawn the most attention, being the most ambitious plans for waterfront development during a period which seems to 38 Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1908, 398-399. 39 None of these projects were executed and little of the documentation seems to have survived. The municipal archive preserves approved projects such as those for the Eduardo VII Park, the enlargement of the Rua do Arsenal, or the amplification of the Mercado 24 de Julho, but different sources mention the existence of detailed plans included in a general, vast improvement plan. See for example “Lisboa transforma-se... Vão começar as obras do Parque Eduardo VII”; “A futura ponte sobre o Tejo;” Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1911, 339-340. GERBERT VERHEIJ Figure 2. The river waterfront nearby Cais do Sodré, according to Ventura Terra’s plans. Source: “Lisboa futura. A projectada Avenida de Santos ao Caes do Sodré,” in Illustração Portugueza 213 (1910), 367-372 111 turn its back to the river,40 and anticipating recent waterfront developments in Lisbon much along the same lines.41 Ventura Terra, in fact, enthusiastically defended such a “return to the Tagus”.42. The first of his proposals was precisely to study the means of more municipal control on the “aesthetic” of buildings: To carry out a study in order to authorize town councils to intervene in the aesthetic of future buildings in their respective municipalities, above all when concerning more important streets, avenues or squares.43 The existing legal framework impeded the creation of such legislation,44 but during the second half of 1909 a Commission of Municipal Aesthetic (Comissão 40 Barata, Lisboa, 'caes da Europa'. Compare with Francisco Moita Flores, “Higiene e saúde pública em Lisboa nos finais do séc. XX” in Lisboa ambientes, ed. António José Costa e Silva and José L. Diniz, Lisboa 1994, 29-87. Flores notes that actual population growth does not necessarily follow urbanization patterns and argues that during the First Republic (1910-1926), it continued to concentrate along the river. 41 See http://www.cm-lisboa.pt/viver/urbanismo/projetos-e-obras/frente-riberinha (accessed 28 March 2015). 42 “Far-se-ha um dia a avenida marginal?” in A República, 14 March 1911. 43 “Que se proceda a um estudo no sentido de obter para as Camaras Municipaes o direito de intervirem na esthetica das futuras edificações nos respectivos concelhos, principalmente quando se trate das ruas, avenidas ou praças mais importantes.” Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1908, 398. 44 Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1910, 10-11. URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER Figure 3. Enlargement of the Rua do Arsenal by means of a portico, according to Ventura Terra’s plans. Source: “Lisboa futura. A projectada Avenida de Santos ao Caes do Sodré,” in Illustração Portugueza 213 (1910), 367-372 112 de Estética Municipal) is created on Ventura Terra’s proposal. The Commission was composed of the municipal President, the directors of the Department of Public Works and of its subsection of Architecture; from outside the municipality, an architect, painter, sculptor and art critic elected by the Royal Association of the Fine Arts, and members of the Council of National Monuments, the National Society of Fine Arts and the architect’s Society. As the architects had asked, it was tasked with exercising municipal control over the city’s aesthetic and its “artistic comfort”, in which there is a significant concern about taking advantage of the “magnificent panoramas” of the city, besides the aesthetic appearance of public spaces (avenues, squares, parks, etc.).45 Its real functioning is difficult to reconstruct, as the minutes of their meetings have not been located in the Municipal Archive. However, the Commission regularly appears in the municipal minutes as being consulted about or giving opinions on matters relating to aesthetic issues.46 Aesthetic conflict and the Eduardo VII park This general intention of exercising aesthetic control over the built environment is rapidly caught up in the politics of municipal management. I want to follow this entanglement by discussing Ventura Terra’s plan for the central park to crown the most important avenue of the city, the Avenida da Liberdade. This park project was in fact a variant of an 1899 project already in (slow) execution, which was itself a re-elaboration by the municipal Department of Public Works of an original 1895 project by the French entrepreneur Henri Lusseau. The revision of this project was for the town council a priority, as its constantly postponed execution was the very image of the city’s frustrated desires of modernization. The 1910 revolution invested the site with additional symbolism (the Marquês de Pombal square and the lower part of the park were strategic to the revolution’s 45 Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1910, 491. 46 See for example Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1910, 287, 760; Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1911, 59-60, 99, 246, 328-329, etc. GERBERT VERHEIJ 113 success). His project was one of the first causes of conflict with the engineer, Diogo Peres, in charge of the municipal Department of Public Works since 1909. Aesthetic arguments were central in this conflict. From the start Diogo Peres is highly critical of Ventura Terra’s variant project.47 He files two reports on the project in which he develops his critiques.48 In 1912, he states them publicly in the newspaper A Capital, for which he is questioned by the town council and officially reprimanded.49 The conflicting views on the park, which will be discussed later, were certainly an important reason for Ventura Terra to remove the project’s elaboration as much as possible from Peres’ control. In June 1911, he has it transferred from the garden section of the municipal Department of Public Works to the architectural section, directed by the architect José Alexandre Soares. His argument was that the project was “a work in which art dominates”, especially the “arts of landscape architecture, monumental architecture and urban architecture”.50 In July, he further proposes to reorganize the entire Department of Public Works, dividing it into two new departments, one of architecture and another of engineering. He gives as a reason the need to distinguish between the competences and responsibilities of engineering and architecture against the national “routine” of the latter’s submission to the former.51 His reorganization thus had an exemplary intention, backed by international good practices. It was enthusiastically received in artistic and architectural circles (SAP, Council of Art and Archaeology and National Society of the Fine-Arts).52 Ventura Terra himself 47 Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1911, 59. 48 The first report is discussed 22 July 1909. See Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1909, 425428. The second report can be found in Copiador de ofícios, 3.ª Repartição, livro 67, 437-442 (Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-E/08). For Ventura Terra's discussion of it, Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1910, 577-579. 49 “O Parque Eduardo VII,” in A Capital, 17 May 1912. Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1912, 345. 50 “[...] uma obra onde predomina a arte, e principalmente a arquitéctura paisagista, monumental e urbana.” Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1911, 353. This indicates that for Ventura Terra planning and urban design were part of architecture. 51 Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 449. 52 Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 491, 507, 522. URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER 114 presented his reorganization at the IX International Congress of Architects in Rome (2-10 October 1911) and related it to the congress’ conclusions on the separation between architecture and engineering.53 The following brief overview54 of the redistribution of competences clearly shows Ventura Terra wanted to remove aesthetic issues entirely from Peres’ influence. Until 1911: Organization of the Department of Public Works (3.ª Repartição) • First section Building lines Studies Public space occupancy • Second section of architecture • Third section Gardens Water services Lighting and rails • Fourth section of roads and pavements • Fifth section Purchases Expropriation General administration After 1911: • Department of Engineering (3.ª Repartição) Engineering Surveys 53 Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 740-741. 54 This is based on a report by Diogo Peres on the organization of the Department of Public Works (Copiador de ofícios, livro 69, 63-66) and Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 449-450, 485-487. GERBERT VERHEIJ 115 Public utilities (sewage, water, gas, electricity) Pavements and roads • Department of Architecture (4.ª Repartição) Architecture Parks and gardens Cemeteries General composition of the city plan Urban furniture (including ornamental pavement) Public art Public space occupancy • Shared administrative services The creation of the Commission on Municipal Aesthetics and the reorganization of the municipal Department of Public Works was to be Ventura Terra’s most lasting municipal intervention. From here on architecture would maintain its autonomy within municipal services, though over time it lost many of its ample attributions (gardening, cemeteries, planning, public space...).55 Against this background it is no’t surprising to see Diogo Peres appear in 1914, after the town council leaves office in January 1913, as one of the promoters of the Eduardo VII project’s suspension and its substitution by the earlier project from 1899 that he had championed.56 Aesthetics and public space Against this background, the Eduardo VII project can be considered as a test case for Ventura Terra’s complete improvement plans, as he also announces 55 See Aurora Santos, “A Câmara Municipal de Lisboa na transição da República para o Estado Novo: As reorganizações dos serviços municipais (1925-1938)” in Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa 9 (2007), 146-162. 56 “O Parque Eduardo VII” in O Ocidente 1269 (1914), 101-102. On the further history of the park, see Ana Tostões, Monsanto, Parque Eduardo VII, Campo Grande. Keil do Amaral, arquitecto dos espaços verdes de Lisboa, Lisbon 1992. URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER 116 when work starts.57 Presumably, it had to show the advantages of an “aesthetic”, architectural approach as both more efficient and with better results than the “old” engineer-based approach. Ventura Terra proposed solving the problem of financing the park’s construction - the main reason for its slow execution - by selling a strip of land on its edges as building lots for “artistic” residences. He imagined them somewhat as a high-class garden-city surrounding the park.58 Two auctions of these lots were held, but failed: only one lot was sold. The buyer was the Paris-based artist Artur Prat (1861-1918), who had Ventura Terra himself design the house. Prat created the sculpture and painting integrated into 57 “Lisboa transforma-se...” 58 “[...] uma série de pequenas casas isoladas, artisticamente dispostas e envolvidas em macissos de verdura [...]” Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1910, 578-579. GERBERT VERHEIJ Figure 4. Artur Prat’s house, Lisbon, rear façade (photograph provided by the author) 117 the façade of the house facing the future park.59 This concern with the integration of the arts, represented in the sculpture itself, reinforces the suspicion that this house was to function as a showcase for the architectural possibilities of these lots. This was also the way it was understood in the specialized press.60 The project’s suspension left the house surrounded by a building site for the following decades. Today, encased in modern iron, concrete and glass, it ironically houses the Order of Engineers, as if it were an involuntary monument to the architect’s defeat in this particular instance of the conflict between engineers and 59 Catarina Oliveira, “Casa situada na Avenida Sidónio Pais e Avenida António Augusto Aguiar, 3-D (casa do Sr. Artur Prat, actualmente sede da Ordem dos Engenheiros)”, 2007, http://www.patrimoniocultural. pt/pt/patrimonio/patrimonio-imovel/pesquisa-do-patrimonio/classificado-ou-em-vias-de-classificacao/ geral/view/72352 (accessed 16 February 2015). 60 E. Nunes, “Casa do Ex.mo Sr. Artur Prat no Parque Eduardo VII com frente para a Avenida Antonio A. de Aguiar. Arquitecto, Sr. Ventura Terra” in Architectura Portugueza 7:1 (1914), 1-4; “Casa do Ex.mo Sr. Artur Prat no Parque Eduardo VII, com frente para a Avenida Antonio Augusto d’Aguiar. Arquitecto, Sr. Ventura Terra” in A Construção Moderna 14:5 (1914), 34. URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER Figure 5. Artur Prat’s house, Lisbon, sculptural detail representing architecture (centre), sculpture and painting (photograph provided by the author) 118 architects. Another mayor change in Ventura Terra’s proposal was the location of the Exhibition Palace, perhaps the real breaking point in his conflict with Diogo Peres. The park is located at a spot where a hill with a steep slope blocked the continuity of the Avenida da Liberdade linking it to the city’s centre. The palace was originally to be located at the top of that hill. Ventura Terra moved it to a large promenade in front which replaces an original lake. Peres considered surrounding a park by buildings to be a bad idea in principle and he defended the stylistic unity and “harmonious whole”61 of the 1899 project. In his arguments, one detects the importance of the visual: scenographic perspectives of the palace were to visually dominate the city, with the park as a picturesque frame. Hence he can not accept Ventura Terra’s idea of the 61 “[...] conjuncto unido e integro [...]” Actas da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, Lisbon 1909, 425. GERBERT VERHEIJ Figure 6. Headquarters of the Order of Engineers, Lisbon, rear façade (photograph provided by the author) 119 promenade on which the palace would be placed with the park “jammed” behind it. For Peres, the palace should be situated either next to the square, thus ennobled by a “grandiose” and “imposing” monumental façade or, preferably, on the original spot on top of the hill, “one of the most beautiful viewpoints of the city”.62 However, in this way the palace and park were separated from the city itself. Looking at artistic renderings of the 1899 project, it is easy to see how they imagined the park as an enclosed area of nature, as a refuge of small waterfalls, soothing water and meandering paths in which to forget the horrors of urban civilization. What is absent in Peres’ considerations is the public use of both palace and park. 62 “O Parque Eduardo VII” in A Capital, May 17, 1912. URBAN AESTHETICS. ON THE MODERNITY OF VENTURA TERRA, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER Figure 7. Main changes by Ventura Terra to the original 1899 project of the Eduardo VII Park: in red, the palace and houses; in blue, the lake. Adapted from maps inserted in Projecto dos arruamentos do Parque Eduardo VII, Lisbon 1936 (Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/10/054) 126 demand of the complex reality of the time in a more appropriate manner. The list of those invited to participate at the Otterlo congress included 43 architects of 20 nationalities. Among the participants from southern Europe were two young Iberian architects who were given the opportunity to present their recent work. They had already gained certain fame and recognition as a result of some of their projects built during the decade that was coming to an end. One was Fernando Távora (1923-2005) from Portugal, who by the age of 36 had built projects in the area around Oporto such as the Vila da Feira Municipal Market (1953-1959) and a holiday home at Ofir (1957-1958). He had also started work on what were to be some of his most emblematic projects: the Quinta da Conceiçao Municipal Park at Matosinhos (1956-1993), on the northern edge of Oporto, and the Cedro Primary School in Vila Nova de Gaia (1958-1960). These projects became a point of reference for subsequent Portuguese architecture. At the Otterlo Congress, Távora presented the Vila da IVÁN YLLERA Figure 1. Partial view of the Vila da Feira Municipal Market. Fernando Távora, 1959. (Photograph by the author) 127 Feira Municipal Market as a work that represented what he was proposing at that time. The other Iberian architect to distinguish himself at that Otterlo meeting was Spain’s José Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat (1913-1984). He went to the CIAM from Barcelona at the proposal of Josep Lluís Sert to present a major project he was working on at the time (and which would, unfortunately, never be built): the Torre Valentina urban development (1959), a group of homes and a hotel carefully integrated within a pine forest on the Costa Brava. As well as this project, Coderch included, on the panels he used to present his work to his colleagues, a few black and white photographs taken by his friend, the wellknown photographer Francesc Català-Roca, of single-family holiday homes such as the famous Ugalde House (1951) and the Catasús House (1956). As well as the houses he presented, Coderch included photographs of a very realistic mockup of a project recently built far from his natural Catalan coastal environment, the Olano House in Comillas, Santander, completed in 1957. A little light in the shade In the decade between 1950 and 1960, the air became a little more breathable in the Iberian Peninsula. Although there was still no full freedom or democracy, there were the first signs of an international opening-up with the aim of encouraging economic growth. In Spain, these were the years that saw the beginning of the end of the autarchy, with a partial breaking of the post-war cultural, economic and social isolation. Despite the lack of freedom, intellectual, artistic and architectural activity remained alive thanks to a few leading figures who were able to follow what was happening internationally through the limited publications to which they had access and through the international gatherings in which they could take part. The opening up of Iberian architecture to the international scene was materialised in initiatives such as that of the Collegi d´Arquitectes de Catalunya, which organised a series of lectures in 1950-1951. The cycle was inaugurated FROM THE POPULAR TO THE SUPER NORMAL 128 by Bruno Zevi who expressed his defence of organic architecture. Understood as post-functionalist architecture, it was a natural development of the Modern Movement, incorporating irregular forms, greater realism, the search for that which is different and having a closer contact with nature. “Architecture is organic when the spatial arrangement of room, house and city is planned for human happiness, material, psychological and spiritual. The organic is based therefore on a social idea and not on a figurative idea. We can only call architecture organic when it aims at being human before it is humanist.”4 At the same time as this outward look was taking place, official entities in the two countries promoted initiatives to identify and catalogue the indigenous features of popular, traditional architecture that set Spain and Portugal apart from the rest of the world.5 Without making much noise from within the system, some of the most noted architects in Spain and Portugal were capable of producing modern, contemporary works. To do so, bearing in mind that the technology and economic resources available to them did not encourage the type of architecture to which they aspired, they relied on the existing workforce, which with its artisanal knowledge was trained to carry out construction with details similar to those that they came across when studying popular, self-built architecture, without architects. Fernando Távora and José Antonio Coderch were among the few architects who tried to recover modernity in the Iberian Peninsula so as to once again become part of the international architectural movement. 