Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism 9780823260829

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Edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa with additional research by Mario Torres

Fordham University Press | The Bronx Museum of the Arts New York 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935132 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1 First edition Front Cover: Mauro Restiffe. Oscar 17c (detail view), 2012. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist.

Contents VII

Foreword: Out of the Box

William Morrish

IX

Acknowledgments

Holly Block and María Inés Rodríguez

1

Introduction

Antonio Sergio Bessa

9

Identity as Style

Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez

19

Modernism and Contemporary Art in Latin America

Ana María Durán Calisto

33

From the Internal to the Radical: Autonomy and Alterity in the Local Modern

Javier de Jesús Martínez

51

Brazilian Machineries (or the Collapse) of Pleasure: Architecture, Eroticism, and the Naked Body

José Lira

71

Concrete Modernity in Venezuela

Carlos Brillembourg

79

Integrating Vanguardisms: Dialogues between Art and Architecture in Modern Cuba

Eduardo Luis Rodríguez

93

Secret Lines: Interweaving a New Territory

Hannia Gómez

105

Two Brazilian Architects: Bo Bardi and Artigas

Dan Graham

107

Time of Cohabitation

Ligia Nobre

119

From Utopia to Abdication: Juan Downey’s Architecture without Architecture

Julieta González

135

Contributors

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Foreword: Out of the Box William Morrish

Resource Extraction, Affiliated Infrastructures, Law of Indies = Oil City, Post-Oil City, Hinterland, Informationization of the Modern, Formalization of the Informal, Industrial and Artisanal Concrete, Collapse of Skin and Structure, Recycled Infill, Dynamic Protrusion, Battlefield, to Become Modern Versus to Keep Identity, Combined Vernacular Constructions with European Functionalism, “Speak” Architecture, Tlatelolco, Latin American Architecture = Art, Urban Genome, Automatic Beauty, Air Is Blue, Parque Vertical, Tlatelolco’s Toilet, Recycling Device, Emergency Architecture, Molecular Urbanism, Nutritional Culture, Collective Economic Activation

WILLIAM MORRISH

The words modernization and modernism are common in Latin and North American art, architecture, and city discourses, but the application of the ideas embedded in these terms builds very different urban landscapes. The opportunity offered by the premise of “getting beyond the supersquare” is evident in this cross section of deep historic readings and design inquiries providing a launching point for how we might better understand the critical difference in urban historic terms, and a further opportunity to get out of the box that confines today’s common oppositional analysis such as urbanization versus urbanism and modernization versus modernism. The collective work in Beyond the Supersquare reveals a stunning body of hidden histories, actors, phrases, and terms upon which this work performs—as well as a unique narrative, through design and experimentation, on the continual search for modern urban living in Latin America.

At the Corner The work presented for Beyond the Supersquare is characterized from a key vantage point of urban prospect—that of looking at the built environment “at the corner” or at the intersection of two disciplines. This more outward-looking perspective allows one to discover how art and architecture become a system, a field, and a political landscape, not just a moment of didactic reflection. If this framework represents a lesson, it is this: the application of North American urban terms through the lens of the Latin American city experience has produced a radically different result, both historically and for future design and development. For example, in North America the word project means a single development, with defined formal

and functional limits to service a particular land use, like the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, which is controlled by one agency and one developer consuming sixteen acres of prime city land and billions in public funds. In Latin America, the term is proyecto, which is not only about building a space but also rooted in advancing various civic, political, and design agendas with unique outcomes. The design terms as presented above found in every essay reveal that in Latin America its modern history and its contemporary pursuit to design and develop an urban “modern way of living and working” is setting new, innovative, and problematic futures. This is the main storyline in Beyond the Supersquare; while the words and drawings look familiar, what was being built, and is under development, stems from a profoundly different set of social constructions.

Acknowledgments Holly Block and María Inés Rodríguez

In October 2011 the Bronx Museum of the Arts held a three-day conference we called Beyond the Supersquare—At the Corner of Art and Architecture, a series of programs devoted to examining Latin American modernist architecture and the manner in which it continues to resonate as a point of interest among many contemporary artists of these regions. This conference was the first in a series of public programs to launch from a generous curatorial research grant awarded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Funding from this grant afforded us the opportunity to conduct research throughout Latin America and the Caribbean where we met with artists and architects in their studios, visited landmark architectural sites, and engaged in conversations with influential scholars of architecture and the visual arts. Our extensive explorations revealed a peculiar trajectory in the training of a number

of artists from the region; an educational path undertaken not through traditional visual arts instruction but rather through training in the allied fields of architecture and design. Taking heed of this unusual phenomenon, the rich and unique artistic projects conceived by artists trained as architects may suggest an enduring and perhaps unavoidable impulse to interrogate the constructed world resulting in artwork indebted to strategic approaches formed through an intimate knowledge and inquisitiveness around architectural practice, urban history, and social-cultural discourses centered on the built environment. In tandem with this fascinating phenomenon, we found that the explosive development of Latin America’s urban centers in the postwar period (Brasilia, Caracas, Havana, Mexico City, São Paulo)—designed by a cadre of now widely recognized modernist masters such as Luis Barragán, Lina Bo Bardi, Felix Candela, Lucio Costa,

HOLLY BLOCK AND MARÍA INÉS RODRÍGUEZ

Oscar Niemeyer, Mario Pani, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, among others—remains a subject of inquiry and engagement in the work of living artists throughout the region and beyond. It is, however, the complicated histories of these impressive modernist sites and their utopian aspirations that compel a cross section of artists and architects to move beyond preternatural examinations of the built environment and instead question the profound legacies of this dynamic era of architectural production on contemporary urban life. Not content with a univocal perspective on this phenomenon, we assembled a group of distinguished architects, historians, and urban planners to gather alongside artists, curators, and other cultural producers from the United States and Latin America to discuss this unique intersection of disciplines, generations, and creative work in a year-long series of online and face-to-face seminars. These spirited and edifying meetings ultimately developed a framework that would inform a series of public programs, publications, and an exhibition all known as Beyond the Supersquare. For lending their time, energy, and expertise throughout the lifespan of this initiative, we would like to acknowledge and extend our warmest gratitude to our project advisory committee. They are: Carlos Brillembourg, Felipe Correa, Ana María Durán Calisto, Belmont Freeman, José Lira, Ligia Nobre, and Pedro Reyes. We are especially grateful to our conference participants whose breadth of knowledge and keen insights took us on a journey throughout Latin America and the Caribbean touching on socially engaged art practices along the USMexico border, modernist architecture in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and through the natural and constructed environments of South America. Among them stand our esteemed lead speaker

