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

In the sixties, the “urban and regional sciences” and the ideologies of “comprehensive city planning” were at their height. The “impressionist” and even metaphysical approaches characterizing Simmelian analyses were diametrically opposed to that technocratic objectivism that, especially under North American influence, had given rise to the major planning agencies of Latin America.

The Savoye Villa provides an excellent example of the Corbusier promenade. It is devised as a series of spaces, which in their entirety show the dynamic character which should be kept in mind by modern architecture, with regard to the new changing vision of cinema and the new means of transport.

The Tugendhat house is a building with mystery. From the moment it was completed and throughout the entire 20th century it was the subject of a thorough and all embracing focus from critics and editors. Between its original residents – who loved it without question–its later occupants who mistreated and damaged it without mercy- and the diverse interpretative approximations by its various students, a certain aura of unfinished legend has been created around it. In this article we analyse not only from a architectural point of view, some of the aspects of this legend and attempt to achieve a idea of its most authentic identity.

In the mild climate of Southern California modern architects found opportunities to explore new ways to blur the boundaries separating interior and exterior space in residential design. Southern California, far removed from the traditions and harsh climates of Northern Europe and the eastern United States, became an ideal testing ground for designs in which living outside was as important as living inside. One of the pioneers of this architecture was R.M. Schindler (1887-1953), who arrived in Los Angeles in December 1920, as project architect of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock house, and lived and practiced in Southern California until his death. Schindler's architecture was influenced by his teachers in Vienna, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, and by Frank Lloyd Wright, but he moved beyond their ideas, developing his own Space Architecture, first fully displayed in his Kings Road house (1921-22). Schindler produced a body of work, both writings and buildings, of startling originality that went largely unrecognized during his life but should now be acknowledged for the major place it holds in the development of twentieth century architecture.

“History and Aesthetics in Architecture: Modernism or the Absence of Conceptual Paradigms” attempts to point to the inadequacy of the common mixture of surface description methods with the comparative study of formal elements, which is typical of historians (of art or architecture), and with the direct attribution of the emergence of a work to ideological, social or economic motives, which is what most Postmodernist critics do. This methodological mélange, or parts of it according to the specialized bias of architects, critics and teachers, either displaces or replaces in architecture the use of theory and aesthetics proper. Teaching or practicing architects are more comfortable appealing to their knowledge of current or historical works than to theory; and when they incorporate philosophical ideas in their study or work, they tend to use either naïve traditional concepts or fashionable ideologies of their time.

In 1936, Minotaure 9 featured as frontispiece a photograph by Brassaï titled “Troglodyte”, a view taken from inside a cave looking out through two elliptical openings (fig. 1). Seemingly innocuous, this photograph is nevertheless beguiling. There is something curious, perhaps even slightly, sinister about it. We, the viewers, are the cave dweller to whom the title refers. Brassaï has placed us inside this ancient dwelling looking out. But perhaps because of its actual size on the printed page, the photograph implies much more than that. As we look at it, it in turn looks back at us. The ellipses are eyes complete with lower lashes, acute 'veining’, and heavy lower lids. Yet the concavity of the image denies this reading of the cave as an object opposed to us. The cave surrounds us. Surely we are not looking at eyes; we are inside, looking out through them.

“Long ago, in the cities, the plaza mayor was the preferred shopping center. The cities grew and commerce remained imprisoned in that “center” that was no longer [its true commercial center] . . . For many people, going shopping downtown today is an achievement and the source of frustrations. This stage of shopping is coming to an end. The era of the shopping center is beginning.”

With few exceptions, it is not possible to date collaborations between Asís Cabrero ( 1912-2005) and a photographer other than Jesús García Férriz ( 1900-1988). Similarly, there are only few and isolated works proving that Férriz made photo reports of other architects’ work. This dual situation points out a unique case study, barely known and unexplored up to date, and of a great theoretical relevance to delve into the intricacies of the marriage architecture & photography. This situation becomes even more exceptional due to the existence of paper prints form the architect’s own archive —kept at the General Archive of the University of Navarra— as well as the availability of the photographer’s original negatives. The close and loyal working relationship between Cabrero and Férriz represent, in the context of modern Spanish architecture, a unique case of complete trust and complicity between an architect and his photographer. Although there are other relevant examples —such as Coderch and Català-Roca or Fernández del Amo and Kindel— none of them proved to have such an exclusive relationship. This fact can be proved not only by the available data and the different hypothesis that might be formulated, but also by the case study described in this text, which provides a rigorous and critic analysis of the unpublished material showing how the architect’s project and idea is described and graphically documented through Ferry’s photography. We therefore address, under a new reciprocal practice among the actors in the process, the synergies between architecture and photography that endorse and support a particular status coherent with the role played by the image of architecture in its growth and media, historiographical and disciplinary transmission. As opposed to Asís Cabrero, who has already been recognized as a leading figure of modern Spanish architecture, the photographic work made by the Férriz family has scarcely up to date been revealed in the field of Spanish photographic community of the 20th Century and has never been recognized as example of professionalism and technical expertise in the course of their long term career. In this text the outcomes of this relationship will be explored not only based on technical and aesthetic qualities, but also on the analysis of the rigor and coherence of their respective attitudes and their professional skills.

