Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
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The study focuses on the presence of Greek fragments in the work of Adolf Loos and Isadora Duncan based on the same admiration of the antiquity. The hypothesis that the study proposes is to demonstrate that the presence of the pre-modern in Adolf Loos and Isadora Duncan are based on Greek recuperation from a careful reading of “ The birth of the tragedy in the spirit of the music”, one of the best known texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose first edition appears in Leipzig, in 1872. Following the programme of Nietzsche, that contemplates the updating of values of the Greek art, Isadora Duncan and Adolf Loos don’t try so much to imitate forms of the past but to make figures emerge that can, again, conform the present. Both authors have in this free reading of what is pre-modern, a basic condition for proposing the foundational recuperation in their respective artistic fields.

Unlike the other masters and great architects of the 20th century, who dedicated their careers to finding the best solutions to specific programs in the conditions imposed by modernity, Mies van der Rohe’s was a reflection on the limits of the very existence of architecture in such conditions. The impossible problem that he took it upon himself to address consisted of creating solutions that were modern but still belonged to the “ancient” world of architecture.

The use of typologies and models has been common practice in the History of Architecture. This work studies them for a group of medieval buildings, that appeared after the Castilian conquest of the city of Cordoba in 1236. The main objective is to establish the keys to the plan design of a part of these buildings: the churches that have been conserved to present. Such an study can only be accomplished within the Middle Ages epistemological context, from which 'Villard's Sketchbook' is an splendid exponent.

Sir Ernst Hans Gombrich, born in 1909, passed away in London in November 2001. Just days before we had sent him the following article for approval. Its publication now constitutes a tribute to the last of a great generation of scholars of art and architecture that includes the likes of Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Wittkower, and Nikolaus Pevsner.

In 1904 the VI International Congress of Architects took place in Madrid. At this event H.P. Berlage and H. Muthesius gave two conferences in which notes taken showed their point of view of how the new style of architecture, that the period demanded, should be characterised.

Like Fernand Leger at the 1933 CIAM IV, I find myself invited to this conference as an interloper: not as a painter, but as an art historian among architects, to deliver, like Leger, a "Discours aux architectes". A few years ago I published a book that tried to present an overview of anti-modernism in France between the two world wars. My argument was —succinctly put–– that reactionary issues such as the return to the soil, anti-urbanism, the questioning of technology and their ideological corollaries— agrarianism, regionalism, Corporatism— had a profound impact not only on mainstream French culture but on French modernism in the aftermath of World War I. This was the country that although victorious had been destroyed was thus psychologically and historically most inclined to try to restore its patrimoine. The Great Depression had only intensified the French disenchantment with industrialization. The "rural" came to occupy a crucial place in the French imagination in the 1930s. All these tendencies, I argued, slid imperceptibly, into the Fascist ideology of Vichy. The one other European country that played a role in my account was Spain. Spain, I claimed, functioned for the French as a purer, benign, less-industrialized, alter-ego in the 1930s, and indeed in the "imaginaire" of both the political Left and Right. Spain was the antithesis to the overly industrialized and commodified society of the United States.

Last year was the centenary of Rudolf Wittkower, the most influential art historian in the Modern History of architecture. An entire generation of English architects came under the spell of his teachings, whether firsthand in British universities or through publications. This essay is a recollection of Wittkower’s work and its place in the development of the historiography of architecture. It also mentions Wittkower’s importance in some episodes of English architecture of the fifties.

In the course of the 20th century, architecture and urbanism were routinely identified with the city. But there were moments, coinciding with critical periods of history, that saw the emergence and diffusion of what we might call ‘anti-urban ideologies’, and these affected artistic and architectural creation as much as they bore upon urbanistic thought. Such ‘anti-urban ideologies’ ––and their opposition (or derivation) to ‘urban ideologies’–– were the theme of the 3rd International Congress of Modern Spanish Architecture that the University of Navarre’s school of architecture organized in 2002.

The very definition of just what constitutes the history of urban planning is not as straightforward as it may seem. Let us begin with the term history itself. Originally the narration of some momentary event or chance incident, it has come to encompass the process and context of all occurrences that can be defined in terms of time and place. Cicero described history as the "witness of time, light of truth, light of memory, teacher of life, harbinger of antiquity". The Prussian historian Johann Gustav Droysen described it as "knowledge of the self". And Theodor Lessing saw it as nothing more than "lending meaning to the meaningless".