Jorge Francisco Liernur along with Barry Bergdoll, Raúl Cárdenas, José Castillo, Felipe Correa, Ana María Dúran Calisto, Hannia Gómez, Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez, Terence Gower, Javier de Jesús Martínez, José Lira, Ligia Nobre, Mauro Restiffe, Pedro Reyes, and Eduardo Luis Rodríguez. For their expert direction and provocative discourse, we thank our conference moderators Sergio Bessa, Carlos Brillembourg, and William Morrish. In addition, we would like to thank Dan Graham and Julieta González for their contributions to this publication. All together, these contributions bring us so much closer to understanding the rich and complex interchange between art, architecture, and urban life in Latin America. It was a privilege to work with artist Pedro Reyes who conceived The Architecture Challenge! for the inauguration of this series of public programs. Cohosted by Reyes and Eva Franch i Gilabert, director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, with assistance from Terence Gower and Adam Tang, The Architecture Challenge! roused contestants Carlos Brillembourg, José Castillo, Felipe Correa, Ana María Dúran Calisto, Belmont Freeman, Hannia Gómez, Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez, Javier de Jesús Martínez, and Jorge Pardo to draw from their deep architectural knowledge and answer obscure questions on Latin American modernist architecture in an event inspired by classic game shows of the 1950s and 1960s. The charm and humor exhibited by our hosts and contestants truly made this a fun and memorable evening, and we thank them for that. We are profoundly grateful to our kind host and program partner, the New School for Public Engagement. We are especially thankful to Karen Cuoni, director, and Annie Shaw, senior office assistant, at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics; Pamela Tillis, director of Public Programs;

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and to the technical staff at the New School for their the vital support during this event. We also would like to thank John Arbuckle, president of Docomomo US/New York Tri-State, for joining us in a quest to locate the borough’s modernist architectural heritage; and Matthew Postal, tour leader of Modernism in the Bronx, for navigating us through such magnificent and underappreciated cultural resources designed by renown architects Diana Agrest, Marcel Breuer, Harrison and Abramovitz, Paul Rudolph, and Rafael Vinoly, to name just a few. We also are indebted to Susan Hoetzel, director of the Lehman College Art Gallery, for allowing us unfettered access to the Fine Arts Building at Lehman College with its fantastic hyperbolic paraboloid umbrellas designed by Marcel Breuer and Eduardo Catalano. We are grateful to the many sponsors of this initiative without whom this enterprise would not have been possible. We would like to thank Rachel Bers, James Bewey, and Pamela Clapp of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for awarding the initial curatorial grant, which launched this project; Sarah Herda, director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for essential funding of the conference and this publication; the Milton and Sally Avery Art Foundation for underwriting a curatorial fellowship for this project; the Brazilian Consulate of New York and the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York for generously supporting travel and lodging for our conference participants; and our travel partners Altours and Cuba Tours & Travel for aiding us with travel arrangements. Furthermore, our appreciation goes out to Diana Darling at The Architect’s Newspaper for media sponsorship, and Rick Bell, executive director of AIA New York along with Laura Trimble, coordinator of partnership programs at the Center for Architecture, for

guiding us through our participation in the inaugural cycle of Archtober. At the Bronx Museum of the Arts, we owe thanks to the many staff members, consultants, interns, and volunteers who made this project a success. Foremost, we would like to thank Sergio Bessa, director of curatorial and educational programs, for editing this publication and providing intelligent feedback throughout this project. We would like to recognize curatorial fellow Mario Torres for his tireless enthusiasm and dedication to this endeavor; Selena Anderson, Allison Chernow, Katherine Fox, Yvonne Garcia, Momo Ishiguro, Ron Kavanaugh, and Leanne Mella for media and development support; Lauren Click, Allison Grandy, and Lynn Pono for their sustained and invaluable assistance; Maria Budo, Hannie Chia, Hanna Weissenbuehler, and the Bronx Museum Teen Council for their hands-on support during the conference; and Jennifer Berklich, Victor de la Cruz, Mario Hamblin, and Hatuey RamosFermín for crucial technical assistance. We also recognize and thank the tremendous efforts of Benedeta Monteverde for exhibition design, and Judy Steinberg, Laura Napier, and Lia Zaaloff for exhibition production support. Of course, this publication would not be possible without the support of Fordham University Press, especially Fredric Nachbaur, Eric Newman, and Michael Koch whose patience is unparalleled. Additionally, we thank Michy Marxuach and Pablo Leon de la Barra for aiding us in research and cultivation; Frederieke Taylor for kindly opening her doors to us and our guests; and Sara Haines for her invaluable translation assistance. We also thank Jonathan Lo of Public Assembly for the design of this handsome publication. In many cases the visual material presented in this volume appears for the first time in a US

HOLLY BLOCK AND MARÍA INÉS RODRÍGUEZ

publication. Our gratitude is extended to the many artists, foundations, and repositories who made their archives available to us, including: Augusto de Campos, Ursula Boeckler, Museo Archivo de la Fotografía de la Ciudad de México, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, Media Farzin, Henrique Faria Fine Art, Colección Henry Klumb of the University of Puerto Rico, the Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, Marcelo Cidade, Laura Eber and Laercio Redondo, Terence Gower, Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, Felipe Dulzaides, Carlos Garaicoa, Alexandre Arrechea, Archivo Fundación de la Memoria Urbana, Fundación Gego, Elemental Arquitectos, Alexander Apóstol, Tomas Saraceno, Fondation Le Corbusier, Pedro Reyes, José Lira, Paolo Gasparini, Marilys Downey and the Juan Downey Foundation, and the Fundação Darcy Ribeiro. Lastly, we would like to gratefully acknowledge the supporters of the Beyond the Supersquare exhibition including the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support from Acción Cultural Española, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Furthermore: A Program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Agnes Gund, Toby Devan Lewis, the National Endowment for the Arts, the O’Grady Foundation, Sciame Construction, and The Venezuelan American Endowment for the Arts. Special thanks to Aeroméxico, The Architect’s Newspaper, the Embassy of Colombia in Washington DC and the Consulate General of Colombia in New York, Galia Solomonof, the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, The Sherwin Williams Company/Manhattan, and Walter Puryear and the Andrew Freedman Home of the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council for their kind contributions to this project.

