Y el Madrid, Qué, ¿Otra Vez Campeón de Europa? ¿No? /And Real Madrid Once Again European Champion, Right? Spanish architecture and CIAM debates from 1953 to 1959

Y EL MADRID, QUÉ, ¿OTRA VEZ CAMPEÓN DE EUROPA? ¿NO? AND REAL MADRID ONCE AGAIN EUROPEAN CHAMPION, RIGHT? Spanish Architecture and CIAM debates from 1953 to 1959 José Vela Castillo IE School of Architecture and Design, IE University, Segovia, Spain Abstract In August 11 1956 José Luis Sert opened the Dubrovnik CIAM 10 meeting with his speech on The Future of CIAM. Just two months earlier, June 13, the Real Madrid Football Club won the European Cup in Paris. It was the first European Cup as such and the first of the many trophies won by the Spanish club. This, of course, is an anecdote, but a fairly informative one. That a Spanish and exiled architect opened the CIAM 10 strongly contrasted with one of the few international events starred by Francoist Spain: winning the European cup. This is an oblique way of saying that CIAM debates were far from being a concern in the Spanish theoretical and professional architecture milieu in the 1950s. Spanish architects were starting to incorporate the basic trends of post-war modernism to their designs at this time, and the American and European modern architecture slowly began to filter, but they were far from being involved in the heated 1956 CIAM debate. However, one Spanish architect, José Antonio Coderch entered CIAM, following Sert’s suggestions, ready to participate as a Team 10 member in the 1959 Otterlo schwanengesang, and for sure some of the preoccupations that occupied CIAM also concerned the Spaniards. This paper recounts how in this brief period, say between 1953 and 1959 with the key middle date of 1956, the contemporary CIAM debates obliquely entered the previously isolated Spain, and how Spanish architects caught up (if so) with post-war modernism and its criticism at the same time. Keywords: Spanish Architecture, 1950s, CIAM, Modernism This text is less about the post-CIAM period, than about how Modern architecture entered Spain after 1953. This is somewhat surprising. The thesis behind is that there were no real post-CIAM debates in Spain (or they came very late) because, in fact, there were no CIAM debates either. During the time when CIAM moved into TEAM X and beyond, modernism still was entering into the country. And when at least one significative encounter happened between the TEAM X group and one Spanish architect, José Vela Castillo, And Real Madrid once again European champion, right? 306 José Antonio Coderch, this was more on personal affinities than on intellectual bases. There was, of course, a post-CIAM period in Spain, at least in chronological terms. Some of the architectural operations that characterized the positions of, say, the Smithsons or Van Eyck were replicated in Spanish architecture, but without the intellectual and even philosophical acumen that went to define the emergent field of architectural theory. Let’s say that we need to wait till the nineties seventies, when for example the journals 2C Construcción de la Ciudad (1972) and Arquitecturas bis (1974) were founded in Barcelona. This is, then, the story of what happened before, the necessary counterpoint to understand that almost nothing happened after. I. The ad It was a very famous TV Ad in Spain. Launched in 1994, it helped to place the Mitsubishi Montero (named ‘Pajero’ in the rest of the world but changed because the involuntarily sexual connotations of the Spanish word) as one of the leading 4WD cars. The 30 minute ad happened mostly inside a dark shepherd’s cabin. A young man eats from a bowl while the old shepherd, with his traditional cap (boina), repeats, in astonishment, some of the ‘news’ that the young guest seems to have told him. A famous businessman and a Spanish ex-minister are mentioned, critically, prompting the old man to ask himself: ‘Y Franco, ¿qué opina de esto? Ah, leche, me dijo usted que Franco había muerto’ (And Franco, what does he think about it? Oh, damn, you told me Franco had died). And the he adds: ‘Y el Madrid, qué, ¿otra vez campeón de Europa? ¿no?’ (And Real Madrid, once again European champion, right?). Cut and outside shot of a shiny red Mitsubishi parked by REVISITING POST-CIAM GENERATION: debates, proposals and intellectual framework Proceedings. Porto, April 11-13, 2019 307 the cabin. Moral: ‘Donde te lleve tu Montero hace mucho que no ha llegado nadie’ (Where your Montero takes you, no one came long ago)1. Figure 1. Mitsubishi Montero Spanish TV Ad, 1994. II. Spain in the 1950s The ad was intelligent (and very funny), and still today many people remember it. In fact, the sentence ‘Y el Madrid, qué, ¿otra vez campeón de Europa?’ entered the daily language long ago. Apart from that, it aptly summarizes Spanish life in the early 1950s: an isolated country, ruled authoritatively by the dictator Francisco Franco, its only point of contact with the reality of a bigger world being… football (not culture, not politics, not economy: just football). The stone shepherds cabin lost in the countryside is an almost straightforward metaphor of the country itself, the shepherd of its inhabitants. The visitor, an alien from another planet 1 Translation by the autor. José Vela Castillo, And Real Madrid once again European champion, right? 