After a few early years working in the Guadalajara of his birth, Barragán seized a dream opportunity and relocated to Spain’s capital city in 1935. In Madrid he embarked on a productive and successful career, designing multi-dwelling units for private developers for 5 years. During that time, further to what he had learnt in his travels across Europe, Barragán saw in modern architecture a catalogue of precise postulates with a reproducible vocabulary. All the buildings he authored in that period indisputably drew from modernist precepts. Nonetheless, like other modern architects, including Le Corbusier himself, Barragán experienced the desolation of white abstraction, of inert and repetitive matter: precise and effective perhaps, but unable to engage with the spiritual values nesting in the deep recesses of the architect’s memory. Around 1940 Barragán decided to break with architectural practice. In so doing he redefined it beyond the stylistic limits that had been his reference until then. The source for that redefinition was the encounter with gardens as the material and object of design, along with the strong attraction exerted on the architect by that specific type of matter. The return to stone, wood or traditional rendering arose not only out of a need to evoke his own experience, but of a desire to conjure up in these materials the memory and nostalgia of other cultures. The El Pedregal gardens and adjacent Prieto House, built in 1945-1950, constituted a veritable laboratory where Barragán, deploying a materially dense architecture, spawned beauty by uniting landscape and aesthetic expression. In a word, the architect aspired to use matter to express humanity’s emotional link with nature, its ultimate haven. With his oeuvre, Barragán blurred the boundaries between technical and humanistic concerns, sensing in every element, every object, the spiritual reasons for building. As in the Capuchin Convent at Tlalpan (1952-1955) and the Gilardi House at Mexico City (19769, with that blurring matter also participates in continuity. Such continuity, converted in his architecture into spatial succession, elicits the feel of a close-knit, changing and uninterrupted sequence. The resulting sleekness is the origin of the joyful, still delight in a work that needs mouldable materials to create that effect. All that together associates memory with the experience of materials. Inherited matter contributes to the generation of timeless and universal architecture, which portrays it not portrayed as the opposite of the spirit but rather, paradoxically, as the vehicle for its expansion.

In the period studied ( 1920-1940), Italian and Spanish journals raised awareness of international architectural movements. Encouraging the dissemination of modern architecture in their respective environs, they became a key to its consolidation. The journals at issue include Architettura e Arti Decorative, founded in 1921 and later renamed Architettura ( Organo ufficiale del sindicato degli architetti), headed by Marcello Piacentini; Quadrante, with Pier Maria Bardi and Massimo Bontempelli at the helm ( 1933-1936); Casabella, managed by Edoardo Persico and Giuseppe Pagano; and Domus, founded in 1928 and run by Gio Ponti until the nineteen forties. In Spain, works authored by May, Taut, Gropius, Schumacher and others were published in any number of journals, such as Arquitectura, Órgano de la Sociedad Central de Arquitectos, Cortijos y Rascacielos, D’Aci i d’Allá, La Gaceta de les Arts, AC and Documentos de actividad contemporánea. The importance attached by these media to vernacular Mediterranean architecture, in connection in Italy with the debate around Mediterranean culture and in Spain with the national context, sheds light on the impact of the subject on architectural practice, irrespective of the positions adopted by the various journals and the opinions defended by their columnists. As a result of a revisionist approach to the Modernist Movement, a good deal of literature has appeared in recent decades on the development of modern architecture in the Mediterranean context. Drawing from those studies and focusing in particular on documentary sources, the primary aim of this article is to establish the role played by vernacular Mediterranean architecture in the appearance and unfolding of modern architecture in Mediterranean regions through a comparison of developments in Spain and Italy.