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Introduction

The boom of modernist architecture throughout Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century is often associated with the end of the colonial era. As that narrative goes, the essential tenets of modernism—which emphasized structure, modularity, and flexibility—embodied values shared by young nations in their plight for self-reliance. As an eminently social construct, modernist architecture became in many centers the fodder for popular debate disseminated to the masses by the press and often articulated by nonpractitioners—writers, poets, and visual artists among them. Building (or rebuilding, for that matter) in Latin America thus became a metaphor, an image to be decoded, and that ought to be of everyone’s concern. Certainly, a building metaphor was at play during the proliferation of constructivist art throughout Latin America from the 1920s to the 1950s.1 In the 1960s and 1970s, however, following a succession of military coups that swept across the southern cone, the very cultural elite that initially welcomed the modernist program would begin to articulate a pointed critique of the movement as a whole. Unarguably, a critical stance toward modernism has been a distinctive trait in some of the most important art manifestations that emerged in Latin America in the last half century. Brazil offers an obvious starting point due to the messianic nature of its commitment to the modernist agenda. The construction of Brasilia in an unpopulated area in the middle of the country—a scheme already envisioned

1

Antonio Sergio Bessa

ANTONIO SERGIO BESSA

2

in the nineteenth century during the monarchy 2—was tantamount to providing carte blanche to an architectural program charged with moving the country away from its colonial roots. This move to the center—the country’s physical center, as well as that of the “world stage”—is leaden with symbolic overtones that can be read differently depending on one’s perspective. A prime example is Lucio Costa’s proposal for Brasilia as an open city in which the common man and woman would be free to decide his and her own path. The fact that his design equally met the need for control by the military regime that took power only four years after its inauguration might seem preposterous. As we consider the troubling incorporation of nineteenth century militaristic strategies into the modernist lexicon, however, the fallacy of the modernist utopia will become apparent. Rooted in the deep historical transformations that took place in Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and having evolved during an era plagued by two world wars, modernist architecture, as it were, was naturally invested with the mission of reshaping a landscape that might have seemed at the time like a blank page. In a perceptive study of the transformations undergone in Paris during and in the aftermath of the Commune, Kristin Ross called attention to the effect that the changing environment had on language, as evident in the work of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who as an adolescent experienced the city during those years of unrest. Ross singles out, for instance, the practice of “lateral piercing” of houses so that “insurgents can move freely in all directions through passageways and networks of communications joining houses together.”3 This kind of anarchitecture, which anticipates the piercings of Gordon Matta-Clark a century later, is parallel, Ross maintains, to Rimbaud’s “lexical anomalies.”4 Ross also likens some of Rimbaud’s verbal tactics to that of the barricade, that antimonument par excellence that replaces “monumental ideals of perfection, duration or immortality . . . by a kind of bricolage—the wrenching of everyday objects from their habitual context to be used in a radically different way.”5 The rubble witnessed by poets like Rimbaud around the early 1870s in Paris finds a magnified counterpoint in the ruins left throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War II. By then, the anarchitecture lexicon of “lateral piercings” and barricades had become an international lingua franca— no longer used as a strategy of resistance, but progressively co-opted by mainstream architecture and urban planning, and updated into a new paradigm. The architectural innovations and strategies brought forth by the communards are in sharp opposition to European modernism’s stated ideal of clarity and pure forms and as such they might account for those instances

INTRODUCTION

Fig. 1 / Advertisement for luxury apartments. Published in O Estado de São Paulo, October 7, 1965.

3

of impurity and chaos that erupt occasionally throughout the modernist canon. Costa’s layout for Brasilia, with its arrangement of superquadras that balance individual freedom and the need for state control, owes a debt to this aesthetics of barricades and piercings. And so does the concrete art produced at the time, for despite its emphasis on precision, objectivity and clarity, the architectural ideas that inform the movement are rooted in that pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when the machine began to replace manual labor. Consider, for instance, Augusto de Campos’s “Luxo,” a collage-poem from 1965 conceived in response to the noticeable capital gains of the upper middle class that supported the military coup in Brazil. Inspired by a newspaper advertisement for luxury apartments that was published on October 7, 1965, “Luxo” effects a powerful critique of rampant consumerism in bourgeois circles and their members’ disregard for the common good. A collage of repeated newspaper clippings, its individual elements (luxo) laid out to spell its opposite (lixo, “trash”), “Luxo” veers close to semiotics. While the overlapping of micro- and macrostructures in “Luxo” clearly alludes to linguistic concepts current at the time, the poem’s layout also hints at modernist proposals for urban planning based on grids. With each icon “luxo” standing for a luxury tower unit, the ensuing composition presents a dismal vision of the modern city.

Fig. 2 / Augusto de Campos. “Luxo” (1965).

ANTONIO SERGIO BESSA

4

By the late 1960s the newness of Brasilia was giving way to what Robert Venturi deemed the “Brazilianoid International” style.6 Meanwhile, the pioneering works by artists like Hélio Oiticica, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Juan Downey, among others, played a pivotal role in broadening our perception of modernity by introducing elements associated with the so-called third world and in clear opposition to the clean aesthetics of modernism. Oiticica’s embrace of vernacular forms around Rio’s slums; Matta-Clark’s interest in destruction and the abject; and Downey’s search for an “invisible architecture” inspired by indigenous constructions have become part of the vocabulary of mainstream architecture. It’s worth noting that with the rise of the military rule in Latin America in the late 1960s, artists like Oiticica and Downey settled in New York at a time when their North American peers—Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, and Carolee Schneemann, among others—were proposing new (architectural) strategies on how to cope with a city on the brink of bankruptcy. The experimental nature of the era was spectacularly summed up in Fantastic Architecture, a seminal book organized by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostel featuring contributions by poets like Franz Mon and Gerhard Rühm; environment artists like Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim; as well as those operating in between language and the visual arts, like Dieter Roth, Lawrence Weiner, and Ben Vautier. In his introduction to the volume, Higgins seems to imply that modernist architecture ought to be seen less as a contribution to art history, and more as a set of technical innovations in construction: Architecture, to the extent that it is an art, is the last art still intact in a primitive state. . . . The main innovations have been structural, as methods of manufacture have become more sophisticated, and in the direction of introducing new materials. The perception of space, the use of space . . . has been allowed to remain quagmired in 19th century or pseudo-Marxist or even narodnik assumptions.7

His notion of our contemporary space “quagmired” in nineteenthcentury ideology is also well taken, and gives fresh new context to reading works like Oiticica’s Nests, which he created in his loft in the East Village, Matta-Clark’s Food, a communal restaurant in SoHo, and Trisha Brown’s groundbreaking Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Roof Piece, and other choreography for the roofs in downtown Manhattan. This pivotal moment, often associated with the emergence of the counterculture movement, is notable for its acentric nature. With increasing access to international traveling in the 1960s and 1970s, the modernist experience in Latin America would no longer be the object of long-distance fetishizing, and in the following

INTRODUCTION

5

decades, a growing number of international artists would look at modernist architecture as a means to effect social critique. Among the major works produced since the mid-1980s, Martin Kippenberger’s Magical Misery Tour (1985) is notable for its incisive look at the various applications of the modernist program, while also relating to painful personal memory.8 Last but not least, one must also consider the important contribution of women artists to a reevaluation of modernism based on a new vision of architecture that included concerns for the body. Lygia Clark, who studied art with the landscape designer Roberto Burle-Marx between 1947 and 1949, produced several works early on in her career in collaboration with architects. A breakthrough for Clark happened in 1956 when she addressed architecture students in Belo Horizonte and urged them to engage visual artists early on in the design phase.9 A decade later, Clark would present the installation A Casa é o corpo, at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, and later that same year at the Venice Biennale. Coincidentally, that year Carolee Schneemann was also at work on Parts of a Body House, a project that looked at architecture as an organic body. Although never realized as an installation, the work was rendered in drawings and texts.10

Fig. 3 / Martin Kippenberger. Tankstelle Martin Bormann, (Seaside) from The Magical Misery Tour, 1985–1986. Photo: Ursula Boeckler. Courtesy Ursula Boeckler.