308 (America?), the modern car a sign of a time that has not arrived to this place yet. True? Mostly true. However, if the general picture is correct, this is not the whole story. On the one hand, at the same time Real Madrid started winning its five consecutive European trophies (1955-56, 1956-57, 1957-58, 1958-59, 1959-60, what a set!) the country underwent an important series of transcendental changes that started in 1953 with the US-Spain Agreements (known as ‘Pacto de Madrid’) and culminated in the Plan de Estabilización in 1959. On the other, the isolation of the country during the decade of the 1940s, if real, did not prevent some continuities with pre-Civil War (Republican) state of affairs and the filtering, slow and partial but steady, of new/modern ideas in the cultural realm, including architecture and urbanism. As said, 1953 was a key year. The signature of the ‘Pacto de Madrid’ opened the country to foreign influence. The agreements granted economic and military aid to Franco in exchange of the right to build an extensive set of military bases in Spain. And this meant not only the beginning of the return of the country to the Western community of nations, once the US superpower blessed the Franco regime, but also the beginning of a different economic policy and the slow but secure cultural Americanisation of the country. With the Americans entered into Spain a different tecnoeconomical rationality, and the country moved towards free-market or at least to a much more open and interconnected form of capitalism, which inevitable opened Spain to foreign influences, not only coming from America itself. The Agreements were signed September 23th, and this very same September, coincidentally, José Luis Sert began his tenure as Dean of the Graduate School of Design in Harvard. The by then liberal version of Sert could have been perfectly welcomed in Spain at the time, his role as an expert at the service of the economic system in which he lived and REVISITING POST-CIAM GENERATION: debates, proposals and intellectual framework Proceedings. Porto, April 11-13, 2019 309 practiced in this moment, and that helped to conform from the point of view of urban planning, was perfectly in tune with the needs of Spain in these years, although clearly not in political terms. By the end of decade, if not directly enforced clearly suggested by the Americans, the Plan Nacional de Estabilización Económica was passed, an inevitable economic turn led by Opus Dei technocrats to prevent the bankruptcy of the country. At the same time, this Plan set the basis for the Spanish Economic Miracle of the 1960s (GDP growth over 7% of between 1960 and 1973) and for the transformation of the backward country in a quasi-modern one (but not a democratic one) in the following decades, till the oil crisis of 1973. III. Post-war CIAM in Spain The main dates framing this process, 1953 and 1959 coincide, curiously enough, with the important period of actualization, transformation and demise of CIAM itself, that started in Aix-en-Provence in 1953 (Charter of Habitat), crossed the midpoint of CIAM 10 in Dubrovnik in 1956 and ended in disarray in Otterlo in 1959. Or, what is the same, imploded forced by inner criticism of Team 10. In this brief period, the contemporary CIAM debates slowly entered the previously isolated Spain however obliquely, with the result that only in the last Otterlo meeting an Spanish (from Spain2) was present, José Antonio Coderch. In fact, it was the time when contemporary modern architecture, in its complex and varied forms, began to be practiced in Spain. 2 I mean, of course, representing Spain. For sure, Jose Luis Sert was Spanish, as Antonio Bonet Castellana, who atended the Bergamo meeting, but in representation of Argentina together with Juan Kurchan (the two plus Jorge Ferrari Hardoy formed the Grupo Austral in 1938), where he exiled and was still living, although he eventually returned to Spain (definitively in 1963). José Vela Castillo, And Real Madrid once again European champion, right? 310 In that sense, José Antonio Coderch is a paradigmatic example. Coderch had been one of the founders of Grup R in 1951, a group of progressive Catalan architects which included Josep Maria Sostres, Antoni de Moragas, Josep Pratmarsó, Francisco Juan Barba Corsini, Joaquim Gili y Manuel Valls along with younger names as Oriol Bohigas, Josep Martorell or Manuel Ribas, although he quit by 1953. In a way they were inheritors of the prewar GATCPAC3/GATEPAC group, the Catalan/Spanish section of CIAM at the time. But Grup R never entered CIAM as such, nor they were as connected with politics as their predecessors (in Cataluña) during Republican times. However they too were interested in popular architecture, especially Mediterranean-Catalan4, which for some like Coderch, and in the late 1940s-very early 1950s was a good way of justifying the practice of ‘modern architecture’ inside the predominant historicist and vernacular stylistic trends favoured by the Francoist regime (Ruiz Cabrero 2001, Cortés 2000). Coderch was invited by Sert, when still CIAM president, to join the organization; however no Spanish chapter was created. Following Coderch presence in Dubrovnik, he was asked by Bakema (secretary of the group) to join the Team 10 (Mumford 2002, 337; Rodríguez García 2014), which he finally did5. Coderch wasn’t an intellectual, though, and modern and advanced as his architecture was in this years, he was personally more a right-wing traditionalist. Nevertheless, shortly after joining Team 10, he published his famous article ‘No son genios lo que necesitamos ahora’, along an English translation (‘It is not geniuses that we need to-day’) in Domus 384, in November 1961, as a kind of self-introduction to the group6. 