Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In “ Design by Choice” ( 1961), Reyner Banham reflected on the role of architects in the new visual environment of objects. Faced with uncontrollable industrial productions, post-war architects were losing their traditional role of “ total designers”. Banham evoked Le Corbusier’s exercise of “ creative choice” with example of the Esprit Nouveau Pavillon ( 1925). Here, the architect refused to design domestic objects and tried to impose the “background control over the choice of others”. Banham was also interested in Alison and Peter Smithson’s “Art of Inhabitation”, domonstrated by their two exhibitions with two artists, Nigel Henderson and Edouardo Paolozzi. Parallel of Life and Art ( 1953) exhibited the accumulation of unusual images from real life and created an unexpected perception of the exhibition room. In Patio and Pavilion ( 1956), the architects were concerned only with pavilion construction inside the room, and assigned the artists to arrange the objects. It was the artists who completely renewed the space, as if inhabitants personalized inside of the new habitat. The Smithsons were influenced by the Eames House ( 1949) through the media. The photo of the living room of the American furniture designer couple, published several times in the Smithsons’ writings, showed a house not “for living in” but “already lived”, and presented mise-en-scène of an ordinary life from American advertisements or films. The Smithsons also compared the interior of the Eames with that of Le Corbusier. The Eames House was far from the aesthetics of the architect-painter, but closer to that of a “layout man” of cinema. The arrangement of the objects by the Eames looked instantaneous and changeable, unlike the composition in a Purist still life. According to the Smithsons, the attitude of the Eames could be translated into a strategy they called the “ Select and Arrange”, almost similar to their “ Art of Inhabitation”. The “ Select and Arrange” is close to the everyday acts of popular people: “ flower arrangement”, “ furnishing”, or “ apples on a plates” at breakfast. The domestic scene becomes spontaneous arrangement of objects “ without rhetoic” and is completely left to the hands of real inhabitants. The “ Art of Inhabitation” continues to this day : based on the hypothesis that the separation between objects-contained and architecture-container will be more evident, architecture seeks neutrality of plan. However, it is not impossible to bridge this rupture between objects and architecture : Examplary strategies are : Auto- Construction “ without architects” but by inhabitants ; Architects’s Baukunst( art of building) from ready-made elements in industrial catalogs. The art of inhabitant influences the art of architect. Nevertheless, choice and arrangement must remain “ adventurous” beyond functional and aesthetic conventions.

The article considers the De Bijenkorf department store as a milestone in Marcel Breuer’s career. The shift it involves can only be understood through the discoveries made in surface superimposition by his Bauhaus colleague Anni Albers. Her influence involves her evolution from 1936 onwards, following her first trip to Mexico to gain a first-hand understanding of Mayan textiles. This learning involved the transition from a design based on the structure of the fabric to another more spontaneous one in which figurative motifs were superimposed onto the structural background. Anni Albers’ progress inspired Breuer’s Dutch project. The strategy of surface superimposition in the field of architecture made façades the subject of study. Concerning this issue, there are three main stages in the architect’s career: the first began in the 1940s, and was based on the literal superimposition of sunshades, which finally led to the vibrations of the different planes of glass used; the second was initiated in the 1950s, with the Dutch projects built in stone, and based on the notion of phenomenal superimposition as determinant; and the third was that of the 1960s and 1970s, in which stone gradually gave way to the larger scale of prefabricated concrete, enabling him to play with the project’s sculptural features. The example studied here illustrates the transition from the first to the second stage. It is characterised by planar stratification. Firstly, the main volume was established as a background in gestaltic terms. The restaurant’s long, deep apertures emphasized the volumetric treatment. Secondly, the volume’s external planes were also addressed in superficial terms, not as the surface of the volume in itself, but as a fabric superimposed on it. In turn, this fabric was composed of different layers. The pattern of loophole windows and the texture of the travertine slabs need to be understood as transparent and superimposed. In the latter case, the pattern varied from one façade to the other due to the different shapes of the stone slabs. This enabled the architect to play with distinct vibrations that would be perceived from different distances. The strategy of planar stratification as the result of the quality of phenomenal superimposition enables the building to acquire its characteristic presence. A phenomenon occurs when the different layers blend into one image that alludes to a textile and gives the building its materiality. Solidity and transparency then merge: Sun and Shadow.