ANTONIO SERGIO BESSA

Beyond the Supersquare

6

The present collection of essays proposes multiple possibilities of reading the multifaceted modernist fable from different perspectives. While the conference Beyond the Supersquare—At the Corner of Art and Architecture, organized by the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2011, has provided the premise for this collection of essays, the original presentations have been expanded into more substantive texts. In addition, new contributions by Julieta González and Dan Graham were added with the goal of expanding and enriching the scope of the subject. The collection opens with an intriguing reflection on language and style as it relates to the important contribution of early modernist Mexican architect Juan Legarreta. Building upon an astute overview of the aftermath of the Mexican revolution of 1910, Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez discusses in “Identity as Style” the paradoxes of enforcing the modernist program onto a culture that could not “speak architecture.” Legaretta’s greatest achievement, HernándezGálvez emphasizes, was his resolve not simply to design works according to the modernist canon but to prod the growing urban populations in Mexico to be modern. And paraphrasing the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz, HernándezGálvez pointedly notes that modernity is less about ideas and more about critique. In “Modernism and Contemporary Art in Latin America,” Ana María Durán Calisto advances the thesis that in Latin America modernist architecture and the favela developed in tandem as two symbiotic entities. Duran’s provocative essay also suggests that architects and artists who grew up under the sign of this duality often attempt to address it through artistic expressions that seek to translate for the common man and woman the complexity of this schizoid reality that remains for the most part unaddressed by traditional methods of architectural representation. The following three essays focus on pivotal works by seminal architects in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Venezuela. In “From the Internal to the Radical,” Javier de Jesús Martínez explores the career of German-born architect Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico, considering how specific formal developments in his style manifested an evolved notion of autonomy in Puerto Rico. In “Brazilian Machineries (or the Collapse) of Pleasure Architecture, Eroticism and the Naked Body,” José Lira explores the quasi-delirious programs of two groundbreaking projects in Brazil: João Filgueiras Lima’s Beijódromo and Lina Bo Bardi’s and Edson Elito’s Oficina Theater. And in “Concrete Modernity in Venezuela,” Carlos Brillembourg develops a study of two buildings that in his view are

exemplary of the transformative possibilities of architecture to convey a sense of modernity as a life-affirming practice: Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s Casa Quoma and Gio Ponti’s Villa Planchart. The following essays tackle the topic of collaboration between architects and artists, starting with Eduardo Luis Rodríguez’s “Integrating Vanguardisms: Dialogues between Art and Architecture in Modern Cuba,” which offers a valuable overview of the complementary and often conflicting interactions between art and architecture in Havana from the 1930s to 1950s. In “Secret Lines: Interweaving a New Territory,” Hannia Gómez discusses the indirect influence that the geometric abstract work of artists like Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) and Jesús Soto wielded on the visual culture of Caracas. Ligia Nobre’s “Time of Cohabitation” contributes a perceptive insight on the challenges faced by Milanese architect Lina Bo Bardi as she followed her husband Pietro Maria Bardi to Brazil in the late 1940s to open the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. The collection closes with a revised version of Julieta González’s “From Utopia to Abdication: Juan Downey’s Architecture without Architecture,” a defining essay on the elusive Chilean artist and architect Juan Downey originally written for the catalogue of Juan Downey—The Invisible Architect. Throughout this selection of essays—including Dan Graham’s winning valentine to architects Lina Bo Bardi and João Batista Vilanova Artigas— the complex relationship between visionary modernist architects and Latin America’s common man is examined with great insight and honesty, a topic perceptively captured by Mauro Restife’s photograph for the cover of this volume. With its dramatic light and superb sense of theatrics, Restiffe’s Oscar 17c captures the historic moment when the citizens of Brasilia lined up in the presidential palace to pay homage to its master builder.

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INTRODUCTION

ANTONIO SERGIO BESSA

Notes

1/ For an informative overview of the period, see Mary Kate O’Hare’s introduction, and opening essay in Constructive Spirit—Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920–50s (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2010), 8–45. 2/ A proposal for building a new Brazilian capital in the country’s hinterland was already in discussion as early as 1823, according to Lilia Moritz Schwarcz. For more on this subject see Schwarcz’s impressive study of nineteenth-century Brazil, As Barbas do imperador, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010), 232.

8 3/ Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 38. 4/

Ibid., 102.

5/

Ibid., 36.

6/ Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 35. 7/ Wolf Vostel and Dick Higgins, eds., Fantastic Architecture (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), 11.

8/ Kippenberger’s Brazilian tour culminated in a performative act involving the purchase of a defunct gas station in Salvador, Bahia, which he titled Tankstelle Martin Borman, hinting at the possibility that survivors of the Nazi regime had a second chance in South America. By 1985, stories of high-ranking Nazi military living incognito in South America were still current, and Kippenberger arrived in Rio only a few months after the remains of Josef Mengele had been exhumed from a grave in a suburb of São Paulo. On the other hand, Brazil’s economy at the time was at the lowest with national currency extremely devalued, a situation that Kippenberger contrasted with the decline of the Reichmark during the Weimar Republic. Like a double-sided mirror, Tankstelle Martin Borman reminds us of the drastic end of the modernist program in Germany with the ascension of Nationalism, conflating it with Brazil’s own modernist rubble under the military rule. 9/ For the English translation of Clark’s lecture, see Manuel J. Borja-Villel, ed., Lygia Clark (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), 71–73. 10 / For the complete text of Parts of a Body House, see Higgens and Vostel, Fantastic Architecture, 11.