4 B. Zevi, Towards an Organic Architecture, London 1950, 76. 5 In Portugal, between 1955 and 1960 the National Union of Architects (Sindicato Nacional dos Arquitectos - SNA), headed by Francisco Keil do Amaral, promoted a project for “Research into Portuguese Regional Architecture” carried out by various teams of architects, including Fernando Távora, which covered all the country’s various regions. The results of this study were published in 1961 as Arquitectura Popular em Portugal. IVÁN YLLERA 129 Távora’s condition From the outset of his career, Fernando Távora was profoundly aware of his Portuguese background, although he was also influenced by the architecture studied during his trips to the United States, Mexico, Japan, Greece and Egypt. There he paused to draw details of the constructions he visited, which were apparently alien to his Portuguese reality, although he never ceased to evaluate them, making critical comparisons of the virtues and defects of the buildings he visited. In one of his first published texts, O Problema da Casa Portuguesa, published in 1945, he made an attempt to put into writing his critical position at that time. In a concise manner he gave notice of his interest in raising the value of popular architecture: “Popular housing teaches us important lessons because it is the truest, most functional and least fanciful”,6 although without abandoning research and inclusion of the progress taking place in international architecture of the time, an intermediate path which according to Távora should not mean any loss of character by Portuguese architecture. The problem of concern to Távora was more social than aesthetic. Instead of taking note of the picturesque resources of Portuguese architecture, he considered it was of more relevance to try to determine the social needs of Portuguese dwellings. A solution for the Portuguese house Two years before the Otterlo gathering, Fernando Távora received an apparently minor commission for a holiday home in a pine grove located in an area between the Atlantic coast north of Oporto and the marshlands at the mouth of the Cávado River separating Ofir from Esposende. On one side, beaches and dunes facing the ocean, on the other, the stillness of the flooded land, rising and falling with the tide, where sweet water meets salt. In between, pines on a sandy beach, an ideal site for camping. From the outset, the architect sought to build more than just a house to meet the needs of a specific family on a specific site. In his 6 F. Távora, “O problema da Casa Portuguesa”, in Aléo, nº 9. Lisbon 1945. FROM THE POPULAR TO THE SUPER NORMAL 130 description, he mentions the prevailing winds: “in summer a maddening north wind, and in winter, a cruel blow from the southwest”;7 he also made reference to the characteristics of the architecture that existed on the other side of the river, at Esposende. He furthermore synthesised his previous training, distinguishing between the artistic and architectural currents with which he was familiar (and which I consider he approved of): organic architecture, functionalism, neoempiricism, cubism. He took this commission as an opportunity to create a synthesis of what he had been aiming at since he was a very young man, that third way that he had been championing in his text O problema da Casa Portuguesa. His answer for the Ofir House project was a group formed of several parts designed to form a unity. Apart from efficiently resolving the complex functional programme for a 7 L. Trigueiros, Fernando Távora, Lisbon 1993, 80. IVÁN YLLERA Figure 2. Partial view of the East and North facades of the Ofir House, Fao, Esposende. Fernando Távora, 1958. (Photograph by the author) 131 small-scale holiday home for a large family in three skilfully articulated blocks (night, day and service), the Ofir House is integrated within the pines, creating a new condition around it, a protected area from which to enjoy the pine forest in which it is situated. In a certain manner, Fernando Távora camps in the pine forest, linking the protected interior to the exterior in a direct manner. This is as Frank Lloyd Wright had done at Ocatillo (1929), his camp in the Arizona desert, taking care to define a perimeter articulated by different pieces protecting an enclosed exterior space, gained for the interior, and around which the construction takes place. The materials used for the Ofir House are natural and local. They reflect their natural state, without any camouflaging of their appearance or texture. Woodwork is pine, in its natural colour, so that one can appreciate the grain of the trunk of the tree to which it belonged. Wood is also used for the roof, and more subtly in the reinforced concrete beams because of the texture left behind by the boards used for the forms that were in contact with the liquid concrete before it dried. In what one can imagine must have been a celebration of the execution of the project, small pieces of coloured ceramic, a seashell and inscriptions inlaid in the beams were included before the concrete dried into its definitive petrified state. Just as in the case of the woodwork and the ceiling, Távora used wood in its natural state, without concealing it, for the furniture he designed especially for the house. These were warm objects for use in storing the limited belongings of the vacationer, who for the summer would dispense with all unnecessary accessories of bourgeois life. For a while, there would be the enjoyment of living with little, a return to basics that would provide pleasure in the common, the ordinary. Wood, clay (ceramics), and as a third natural material, stone in different finishes and proportions for the floor of the living-room as a transition from the constructed floors and the sand of the pine grove, and for the chimney, harking back to the ancestral hearth. Távora thus reflected the naturalness and immediacy FROM THE POPULAR TO THE SUPER NORMAL 132 communicated by traditional constructions, a narrative architecture from which it is possible to read the manner in which it has been built, incorporating only those materials strictly necessary for each function, displaying with clarity those elements that have gone to make up the building. At Ofir, Távora attempted to make modern architecture with simple materials.8 This celebration of in situ construction, of the way in which things are built, was not present only in popular architecture, but would also be one of the characteristics of the new Modern Movement generation that arose following the Second World War. There was to be a recovery of the focus on the materiality of architecture, a fundamental part of the discourse of certain English architects and artists during those years, defined subsequently as members of the New Brutalism, notable among whom were Alison and Peter Smithson with their 8 J. Frechilla, “Fernando Távora: Conversaciones en Oporto”, in Arquitectura, nº 261, Madrid 1986. IVÁN YLLERA Figure 3. Detail of one of the concrete beams of the Ofir House. (Photograph by the author) 133 first ‘as found’ works in which materials were shown in their natural state, in the rough: “We were concerned with the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of wood, the sandiness of sand. With this came a distaste of the simulated, such as the new plastics of the period – printed, coloured to imitate a previous product in ‘natural’ materials.”9 Coderch seeking Coderch While in his early works Távora attempted to follow an intermediate course towards modernity that valued tradition, on the opposite shores of the Iberian Peninsula, in the Mediterranean, José Antonio Coderch also aspired to travel a personal path towards a revised modernity, sharing some of the concerns expressed at the international forums at which he took part. After graduating as an architect from the Escola Tècnica Superior d´Arquitectura de Barcelona in 1940, Coderch moved to Madrid to work at the Dirección General de Arquitectura together with Francisco de Asís Cabrero, Rafael Aburto and Ricardo Abaurre, and in Alejandro de la Sota he found a kindred spirit as regards his proposals and intentions. During that period in Madrid he also collaborated with the form of Secundino Zuazo, someone he would always recognise as one of his teachers. Working in Madrid, he had access to the Architettura, Lo Stile and Domus magazines. He soon returned to Barcelona to set up his own firm together with his study companion Manuel Valls in 1942. His first commissions were single-family dwellings, mainly holiday homes, for a middle-class that was once again thinking of holidaying and enjoying the Mediterranean scenery, before the arrival of mass tourism in search of sun and beaches that would completely alter the Catalan coast and the rest of the Iberian Peninsula. Like Távora, Coderch backed the critical revision of the Modern Movement that was taking place in 9 C. Lichtenstein & T. Schregenberger, As found. The discovery of the ordinary. British architecture and art of the 1950s, Baden 2001, 40. FROM THE POPULAR TO THE SUPER NORMAL 134 Europe. He decided to detach himself from his first jobs carried out in Madrid, as well as from the historicist environment encouraged by the regime, taking on the challenge of embarking on a path of his own. In the words of Antón Capitel: “Coderch chose to marginalise himself, to withdraw to a world that was of necessity personal”.10 In the search for certainties on which to go on defining his architectural stand; Coderch resorted to the values and resources offered by traditional Mediterranean architecture.11 His admiration for this self-built architecture without architects was also in harmony with the path chosen by Gio Ponti and Bernard Rudofsky expressed in the Italian Domus magazine. Another reference he would very much bear in mind was the magazine A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea, published between 1931 and 1937 by the G.A.T.E.P.A.C.,12 in particular the issue dedicated to popular Mediterranean architecture,13 and that on rural architecture on the island of Ibiza.14 He travelled with his partner Manuel Valls to study in situ the examples published in those issues of the AC.15 As Federico Correa would recall: “He was fascinated by the architecture of Ibiza, by its severity. This was of great help to him in achieving a certain purity in his own architecture”.16 A house far from the Mediterranean In the mid-1950s, Francisco Olano commissioned from Coderch a house at 10 A. Capitel, “José Antonio Coderch, del mar a la ciudad", in A. Capitel & J. Ortega, J.A. Coderch: 1945-1976, Madrid 1978, 5. 11 During his first period in Madrid, when working for the Dirección General de Arquitectura, José Antonio Coderch travelled along the Catalan and eastern coasts of Spain from Cadaqués to Alicante in order to document a team task for the Plan for Housing Improvement in Fishing Villages. 12 (Group of Spanish Architects and Technicians for the progress of Contemporary Architecture). Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea. 13 AA. VV., A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea No 18 (1935), Barcelona: G.A.T.E.P.A.C. 14 AA. VV., A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea No 21 (1936), Barcelona: G.A.T.E.P.A.C. 15 The magazine A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea was published by the Catalan chapter of the G.A.T.E.P.A.C., known as G.A.T.C.P.A.C., and had as its principal writer Josep Torres Clavé, together with Josep Lluìs Sert. 16 B. Galí, Correa & Milá. Arquitectura 1950-1997, Barcelona 1997. IVÁN YLLERA 135 Comillas, Santander, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. This commission provided Coderch with the opportunity to build his first project outside Catalonia.17 The Catalan architect must have felt he was very far from the Mediterranean. The blinding light of Cadaqués or Sitges to which he was accustomed was nothing like the sunny intervals between the clouds and storm fronts of the Cantabrian. Suddenly, after so many years of becoming familiarised with the climate of the Costa Brava, he found himself out of place, unfamiliar with the humid and melancholic environment of Comillas. The site on which the house was to be built was a long field bordering lengthwise on the Rabia estuary with a sharp slope running down to the shore. Coderch decided to locate the house almost at the end of the property in a clear area with a view of the end of the estuary: the beach at Oyambre and, on a clear day, even the Picos de Europa. Once again he was faced with a site from which to enjoy distant views in several directions, as had been the case when designing the Ugalde House and the house he planned for his family, the Coderch House (1955) at Caldetas, Barcelona. The initial plan was based on the experience acquired from those projects; so as not to have to give up any of the views This house would also have a radial organisation, and it was decided to raise it above the natural level of the land to increase the sense of observation from a horizontal platform in which the perception of the place changed according to its orientation. The Olano House continued with the oblique geometry developed somewhat uninhibitedly for the Ugalde House and subsequently at the Coderch House in Caldetas, as well as for the housing in Barceloneta, Barcelona (1951). This time, however, although the proposed geometry was complex, the design of the house was developed on a plan occupying two pentagons, controlled geometric shapes that shared one of their sides. One of the pentagons housed the entrance, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and the service area (kitchen, laundry, two bedrooms 17 With the exception of the Casa Ferrer Vidal in Mallorca (1946) and his early jobs in Madrid. FROM THE POPULAR TO THE SUPER NORMAL 142 JORGE PALINHOS The arrival of Modernist ideas in Portugal was surprisingly fast for a small minority of artists, but much slower for the majority of the population and of the artistic landscape of the country, and namely for the artists who depended more on public support or state financing. In fact, the naturalistic taste in arts in Portugal would last until the middle of the 20th century. This was more evident in arts more heavily dependent on audience applause or government support as was the case with the performing arts. In fact, the principles of Modernist theatre would take a long time to be well-received in Portugal. There were a few attempts at Modernist theatre in Portugal in the beginning of the 20th century. For instance, França notes that the future of the magazine Orpheu, the first Modernist magazine in Portugal, also entailed an ambitious programme of conferences and a theatre festival2 that never took place. One of the protagonists of Portuguese Modernism, José Almada Negreiros (1893-1970), had a deep interest in theatre and was writing, directing and designing for theatre in the 1920s, but the lack of opportunities and interest among audience and artists, at that time, ultimately discouraged him and led him to move abroad for a while. Therefore, for the first 30 years of the 20th century, Modernism did not take hold in Portuguese theatre, except in one area: the stage and costume design of one of the most popular and traditional Portuguese theatre forms – Teatro de Revista. In fact, several of the most important early Portuguese Modernist artists, like Jorge Barradas, Milly Possoz, José Barbosa, Sarah Affonso, Stuart Carvalhais and even Almada Negreiros, had an important role redefining the stage and costume design of Portuguese Teatro de Revista around the 1920s, and, in this paper I will try to document the origins, reasons, evolution and influence of this change. Teatro de Revista Teatro de Revista, also called Revista à Portuguesa, is a very popular Portuguese form of satirical sociopolitical theatre, which strives to reenact and satirize some 2 José-Augusto França, A Arte e a Sociedade Portuguesa no Século XX (1910-1990), Lisboa 1991, 13-14. 143 MODERNISM AND THE PORTUGUESE TEATRO DE REVISTA of the most popular, well-known and controversial current affairs and events of society. Its influence was so deep that even at the beginning of the 21st century, its hold on the Portuguese imagination remains strong. Most of the population, however, still conflate theatre with Teatro de Revista and see its old celebrities as examples of theatre performers. Its political and financial support still is a relevant issue,3 even if Teatro de Revista itself is today a dying theatre genre, with most of its practitioners retired and its stages closed or degraded. The origin of Teatro de Revista can be found in France at the end of the 18th century. Amidst the turmoil of the French economic and social crisis and the subsequent revolution, theatre became a popular tool to inform and reflect about the events then taking place in France. A specific type of theatre started to appear called the revue de fin d’ année,4 that was used to tell, show and comment on the main political and social events of the previous year. Combining popular songs, humor and current affairs, revue de fin d’année became a massive popular hit because it satisfied the wider audience’s need for entertainment and information and it quickly spread across Europe. The revue arrived in Portugal in the middle of 19th century, with the first one being, according to Luiz Francisco Rebello,5 “Lisboa em 1850” (“Lisbon in 1850”), which premiered on 11 January 1851, in the Teatro do Ginásio. This theatre was already popular for staging vaudeville and opera bufa. Revue de fin d’année was the next logical step, immediately becoming very popular with the audience, the piece being staged for a full month and repeated during the carnival. This success ensured that the revue de la année quickly stopped being just an annual event, but became a commercially successful enterprise, that happened 3 In 2001, the mayor of Lisbon, Pedro Santana Lopes, created a casino in the city ostensibly with the sole purpose of supporting the recovery of the degraded area of Teatro de Revista’s theatres, Parque Mayer. These areas should have been recovered with a project by the architect Frank Gehry, but, although the casino was created and opened, the rebuilding of the theatres never actually took place. 