The main purpose of this text is to address the ideas that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown proposed in defense of the American Suburb throughout the 1970s, from a new critical perspective that can make them relevant for a contemporary reader. To achieve this particular approach, I would like to shift the area of reflection from the notion of the “ symbolic”, which Venturi and Scott Brown placed at the center of their theoretical project, to the ideas of the “ quotidian” and “ everyday life” as they were theorized by thinkers like Henri Lefebvre or Michel De Certeau during the second half of the Twentieth century. Within the general theory of the everyday, the article concentrates on how the complementary notions of tactics and strategies, proposed in Michel De Certeau’s ‘ The Practice of Everyday Life”, apply to the ideas about suburbia proposed by Venturi and Scott Brown. On one hand, it seems clear that within the urban and architectural narratives of ‘ Learning from Las Vegas’, there is an implicit admission of the economic and social logic of modern American capitalism. However, on the other hand, despite the fact the book defends the aesthetic viability of the great privatization drive of the mid-century American city, it also shows a consistent positioning against the status quo and in favor of the less favored classes. This interpretative tension reproduces the two opposing notion of strategy and tactic proposed by De Certeau. The acquiescence with the spatial results of capitalism as a dominant economic and cultural system, makes the ideas proposed by Venturi and Scott Brown parts of a wider strategy. However, those same ideas appear as tactics insofar as they claim the architectures of capitalism to be unexpected residues that oppose to the spaces of the culturally dominant paradigm of the modern utopia. If we acknowledge these residues as fragments without a totalizing ideology, hence the byproduct of everyday practices in suburban America, then the defense of their legitimacy becomes a a form of resistance. In this article I question whether such taste of resistance, which was undoubtedly premeditated by Venturi and Scott Brown and became essential for the critical success of postmodern ideology in architecture, responds to an honest analysis of Las Vegas and its social context, or if it was only the result of a rather partial –and reactionary– interpretation.

The debate begun years ago on the relationship between furniture and architecture remains alive during the first decades of the twentieth century. In this context, they are becoming more and more common among the pages of the architectural journals in Europe designs which propose a typology of multifunctional furniture, generated by simple forms based on orthogonal planes that adhere to the new architecture. This furniture has a unique character because of its physical connection with architecture, in which it adopts a non-standard form. Some architects begin to design this type of furniture as a sign of modernity and as a new space strategy proper to architecture. Among this group of architects is Carlos Arniches, architect director of the works of Junta para the Ampliación de Estudios, who is contacted in 1932 by Maria de Maeztu, director of the Residencia de Señoritas, to be in charge of the construction of a new pavilion for students. The architect designed an avant-garde building appropriate to the modernity of the pedagogical project of the Junta. To do this, he proposed an integral project that includes a typology of multifunctional furniture that adapts to the forms of the new architecture. This initiative allowed the residents’ activities to be developed, turning them into the center of the project, following the same formative postulates dictated by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, based on a comprehensive education. The architect approved the modernity of the pedagogical project of the Junta to apply this European model that incorporates other characteristic styles of the modernity linked to the production and the space. Therefore, this research analyzes the Pavilion of the Residencia de Estudiantes by Arniches, from architecture to furniture design, as an enabler of the modern pedagogical project of the Junta, and reconstruct the creation process from the documents found in the Archive of the Residencia de Señoritas and the architectural journals of the time.