Identity as Style

In his attempt to explain the Mexican character, poet Octavio Paz famously wrote, “in a strict sense, the modern world has no ideas,”1 to this he would later add, “today we have critique, not ideas,” that “our unique Idea, in the right sense of the word, is Critique.”2 Using Paz as a starting point, we can argue that modernity is about critique, a critique of ideas that are, in fact, not modern. To an extent, the mid-twentieth century in Mexico showed itself to be an effusive period of critical discourse, perceptible in cultural shifts—and artistic production—in response to the dynamic social and economic changes of the modernizing world. This notwithstanding, we must ask ourselves: has there truly been a moment of Mexican modernism in architecture? When and how? When was the time of critique and not just that of modernization? Two decades after the beginning of the Revolution that lasted until 1923 and following the violent and convoluted 1920s—which witnessed continued upheavals and the formation of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)— Mexican architects began to ask themselves how to be modern. In 1933 a group of experienced and novice Mexican architects participated in a series of lectures trying to elucidate what Mexican architecture should look like. Among them was Alfonso Pallares, president of the Mexican Society of Architects and organizer of the lecture series. In the introductory notes to the lecture proceedings published in 1934, Pallares wrote, “new building methods and

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Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez

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economical conditions, together with ideological elements as a result of the World War, had led to architectural forms and goals absolutely contrary to our deeply rooted tradition.”3 In what way were these architectural forms absolutely contrary to our deeply rooted tradition? What kind of architecture was appropriate for that new condition? Should it be modern—functionalist was the term they used—or should it look deeper into forgotten sources of Mexico’s past? If turn-of-thecentury Mexican architecture had been under the influence of the French École des Beaux Arts and its eclectic historical mix of architectural styles—in the same way that Mexican intellectuals were influenced by French positivism— then the new architecture had to respond to the conditions that arose from the Revolution and the social and economic changes that had taken place not only in Mexico but around the world. Juan Legarreta, Alvaro Aburto, and Juan O’Gorman were among the young architects invited to the lectures.4 Unlike their elders, they did not see the necessity of a national architectural identity as a priority, at least not in the same way stylistically or aesthetically. For these aspiring architects, the ugliness of Mexico—as Antonio Pallares had written in a 1924 newspaper article5—was not just (or foremost) an aesthetic problem (a question of style), but also one of quality and equity of living spaces. Legarreta was the first to speak in those lectures, and we know his talk was clear and shocking, but when the transcripts of his lecture were sent to him for publication he sent back a handwritten, brief, and harsh statement: “A people living in huts and one-room houses cannot speak architecture. We will build the people’s houses. Rhetorical aesthetes—wish they were all dead—will make their speeches later.” According to historian Israel Katzman, Legarreta was a very special case. His character was conditioned by a corporal defect, as he suffered total paralysis of both legs since the age of twenty. His effort and tenacity, admired by his companions, opened many doors for him. He was nonconformist, rebellious, biting, and almost blinded by one single idea: that he had to provide housing for the dispossessed masses.6 Legarreta was an angry man, but his position on the role of architecture in contemporary society was clear. In many ways, his sentiments echoed what others agreed upon. Pallares himself, for instance, had written in that 1924 newspaper article, with a mix of social consciousness and paternalistic pedantry, that “millions of Indians and poor people, even middle-class people” had to be suitably lodged and even “taught how to live clean, healthy, and carefully in their dwellings.” He went as far as writing that “as important as it was to make those people hate not

knowing how to read, write, or count, they also had to learn to despise living in thatch and mud huts with neither windows nor doors, in stinky cellars.” According to Pallares, those were “transitional buildings between a troglodytic age and the civilized times.” In that way of living everything was wrong: “the walls do not protect from anything and are nests to all kinds of bugs, the roofs do not cover but, again, let in insects and animals, floors do not rise and differentiate from filth.”7 For Pallares and Legarreta, the central problem of housing could not be remedied through improvements in architectural style alone. Their opinions differed from that of Austrian economist Emil Sax (1845–1927) who in 1869 commented, “by improving the housing of the working classes it would be possible to successfully remedy the material and spiritual misery which has been described, and thereby—by a radical improvement of the housing conditions alone—to raise the greater part of these classes out of the morass of their often hardly human conditions of existence to the pure heights of material and spiritual well-being.”8 Instead, Pallares and Legarreta’s descriptions of the conditions of housing for the poor were not far from those made by Dickens, Marx, Engels, and other nineteenth-century writers and thinkers. Similar to Engels—who takes issue with Sax’s position in The Housing Question that living conditions would improve by changing the particular conditions but not the production relations that were the underlying cause—architects like Legarreta, O’Gorman, and Aburto rejected an architectural style as the solution to the housing problem because a people living in huts and one-room houses could not speak architecture. While several architects who had participated in the lectures agreed that the housing problem was not just a question of style, the quest for mexicanidad in architecture remained a preoccupation for many in those days. The debates around mexicanidad were not only concerned with identifying a modern expression that could define what Mexican architecture should be but also how architecture could introduce a modern way of being. Among the architects engaged in this discourse were those who thought it necessary to return to the origins of Mexican identity. But where exactly were those origins buried? Could they be found in the pre-Cortesian past or in the colonial period when the peculiar mixture of Mexico’s hybridity first emerged? It was nearly universally agreed upon, however, that Mexican architecture built in the years following the wars of independence would not provide the necessary answers to resolve the question of identity. Pallares himself had tackled the question in an article published in Excelsior on May 9, 1926, in which he asked why Mexico had not produced a national architecture. After surveying the nineteen project

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proposals for Mexico’s pavilion at the Universal Exposition of Seville of 1929, Pallares identified five trajectories of Mexican architecture: (1) archeology, which adapted “typical forms of the pre-Cortés style to the demands of the program for a twentieth-century building”; (2) assimilation, which also started from pre-Hispanic architecture but subjected it “to more or less radical transformations”; adaption or transformation of (3) the architecture of the colonial period starting in the second half of the sixteenth century, or (4) the architecture of the neocolonial period; and (5) modernism, “which disengaged itself completely from everything traditional, imposing on its building the forms recently elaborated by the latest architectonic evolution, and not employing, but rather only hinting at, like a vague decorative incident, some elements of our pre-Cortés architecture.”9 For some architects the question of a national architecture was not a question of identity, but of authenticity. Manuel Amábilis, an architect born in Merida, Yucatan, in 1886, thought of neo-Mayan architecture as a metonymy of all Mexican architecture. In the 1933 lectures he clearly stated that “ancient art is the only art authentically Mexican.” Amábilis was clear that the forms of pre-Cortesian architecture were “absurd for our actual artistic concepts,” but that there were some “abstract modalities of aesthetics” that “having been built in the souls and hearts of our race, living on the same ground and under the same sky, are, logically, closer to our people than any other.” Despite his views, Amábilis’s ideas manifested in an architecture that was more or less a rhetorical revival of Mayan decoration rather than a reenactment of their geographical or landscape operations. Taking apart the rhetoric of Amábilis’s lecture, Pallares understood Amábilis’s position as one driven by a geo-poetic approach to architecture; for him, not just any architectural style would suit prevailing Mexican ideologies or tastes, especially not one produced under a different set of temporal and territorial conditions. Pallares would conclude that Amábilis was struggling between the colonial trajectory and a certain degree of modernism, although the former would weigh on him much more. The crisis of identity was not exclusive to those prone to tradition like Amábilis. Juan O’Gorman, another young radical, turned his back on architecture in his mid-thirties after designing houses for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and almost thirty schools in Mexico City. For him, architecture had become a Frankenstein monster so much so that he took a nearly two decade long hiatus from architecture during which he devoted his time to painting murals and portraits. O’Gorman dismissed his early work as building engineering, the fruit of his immature acceptance of Corbusian ideals and his ignorance of the ideas formulated by a true American, that is, Pan-American

