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

The year 1929 is a key moment in the evolution of “modern” architecture in Spain. The incipient avant-garde movements had had few opportunities to make themselves known by the general public, beyond some specific experiences. For a few months, the country became the center of international architectural interest thanks to twoexhibitions in Barcelona and Seville. The architecture proposed in both events has been the subject of numerous studies. The aim of this paper is to study how non-specialized press helped to disseminate these architectural proposals among its readers, not used to the tendencies of modern architecture. It has been analysed the impact of the two most important newspapers of the time, ABC and La Vanguardia. Although most of the architecture exhibited was still influenced by the eclectic tradition of the 19th Century, the subjects addressed in the articles and, mainly , the way in which they were written, allow us to contemplate how Spanish society began to know the architecture proposed by the avant-gardes. In this way,the German pavilion of Mies van der Rohe of the Barcelona exhibition became the first purely modern example that got through to the Spanish public by the pages of the daily press.

If a modern myth is intimately connected with a territory, it is the American West. Transmitted by cinema, television, literature or advertising, the American West has transcended its status as a true American cultural reference, which was created at the same time as the historical reality on which it is based would disappear, to become a global topic that can not only be linked to a specific model of a society, but to a certain landscape as well. However, the western myth has not remained unchanged throughout the twentieth century, but it has been adapted to different historical contexts, which have allowed it revives at significant moments in American history not only as a mere fictional entertainment but also as a cultural reference that has been able to change the tangible (territorial) and intangible (social) reality. This paper aims to introduce and frame a widely known concept in the American context, the “New American West”, that raised from the revision of the original myth, focusing on its interpretation of territories and places. Starting from the shaping of the myth in the fictional westerns, the paper shows the original sources from which its landscape was defined and the characteristics that it represents. For this purpose, some significant stages in American Western history, coinciding with the times in which some huge alterations of the western territory were taken place, are analyzed, showing the new western-landscape representations and their narratives. This research seeks to establish an elemental basis from which the revival of the interest on the western myth and its landscape, both in USA and Europe, can be better understood, but it also reflects on landscape as a powerful tool to help us understand and change our environment.

While the status of the architectural exhibition has recently received renewed attention in the museum world as a specific set of practices different from other forms of curation and display, less attention has been paid among architects to the specificities of the exhibition and its related formats as vehicles for reshaping public understanding of architecture. Beyond the exhibition as an opportunity to expose a broader audience to architecture, museums and galleries have been important platforms for the discussion, exploration, and dissemination of fundamental disciplinary ambitions, particularly also through their exponentially growing publications programs. This essay focuses on a small, and often overseen exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Staged by the architect John Hejduk, exhibition number 984 Education of an Architect (1971) showcased student work from the Cooper Union. While the impact of this exhibition consisting of fourteen models and a selection of drawings and collages, was mostly limited to a local audience, the book published in parallel would prove to become a key reference for architectural educators around the world. Education of an Architect: A Point of View (1971) is the origin for a number of publications that focus on pedagogical concepts, and as such, it fueled the discussion and reassessment of how we teach foundational courses in architectural design.

An exhibition entitled ‘Structures Gonflables’ was held from the first to the thirty-first March 1968 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris’s (at the time) new ARC (Animation, Recherche, Confrontation) Division . A few weeks after the detonation of the social movements that turned the streets of Paris into a platform for debate and confrontation, the multidisciplinary community ‘Utopie’, whose members were architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungermann and Paul Stinco, together with Isabelle Auricoste, Catherine Cot, René Loureau and sociologists Jean Baudrillard and Hubert Tonka, curated an exhibition commissioned from Pierre Gaudibert.

The examples selected in this short article describe the first instances, in the mid-1970s, where architectural documents –particularly drawings– were absorbed into the art market by commercial galleries in New York.

 

The role that historically played certain institutions as effective creators of the cultural city presents a new variant with the configuration of important international business conglomerates. These groups, capable of articulating different socio-economic structures, also produce an architectural reality linked to their needs, from a strictly functional horizon or as representative iconic values. The case of the Palazzo de la Civiltà Italiana, projected by Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Lapadula and Mario Romano, and started in 1938, is revealing of this contemporary business paradigm. It was conceived as the emblematic museum of the failed Universal Exposition of Rome, 1942 and has been in a continuous process of programmatic redefinition since those years that saw it stand up and that augured a destination for it as Museo della Civiltà. Different cultural approaches have been filling it but in no case with a relevant repercussion neither for its immediate environment nor for the effective construction of the public city. Currently, after the agreement reached in 2013 between the management company of the property and the FENDI house, its exhibition spaces have been reduced significantly, but it has a new program that has regenerated it as a headquarters building program and as a global icon.

In December 2018, the Victoria & Albert Museum reopened Cast Court after a period of intensive rehabilitation. Its collection of plaster casts of the principal monuments and works of art is one of the very few that is still held in the original place for which they were designed. The impact of this encyclopaedic, exhaustive and universal collection on visitors to what was then London’s South Kensington Museum was summarized as “an excursion around the world”, in a spirit close to that which lit up the Great Exhibition of 1851. Originally, the dual function of museums as teaching workshops and catalysts of the general public’s critical culture placed collections of full-scale architectural reproductions in the ambiguous terrain between the academy and the market. Architecture in the museums took on board the risks of defining the value of the copy, its pedagogic purpose and its circulation as manifesto. This article concentrates on two reproductions of Spain’s architectural heritage that allow us to reconstruct this journey: from the Court of the Alhambra to the Pórtico de la Gloria.

Building a Stadium for a Museum was the operation behind “Stadium”, Chile Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennial in 2018. The exhibition recovered a forgotten event of recent local history where, during Pinochet’s dictatorship, 37,000 property titles were awarded to Santiago slum dwellers in Chile National Stadium. For the event in 1979, a footprint of the building was redrawn, which instead of grandstands traced polygons with the name of more than 60 towns on the outskirts of Santiago, from where those summoned that day came. The drawing, the starting point of “Stadium”, brings together a cartographic and a narrative impulse in the same effort. Stadium debate its premises from a second adaptation of the pavilion, in which the stadium is reconstructed for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santiago in 2019. The exhibition, like the event of the past, transports the city into a building, and makes visible the periphery in the centre. Thus, the Venetian Arsenal and the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago echo its content and open new disciplinary reflections from the operations involved: in them a building is compressed inside another, or even a city compressed within another. “Stadium” takes up Rossi‘s premise on Architecture for the Museum and raises its potential to open critical debates about architecture and its practices.