The work of Juan Navarro Baldeweg carried out during the first years of his professional career at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveals the basis of his principles and the main ideas that have been present in his work throughout his life. He has acknowledged the strongest influence that had on his work the years that he spent at the CAVS, with explicit reference to some of the artists with whom he worked and specially mentioning the impact of György kepes on his understanding of the world as a ‘ coherent landscape’ and on his approaching to the perception of the physical environment. The present article tries to show the above mentioned influences, claimed by him several times but not deeply studied in depth up to the moment. A look at the work carried out by Navarro Baldeweg during his professional career reveals his adscription to the theoretical concepts explored during these years: his desire to apprehend the reality using a variety of artistic media and his interest to show all his works sharing the same place, something that is present already in this first stage of his career at which he used different materials and media. Also, he shows a permanent interest to go deeply into the knowledge of the physical reality, through the relationship between the individual and the space that surrounds him; his search of a conceptual structure that has allows him to understand the urban and architectural space, thanks to a coordinate system based on essential variables intimately related to the individual and the manifestation of a mental space associated with the physical reality, materialized so often since then through subtle mechanisms in his paintings, installations and architectural projects, that impress directly on the human senses and incite to the participation of the individual in the definition of this complementary space.

When, in February 1997, Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue won the competition for the renovation of the Town Hall of Utrecht, they were confronted with a building that had been under construction for centuries, at first as a set of medieval houses, later on as a continuous adaptation and remodeling of these houses to the uses and functions of a public building. The archive of the Miralles Foundation in Barcelona conserves 479 original drawings of Enric Miralles for the project of the Town Hall of Utrecht. Most of them are floor plans made on onionskin paper, whose size ranges approximately between DIN A5 and DIN A3, mainly on 1/400 and 1/200 scales. When Enric Miralles, through successive drawings, begun to develop a new structure for the City Hall of Utrecht, an incorporation of his way of drawing to the geometry of the floor plan occurred. The evolution of the project shows a progressive differentiation from the architectural character of the original building, passing the floor plan of the project from having a structure built by history to having a configuration defined by a way of drawing. Miralles drew and designed: by hand, on onionskin paper superposed on the previous version of the floor plan, on small scales when searching for the overall configuration, on progressive increases of scale to define with precision the geometry of the project and its constituent parts. The repetition of this process over time produced a manual presence in the floor plan of the Utrecht project. The notion that the repetition of the same idea at different moments produced different instances would serve Miralles to explain that the geometry of his architecture was linked to the execution of multiple drawings in the design process, as a mechanism to get rid of the departing conditions in any project.

Louis kahn's interest in European architecture in general, and in the Spanish one particularly, is known and well documented. Yet, it was not until 1972 when the American architect visited our country. The reason was the invitation by the Barcelona Fair to participate in the Technical Conference about Construction and Urbanism, held in the Montjuich Campus from 6 to 9 June 1972. The singularity of this visit inspires to analyze in depth the Conference and his brief stay in Spain. Kahn shared the event with some of the most prominent architects at the time as kenzo Tange, James Stirling and Frei Otto. kahn gave the lecture titled " Architecture and human agreement" , a deep talk where he expressed his concerns about the nature of art and architecture. After that, he spent some days visiting Barcelona where David Mackay, partner of the architecture studio MBM, showed him some of his works along with Antoni Gaudi's masterpieces. Nevertheless, kahn's relationship with Spain does not end in Barcelona. His classical education, and the influence of other architects, encouraged his enthusiasm for the great examples of Spanish architecture and, especially, with Granada and Cordoba. Up to the point to prepare a specific trip to visit these two cities two years after his visit to Barcelona. Yet work problems suspended momentarily this travel and his unexpected death a few weeks later ended with this dream trip. Despite of that, the analysis of the work of kahn reveals certain Spanish influences. For example, the relation between central space of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla with the Court of the Myrtle of the Alhambra; or the geometrical solutions of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester or the Dominican Motherhouse in Media with the Palace of Charles V. All these relations express the interest and knowledge of kahn about f the Spanish architecture but also, the desired of trip never realized ( at least physically).