architect: Frank Lloyd Wright. Upon his return to architecture in the 1950s, O’Gorman began to turn away from the monochromatic abstraction of his early residential projects, painted in bold hues of blue and red, moving toward an architecture of polychromatic and textural exuberance as in the Central Library of the Ciudad Universitaria, a modernist box dressed up in folk costume, as many have commented; or his own house in San Jerónimo, an inhabitable sculpture of extreme polychromatic and decorative variation. In the same vein, Luis Barragán, who after an early regionalist period in his native Guadalajara, transformed himself into a rationalist during the mid-to-late 1930s and invented—simultaneously but with more success than other Mexican architects—a sensual monochrome modernism that today many associate with Mexican modern architecture. Just prior to the launch of the 1933 lecture series, a request for proposals appeared in a 1932 edition of the El Universal newspaper calling for new approaches to workers housing. Launched by the Muestrario de la construcción moderna (Showcase of Modern Construction)—a business directed by Carlos Obregón Santacilia, a prominent figure of the older architectural vanguard—the competition invited Mexican engineers and architects “to analyze the spatial conditions within which the life of the wage-laborer population developed, to propose the best opportunities for its dignification, and to conclude with the design for a dwelling space that would renovate the proletariat class’ quality of life.”10 Legarreta won first prize, Enrique Yánez came in second, and Carlos Tarditi and Augusto Pérez Palacios shared third price; O’Gorman obtained a mention upon presenting a multifamily residential project instead of a house.11 Legarreta thought of new architecture neither in aesthetic terms nor as a problem of identity—at least not an aesthetic identity—but in political and social terms. After winning the design competition, Legarreta had the opportunity to build some of those workers houses, a small workers neighborhood really, before his death in 1934. There had been plans for social housing before Legarreta, even in the times of the old regime (before the Revolution), such as the housing project by the tobacco company El Buen Tono, built at the beginning of the twentieth century. But for Legarreta the challenge was to build an entire city, unit by unit. His model was not only the European architectural avant-garde but also Mexican popular architecture. Legarreta knew that, in some way, his task was not only to build houses for the people, but also to build people, a people that—once the basic needs of housing were met—could “speak architecture.” That is in part what distinguishes Legarreta from what Mario Pani was doing between the late 1940s and 1964 when he built the Tlatelolco housing

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Fig. 2 / Juan Legarreta. Worker’s Housing street view (1934). Mexico City, Mexico. Courtesy Museo Archivo de la Fotografía de la Ciudad de México.

Fig. 3 / Juan Legarreta. Worker’s Housing street perspective (1934). Mexico City, Mexico. Courtesy Museo Archivo de la Fotografía de la Ciudad de México.

Fig. 4 / Juan Legarreta. Worker’s Housing community market (1934). Mexico City, Mexico. Courtesy Museo Archivo de la Fotografía de la Ciudad de México.

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Fig. 1 / Juan Legarreta. Worker’s Housing exterior view (1934). Mexico City, Mexico. Courtesy Museo Archivo de la Fotografía de la Ciudad de México.

complex. If Legarreta thought he was building a people by building for the people, Pani, a Beaux-Arts architect by training and a Corbusian modernist by conviction, knew he was doing it for a class: the emerging urban middle class. The radical, socialist architect built single-unit dwellings for the people, while the elitist architect trained in France designed a colossal housing complex for the emerging middle class. Yet they both built cities, they both imagined societies in a way. In the postrevolutionary period in Mexico, architecture was charged with certain didactic positions; it was clearly viewed as a form of indoctrination and propaganda. For this reason, educational buildings were likewise entangled in the tension between identity and style. From the mid-1920s to the 1950s, under the authority of the Ministry of Education, a number of educational buildings in Mexico were adorned with murals, the highest achievement of which was the Ciudad Universitaria, the new campus of the National University (UNAM). Built at the southern end of Mexico City in the volcanic rock landscape of the Pedregal, UNAM’s buildings were treated as canvases depicting sweeping national narratives. Style and identity were at war in those buildings at UNAM in the sense that they had to operate successfully as containers for learning and devices for teaching, in the same way that baroque architecture served in the propagation of faith. As early as 1925, Obregón Santacilia, the same architect who promoted the workers housing competition, designed Benito Juarez elementary school in Mexico City. The school is not only a neocolonial building but also an interpretation of colonial monasteries: the library is the church, the cloister and cells are transformed into classrooms. That same year, Guillermo Zárraga, a singular character in Mexican architecture—architect, teacher, politician and, under the pseudonym Diego Cañedo, a science fiction writer—designed, several educational buildings in a more vernacular and austere neocolonial style than Obregón Santacilia. Zárraga and Mendiola were on the faculty at the UNAM School of Architecture in the early twentieth century, and taught Aburto, Legarreta, and O’Gorman. The public schools that O’Gorman designed in the early 1930s were commissioned by Zárraga while he was the head of the national Department of Public Works.

Fig. 5 / Juan Legarreta. Worker’s Housing typical kitchen (1934). Mexico City, Mexico. Courtesy Museo Archivo de la Fotografía de la Ciudad de México.