4 V. Pavão dos Santos, A revista modernista, Lisbon 2000, 2. 5 Luiz Francisco Rebello, História do Teatro de Revista em Portugal. Vol. I Da Regeneração à República. Lisbon 1984, 55. 144 multiple times a year, through several productions. Virgilio Ribalta6 describes Portuguese Teatro de Revista as being full of colorful set designs exchanged in quick succession, and a choir of scantily-clad women wearing gaudy costumes, all with a sense of dynamic movement and constant change, which would satisfy the appetite of a popular audience for magnificence and sexual innuendo. Its popularity also ensured that it was one of the few theatre genres in Portugal that could thrive without government backing, even if the number of performers, set designs and costumes made it an expensive production to stage. When successful, these productions had long runs that demanded a constant search for novelty that could keep the audience’s interest and make them return to see a show more than once. Usually, this interest was sustained through popular songs, guest stars, new sketches, etc. Obviously, its satirical addressing of current affairs – for example during the First Portuguese Republic, with its numerous political crises, rebellions and uprisings – also added to the public interest in Teatro de Revista. Dramaturgically, Teatro de Revista had a very specific and stable structure. Usually, each piece was divided into two parts, each one with a specific, although broad, theme. The first part would open with an orchestral piece followed by the first song. Then, several different scenes would take place, mixing songs, dance and theatrical scenes inspired by political, social or theatrical events, or scenes combining all these. These scenes could be connected by the character of the compére or comére – an actor or actress who, in between scenes, would walk to the front of the stage and, while the set was being changed behind the curtain, would have a humorous dialogue with the audience or with another actor, thus creating a thematic bridge between scenes. One of the scenes would include a guest star, usually a well-known fado singer. Then, there would be some ‘street scenes’ about daily life in Lisbon which would end with a festive parade. After that, there would be a second part, with a very similar structure to the first 6 In José Carlos Álvarez, A República Foi ao Teatro, Lisboa 2010, 25. JORGE PALINHOS 145 part, which would end also with a sort of festive parade, although shorter than the one at the end of the first part, where all the cast would be on stage, in a very hierarchical order, with the choir girls on the side and at the back, and the compére and comére, and guest stars being on centre stage in the front line.7 It was, therefore, a highly festive theatre, involving several dozen performers, and a very detailed, multiple and complex set design, meant to impress the audience with the magnificent and surprising visuals, but also easily changed to allow the quick succession of different musical, dancing and theatrical scenes. Its popular impact in the beginning of the 20th century was undeniable: between 1910 and 1926 about half of all theatre production in Lisbon and Oporto was composed of pieces of Teatro de Revista.8 Many of its performers were celebrities and several of its songs became popular hits or were inscribed in cultural memory. Teatro de Revista even became the model and inspiration for Portuguese comedy films that would be made in the 1940s. It even helped turn fado - at the time a despised popular music genre in Portugal and usually connected with sailors, prostitutes and criminals - into a music genre closely related to national identity. It began being used in Teatro de Revista from the 1870s onwards to help to illustrate the bohemian side of life in Lisbon at that time. Despite its popularity, and despite the fact that Portuguese audiences mostly rejected Modernist performing arts, as we will see, Teatro de Revista was also the first theatrical art form to welcome, search and popularize the first modernist artists in theatre in Portugal. Modernism in Portugal Modernism, in Portugal, was at first welcomed by a small clique of artists, usually connected to the magazine Orpheu, like Fernando Pessoa, Mário de SáCarneiro, Santa-Rita Pintor, and Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, among others. 7 Alvarez, A República Foi ao Teatro, 26. 8 Alvarez, A República Foi ao Teatro, 34. MODERNISM AND THE PORTUGUESE TEATRO DE REVISTA 146 Most of them had lived in Paris, and knew and were influenced by the new Modernist ideas coming from there. However, their ideas and works were mostly rejected – or even made fun of - namely in the theatre. It is well-known that the first number of Orpheu was regarded as an ‘insanity’ at the time and even became a minor success mostly for scandalous reasons, not for any real appreciation by the audience of the aesthetics it promoted. It is worth noting that the presence of theatre in Orpheu was also ambiguous because it included only a theatre play, O Marinheiro (The Sailor) by Fernando Pessoa, which was clearly more influenced by the symbolism of Maeterlinck, than any Modernist aesthetics. In theatre, such rejection also happened among audience and critics. In Figure 1 we have a caricature published in one of the foremost theatre magazines of the time, joking about the reception of futurist authors in Portugal by hostile audiences. JORGE PALINHOS Figure 1. A caricature in the De Teatro magazine, showing how the playwright should show gratitude for the applause after the première. On the lower right, the futurist or modernist author is showed bravely enduring the rain of tomatoes and other vegetables thrown by the enraged audience 147 Such hostility could be felt even against foreign productions, as it happened with the Ballets Russes, as I will try to describe. The Ballets Russes was a Russian dance company founded in 1909 and managed by Sergei Diaghilev. It was the foremost and more influential dance company of the time, having distilled classical ballet into a more widely-appealing form, working according to Modernist principles. It partnered some of the most important modernist artists of the time, like Léon Bakst, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, who all created the costumes and scenery for Parade (1917) and Le Tricorne (1919) for that company. André Derain, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, Robert and Sonia Delaunay were also associated with the Ballets Russes, as were several of the most important composers and choreographers of the time, like Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Eric Satie, and Nijinsky, even having costumes designed by Coco Chanel. It was a fortunate mix of clever commercial success, the ability to court the support of rich and powerful sponsors, and attracting a wide audience through acclaim and scandal. Modernist art was fascinated and inspired by dance, namely through the use of movement of the human body. Dance also created art through the use of existing elements, like the human body, like in a collage, its sensual elements, the use of different artistic materials, its mass appeal, the idea of a collective. The absence of spoken language as well gave it a more irrational, subconscious appeal. All of these were, of course, defining traits of modernist aesthetics. The Ballets Russes was able to find a wide audience from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, and plenty of funding for its extravagant and exotic productions. Through its innovative dance and openness to collaboration with the most avantgarde artists, and its willingness to shock and provoke, Ballets Russes became the most acclaimed performing troupe of the time working under modernist principles and it was a magnet for Modernist artists. Sasportes9 notes that Portuguese artists living in Paris at the time, like the poet 9 José Sasportes, Trajectória da Dança Teatral em Portugal, Lisbon 1979, 57. MODERNISM AND THE PORTUGUESE TEATRO DE REVISTA 148 Mário de Sá Carneiro, the architect and painter José Pacheko, the architect Raul Lino and the painter Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, were fascinated by the performances of the company. And therefore, the Modernist artists were enthusiastic when the Ballet Russes came to Portugal at the end of 1917. While the First World War was taking place in Central Europe, the Ballets Russes found themselves in a difficult situation, having a hard time finding sponsors and places to perform. Diaghilev tried to resolve the problem by making the company tour South America and then Portugal and Spain. When the Ballets were coming to Portugal, on 14 October 1917, Almada wrote a long article for the first and only edition of Portugal Futurista, the new Modernist magazine he directed, where he described the company as one of the “most beautiful landmarks in the civilization of modern Europe”10 and then, in a very emotional and impressionistic text, described the work of the company, even if he – not having had the opportunity to be in Paris - had never actually seen it in person, but knew it only through the photos published in newspapers and magazines.11 However, the presence of Ballets Russes in Portugal, despite all the hopes and enthusiasm of the Portuguese modernist artists, was for the most part a fiasco. The company arrived on December 2 to premiere at the Coliseu dos Recreios on December 6. However, on December 5, the rebellion of Junta Militar Revolucionária began, led by Sidónio Pais against the government of Afonso Costa. It paralyzed Lisbon for three days and forced the company to stay indoors at their hotel, supposedly in the company of some Portuguese modernist artists like Almada Negreiros, the composer Ruy Coelho and the architect Carlos Ramos. Therefore, the premier could not take place until December 13 in a severely damaged Coliseu de Lisboa. The company was unhappy with the working 10 My translation. 11 V. Pavão dos Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes ou Gil Vicente visto por Almada Negreiros, Lisbon 1993, 14. JORGE PALINHOS 149 conditions, but nevertheless presented Les Sylphides - usually considered to be the first abstract ballet - Schéhérazade, a sensuous and exotic piece, Le Spectre de la Rose, Warrior Dances of Prince Igor, Le Soleil de Nuit, based on Russian folk themes. Among other pieces, Ballets also performed Le Carnaval with costumes by Bakst, and based on characters from Commedia Dell Arte, which would have a deep impact on Almada Negreiros and become the best received piece of the troupe in Portugal. Other performances were Thamar, based on a legend of Georgia and Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur, which daringly combined erudite dance, folk dance and conventional gestures of daily life. There would be eight presentations at the Coliseu de Lisboa between December 13-27, 1917, and two more in the equally damaged Teatro São Carlos on the January 2 and 3, 1918. Despite the intense promotion and access to the prestigious Teatro São Carlos, at the time attended by the cultural and social elites of Lisbon, these performances seemed to have been a failure. Most presentations had half-empty auditoriums, almost no profits, indifferent audiences and hostile reviews. One reviewer, Álvaro de Lima, compared the set design to the “ridiculous blots of ‘futurist’ paintings”12. Another reviewer, F. Rodrigues Alves, described Le Soleil de Nuit as being “a madhouse fantasy, obviously cartoonish. A sort of futurist ode, created by fakes and danced by crazy people. Worthless set design.”13 Obviously, the main defenders of the show were Portuguese modernist artists, like the writer and journalist António Ferro and, especially, Almada Negreiros. The writer and artist Almada Negreiros was already an admirer of Ballets Russes, which he knew from the French magazines to which he subscribed and through an intense correspondence with Robert and Sonia Delaunay. These two artists had moved to Portugal, to the northern town of Vila do Conde, in 1915, to escape the First World War. Robert Delaunay was already a famous Modernist 12 Santos, A revista modernista, 4. (My translation) 13 Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes,19. (My translation) MODERNISM AND THE PORTUGUESE TEATRO DE REVISTA 150 painter, and his wife, Sonia Delaunay, was also a painter and costume designer. Both of them would be later involved in the set design of the Ballets Russes. It can be said that the Russian artist Sonia Delaunay had a strong influence on Negreiros. Not only did Sonia work for Ballets Russes, directly and indirectly inspiring Almada’s interest in stage design under modernist principles, but her style can also be seen in later stage designs by Almada and also of the modernist Revista, as we will see later. Almada Negreiros and Sonia Delaunay even developed a dance project, influenced by the simultané principles proposed by Robert and Sonia, called Ballet Veronese et Bleu, which was never actually performed.14 But Almada, who was well connected to the Portuguese aristocratic and bourgeois elites, was already directing a series of small dance pieces with young girls of aristocratic families. Obviously, these had been small, intimate affairs, with very restricted audiences, performed during aristocratic parties, later described by one participant as a “little entertainment”.15 However, in 1919, Almada, with the financial support of his patroness Helena Castelo-Melhor, actually staged a dance performance in Teatro São Carlos. It was composed of two dance pieces called Bailado do Encantamento (Dance of Enchantment) and A Princesa dos Sapatos de Ferro (The Princess of the Iron Shoes), with music composed by Ruy Coelho and set design by Raul Lino with the participation onstage of the always daring Negreiros. These presentations were a minor success, with three repeat performances in the presence of most of the elite of Lisbon and even of the then President of the Republic, Sidónio Pais. Later, Almada would give up choreography and dance, but would never lose his interest in theatre. He started designing posters for some theatre troupes, like Companhia Lucília Simões, and later he would go on doing illustrations and covers for the most important theatre magazine of the time, De Teatro. 14 Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes, 10. 15 Santos, O Escaparate de Todas as Artes, 12. JORGE PALINHOS 151 He was also writing for drama under modernist principles, with plays like Os Outros (The Others), Pierrot e Arlequim (Pierrot and Arlechino) where he displays his obsession with the characters of Commedia Dell Arte, Portugal or Deseja-se Mulher (Wishing for a Woman). However, in spite of his own efforts and the efforts of others, most of his plays seemed not to have been staged throughout most of his life, and were staged only from the 1960s onwards, therefore beyond the scope of this essay, which is mostly focused on the first three decades of the 20th century. As an aside, let me state that António Ferro, who was a theatre critic and later, during Salazar’s dictatorship, would be responsible for the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional, the ministry that promoted arts and culture under that dictatorship, was also an admirer of the Ballets Russes. When he created the Portuguese dance troupe Grupo de Bailados Portugueses Verde Gaio in 1940, he was obviously inspired by Ballets Russes, and even called them the Portuguese ‘Ballet Russes’, according to Castro.16 As another aside, but of greater significance, the show at the Coliseu had a brochure with illustrations by Jorge Barradas, who would become one of the most important set designers of Teatro de Revista in Portugal, as we will see later. Modernist set design and Teatro de Revista According to França17, Teatro de Revista had an important presence in Lisbon. There were at least ten theatres that were devoted solely to Teatro de Revista, and most of them were run by the same entrepreneur: António de Macedo. This means that Teatro de Revista was a commercial enterprise that demanded large audiences regularly attending the performances. This required employing celebrities, using famous tunes, addressing current affairs and novelties that 16 Maria João Castro, (2009) “A influência dos Ballets Russes na criação do Verde Gaio,” in http://www. fundacaoantonioquadros.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=65&Itemid=34&limit=1 &limitstart=17 (accessed 24 December 2014). 17 José Augusto França, Os anos vinte em Portugal, Lisboa 1992, 103. MODERNISM AND THE PORTUGUESE TEATRO DE REVISTA 254 trying to understand the inner structure of that human thought, which becomes necessary in conditions of crisis. Happiness that accompanies knowledge is a kind of freedom for the artists, for the architects and in this case can lead to the re-inscription of that world in our contemporary conditions. For ‘freedom’ is the possibility for everyone to experience their own constant challenge and be able, through their own reality, to recognise their personal and inner responsibility towards a place. NIKOS SKOUTELIS Figure 6. N. Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Large Landscape on Hydra, 1938, oil on canvas, 114x162. Private Collection, Athens 255 HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ESTADO NOVO’S AFFORDABLE HOUSES PROGRAMME1 SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS In 1933, the dictatorial regime imposed in Portugal after the coup of May 19262 lost its military status. The government, since 1932 headed by Oliveira Salazar,3 wrote a new constitution, which was published in April 1933, and in the following months prepared a set of legislative orders that became the fundamental decrees of the new corporative state, the Estado Novo (New State). The drafts of those decrees were published in the newspaper Diário de Notícias, to allow the several social forces to react and propose changes to the legislation before it became official.4 One of those decrees established the principles of the construction of affordable houses by corporative or public institutions, with the support of the State. The Affordable Houses Programme was, from the start of the Estado Novo (New State), seen by the government as a central initiative in the framing of a new social order, and built over sixteen thousand houses across the country until the end of the regime in 1974. 