3 Of which Sert was one of the more active members. 4 Like Sert (Pizza 1997) and his colleagues Torres-Clavé and Subirana were. 5 In a letter to Bakema, dated May 22, 1962 Coderch added this postscript: ‘As I am convinced that the Team-ten is really useful and may become the impulse of many necessary reforms and initiatives for our trade of Architects, I have made up my mind to beg you -as the Secretary of the Team-10to accept me as member of the Team-ten - if you think that my taking part in it would be useful’. In Rodríguez García 2014. 6 Re-published by Alison Smithson as ‘It’s Not Geniuses We Need Now’ in the Team 10 Primer, Architectural Design, December 1962. REVISITING POST-CIAM GENERATION: debates, proposals and intellectual framework Proceedings. Porto, April 11-13, 2019 311 And he kept attending Team 10 meetings till their end in the seventies, being a respected figure as a practitioner inside the much more experimental and intellectual group. Figure 2. José Antonio Coderch and Manuel Valls, Casa Ugalde, Caldes d’Estrac, 1952. IV. The long way towards modern architecture in the countryside and the city It is significant, however, that, given the (mostly) anti-modern period of the 1940s in Spanish architecture, when Spanish architects started to introduce modern ideas and styles (and the plural is intentional) at the beginning of the 1950s, they were in need to catch up almost simultaneously with (post-war) modernism and its criticism, which can be clearly seen in the formation of the Team 10 group inside CIAM precisely at the moment that modern style started to be used in Spain. And even if some aspects of this criticism were already present in the previous Spanish José Vela Castillo, And Real Madrid once again European champion, right? 312 debates, the intellectual form they took was fairly different, since they came from a different tradition. The Spanish Civil War ended April 1st 1939, with immediate consequences for Spanish architecture. Many architects, most of the modernist ones, were either forced to exile or disqualified to work by the fascist regime. Modern architecture was seen by many as foreign, associated with the loathed República, hence unfit for the new fascist Spain or even worse, directly communist. Architecture turns decidedly towards an historicist and neoimperialist style, sometimes labelled ‘Nationalcatolicism’ or sank into regionalism. Germany and especially Italy, the friend fascists countries, were seen as models for many; for others it was the Imperial past of Spain, represented by El Escorial. In addition, the hard economic conditions after the war and the start of WWII, where Spain was technically neutral, forced the continuity of traditional techniques and designs, the possibility of full industrial development of building construction out of question. The Francoist state opted for an economic policy based in autarky that lasted till the mid-fifties. From 1939 on, the priority of the Francoist state was the reconstruction of the agrarian and industrial tissue of the country; the material reconstruction of what had been destroyed in the cities was postponed. The two main aims were to transform a mostly traditional agriculture into an industrial one and to create a heavy industry sector of their own, both with self-sufficiency in mind (autarky). Two main state agencies were created to cope with the architectural demands, especially in the countryside, the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas y Reparaciones (DGRDR) and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (INC), who built extensively. During the 1940s most of the architecture they produced followed traditional techniques and designs, only slowly entering more rational and modern approaches towards the end of the decade. But if not always in stylistic terms, and surely not in terms of political REVISITING POST-CIAM GENERATION: debates, proposals and intellectual framework Proceedings. Porto, April 11-13, 2019 313 responses, preoccupations on social housing and urbanism shared concerns with some of the contemporary European developments. For example, in Scandinavia, and especially in Sweden, which also remained neutral during the War. Spain definitively wasn’t a social democracy, but concerns with the deleterious effects on the ‘common man’ by way of the pressures of modernization were similar, even coming from different ideological and cultural approaches. In England J.M. Richardson, from the Architectural Review, proposed the term ‘New Empiricism’ to refer to this Scandinavian approaches, which, through the MARS group entered the CIAM debates too. By early 1950s a new generation of Spanish architects, graduated after the war, started to emerge and to introduce this contemporary ideas and debates. They were also aware of these first criticisms of Modern orthodoxy, and sought a mixed esthetical approach, far both from ‘Nationalcatolicism’ and straightforward versions of modernism, unsuited for the Spanish conditions as has been said. Particularly relevant were the debates inside