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O’Gorman’s schools are stark and austere buildings, closer even to the severe architecture of the workers housing project by his friend Legarreta than to his own housing projects. They are clearly a product of that building engineering that he would later criticize. As previously mentioned, O’Gorman returned to architecture as a painter and artist, helping Diego Rivera with the design and construction of a museum that would house Rivera’s collection of pre-Hispanic art, the Anahuacalli. Built with black volcanic stone, it mingled influences from Mexico’s Aztec ruins with Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture, which Rivera admired—an admiration he would pass on to O’Gorman. Next, he was the architect for the Central Library at Ciudad Universitaria, along with Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martinez de Velasco, but also the muralist, covering the four walls of the library with a huge mosaic that deals, again, with issues of identity, depicting Mexican culture as a mixture of many traditions. The title of the mosaic is “Historic Representation of Culture.” In Mexico, the combination of modern architecture and visual arts came to be known as plastic integration, and was seen as a particularity of national modernism. But rather than a local, national program, the idea of an architecture that would speak to the people was a somewhat typical reaction to the purity of the whitewashed walls commonplace among the heroic modernism of the early twentieth century. Even Le Corbusier did not closely follow the law that he had decreed in the 1920s, prescribing that every building should be painted in white.12 In 1943, for example, Sigfried Giedion, Josep Lluis Sert, and Fernand Léger had written in their Nine Points on Monumentality, “the people want the buildings that represent their social and community life to give more than a functional fulfillment.” For a building to be a monument, that is to be representative of the community where it was built, it had to be the result of the collaboration and “integration of the work of the planner, architect, painter, sculptor and landscapist.” But as a choice of style, plastic integration was not an easy task. Murals and sculptures affixed to buildings did not define integration. Obregón Santacilia, who was not invited to participate in the design of the Ciudad Universitaria, wrote in his book 50 Years of Mexican Architecture, 1900–1950 that architects had become exterior decorators. And even O’Gorman, when writing about the Central Library, complained that the murals did not introduce any new spatial or architectural innovations to the library building; it was to an extent a functionalist, international style building outfitted to look Mexican. From a people that couldn’t speak architecture, to an architecture that could speak and, therefore, following a didactic and propagandistic ideology, educate the people, the problem of identity was not solved between the

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1930s and the 1950s nor later, when it was reduced to variations on the theme of rough colored walls. Today, the problem of identity in architecture is no longer thought of at all. The problem with architecture as both an instrument of modernization and a criticism of it—as well as an example of modernity— was apparent in at least two ways: style, which became convenient and appropriate for the country and its culture, as demonstrated by Pallares’s trajectories; and dialogue, a consequence of the former, or the way in which architecture communicated with and about the pueblo. Not just muralism, but also the more abstract use of color—as shown in the murals by O’Gorman in his houses for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, or, later, by Luis Barragán in the architecture that made him famous—progressively changed their critical disposition for a didactic pretension; muralism was in large part a moralism that at times was reduced to morals. The position sustained by Legarreta, as summarized in Pláticas del 33, and the rigorous, raw functionalism that he demonstrated in the few years in which he practiced—and today we cannot know if with time he would have changed and softened his hardness—seems to clearly distinguish between the conversations about architecture intended for the people and the discourse of the aesthetes and specialists.

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Notes

1/ Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) (1950; repr., Santiago and Mexico DF: Economic Culture Fund 1984), 153. 2/ Octavio Paz, Aparencia desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp (Naked Appearance: The Work of Marcel Duchamp) (1973; repr., Mexico City: Era 1990), 88. 3/ Alfonso Pallares, ed., Pláticas sobre arquitectura (Lectures on architecture) (1933; repr., Mexico City: INBA, 2001), 1.

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4/ Legarreta died in a tragic accident at age thirty-two, a year after the lectures. Aburto and O’Gorman where twenty-eight at the time of the lectures. 5/ Alfonso Pallares, “Cómo habita el pueblo mexicano” (How do the Mexican people live), in Cultura arquitectónica de la modernidad mexicana, antología de textos 1922–1963 (Architectural culture of modernity in Mexico: Anthology of texts, 1922–1963), ed. Enrique X. de Anda and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez (Mexico City: UNAM 2010), 35–39; originally published in Excelsior, November 23, 1924.

6/ Katzman, Israel, La arquitectura moderna mexicana (Contemporary Mexican Architecture), Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1964), 151. 7/ It is interesting to note that treating the traditional ways of dwelling as unhealthy and unfunctional spaces is still part of our culture: one of the programs of Felipe Calderon’s government (2006–2012) was to build concrete floors in the houses of the poorest neighborhoods. 8/ Emil Sax, The Housing Conditions of the Working Classes and their Reform (1869), quoted by Friedrich Engels in The Housing Question (1887), http://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1872/housing-question/. 9/ Alfonso Pallares, “¿Por qué no tenemos una arquitectura nacional? El concurso del pabellón de México en Sevilla y su significado,” in Ideario de los arquitectos mexicanos, vol 2: Los olvidados (Ideology of Mexican architects: The forgotten), ed. Ramón Vargas Salguero and J. Victor Arias Montes (Mexico City: UNAM, Conaculta 2010), 116; originally published in the newspaper Excelsior May 9, 1926.

10 / Enrique X. De Anda, Concurso de habitación obrera (detalle), Juan O’Gorman, 1932 (The project of Juan O’Gorman for the competition of the “worker’s dwelling” of 1932), Arquine 20, Summer 2002, 65. 11 / Enrique Ayala Alonso, “Vivienda de masas en México,” in Habitar la casa: historia, actualidad, y prospective (Live in the house: history, present, and prospective) (Mexico City: UAM 2010), 111–25. 12 / Le Corbusier, “Le lait de chaux, la loi du Ripolin” (“A Coat of Whitewash: The Law of Ripolin”), in L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (The Decorative Art of Today) (Paris: Flammarion, 1996).

Modernism and Contemporary Art in Latin America

Beyond the Supersquare presents a conceptual challenge for those of us who tend to keep our reflections within the architectural universe and its predominant referents; a challenge that is renewed time and time again by the constantly mutating connection between the inseparable fields of art and architecture. In the specific case of Latin America, this challenge led us to speculate on a contemporary phenomenon: the profound influence that modern architecture has had on the region’s artistic work; an influence that, among other things, is reflected in the work of a countless number of contemporary artists who were trained as architects, in schools of architecture, rather than as visual artists.1 One need only name a few of the most prominent of these artists to realize the ubiquity of this phenomenon: Alexander Apóstol (Venezuela), Felipe Arturo (Colombia), Pedro Bandeira (Brazil), Dino Bruzzone (Argentina), Mauricio Bueno (Ecuador), Raúl Cárdenas (Mexico), Teddy Cruz (Guatemala), Dario Escobar (Guatemala), Alfredo Jaar (Chile), Mateo Pintó D’Lacoste and Carolina Cisneros (Venezuela/ Argentina), Juan Downey (Chile), Martín Huberman (Argentina), Laura Janka (Mexico), Gaspar Libedinsky (Argentina), Manuel Mansylla and Jimena Leiva (Guatemala), Nicolás Paris (Colombia), Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen (Chile), Teresa Ponce (Ecuador), Pedro Reyes (Mexico), and Tomás Saraceno (Argentina).