1 This text is a revised and extended version of the paper “House as Ideology in the Affordable Houses Programme of the Estado Novo” presented at the international conference Southern Modernisms: Critical Stances Through Regional Appropriations, ESAP, Oporto, 19-21 February 2015 2 See José Mattoso, História de Portugal – Vol. VII – O Estado Novo (1926-1974), 1994. 3 António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) was Minister for Finance (1926, 1928-40) and President of the Ministers’ Council (from 1932 to 1968). 4 Diário de Notícias 24. 249-24. 254, 5-10 August 1933. 256 Salazar himself highlighted the main purposes of the programme in March 1933, in a speech about the economical principles of the new constitution, placing family and private property in the centre of a reinvented society. For Salazar, the individual house, the family’s own house, was the only solution for “life’s intimacy”.5 Even before the decrees were finalised, a speech by the newly vested Undersecretary for Corporations and Social Welfare, Pedro Teotónio Pereira,6 listed the housing issue as one of the priorities of the government: “as much as possibilities allow it, it will be sought to fill with sun, air and light the home of those who work”.7 Housing had already been a concern for the 5 António de Oliveira Salazar, “Conceitos Económicos da Nova Constituição”, in Discursos, Vol. I, 1961. 6 Pedro Teotónio Pereira (1902-1972) was Undersecretary for Corporations and Social Welfare (193336), Minister for Commerce and Industry (1936-37) and Minister for the Presidency (1958-61), and was the Portuguese Ambassador in Madrid, London and Washington. He is considered one of the main developers of the corporative organisation of the Estado Novo. 7 Pedro Teotónio Pereira, “Corporações e Previdência Social: Primeiros Aspectos”, in A Batalha do Futuro: Organização Corporativa, Livraria Clássica Editora, Lisbon (1937), 62. SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA and RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS Figure 1. Archs. Raul Lino and Joaquim Madureira, Affordable Houses Neighbourhood of Condominhas, Porto, 1934-36. The archetypes of the small Portuguese house and of the rural village are the basis to the neighbourhood design. (Source: Sistema de Informação do Património Arquitectónico, http://www. monumentos.pt/) 257 previous regime, which had launched a similar initiative in 1918, and the Estado Novo used that legislation as reference for the development of its own housing programme. Although actual initiatives of housing construction only started in Portugal then in 1918, the discussion on the subject started as early as 1884, still under a monarchy, when a proposal for a law was presented to the chamber of deputies by Augusto Fuschini (1843-1911) that intended to promote the construction of houses for the poor. That discussion restarted in 1914, already under a republic (after the coup of 1910 that deposed the king), but it was only in 1918 that the government was able to start building. Of the three neighbourhoods that were begun by the First Republic – the republican regime that would be substituted by the military dictatorship in 1926 - not even one was completed. The initiative was halted in 1922 and, after attempts to sell the houses at the end of the decade, the dictatorial regime took control of the construction, finished it and presented them as works of the new regime – already stating how the National Revolution had come to solve the problems that the previous regime was not able to solve.8 The housing initiative of the First Republic was structured according to principles that would serve as bases for the Affordable Houses programme. For the Estado Novo there was, however, a need to make its power noticeable in the new communities to be created. The set of decrees that became official on 23 September 1933 is no coincidence as they all relate to the organisation of work forces within the new corporative logic.9 The Affordable Houses decree established a complex bureaucratic network of institutions that would be responsible for the 8 For more information on those neighbourhoods and their appropriation for propaganda purposes, see Maria Júlia Ferreira, “O Bairro Social do Arco do Cego: uma aldeia dentro da cidade de Lisboa,” 1994 in Análise Social, vol. XXXIX (127), 1994, 697-709 and Maria da Conceição Tiago, “O Bairro Social da Ajuda-Boa Hora: Um projecto da República Nova e uma realização do Estado Novo 1918-1935”, Master Thesis in Contemporary Social History, Instituto Superior do Trabalho e da Empresa, Lisbon 1997. 9 Decrees 23.048, 23.049, 23.050, 23.051 and 23.052, Diário do Governo, Série I, no. 217/33. The decrees 23.048 to 23.052 establish, respectively, the general laws of work –Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional, the guilds of employers – Grémios, the Unions of Workers – Sindicatos Nacionais , the organisation of rural and agricultural workers – Casas do Povo – and a programme to build houses for public employees or unionised workers – Casas Económicas, or as we will call them, Affordable Houses. HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ... 258 programme. The promoter would be the government itself, with the support of or supporting initiatives by city councils or corporative institutions (such as the Guilds or Unions)10, and for each group of houses the cost was to be divided in half by the government and the respective institution. The projects were designed by the SCE11, a section of the national entity in charge of public buildings and monuments, DGEMN.12 The financial management was centred on the FCE13, a fund created at and managed by the public bank, and the houses were distributed by the RCE14, a section of the INTP15, the institute that was also created in 1933 to regulate work relations. The SCE reported to the Ministry of Public Works and Communications, which had to approve every project, and the FCE and RCE reported to the Undersecretary for Corporations and Welfare. It is interesting that, through this organisation, several national powers – the administrative, the economical and the de facto legislative power, the cabinet of Salazar – influenced the development of the Affordable Houses Programme. What could be seen as an overlapping set of responsibilities was, in fact, a steep bureaucratic pyramid that was headed by Oliveira Salazar, who had a say in almost every aspect of the programme’s organisation. The decree created two types of houses, A and B, to be distributed according to the income of each family, and each type had three versions, with varying sizes according to the number of children in each household. Although the decree established a minimum number of 25 houses and a maximum of 100 per neighbourhood, those limits were never taken into account in the development of the programme. The Affordable Houses decree, as many laws created by the Estado Novo, is as important for what is says as for what it implies. 10 The Portuguese corporative state had many similarities with the Italian fascist structure, particularly in the bureaucratic organisation of work forces. The Portuguese “Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional” (National Work Statute) was coincidental in many points with the Italian “Carta del Lavoro”. 11 Secção das Casas Económicas (Affordable Houses Section). 12 Direcção-Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais (General Directorate for National Buildings and Monuments). 13 Fundo das Casas Económicas (Affordable Houses Fund). 14 Repartição das Casas Económicas (Affordable Houses Department). 15 Instituto Nacional do Trabalho e da Previdência (National Institute for Work and Welfare). SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA and RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS 259 Ownership and Behaviour By focusing the Affordable Houses programme on a principle of ‘resoluble’ property - in which a monthly rent included the payment of the house instalments and life and fire insurance - the regime was putting in writing some of its fundamental principles. The term ‘resoluble’ is self-explanatory: the property is permitted by the state, under some conditions that, if not strictly followed, could imply the loss of that property, and in several cases it did. This notion of impending threat was an instrument to which the Portuguese regime resorted not only with the Affordable Houses programme, but also can be seen as an example of social control. Fernando Rosas16 has recently described the importance of this “preventive violence” as a kind of “silent” pressure which implied the constant surveillance of behaviours. This surveillance was developed by several branches of the regime either through the censorship of information or through the reorganisation of police forces. But what is perhaps more important to the analysis of the Affordable Houses Programme is a secondary kind of preventive violence, one that was not so direct in its actions and yet was able to develop some degree of omnipresence. Rosas notes the role of several institutions “that had as a mission, in the family, in the school, in the workplace (...) to supervise daily life and to inculcate”17 the new social values that recovered traditional roles for the man and the woman, and their obligation to raise a family accordingly. The Affordable Houses decree also required the institution of a ‘homestead’ principle (casal de família), using a law from 192018 aimed mainly at protecting farmers’ properties. This law determined that the family house could not be used as collateral to pay potential debts, and suggested a concern for the stability of the family, seen by the regime as the basis of society. This is a particular aspect of the programme that must be underlined. The 16 Fernando Rosas, Salazar e o Poder: A Arte de Saber Durar, Tinta da China, Lisbon 2012. 17 Rosas, Salazar e o Poder…, 199. 18 Decree 7.033, in Diário do Govêrno, I Série, no. 298, 16 October 1920, 1356-1358. HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ... 260 importance of keeping the house is a reflection not only of political, but also economical beliefs, and in a regime built by scholars (such as the economist Salazar and the mathematician Teotónio Pereira) those two aspects are intertwined and must be read together. The facilitation of private property was certainly read as a strong opposition to the collectivisation trends that had been felt in Europe in the previous years; in a way, it is the antithesis of the revolution19 that the regime saw as its own hypothetical nemesis. The political war on communism is one of the constants of the Portuguese regime’s evolution and one that dictates not only the several periods of hardening of the political persecutions and State laws, but also the evolution of the foreign affairs of the State. It was, in fact, the only thing that could allow for somewhat stable relations between the regime and both Nazism in the 1930s and the USA in the 1950s. Teotonio Pereira was a key figure in this management, serving as the Portuguese ambassador in particularly critical contexts – at the start of Franco’s regime in Spain from 1937 to the end of the Second World War and in Washington both from 1947 to 1950 in the early years of the Cold War, and from 1961 to 1963 during John F. Kennedy’s presidency. So, a refusal of collectivisation is masked as a social intervention as the regime announced the housing programme as being destined for the very poor. When the Affordable Houses decree’s draft was published in Diário de Notícias, that priority was readily advertised: “the first experience to be carried out under this decree intends mostly, as it would be logical to suppose, to favour the working class, not just devoid of comfort, but of normal living conditions”.20 However, the decree did not mention this goal and in the list of selection criteria, salary came in fifth place. Not only were the priorities the stability of the applicants’ jobs and their moral and professional behaviour but the monthly 19 Mark Swenarton has described the English case of a similar view of investment in housing as a preventive measure. See “An insurance against revolution”, in Mark Swenarton, Building the New Jerusalem, Watford 2008, 41-57. 20 Diário de Notícias, no. 24.248, 5 August 1933, 6. SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA and RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS 261 rents established were too high for most of the working class. The target seems to be an educated middle class, of higher income, that the regime had to keep satisfied. When the bureaucratic network that was to be responsible for the Affordable Houses Programme was set, it was time to create the house that fitted the programme and the beliefs of the regime. This implied the selection of an image for the programme, which had to be a reflection of how the regime saw itself. Nationalism and Industrialism The creation of the State image of the Estado Novo revolves in the first years of the regime around one name, Antonio Ferro.21 He was a part of the first generation of modernist Portuguese artists and developed a system of propaganda for popular consumption that used historical figures and anecdotes as well as popular beliefs and traditions and masked under a modern approach to graphical design. These references were shared by the most conservative factions of the regime. Timid initiatives of an industrialist faction were not able to unsettle the strength of a traditionalist belief in a rural mythology as the basis of society. This belief took over the regime’s propaganda in the 1930s and was a central factor in the delays that kept Portuguese society, and particularly its industrial sector, largely stagnant during that decade. Similar to other authoritarian regimes of the time, the Portuguese dictatorship resorted to reinforcing nationalist beliefs, which was achieved by highlighting simultaneously two dimensions of Portuguese history. Those parallel dimensions were represented by an elite – be it military, in a retelling of the historical battles, or governmental, in the person of the Portuguese kings and princes – and by the people, seen as following a stable, quasi-eternal structure that had to be 21 António Ferro (1895-1956) was the Director of the Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional (Secretariat for National Propaganda) from its creation in 1933 to 1949. The Secretariat was renamed Secretariado Nacional da Informação (National Secretariat for Information) in 1945 when it absorbed the censorship services for publications and spectacles. See Jorge Ramos do Ó, Os Anos de Ferro, Lisboa 1999. HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ... 262 protected from sudden transformations for which it would not be prepared. These parallel ideals formed the two subjects of the celebration of the regime’s mythical year of 1940, when combining anniversaries celebrated the crowning of the first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, in 1140 and the independence from Spanish rule in 1640. The Portuguese World Exhibition was one of the great works of the regime’s propaganda and was supported by those two realities. On the one hand, the stability and homogeneity of popular life, represented in the Popular Villages Section designed by architect Jorge Segurado, on the other hand, the work of the chosen elite that ruled the country through its epic past, represented in temporary buildings with such apt names as the Honour Pavilion, Independence Pavilion, Formation and Conquest Pavilion, etc. Luis Cunha22 has used the Portuguese World Exhibition, as well as the “Most 22 Luís Cunha, A Nação nas Malhas da Sua Identidade, Porto 2001. Figure 2. Arch. Jorge Segurado, Portuguese World Exhibition – Popular Villages Section, 1940. (Source: Biblioteca de Arte, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, https://www.flickr.com/photos/biblarte/) SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA and RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS 263 Portuguese Village” Competition, also in 1940, and the Colonial Exhibition of 1934 to analyze the construction of a State image, noting also how the Portuguese World Exhibition was a reflection of two confronting views inside the regime, of modernity versus tradition. Daniel Melo23 has also noted the formation by the regime of a common identity in which popular culture is constructed by resorting to historical references. Traditional building techniques were also seen as a historical reference, as was perceptible in the Popular Villages Section, simulating a bucolic rural life, not at all coincidental to the difficult life of the uneducated and poor agricultural populations. This opposition between the need for an update of the Portuguese industry is paralleled by a devotion to the belief that the general population should be kept distant from modernisation. That distance would create a stagnant and therefore quiet crowd, ideologically pure and uninterested in the politics that were to be managed by an intellectually superior caste. The rural setting was the model, but there was a faction of the regime that did not see things the same way. Using the “Most Portuguese Village” Competition as an example, in 1945 Ferreira Dias24 criticised the glorification of backwardness that the competition represented by selecting the fairly isolated village of Monsanto25. Another member of the industrialist faction of the regime was José Araújo Correia, who was a Minister for Commerce and Communications in the military dictatorship’s cabinet of Vicente de Freitas in 1928, the first to include Salazar as Minister for Finances and Duarte Pacheco as Minister for National Instruction. From 1929 to 1964 Correia was an administrator of CGDP in charge of the analysis of the state’s yearly finances for more than two decades. He 23 Daniel Melo, Salazarismo e Cultura Popular (1933-1958), Lisbon 2001. 24 José Ferreira Dias (1900-1966) was openly critical of the traditionalist propaganda of the first years of the regime. He was an Undersecretary for Commerce and Industry (1940-1944) and Minister of Economics (1958-62). 25 Melo, Salazarismo, 223-224. HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ... 