the Instituto Nacional de Colonización, that showed bot continuities with pre-war Republican ideas and with contemporary modern architecture, which meant that they found themselves, in many cases, nearer the first revisionist approaches without ever being fully modern. The INC was the responsible for the planning of entire new agricultural villages, with which the Regime tried to revitalize the countryside, producing attractive environments for the peasants to come and develop strong agricultural production poles in new irrigation areas. The roots of this policy can be seen, among others, in the Italian developments in the Agro Pontino and in the Spanish República initiatives around the Guadalmellato and Guadalquivir riverbeds, in both cases Prewar initiatives. At the beginning of the decade of the 1950s some of the best Spanish architects were designing new Poblados de Colonización for the INC, like José Luis Fernandez del Amo (Cañada del Agra, Vegaviana), Alejandro de la Sota (Esquivel), Antonio Fernández Alba (El Priorato) or the José Vela Castillo, And Real Madrid once again European champion, right? 320 the State, a corollary of the fascist political ideas of the Nuevo Estado was finally, in advantageous conditions, given to capitalist private initiative. The turn towards free market led also to an unprecedented growth in the country, and even if a new law that regulates real state (Ley del Suelo) was passed in 1956 and Planning was implemented in any major city, the tools showed the inadequacy to cope with the accelerated change of the 1960s. The result was a dull and overcrowded periphery mostly devoid of services and community cores. Team 10 formal findings also entered Spanish architecture, but for the intellectual debates with philosophical overtones it took a little bit more time to arrive. During the sixties Spanish architects mostly followed the tamed and very diverse modern vocabulary they discovered during the previous decade, from more strict International Style to overt organicism, brutalism and the beginning of contextualism. The architects that started to introduce modern ideas continue to develop them, and the new generations incorporated easily, following the opened path of their masters. And architecture, somehow, normalized. Modernism came late to Spain, but this, paradoxically, allowed Spanish architects a much freer relation with the ‘style’, if we are to call it a style. The younger generation debates inside CIAM in the post-war time were not really significant in the Spanish context, basically because there wasn’t an older modern generation to discuss with. This had been cut out with the Civil War. In that sense, they felt freer to adopt and adapt different approaches, and contribute with their own preoccupations to a debate that was, surely, held much more in the built than in the written form. REVISITING POST-CIAM GENERATION: debates, proposals and intellectual framework Proceedings. Porto, April 11-13, 2019 321 References Baldellou M. Á., and Capitel, A. (1995). Arquitectura Española del Siglo XX. Summa Artis, Vol. XL. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Cortés, J. A. (2000). Internacionalismo y referencias vernáculas en los años cincuenta. In Rispa, R. (Ed.), Arquitectura del siglo XX: España (pp. 140-167). Sevilla: Tanáis and Sociedad Estatal Hannover 2000. Diefendorf, J.M. (1993). In the Wake of War. The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. López Díaz, J. (2003). Vivienda social y Falange: ideario y construcciones en la década de los 40. Scripta Nova Vol. VII, núm. 146(024). Loren, M. 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Barcelona: Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña. Rodríguez García, A. (2014). ‘No son genios lo que necesitamos ahora’. Una reflexión sobre el escrito de J. A. Coderch en el contexto de Team 10. In: I Congreso Pioneros de la Arquitectura Moderna Española: Vigencia de su pensamiento y obra. Madrid. Ruiz Cabrero, G. (2000). Los intensos sesenta. In: Rispa, R. (Ed.), Arquitectura del siglo XX: España (pp. 186-217). Sevilla: Tanáis and Sociedad Estatal Hannover 2000. Ruiz Cabrero, G. (2001). El Moderno en España. Arquitectura 1948-2000. Sevilla: Tanáis. Sambricio, C. (2000). Desarrollo del Gran Madrid en los años cincuenta y sesenta. In: Rispa, R. (Ed.), Arquitectura del siglo XX: España (pp. 168-185). Sevilla: Tanáis and Sociedad Estatal Hannover 2000. Urrutia, Á. (1997). Arquitectura Española del Siglo XX. Madrid: Cátedra. José Vela Castillo is a practicing architect, researcher and educator based in Madrid. He holds a Ph.D. in architecture from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He is assistant professor of Design Studio and Architecture History and Theory in the IE School of Architecture and Design (Segovia and Madrid, Spain).He publishes regularly both in José Vela Castillo, And Real Madrid once again European champion, right? 322 Spanish and English and presents his research in international conferences. In 2010, he published the book (De)gustaciones Gratuitas on Derrida and Mies van der Rohe (translated in 2012 into Portuguese). He is also author of a book on the work of architect Richard Neutra. He is founding member of Intersección, a research group on philosophy and architecture. His current research is focused in the architecture of the US military bases in Spain in the 1950s.