270 is clearly noticeable in the Affordable Houses Programme as in much of the architecture sponsored by the state during the dictatorship. Stagnation and Sufferance As we have seen, if the first intention of the programme was to build houses for those who could not afford one, that intention was swiftly bent as the Affordable Houses decree itself prioritised job stability and moral behaviour. In 1934, when the programme was barely starting, an architectural competition was prepared, but not launched, to create a large neighbourhood of 1050 houses in a part of Lisbon that corresponds roughly to the area that was, more than a decade later, subject to Faria da Costa’s plan of Alvalade. The competition brief37 is a statement on the regime’s view of the Affordable House as an instrument, and particularly of the reflection of ideology in architectural practice. The brief states the importance of the backyard as a kitchen garden to “stop the waste of free time from work in places of pernicious activities for intellectual life”. Not that intellect was something to be developed, as the “new inhabitant [would] be saved from the effort of thinking where the domestic activities will take place”. The way of life would be imposed on the inhabitant, stressing the educational role of the house. That educational role had, inevitably, a social charge. We have stated that the difference between the rural type and the urban type was related to the way the main room was to be used, that is, the way the family lives. This implied clearly a stagnation of a way of life: to each its place in society, and each should accept the sufferance his or her place in society demanded. There is a constant contradiction in the development of the Programme that is no stranger to the contradiction in the distribution of the houses. One must wonder if the full bathroom and the large family room implied, as advertised, 37 Realização de Concurso para o Anteprojecto de um Bairro de Casas Económicas do tipo de Cidade Jardim, a construir em Lisboa pela Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Crédito e Previdência, Oliveira Salazar Archive – Torre do Tombo, PT/TT/AOS/D-G/2/1/8. SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA and RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS 271 HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ... the educational role of the house for the less educated classes - supposedly the target of the programme – or if they existed, instead, because the growing middle-class would not accept less than those “luxuries”, as those who criticised the programme called them. It is clear, however, that for at least a sector of the state responsible for the Programme’s development, the educational and moral factors were fundamental elements of the design of the Affordable Houses. The regime feels the need to create the post of Neighbourhood Controller (Fiscal), to serve as a representative of the regime inside the community to control the behaviour of the other inhabitants. The Affordable Houses neighbourhoods would be simultaneously apolitical, as discussing politics was forbidden, and symbols of the regime and of the regime’s beliefs. The social role of the Programme was developed and clearly advertised. The investment of the State in the propagation of an ideal way of life for the Portuguese people is reflected in the development of several institutions devoted to that propagation, particularly to the stabilisation of the role of the woman in the family and in the house. Those institutions, such as Obra das Mães para a Educação Nacional and Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina38 saw the woman as the ‘mainstay’ of the family and of family life, and educated young women to become, what they believed, were the perfect housewives. The Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina’s bulletin even published an article defending the singlefamily model as the perfect example for the Portuguese way of life and citing the Affordable Houses Programme as the correct option.39 Commemoration and Transformation One of the links between the Affordable Houses programme and the regime’s 38 Mothers’ Work for National Education and Portuguese Female Youth; for more on the development of these institutions, see Irene Flunser Pimentel, A cada um o seu lugar: a política feminina do Estado Novo, Círculo de Leitores e Temas e Debates, 2011. 39 Francisca de Assis, “Um Problema,” in Boletim da Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina, no. 51-52, JulyAugust 1943. 272 view of it as an ideological instrument and propaganda feature is its presence at times of commemoration. The inaugurations of newly built neighbourhoods were used as celebrations of the regime’s work and, particularly in the first decade, presented stages in which prominent figures of the regime could express their beliefs in speeches to be featured in official publications and in major newspapers. Also interesting is the effort made to complete neighbourhoods in time to stage those inaugurations on celebratory dates. The 1934 Lisbon competition brief stated that the large neighbourhood was to be inaugurated on the 28 May 1936, the tenth anniversary of the “national revolution”; and, in 1938, a broad-reaching plan was launched by the government to prepare the celebrations of the already-mentioned regime’s mythical year of 1940, and again the importance of the Affordable Houses Programme is noted. In the same year of 1938 a decree by Duarte Pacheco forbade the construction of single-floor houses, basically eliminating the model developed by Raul Lino. That model Figure 5. The Affordable Houses Neighbourhood of Belém behind the Monastery of Jeronimos, Lisbon, 193839. Construction works for the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1940 are visible on the bottom right. (Source: Biblioteca de Arte, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, https://www.flickr.com/photos/biblarte/) SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA and RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS 273 HOUSING, NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL CONTROL: THE FIRST YEARS OF THE PORTUGUESE ... represented poverty, it was now believed, and the Affordable Houses Programme had to stand for dignity and quality of life. Again, it is unclear if this was meant as a moral factor or as a way to make the programme more attractive for families of higher incomes. What is clear is that at the end of the 1930s a second stage of the Programme was launched which announced a transformation as neighbourhoods were expanded with two-floor houses (the B type house had practically not been used until then), new neighbourhoods were planned, and new types of Affordable Houses were designed. The Portuguese dictatorship’s investment in housing, not only in the Affordable Houses Programme, but also in other initiatives of similar goals, is commonly recognised, but paradoxically, underrated. The true dimension of that investment is, however, unknown as the information of the several institutions responsible for its development is scattered through more or less organised archives. A broad analysis of this information is necessary in order to develop a real understanding, not only of the importance of the housing problem during the dictatorship, but also, and particularly, of the use of housing as an instrument of political pressure and social control and of the effects of this use in architectural design. By broadening the scope of what architectural history considers relevant, in order to encompass such initiatives that could be, and have been, deemed as minor or inferior architecture, it should be possible to create a reinterpretation of several loose ends of the genealogy of modern architecture in peripheral countries. There is a clear perception that there was, as we have stated, a somewhat deep knowledge of the development of what architectural history has reviewed as the canonical architecture of the Modern Movement, and of its ramifications throughout Europe in the first decades of the 20th century, both by architects and by senior figures of the regime. This knowledge implies causality, not an uninformed option, in the development of publicly funded architectural design. When the Affordable Houses Programme entered its second decade, the world was different, and the regime was forced to adapt. The allies’ victory in the Second World War was likely, and, as the Portuguese government realised its 274 inevitability, the Affordable Houses Programme itself was transformed. In 1943, the decree 33.27840 ordered the construction of 4000 new Affordable Houses and established two new types of houses, C and D, of larger areas and for families with bigger incomes. It could not be a coincidence that this decree was published at the height of the difficulties caused by the rationing brought on by the war economy. We have seen how the investment in housing by the Portuguese regime was sustained in its first years by the same beliefs that structured the regime’s propaganda. The ideal of a traditionalist way of life that could be crystallised in planned and controlled communities adjacent to city centres, took form in small neighbourhoods where modern approaches to housing design developed single-floor houses to which traditional building elements were superimposed. As the war drew to a close, the regime tried to adapt to the victory of democratic regimes and to the start of the transformation of the USA as a world power. The investment in Affordable Houses in that moment and the transformations in the Programme, proved simultaneously that not only was it distancing itself more and more from the small salaries of the working class, but that also the new middle-class was going to be a harder class to tame than was initially supposed. The modernising forces within the regime – which had representatives, as we have seen, with connections to the development of the Affordable Houses Programme – took control of the economic policy of the regime and moved it towards a long overdue industrialisation. The world was different, society’s demands were different and, by 1943, Nationalism was no longer enough. 40 Decree 33.278, in Diário do Govêrno, Série I, no. 256, 24 November 1943, 823-827. SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA and RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS 275 Introduction The present study explores the idea that in southern countries such as Portugal, Spain, and Italy, a certain facet of modernism was developed with a regional feature generally guided by the desire to reconstruct an identity. In other words, the paper considers the existence of a kind of regional modernism, which does not necessarily result from a cultural delay, nor from a misreading of the Parisian one - a misreading ostensibly linked to the peripheral location of these countries or to the sculptor’s inability to understand the essence of the Parisian trends.2 Therefore, this study intends to re-read the artistic production of four sculptors: the Spanish Manolo Hugué (1872-1945) and Alberto Sánchez (1893-1962), the Portuguese Ernesto Canto da Maia (1890-1981), and the Italian Arturo Martini (1889-1947). These sculptors have been chosen both for their similarities and for their differences. On the one hand, some of them are linked, not only by 1 This text is a revised and extended version of the paper “The redemption of the vernacular in the understanding of the modern: two cases from the South” presented at the international conference Southern Modernisms: Critical Stances Through Regional Appropriations, ESAP, Oporto, 19-21 February 2015. 2 See, for instance, J.-A. França’s arguments on the subject. José-Augusto França, A Arte em Portugal no Século XX, Lisboa 1994. PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE – A LOOK AT MODERNISM IN THE SCULPTURE OF SOUTHERN EUROPE1 SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA 276 common formal and conceptual options, but also by specific characteristics, unique to each case, that rescue elements of non-erudite culture and of the traditions of their respective countries. On the other hand, the formal solutions adopted by all four are, in many cases, very dissimilar, more so because some of these artists are from different generations. However, what is worth underlining is that there is, in fact, a common ground which they all shared in their practice, regardless of the plurality of their answers. Finding their own cultural roots “…returning to the tradition of the unique art of the Mediterranean lands; escaping French impressionism, the English pre-Raphaelites, German symbolism”; a “unique art of the man from here, of our religion, of our celebrations, of our life.” Thus spoke the Uruguayan theorist and painter Joaquín Torres-García (1874-1949) in 1907, in the journal Empori, in an article written as a manifesto, entitled La nostra ordinació i el notre camí.3 Though at a later stage, in 1917, Torres-García went on to reject everything from the past and advocate the original and the new4 (thus distancing himself from his previous views), according to the Spanish scholar Jaume Vallcorba he explicitly formulated in that 1907 article the principles of Mediterranean essentiality.5 There, he pointed the way to finding his own personality6 - being Mediterranean, being of the South, as opposed to being from the North - finding in his own cultural roots a unique way of being modern, as opposed to the international modernism that was not particularly concerned with nationality or tradition (at least not the Western one). This essentiality coincided with that 3 Joaquín Torres-García, “La nostra ordinació i el nostre camí” in Empori 4 (1907), 188-191, here 190. 4 Joaquín Torres-García, El descubrimiento de sí mismo. Cartas a Julio, que tratan de cosas muy importantes para los artistas, Girona 1917, 25. 5 Jaume Vallcorba. Noucentisme, mediterraneisme i classicisme: apunts per a la història d’una estètica, Barcelona 1994, 38. 6 Joaquín Torres-García, Escrits sobre art, Barcelona 1986, 37. SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA 277 of Catalan noucentisme,7 a collective ideological project of modernity, widely informed about the Parisian artistic avant-garde, but that vindicated a position of its own.8 The search for cultural identity was not exclusive to noucentisme, since it was also alive in other Southern regions, namely in Madrid, where the literary movement known as the Generation of 98, with its nationalist and regenerative spirit, dwelled on the nature or essence of Spain.9 A discussion in which the sculptor Julio Antonio (1889-1919) took part when attempting to set the fundamental types of the race, through the series of sculptures Bustos de la Raza, produced between 1909 and 1914.10 Julio Antonio was a Catalan artist from Mora de Ebro who, after a sojourn in Barcelona, went to Madrid in the same year, 1907, in which Torres-García wrote the previously mentioned La nostra ordinació i el nostre camí. His stay in Madrid at that time was brief, as he embarked the following year on a journey through Spain, from which resulted the aforementioned busts portraying anonymous figures - figures of the people – representing an ethnic survey of Spain and the diversity which characterizes its people and its cultural heritage.11 It is important to mention that the Portuguese sculptor Canto da Maia (who will be addressed later on) would consider Julio Antonio, under whose guidance he worked in Madrid, his great master. But this would be only after 1915. The discussion about the essence of Spain and how this research should be present in art, acquired new meaning in the 1920s and 1930s namely through the sculptor Alberto Sánchez (also to be considered below), the painter Benjamín 7 Torres-García’s artistic work is often referred to by Eugeni d’Ors (the intellectual father and inventor of the term noucentisme), not only in several articles, but also in his work La ben plantada a book that summarizes the ideology of noucentisme. However, Torres-García had his own theoretical elaboration, explicit before the configuration of noucentisme around 1910. See Joan Sureda Pons, Torres-García, Pasión Clásica, Madrid 1998. 8 See Martí Peran et al., “Noucentisme y vanguardia” in El Noucentisme: un projecte de modernitat. Barcelona 1994. 9 Jaime Brihuega et al., Alberto 1895-1962 exh. cat., Madrid 2001, 120. 10 Concerning this sculptor see Antonio Salcedo Milani et al., Julio Antonio: 1889-1919. Madrid 2002. 11 Antonio Salcedo Miliani, Julio Antonio 1889-1919 Escultor, Barcelona 1997. PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE ... 278 Palencia (1894-1980) and their Madrid followers. The two chosen Spanish artists, Manolo Hugué, framed by historiography in the conceptual principles of noucentisme, and Alberto Sánchez, usually linked to surrealism and the abstract, though in different ways, can be seen as forming part of this view of modernism that I intend to explore. Manolo Hugué was born in 1872 in Barcelona. He was a great admirer of Josep Llimona (1864-1934), a sculptor who was affiliated to the Sant Lluc Circle founded in 1893 and which favoured the separation of the South from the North and the return to a Mediterranean spirit.12 He also was one of Picasso’s great friends. They left for Paris in 1900, two years after Rodin’s plaster model for the monument to Balzac had been scandalously displayed and rejected; a monument which is considered to represent the birth of modern sculpture by denying any traditional expressive attribute.13 That same year saw the opening of the Universal Exhibition of Paris that included an extended display of Rodin’s works. It was still in that same year that Matisse visited Rodin’s studio, starting his Self (1900-1908) through which sculpture reasserted its autonomy as an object.14 It is reasonable to expect that Hugué and Picasso had been aware of all these developments. First of all because one of Picasso’s purposes, when he went to Paris in 1900, was to visit the Universal Exhibition, secondly, because he soon became close to the avant-garde circles as is well known. Hugué stayed in Paris for a decade and he also kept close contact with avant-garde artists. However, what seems to have impressed him most was the Mediterranean and archaic sculpture seen during his visits to the Louvre.15 It is also reasonable to think that he visited the exhibition of ancient Iberian sculptures that the museum hosted in 1905. In the same year of 1905 the French Catalan Maillol (1861-1944) presented his 12 See William Robinson et al., Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí, New Haven and London 2007. 13 Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism, London 2004, 57. 14 Foster, Art Since 1900, 57. 15 See Cristina Mendonza, ed., Manolo Hugué, exh. cat., Barcelona 1990. SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA 279 famous La Méditerranée in the Autumn Salon in Paris, a key piece of modern sculpture that, according to André Gide, “is beautiful. It means nothing, it is a silent work”, meaning that it broke with any kind of traditional descriptive and narrative representation, freeing itself from the subject to concentrate on form. The form is that of a human body, in a reinterpretation of the classical ideal that pre-empts by more than a decade what would become the return to order in the period between the wars. When Hugué moved to Ceret, in French Catalonia, in 1910, he settled into a monastery bought by Burty Haviland, (a Cubist painter, friend and client of Picasso and Braque), and Picasso took over the first floor.16 That place would become the artistic centre for some of the most important painters of the time. Hugué lived in Ceret surrounded by Cubist artists, whom he befriended and with whom interacted. He had lived in Paris for ten years where he was aware of the avant-garde artistic developments though he never tried to follow Cubist experiences. Therefore, it seems appropriate to conclude that Cubist interrogations clearly did not interest him. It is why I would disagree that the presence of the classical in Hugué’s work is just a formal solution that he adopted to correct his inability to access the theoretical speculations of the new trends, as has been claimed.17 He was closer to Maillol’s research, not only in solid and monolithic shapes, but also in a pre-classical inspiration and in the search for the primordial values of sculpture. Moreover, Maillol’s sculpture La Méditerranée illustrates the noucentiste sculptural Mediterranean programme; the southern alternative18 to which Hugué seems to be closer. Noucentisme believed in a new artistic creation that could be nurtured by the rural and popular culture of a region. Hugué effectively found this creative stimulus in the rural surroundings of Ceret and also in Caldas de Montbui 16 Roland Penrose, Picasso, his life and work, Berkley 1981, 517. 17 Arnau Puig, “Dónde debemos situar a Manolo Hugué dentro de la plástica catalana?” in Artes Plásticas Barcelona, year 1, 2 (1975), 19-22. 18 See Carlos d'Ors, El Noucentisme: presupuestos ideológicos, estéticos y artísticos, Madrid 2000, 122-128. PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE ... 286 are thought to be much closer to the first ones. They are a synthesis of animal, vegetable and human forms, frequently textured like ploughed fields, created in recycled materials, in clay and plaster, which capture subjects of rural life and the experience of nature.34 As Hugué, Sánchez also let himself be fascinated by archaic sculptures, namely the Iberian ones found at Cerro de los Santos and held by the archaeological museum in Madrid, which he visited whenever he could from 1921.35 The simplicity of these figures, their unpretentious form, as if they had been shaped by nature itself36 and the fact that they were of small scale, but seemed such gigantic pieces, impressed him. This impression would be the mark in his works – normally small-scale pieces, but often destined to be monumental sculptures. Sánchez also emphasized his lack of academic training and his contempt for technical dexterity and virtuosity in the composition of sculpture. As he maintained, Iberian sculptures were “sculptural objects (…) from other semiilliterate people like (him)”. For that same reason, he despised good and bad opera singers, preferring the song of a man mounted on his little donkey crossing hills and valleys. This song was for him profoundly human, the sap of a people, capable of interfering in the elements of nature (the wind, the rocks, the rivers, the crops).37 Partly following the lesson of those unpretentious Iberian archaic objects, Sánchez exercised a certain innocence in his approach to sculpture. There is a certain naivety, as if what is seen is being looked at for the first time; as if the look 34 See figure on http://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/perdiz-caucaso. 35 In the late 20s and early 30s, the primitive cultures were the order of the day. In 1929, there was in Madrid an exhibition about cave paintings in South Africa and a lecture about the Cave of Altamira, and in 1932 Pre-historic man and the origins of humanity by Hugo Obermaier was published. 36 Diogo de Macedo (1889-1959), a Portuguese sculptor and art historian, referred to Maillol’s work in quite a similar way. In actual fact, he mentioned that Maillol’s first sculptures seemed to have been sculpted by nature, as if they were like tree trunks and capricious rocks. He also compared Maillol’s sculptures in pink clay with Tanagra statuettes. (Notice that Tanagra statuettes are also linked to the work of Portuguese sculptor Canto da Maia to whom I will refer in due course). Macedo, Cinco Escultores franceses: Rodin, Bourdelle, Bernard, Despiau, Maillol, 45. 37 Sánchez, Alberto Sánchez, 24-25. SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA 287 itself was the first; as if the gesture of doing was also original, pure, stripped of all knowledge, free of any preconceived idea. The result is a sculpture permanently linked to the act of composition, revealing the mark of the human hand. Clay is the material that he frequently used, as well as other materials traditionally not considered as noble or as definitive. The redemption of the vernacular in the understanding of the modern In 1960 when speaking of his path as a sculptor, Alberto Sánchez said that it was his main wish to create an art plastically different from anything produced till then. However, when he observed his first drawings from which he expected to create sculptures, it became clear that they represented fragments of women, animals, hills and the countryside and he clearly understood that he would never be able to create non-existent things. So he reassured himself and stopped resisting his search for his forms in nature around him. In truth, he began to take a survey of these forms of the land, to try and capture the sobriety and simplicity that the land of Castile provided. His sculpture is populated by references to the rural and the countryside: birds, bulls, vineyards, wheat fields, rocks eroded by time.38 He wished his sculpture to be the product of a profound Castilian experience of nature, a sensorial experience of the rural setting and popular culture: “Give form to what you see in the field at five o’clock in the morning...”.39 Sánchez found his inspiration in the countryside around Madrid; Hugué found his in the rural inhabitants of Ceret. Like Hugué, Sánchez chose for his artistic quest scenes of the world around him, though with a different purpose. Through his sculptures, Sánchez intended to provide a stimulus to the new man giving him a new breath.40 Simultaneously, some of his sculptures were thought to 38 See figure on http://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/maternidad. 39 Enrique Azcoaga, Alberto. Madrid 1977, 65. 40 Alberto’s artistic production increased with the second republic in 1931, when the environment was conducive to cultural-artistic renewal and redemption of popular culture, which was close to Alberto’s desire for regeneration. PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE ... 288 work as a kind of landmark, a link between the modern architecture around it and popular and national roots. He had a political agenda. He believed art could change society and start the spectator’s consciousness on a journey through human solidarity and personal elevation.41 Even though a connection with the abstract can also be seen in Alberto Sánchez’s work, the truth is that he kept an evident link to reality, though rejecting illusionistic representation, and never broke with the figurative. His modernism was not a “no” to the traditional, but rather a “yes”. Tradition was, more so, a fertile source for his innovative solutions.42 In 1929, Sánchez’s work was included in the Exhibition of Spanish Artists Residing in Paris, although he remained in Spain. This was a very important opportunity for a close contact with what was being done in the famous artistic centre. Another opportunity was his journey to Paris in 1937 in which he made personal contact with some of the most important avant-garde artists at the time.43 However, there is no significant influence in his sculpture from that contact. He remained connected to his beliefs in art. The monumental sculpture, then presented at the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion in the Universal Exhibition in that same city (The Spanish people have a path that leads to a star), remained a reference in his subsequent work.44 We now consider the Portuguese case study. Canto da Maia was a sculptor who was born in the Azores. The first date worth mentioning for the purposes of this article, is 1912, which is when Canto da Maia went to Paris and studied under the guidance of the sculptor Bourdelle (1861-1929), who will be addressed later on. What is interesting about 1912 is that this is also the year when Canto da Maia exhibited in the first Portuguese humourist exhibition, in 41 Azcoaga, Alberto, 86. 42 Azcoaga, Alberto, 69. 43 Fernando Martín, El Pabellón español en la Exposición Universal de París en 1937, Sevilla 1982. 44 See figure on http://www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/pueblo-espanol-tiene-camino-queconduce-estrella. SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA 289 Lisbon, which also featured Almada Negreiros, Jorge Barradas, among other Portuguese modernist artists. Canto da Maia exhibited a series of multi-coloured clay statuettes, portraying scenes of Parisian society in a humorous and critical fashion. According to the Portuguese scholar Lúcia Matos, these terracotta pieces differ from the popular representations because of their cosmopolitan sense.45 Nevertheless, this popular root is very present, not only in the dimensions of the figurines, but also in the choice of materials and their finish. They also bring to mind the kind of representations that Canto da Maia started making in his native island: small figurines of people and animals with candle wax and clay from the Lagoa potters.46 He now changed the subject and his critical eye in tune with the cultural values of the environment in which he now lived. Lúcia Matos goes so far as to say that in the Tanagra figurines, the sculptor would have found antecedents for his own terracotta sculptures which, like their Hellenic precursors, gracefully captured the spirit of the times.47 Tanagra is a small village in Greece, famous for the small terracotta statuettes painted in bright colours and produced in the pre-classical era. They were very popular and that is why they were exported and copied all over the Greek world. They portrayed mainly young women and children usually preforming daily tasks. Today many of them have no colour, but in fact they were intensely colourful, as some examples still show. They were discovered by chance in 1870 and a considerable number of them is in the Louvre Museum collection, which Canto da Maia might well have visited, especially because Bourdelle, with whom he studied, was interested in archaic Greek sculpture. Bourdelle followed one of the newer tendencies in sculpture, inspired, like Maillol, by the pre-classical sculpture. In 1915 there was another event that seems key in Canto da Maia’s career and that was his stay in Madrid and his contact with sculptor Julio Antonio, whom 45 Lúcia Almeida Matos, Escultura em Portugal no Século XX, 1910-1969, Lisboa 2007, 75. 46 Paulo Henriques, A Insularidade de Canto da Maia, master’s thesis, Lisboa 1989, 13-14. 47 Matos, Escultura em Portugal no Século XX, 1910-1969, 106. PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE ... 290 he later considered to be his great master, as mentioned before. In Madrid, Canto da Maia also had important contact with the regenerative and nationalist spirit of the Generation of 98 by participating in the famous Tertulia de la Cripta del Pombo, founded in that very year. The contact with the Spanish artistic environment and with Julio Antonio reinforced his interest in the roots of Mediterranean culture, adding to it a renewed interest in the popular and traditional, as well as the mediaeval (intrinsically connected to the roots of a people). As an immediate consequence, in 1916 he produced The Courage of Life, where the archaic root is implied and also small statuettes entitled Types of People, thematically quite close to Julio Antonio’s Bustos de la Raza. In the following years, he presented Fish sellers (1919), three bas-reliefs with popular figures of fish sellers with baskets and peasants with pitchers on their heads and Types of Portugal (1920), two bas-reliefs depicting rural scenes of the Portuguese environment. One of them depicted peasant figures leading a cow, and the other showed couples dancing – illustrating the national identity translated to the rural and folk world. These subjects were quite close to Hugué’s rural scenes. Again, the work was bas-relief. From the 1920s, Canto da Maia’s sculpture revealed a search for a formal synthesis, centred on a quest for the essential values manifested in mythical, timeless and sacred attitudes, which he built with references to the representations of pre-classical sculpture and mediaeval virgins. His sculpture was largely populated by female figures, subtly expressing their inner life. The Portuguese scholar Paulo Henriques, refers to “Canto da Maia’s melancholy quest for a primordial world”.48 These sculptures are depictions without time or space, which seem to search for universal truths and, as such, are universally understandable. Inspired by archaic and mediaeval art, through schematic lines and simplified volumes, Canto da Maia shows a world of love and heartbreak, but also a celebration of life.49 48 Henrique, A Insularidade de Canto da Maia, 125. 49 See Paulo Henriques, ed., Canto da Maia – escultor, Lisboa 1997. SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA 291 Unlike Hugué, Canto da Maia’s women are not primitive deities projected through the depiction of Mediterranean women, robust and massive, but rather they are slender mythical figures of the period of Greek archaic sculpture, or elegant mediaeval maidens. Another look at his work one will also reveal a direct quotation of popular Portuguese motifs, depicting elements of a traditional and formal repertoire. For example, flower elements, textures, birds, which can be found in the Portuguese mediaeval illuminated manuscripts and which have been copied by all manner of artisans, especially in the North of Portugal, in embroideries and tapestries, and in the 18th century granite work from Minho, and partly in the motifs of traditional Azorean granite work. They are images that, consistently or not, fit the cultural and visual universe of Canto da Maia’s origins, Azorean and Portuguese. Canto da Maia was considered by the Portuguese art historian J.- A. França to be trapped in the art deco taste in his depiction of a “mannered PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE ... Figure 3. Ernesto Canto da Maia, Jogos de crianças, 1925, 57x57 cm. Coleção Herdeiros de Canto da Maia 292 decorative shape”.50 The notion I wish to reinforce is that his modernism, regardless of the international influences it may have presented, represents a quest for primordial gestures, for the essential forms of sculpting, and for a primitive inwardness undetached from his experience on his island. It is also represented by the depictions of Eden-like nature, though not exotic, in which elements of national popular culture are shown. Like Canto da Maia, Arturo Martini, the Italian case under study here, showed a close connection with his homeland, in this case Tuscany. There, small Romanesque churches and the archaic Gothic played an important role in the region’s visual culture. Furthermore, the local contemporary life was widely affected by the discovery of Etruscan art, namely the Vulci necropolis that, from 50 França, A Arte em Portugal no Século XX, 264. SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA Figure 4. Ernesto Canto da Maia, A Dança e a Música, 1926, painted concrete, 185x150 cm. Coleção Herdeiros de Canto da Maia 293 1828, gave rise to a great number of archaeological excavations in the territory.51 Marini’s father was a patissier and his first sculpting stimulus may have come from arabesques that, his father used to create with butter and a piping bag. At least that is the image he would later recall.52 In 1908, Martini left to study in Venice feeding off classical culture and spending many hours in museums studying the sculpture of the great masters. One year later he travelled to Munich where he studied under the guidance of Adolf Hildebrand, the sculptor whose theory seems to have been very relevant to some of the sculptors from this period.53 In 1912, the very same year that Canto da Maia arrived in Paris, Martini exhibited some pieces in the Parisian Autumn Salon. In this city he came into contact with avant-garde experiences which, as was the case for Hugué with Cubism, proved of little interest, unlike everything connected to his past and especially to his Tuscan roots. At the beginning of the war, Martini reconsidered his work. This led him on to a unique personal journey through various influences linked to the history of Italy: from Etruscan archaeological findings and Roman references - including the unearthing of the bodies in Pompeii, to the Gothic and the classical Renaissance.54 His modernism is found deeply anchored to national historical references together with artisan practices like pottery and its wide repertoire of nativity scenes and the imagery linked to legends and traditions. Martini reinterpreted all of this, in a depiction of pure figures and balanced compositions. He fits the Novecento spirit, an heir to the programme proposed by the art journal Valori Plastici, which also encouraged a European return to order and proposed a return to art as an experience of Italy and its traditions. In that same way, the Novecento embodied the traditional values of the Latin spirit 51 See George Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 1848. 52 See Arturo Martini et al., Arturo Martini: Opere edite e inedite, 1908-1944, Milano 1996. 53 See footnote number 20. A look at the work of the sculptors mentioned in this paper would show how Hildebrandt’s theory on sculpture might have inspired their formal options. 54 See figure on http://www.archimagazine.com/bmartini.htm. PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE ... 294 against the avant-garde. Like Hugué, who seemed to search for the ingenuity of the first man sculpting, rejecting progress, or, like Sánchez who searched for inspiration in Castilian nature, Martini declared that he wished to be free of his infirmity of having seen the statues of the world, being more enthusiastic about manifestations of nature than about any form of art. He declared that he wished to reproduce only what he had in his mind55 – producing a work that once more rejected an educated training. Obviously, from all that has been said, his view of the world left many traces in his sculpture. That is the case in his work of Hellenic reference: The Stars (1932) which recalls a group by Phidias, Aphrodite in her mother Dione’s lap. To these types of references he added those of a popular spirit, the world of fables and religious subjects, like The Dream or The Annunciation (1931). These smallscale works bring to mind the traditional Italian terracotta cribs and nativity scenes.56 Other themes explored were domestic scenes and traditional activities of the Italian people, once more highlighting the single point of view and the combination of planes as advocated by Hildebrandt. The uniqueness of his sculpture gains particularly original contours when he dwells on legendary and biblical scenes, which have been recurring subjects in artistic representation throughout history, for example, The Rape of the Sabines or Solomon (1935), among others.57 The human body remains the central motif, but with such a freedom in the way scenes are recreated that what one can see is an audacious approach to a traditional subject radically challenging the way it is 55 Guido Perocco, Arturo Martini: Catalogo delle sculture e delle ceramiche, Roma 1966, 18. 56 See figure on http://www.gnam.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/23/gli-artisti-e-le-opere/158/le-stelle-ole-sorelle. 57 It is really a subversion of the academic nude in line with one of the avant-garde transgressive claims. See Foster, Art Since 1900, 67. SÍLVIA VIEIRA DE ALMEIDA 295 now seen.58 Like Canto da Maia or Manolo Hugué, Martini took to researching form in which the human body prevails but, in depictions that strenuously reject mimicry. Nevertheless, they seem to agree with the concept by Marino Marini, another sculptor of the Italian Novecento, who stated that “according to my Mediterranean nature I cannot express myself freely through anything else than the human”.59 I would add that nature does not prevent their innovative proposals from rescuing the vernacular in the understanding of the modern.60 58 In 1945, at the end of his artistic path, Arturo Martini seemed to have stopped believing in sculpture, stating his agreement with Charles Baudelaire that sculpture is boring, because there is nothing there which has not been already tried and achieved (See his book La Scultura Lingua Morta e altri scritti, Milan 2001). At that point, he seems somehow disappointed with his achievements in the area. Nevertheless, in my opinion, his work keeps testifying to his virtue as one of the most interesting of modernist research in the field of sculpture. 59 Patrick Waldberg, Marino Marini: l’oeuvre complet, Paris 1970, XIV. 60 I freely quote Eugenio Carmona’s expression in regard to Alberto, but I believe that it can be applied to the other cases in this study. Brihuega, Alberto 1895-1962, 128. PRIMORDIAL GESTURES, ARCHAIC ROOTS, POPULAR CULTURE ... Figure 5. Arturo Martini, Salomon, 1935, Plaster, 61x21x20,5 cm. Palazzo Thiene. Vicenza. Inv. 14204 302 architecture develops out of his argumentation of a connection of architecture to fashion. He puts fashion into a direct relation with architecture, arguing that modern architecture is precisely defined by the conscious exclusion of fashion and, thus, fashion becomes an integral part of modern architectural design as no discourse can isolate itself from fashion. Wigley argues that “modern architecture was explicitly launched against fashion, and its white surfaces played a key role in that attack.”11 The white surface thus becomes the key element of the attack against fashion and the all-defining anti-fashion look of Modernity. The link between fashion and architecture is not only achieved by modern architecture’s aim to be timeless - or the anti-fashion look for Wigley - or by the metaphor of the connection between dress-design and clothing the surface wall 11 Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 37. SUSANNE BAUER Figure 1. Changing dress code for women 303 of a building, but also by its close connection to fashion, which Wigley argues derives out of the reform against fashion.12 “Any anti-fashion that attempts to establish a timeless style is always itself a fashion statement… The very idea of being modern cannot be detached from fashion. What could be more fashionable than the desire to be modern?”13 This creation of the modern fashion image is also reflected upon by Beatriz Colomina who argues in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media that Modernity was created by the image itself rather than the functions and mechanisms that go into creating the art object. The state of the ‘modern’ is therefore a representation and this modern representation goes as far as being 12 “… if modern architecture is truly a form of clothing reform, it cannot so easily resist fashion. Reforms tend to become fashions.” Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 160. Later he proclaims: “Reform is actually carried out by fashion,”, Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 180. 13 Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 161ff. THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... Figure 2. Modern fashion 304 produced by the image, and thus the mass media, itself. She points out that the widespread publication of The International Style was the generator of this image, rather than the travelling exhibition itself, for which the publication was created. The accompanying book had, in fact, such an impact that the exhibition is known under the name of the publication, rather than what it actually was called: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. Colomina states that “if the International Style is to be thought of as a publicity campaign for modern architecture, this publicity was aimed at a public much larger than that which ‘can afford art’… It is not just the house that is for sale in these promotions… The International Style publicized the private… It offered that image for mass consumption.”14 14 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity – Modern Architecture as Mass Media. Cambridge, MA , 1994. 207ff. SUSANNE BAUER Figure 3. Le Corbusier, Double house, Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, Germany, 1927, black-and-white advertising image, 1927 305 It was the image of this style that has since been attached to a perceived modern architecture and which is still used in a minimalist style of today, seeking to sell a life-style as much as an architectural design. Although it is granted that the all-white image of modern buildings was supported by the black-and-white photographic image that formed the symbolic white of the modern architecture itself. In the public imagination Modernism in architecture matches that image of buildings that are white, have plain simple walls and, most frequently, a flat roof. This canonical image of Modernism in architecture is linked to a language of functionalism and utility at the beginning of the 20th century that becomes embedded in the promise of the good life and regarded as a status symbol of luxury in the second half of the 20th century. By then the modern image had already been successfully disseminated through its radical aesthetic principles. A wave of new Modernism was using this image THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... Figure 4. Le Corbusier, Double house, Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, Germany, 1927, colour photo, taken 2013 306 to continue in this now internationally acknowledged style. As Reyner Banham states in 1969 in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment: “the [American] architects were working with the artistic preferences… and not – as was so often the case in the less relaxed intellectual atmosphere of Europe – against them.”15 The white modern image was thus moved from its inception in Europe as an attack against fashion to an American audience as a fashion image itself, and, with the use of mass media - book publications and exhibitions to begin with – this image was successfully spread to a general public as the image of the ‘modern life-style’ itself. Yet this machine aesthetic, as he further argues, is never in full view as it is hidden under the layer of white paint that constrains the services and mechanics behind the aesthetics of the ‘new machine house’: “The lessons of such a house are… that designing for mechanical services is not merely a matter of finding neat ways to install them… but of setting them to work in partnership with the structure so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts”.16 Meaning, of course, that the mechanical services were hidden from prime view and merged with the structure to become ‘invisible’. Technology was generally not controlled by its users, but had to be covered up so as not to show a type of mechanism that was not of interest to them in terms of its running of services, but only in its ability to bring a kind of comfort level to the modernized world that would suit its new abilities. This feeds into Mark Wigley’s argument of the controlled modern surface through the overall application of a coat of white paint and its whitewashing and cleansing of all distracting elements. Industrialization as such was never discussed in terms of its mechanization, but rather was only relevant as a design issue in terms of its aesthetic values. Therefore, the Machine Age aesthetic was used rather as an image and the modernisation that had occurred was likewise hidden from view. Banham argues that the modernisation in terms of new mechanisms did not interest the modern 15 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, London 1969, 93. 16 Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 109. SUSANNE BAUER 307 architect, nor the modern man. The ‘modern’ image has since been attached to this ‘pure’ and ‘honest’ aesthetic and was created at a time that was more defined through what lay behind this image. To this day, Le Corbusier is still regarded as the founding father of modern architecture, and therefore his architecture is often considered as all-white. However, Le Corbusier’s extensive research into polychrome architecture, and the introduction of coloured photographic images, only later superficially changed the perception of an all-white modern architecture. By analysing Le Corbusier’s colour scheme, it is granted that the all-white image of modern buildings was supported by the black and white photographic image that formed the symbolic white of the modern architecture and was soon used in countless advertising campaigns promoting the new machine age. Le Corbusier took on standardisation and mass-production as by-products of the Industrial Revolution that he was keen to show in his projects. While his buildings appeared monochrome, Le Corbusier unwillingly became associated with an all-white architectural style. The whiteness, however, was always essential to a polychrome architecture for him as it was the means to control the colours and put them in the right spatial order. In the introduction to his testimony on modern architecture, Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture), it is evident that the Industrial Revolution would change aspects of life as well as architecture. Rather than the drive for an aesthetically pleasing design, he was keen to show these new technologies in every aspect of his creations. Le Corbusier states: “a great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit. Economic law inevitably governs our acts and our thoughts... Industry on the grand scale must occupy itself with building and establish the elements of the house on a mass-produced basis… We shall arrive at the ‘HouseMachine.’”17 This new style that he was talking about was underlined by his Five Points of Architecture that created the new architecture as he envisioned it: the 17 Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, London 1995, 5ff. THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... 308 SUSANNE BAUER pilotis - the reinforced concrete columns; the free plan as a result of the absence of supporting walls as the concrete columns would take on the structural load; the free façade as it could be separated from the structure; the horizontal window; and the roof garden. What followed from this glorification of the machine was his 1925 book, L’art decorative d’aujourd’hui (The Decorative Art of Today), where he once again advocated the white wall. As Le Corbusier wrote: “imagine… every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white Ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanness, for the course adopted leads to refusal to allow anything at all which is not correct, authorised, intended, desired, thought-out: no action before thought.”18 Whiteness was even further celebrated in his memoirs of his travels through the Mediterranean, which he reflected upon in When the Cathedrals were White.19 It was about a new era of cityscapes, but, as the title suggests, his first chapter, entitled the Greatness of Things, was dedicated to the colour white. Le Corbusier proclaimed whiteness as a sign of a new era, “a great expression of liberty of the liberated spirit.”20 He exalted the whiteness as the author, the origin and as the zero-point of architecture, as he writes: “The cathedrals were white because they were new. The cities were new; they were constructed all at once, in an orderly way, regular, geometric, in accordance with plans. The freshly cut stone of France was dazzling in its whiteness, as the Acropolis in Athens had been white and dazzling, as the Pyramids of Egypt had gleamed with polished granite… The new world was beginning. White, limpid, joyous, clean, clear, and without hesitations, the new world was opening up like a flower among the ruins. They left behind them all recognized ways of doing things; they turned their backs on all that. In a hundred years the marvel was accomplished and Europe was 18 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today. London 1987, 188. 19 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, New York 1947. 20 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, 5. 309 changed.”21 The architectural characteristics of that white modern image of buildings, that of the white wall and flat roof, were taken up and promoted as “an essential aesthetic significance”22 of that style by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in the 1932 exhibition, now referred to as The International Style Exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It had been the aim of the curators to show the American public the new movement in architecture that they had found in Europe. In the work of this exhibition, “white is transformed into a ‘natural’ colour of a material, an extraordinary move that is slipped in as if nothing has happened. A moralistic tone of truth to materials is credited to white in the very moment that it successfully masks the material that it is added to”,23 as Mark Wigley notes. The exhibition came to prominence and widespread recognition through an accompanying book that was jointly written by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson called The International Style. This publication aimed at establishing the principles that made up the new style. According to Hitchcock and Johnson these were: “First, a new conception of architecture as volume rather than as mass. Secondly, regularity rather than axial symmetry serves as the chief means of ordering design. These two principles, with a third proscribing arbitrary applied decoration, mark the productions of the international style.”24 The First Principle of this new style – Architecture as Volume – was made possible through the advances in industry. Traditional masonry was replaced by a skeleton construction, which in turn allowed the plan to have a greater freedom than in the past. “The effect of mass, of static solidity, hitherto the prime quality of 21 Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, 4. 22 As Hitchcock and Johnson refer to it in the exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition and in the accompanying book to the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932. 23 Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, 331. 24 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style, New York 1995, 36. THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... 310 architecture, has all but disappeared; in its place there is an effect of volume, or more accurately, of plane surfaces bounding a volume. The prime architectural symbol is no longer the dense brick but the open box. Indeed, the great majority of buildings are in reality, as well as in effect, mere planes surrounding a volume.”25 he Second Principle of ‘the style’ was Concerning Regularity. The modern architect, who would use standardized parts as a technological advance in construction and for economic reasons, would have no problem implementing the second principle into an architecture derived from standardized construction units. “Modern standardization gives automatically a high degree of consistency in the parts. Hence modern architects have no need of the discipline of bilateral or axial symmetry to achieve aesthetic order. Asymmetrical schemes of design are actually preferable aesthetically as well 25 Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, 56. SUSANNE BAUER Figure 5. Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1932 311 THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... as technically. For asymmetry certainly heightens the general interest of the composition. Function in most types of contemporary building is more directly expressed in asymmetrical form.”26 Regularity in architecture was thus clearly set against a symmetrical architecture, but rather inevitably derived from the new construction solutions of modern architecture. The Third Principle – The Avoidance of Applied Decoration – was about the avoidance of cheap and common decoration. “The current style sets a high but not impossible standard for decoration: better none at all unless it be good. The principle is aristocratic rather than puritanical.”27 Although white as the chosen colour of modern architecture was not frequently referred to in The International Style publication, it was as though it was already 26 Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, 72. 27 Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, 87. Figure 6. Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1932 318 colour protects buildings in hot weather, from the harsh climate conditions, this vernacular tradition is one of the main reasons for the use of whiteness in Southern Modernism. Aesthetically, this could be considered as an ‘international style’ when in effect it was derived out of context and culture. In another of his well-known projects, he again found inspiration from modernist roots away from the aesthetics of the white wall. In the 1977 Bouça Social Housing, he introduced a bright red wall on the exterior façades of the four parallel four-storey high blocks comprising over a hundred apartments. Leoni refers to the whole scheme as: “More evident references to Dutch and German social buildings of the second half of the 20th century – and to J.J.P Oud in particular… based on the serial repetition of duplex dwellings. There is no lack of elements for re-reading popular tradition, although in an especially SUSANNE BAUER Figure 9. Alvaro Siza, Library, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, 1988-1995 319 abstract form here”.41 This abstract form is made visible through the bright red wall, which is inspired by another modernist architect known for his polychrome design rather than his white walls. Siza explained the red wall as a homage to Bruno Taut, who had been a strong influence on him. This was especially so as Taut had undertaken many social housing projects in Berlin and had worked together with the users, just as Siza did in Bouça, and red was the colour that Bruno Taut had used throughout his projects.42 As was the case with Bouça for Siza, influences in his work are constant and manifold. The continuity of his work is also a reflection of the continuity of architectural history itself for him and due to these various influences there 41 Giovanni Leoni, Alvaro Siza, Milan 2009, 43. 42 Alvaro Siza, interview 6 September 2012. THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... Figure 10. Alvaro Siza, Schilderwijk Housing, The Hague, Holland, 1989-1993 320 cannot be only one style describing his architectural work as well as those of his contemporaries. As he said: “The first contemporary stories of architecture begin firstly with a rationalist idea, with the evolution of techniques, appearance of steel and concrete and so on. But several relate to a time much sooner and go back to the 18th century. They don’t begin with what we now call rationalism but go further back. At the end it is a reflection that we not only see new things in the new architecture, but we see more and more things that are taken from the past. And the interesting thing for all architects is that we see more and more past relationships in what we perceive as new architecture.”43 He further acknowledges the difficult position of his work, set between an architecture of culture and that of a modern generalized world as succumbing to an international design language, but taking influences from both vernacular and 43 Alvaro Siza, interview 6 September 2012. SUSANNE BAUER Figure 11. Alvaro Siza, Ibere Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1998-2008 321 modern architecture: “It is said that my works, both recent and those made some years ago, are based on the traditional architecture of the region. Yet even with these works I encountered the resistance of workmen and the anger of passers-by. Tradition is a challenge to innovation. It consists of successive inserts. I am a conservative and a traditionalist – that is to say, I move between conflicts, compromises, hybridization, transformation. They tell me that I do not have a supporting theory or method. That nothing I do points the way... A sort of boat at the mercy of the waves which inexplicably does not always get wrecked... I do not expose the boards of our boats too much, at least not on the high seas. Excesses tend to smash them to bits. I study the currents, eddies, I make sure I know where the inlets are before taking a risk. I can be seen alone, walking the deck. All the crew and the equipment is there, the captain is a ghost. I dare not put my hand on the helm, when the pole star is barely visible. And I do THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... Figure 12. Alvaro Siza, Faculty of Architecture, University of Oporto, Porto, Portugal, 1986-1996 322 not point out a clear way. The ways are never clear.”44 It is in this quotation perhaps, that the problematic of the similarity of the vernacular aesthetics of a Southern Modernism with that of a generalised international design language become inherent. The architecture of Southern Modernism must therefore be analysed in its traditional context and its architects must not be assumed to have succumbed to an international style language. The status of contemporary architecture - not only in Southern Modernism - and its continuous link to an aesthetic of the modern style is made visible through the use of the white wall. Yet, the use of white has since been disconnected from a design language influenced by social and political conditions in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Whereas in Europe the modern aesthetic had itself established from a move away from the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, as well 44 Alvaro Siza, in Kenneth Frampton, Alvaro Siza – Complete Works, 71ff. SUSANNE BAUER Figure 13. Alvaro Siza, SAAL Housing Estate Bouca, Porto, Portugal, 1975-1977 and 2001-2006 323 as a social and political necessity of pre-fabricated building products, modern architecture in the branding of the ‘international style’ was then recognized as an intellectual method of formal analysis of architectural space. By doing so, modern aesthetics were applied as a continuation of these stylistic principles and, thus, the modern fashion image has become the medium itself. The use of white has therefore been disconnected from an international style in Southern Modernism. Modern influences are integral to the architecture of Southern Modernism, as in the work of Alvaro Siza, however, the international design language cannot be defined among many different cultures. The white image of Southern Modernism must be differentiated from the fashion image for an international audience. It is in this sense that Reyner Banham’s critique on the modern image finds its validation: “The pure white image of a new architecture… has become a threat, a whited sepulchre in which modern architecture could die… All that had happened, in fact, was that modern THE DEFAULT MATERIALITY OF WHITENESS IN SOUTHERN MODERNISM ... Figure 14. Alvaro Siza, SAAL Housing Estate Bouca, Porto, Portugal, 1975-1977 and 2001-2006 324 SUSANNE BAUER architecture had ceased to be a stylistic teenager, and its practitioners were no longer compelled to wear the uniform of their peer-group for fear of expulsion from the gang… But the teenage uniform of modern architecture, the socalled International Style, or White Architecture, nowhere near exhausts the possibilities inherent in its heredity and formation. The next move was not as many people thought around 1950, simply to put the clock back half a century and write off modern as a mistake; there was no need to go back to the old architecture that was before 1900.”45 As much as this was true in the middle of the 20th century, the internationalization of the modern image becomes even more evident as it is still attached to different design styles and cultures, and thus, prevents the visibility and analysis of different Modernisms. It is no coincidence that the International Style also derived from the fascination of the vernacular style of the Mediterranean; yet, the regional architecture of these places is now classified under this international style. 45 Reyner Banham, Guide to Modern Architecture, London 1962, 18. 325 AUTHORS ANAT FALBEL Received her Ph. D in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo, in 2003, with the thesis “Lucjan Korngold: the trajectory of an immigrant architect”, dealing with the subject of émigrés architects, between the 40’s and 60’s in the city of São Paulo. Presently she is a researcher collaborator of the IFCH/ State university of Campinas. A Canadian Center of Architecture Visiting scholar (2013), she is a member of the EAHN and the DOCOMOMO. Editor of the book Bruno Zevi Arquitetura e Judaísmo: Mendelsohn (2002), she was responsible for the editions of Joseph Rykwert in Brazil. In 2011 she curated the exhibitions “Exile and Modernity: The space of the foreigner in the city of Sao Paulo” and in 2013 “Vagabond Stars: Memories of the Jewish Theater in Brazil”. Her recent publications are dedicated to issues of architecture historiography and photography. ANTONI REMESAR BETLLOCH Is Full Professor in the Fine Arts Faculty at the Universitat de Barcelona. He is the Director of the M.A. in Urban Design: Art, City, Society and of the PhD Program Public Space and Urban Regeneration: Art, Theory and Heritage at the same University. Head of the research Center POLIS where he leads the research Group Art, Ciutat, Societat since 1999. He is the main editor of Cr. POLIS digital journal On the W@terfront. (www.ub.edu/escult). BEGOÑA FARRÉ TORRAS Completed a BA (2011) and an MA (2014) in Art History at Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she is at present undertaking her PhD. She is a researcher at Instituto de História da Arte, of the same university, currently engaged in the Southern Modernisms Exploratory Project ref. EXPL/CPCHAT/0191/2013. CONCHA DIEZ-PASTOR E IRIBAS Dr Arch (PhD) with a Master’s degree in architectural space (MRes, University of London, UK), she is a practicing architect (1996, ETSAM). She obtained her PhD (summa cum laude) in 2003 (ArchitecturalComposition and Theory Dept., ETSAM, Madrid). Since then she has been Professor of Architectural Theory at IESA, IE University–Segovia; UCJC (Madrid); ESNE School of Architectural Design (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos I, Madrid); and ETSAM (Madrid). She has lectured at BUTE (Budapest, Hungary), Bauhaus-Univeristät Weimar (Germany), and the UK, among other places, and has joined several research projects. At present she is Head Researcher and Director of the ‘Project Architectology’: http://architectology.wordpress.com. Among her writings are the book Carlos Arniches y Martín Domínguez, arquitectos de la Generación del 25 (ISBN: 84-932367-8-0); 15 biographies of Modernist architects to the Spanish Biographic Dictionary (Royal Academy of History); a 326 contribution to the collective work Nationalism and Architecture (ISBN: 978-1-4094-3385-9), and a number of articles including ''Albergues de carretera' (Highway inns): a key step in the evolution of Spanish tourism and modernist architecture', Journal of Tourism History, 2: 1, 1 — 22, 2010 (DOI: 10.1080/17551821003777832), accessible at (last seen, 27th June, 2015): http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/17551821003777832. Her article on Modernist public architecture in Spain is now under review. GEORGE EPOLITO Is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture in the U.K. His research explores the intersection of politics and culture with an emphasis on the innovative aesthetics produced by people who have been displaced into the margins of societies. His recent book chapters regarding displacement are: On Otherness - Looking at (different ways of) Inculcating Diversity in Space Unveiled: Invisible Cultures in the Design Studio (2014) and Parallel Expressions: Artistic Contributions of Italian Immigrants In South America at the Time of Simon Rodia in Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development (2014). GERBERT VERHEIJ Graduated from the New University of Lisbon with a degree in Art History. His M.A. thesis centred on public sculpture in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique during the 1930s-1940s. At the moment he is doing PhD research at the University of Barcelona on town planning and urban aesthetics in Barcelona and Lisbon during the early twentieth century. GUSTAVO PEIXOTO MA in Architecture (UFRJ, 1993). PhD in Social History Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais in 2004. Full Professor and Permanent member of the Programa de Pós Graduação em Arquitetura – PROARQ. From 2006 to 2010 he was the Dean of the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (UFRJ). A visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (2013-2014) Between his main publications are Reflexos das luzes na Terra do Sol: on architectural theory at the age of Independence. (São Paulo: ProEditores, 1999), Guia da arquitetura eclética, romântica do Rio de Janeiro (co-edtitor with Jorge Czajkowski– Rio de Janeiro, Casa da Palavra, 2000) Leituras em teoria da arquitetura 3 volumes (co-editor with Beatriz Oliveira, Gulherme Lassance and Laís Bronstein–Rio de Janeiro: Viana & Mosley, 2009; Rio de Janeiro: Viana & Mosley, 201;–Rio de Janeiro: RioBooks, 2011) Estratégia da Aranha of the possibility of a metahistorical teaching in architecture. Rio de Janeiro, Rio Books, 2013. IVÁN YLLERA Teaching Assistant of Architectural Design under professor Javier Frechilla for two years, 2008-09 and 2009-10, at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Architect by ETSAM, UPM, 2002. In 2010 he obtained a PG Dip in Doctoral Studies at the ETSAM. Now he is a PhD candidate and is working on his Doctoral Thesis titled: Veranear de nuevo. Reinterpretación de la modernidad en algunas casas ibéricas de los 1950s. (Summering again. Reinterpretation of Modernity in some Iberian Houses from the 1950s) at the Department of Architecture, ETSAM, UPM. JOANA CUNHA LEAL Is Assistant Professor in the Art History Department of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she teaches graduate and post-graduate courses on 19th and early 20th century art and architecture, art theory and historiography. She is also Associated Researcher of the Art History Institute of the same University, where she leads a research group on Art theory, historiography and criticism. She is also a permanent collaborator of the CEAA research group from ESAP. Her recent work privileges the study of modernism and the avant-garde. Her research project on “Other Modernisms? The case of Amadeo Souza Cardoso” was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 2010. She was also a fellow of the Stone Summer Theory Institute 2010 – “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic” (Chicago, July 2010). She currently PI of “Southern Modernisms” (EXPL/ CPC-HAT/0191/2013). AUTHORS 327 JORGE PALINHOS Is a playwright and researcher. He has a degree in Modern Languages and Literature from the Faculty of Arts, Universidade doPorto and a Masters in Terminology and Translation from the same university. He has written and worked for the theatre since 2003, and several of his plays have been presented and gained awards in Portugal and abroad. He studied dramaturgy with Guillermo Heras, Hans-Thiers Lehmann, JeanPierre Sarrazac, Mick Gordon, Michael Bradford, Andrea Thome, Jose Sanchis Sinisterra, Neil LaBute, Raimondo Cortese, Thomas Bakk, Linda Seger, Goran Radovanovic, Ahmed Boulane, Paulo Filipe Monteiro and Vergílio de Almeida. He co-edits the journal Drama, published by the Portuguese Association of Screenwriters and Scriptwriters, and he is a member of the scientific commission of the journal Persona. He has also published with Sinais de Cena, P3, Grande Porto e Porto24. He has published articles in several journals and presented papers at a number of conferences. He is currently undertaking FCTfunded research in Contemporary Drama. MARIA HELENA MAIA Graduate Graduate in History/Art and Archaeology and PhD in Modern Architecture and Restoration. Professor at ESAP and member of its Directorate (Deputy Director). Director of CEAA, FCT R&D unit 4041 and principal researcher of its Architectural Studies research group; Researcher of the projects Photography, Modern Architecture and the "Escola do Porto": Interpretations on Teófilo Rego Archive (20132015), Southern Modernisms (2014-2015). Last related publications, include the books To and Fro: Modernism and Vernacular Architecture (ed.) and Dois Parâmetros de Arquitectura Postos em Surdina. Leitura crítica do Inquérito à arquitectura regional. Cadernos 3 and 4 (all with A. Cardoso and J.C. Leal, 2013). Prizes: (1) José de Figueiredo 2008 of Portuguese National Academy of Fine Arts; (2) Ignasi de Lecea 2007-2008 of Public Art & Design Observatory –Universitat de Barcelona (with M. Acciaiuoli and J. C. Leal). MARIA JOSÉ DE AZEVEDO MARCONDES Architect and urbanist, Ph.D. in Architecture and Urbanism from the School of Architecture of the University of São Paulo. Professor Doctor of undergraduate courses in Architecture, Urbanism, and Visual Arts, and also of the Visual Arts Post Graduate Programme of the Arts of the Institute of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Author of various articles, a book, and chapters of books on subjects such as Modern Cultural Heritage, Cultural Landscape and Public Spaces. Since 2003, coordinator of Research Groups accredited by the National Council for Scientific and Technical Development - Art and the City, and of the group Criteria for the Revitalization of Cultural Heritage. Former member of the Council for the Defense of Historical, Artistic and Touristic Heritage of the State of São Paulo. MARIANA MATA PASSOS (1981, Lisboa, Portugal) Is an art history graduate student at FCSH-UNL, currently working on a master’s dissertation on two Portuguese architects, Carlos e Guilherme Rebelo de Andrade. MERCÈ VIDAL I JANSÀ Is a professor of History of Modern and Contemporary Art at Universitat de Barcelona, where she completed her PhD (1989) with a thesis on Noucentisme art theory and criticism. She has taught 20th century Art, Architecture and Design at Universitat de Barcelona as well as at other universities and design schools in Barcelona and France. She has conducted research at Fondation Le Corbusier, curated exhibitions and participated in heritage surveys. She has authored books and papers on her research interests: art production, architecture and interior furnishings, museography and historiography. NIKOS DASKALOTHANASSIS Was born in Athens in 1961 (BA, University of Athens, MA, Université de Paris I, PhD University of Thessaloniki). His books (in Greek) include The construction of De Chirico's 'arte metafisica' visual space (Athens, Opera Publications, 2001), The artist as historical subject: 19th-21st centuries (Athens, Agra Publications, 2004), From minimal art to conceptual art: a critical anthology (editor) AUTHORS 334 ABSTRACTS The investigation into the whiteness of Modernism therefore serves as a tool into the overall analysis of the change of different modern architectural design languages within cultures and times. The whiteness used in the architecture of Southern Europe in the mid-20th century therefore differs in its purpose and usage to an international style language used in the US and might equally be seen as a characteristic of its regional and vernacular styles as well as derived from various influences of architectural histories. In the case of Alvaro Siza the continuity as well as its connection to an international design language is questioned through his diverse projects along with his many influences and his relation to continuity and change. 335 336 -1- SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: from A to Z and back again SOUTHERN MODERNISMS: from A to Z and back again Joana Cunha Leal Maria Helena Maia Begoña Farré Torras Editors CEAA - IHA Project Southern Modernisms (EXPL/CPC-HAT/0191/2013) CEAA I Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo and IHA - Instituto de História de Arte, 2015