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What compels these architects to abandon the limits of traditional architecture and venture into the more open-ended initiatives of the art world? There are clear and universal answers: artistic endeavors are much more permissive than architectural projects, and their budgets facilitate experimentation and risk-taking that would be unthinkable on a larger scale, especially in conditions that require habitation (an art installation, for example, allows the artist to test technologies, concepts, and systems that few clients would be willing to finance in their architectural projects). Artistic spaces provide an area for experimentation that is vital to the development of discourse, technique, and production. Additionally, there is an interest in public and collective space (be it urban or not) that drives many young artists to intervene in it. However, the question before us is much more complex, given that it evades the natural and universal relationships between art and architecture, artist and architect (often times the same person) and investigates the specific form that this relationship takes on within the cultural-territorial construct we know as “Latin America” (an amalgamation of the diverse cultures that make up each one of our countries). I am going to risk five hypotheses on how these architects-turned-artists confront the legacies of the modern, not trying to offer positivist verifications or definitive facts, but rather maintaining the spirit of the speculative question which gave rise to this essay.

Vernacular or Popular Modernism and Le Corbusier’s Incidental Cities At the heart of the answer lies the need to unify two phenomena that are perceived and treated as separate, despite expressing the same historic conditions in meaning, ordering, and entropic capacity; that is, from its inception, the modernization of Latin America was a “favela-zation.” Our modern cities, epitomized by Brasilia were born with their ranchitos and favelas, their slums, annexes, informal settlements, shacks, irregular lots, shantytowns, and so on. The richness of the terms that we use to name them points to the local inflections that they acquire.2 “While some self-constructed neighborhoods possess a long history—the first favela of Rio de Janeiro, Morro da Providencia, for example, was founded in 1880—the majority of megaslums began development in the sixties”;3 in other words, at the peak of our process of modernization. Modernism and the favela flourished and developed inseparably: two faces arising from the same process of assimilation, heralding the construction of a doubly aspirational space.

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Fig. 1 / Le Corbusier. Maison Domino (1914, never built) © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2014

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On the one hand, the modern architecture of Latin America—forged at a distance from the age of industrialization and its mechanization of space, time, and life—was realized with cheap labor,4 with bricklayers who, in contrast to machines, learned to reproduce, adapt, and reinterpret modern architecture’s standards, materials, and techniques. It is well known that the laborers who participated in the modernization of our built environments were themselves the laborers of our “favela-zation” and that the earliest slums were constructed to house their families. Indeed Brasilia was hatched alongside its “informal” neighborhoods—a need unforeseen in such a grandiose vision planned without provisional housing for the workers who would build it. On the other hand, Latin American modernism was born as a social aspiration, not only in its renown housing projects, drawn with the T-square, but also in its self-constructed neighborhoods, whose structures are founded on the same principles that even today establish the majority of our buildings: Le Corbusier’s domino system.5 Free from its original context, Le Corbusier’s technology was coopted and subjected to a (re-)encounter between skin and structure—set to perform as a new system intended to act as a load-bearing wall structure. Thus vernacular modernism with its patchwork self-construction is also part of Latin American modernity; not a phenomenon to be treated separately under the heading of or exclusive to other disciplines (perhaps for this reason Rudofsky has made attempts to restore their place in the history of architecture?). Also, this “informal” form (a worthwhile paradox in itself) of modernism is itself aspirational, manifest in corrugated steel rods projecting skyward expressing a longing for family and socio-economic growth. The dynamism implicit in these self-constructed barrios is echoed in academic paradigms that propose projects capable of accommodating population growth, like the implementation of Habracken supports;6 or conceptual affinities with utopian visions like the plug-in systems of Archigram. This dynamism has also been formalized and interpreted in housing projects that seek to learn from their mutant and unfinished conditions, such as the Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) in Lima (1967)7 and Elemental (2001).8 Our regional modernism was designed by

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22 Fig. 2 / ELEMENTAL (Project team: Alejandro Aravena, Alfonso Moreno, Tomas Cortese, Emilio de la Cerda). Quinta Monroy (2003–04). Iquique, Chile. Photo: Takuto Sando. Courtesy ELEMENTAL.

highly trained architects who introduced it to Latin America, yet our modernism was realized by thousands of “comparative advantage” laborers. The hands who built our modern cities, infrastructures, and architecture were the same hands who erected the monumental ecologies of the favela as well. What we face, once more, is the age-old dichotomy between “high” and “low”: Art/art, Architecture/architecture, Modernism/modernism. Beyond the subdivisions that originate from the colonial roots of various definitions or dominant cultural taxonomies, the point is that the expression of a space construed as an “A” or as an “a” stems from the same phenomenon of assimilation: the modern paradigm. To this “double modernity,” one has to add the complexity acquired by our cities when we informalize the formal. To prove it, one only needs to study the evolution of social housing projects or collective dwellings in the region. Over time, their users tend to adapt them to such a point that without memory of the underlying historical layer, as originally planned, it is thought that they were informal since their inception.9 It is also fascinating to follow the path of the informal use of some elements of the base and superstructure of Brasilia (or of Chandigarh, in its deficiency, as a modern formulation of analogous conditions).10 Inversely, these processes of formalizing the informal are equally interesting. Urban acupuncture has become the principal channel of intervention in this direction in recent decades.11 The threshold between these counterpoint modernities is constantly diluted and inverted in unexpected ways. And it is interesting to note that the aggressive expansion of favelas worldwide gives shape to another of the expressions of international architecture.12 Informal areas are often indistinguishable from each other, a sort of “generic popular modern” indiscriminately inserting itself regardless of site, weather, or culture. After all, according to Alan Colquhoun, the central distinction between the way Perret and Le Corbusier used reinforced concrete is that Le Corbusier understood that its potential lay far beyond its ability to express the structure of a new vertical urban order, rather it carried the raw potential to construct mass produced housing.13 What he did not foresee was the adaptability of Le Corbusier’s Fordist infrastructure—that his domino system would become the primary method of building a vernacular modernism, a key characteristic of the sprawling expanses of developing countries. Our modernism was born as a symbol of modernity and was since its inception only symbolic. It was postmodern at its beginnings, and for that, perhaps, it was never modern per se, as some theorists of Latin American architecture have postulated, conscious that the transference of thought, style, form, and materials from abroad occurred without the import of the economic-industrial sustainment that gave it life

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(the superstructure migrated without its infrastructure). Perhaps for the same reason, the domino system continues to endure as the dominant paradigm of design and construction. Many of the contemporary architects who work in this double condition of Latin American modernity face, confront, denounce, communicate, or integrate it in expressions and projections thanks to art, whose tools help to resolve that impossible schism between modernisms. Art and architecture also play an important role as mediators in community participation processes centered on designing in and for marginalized communities. In this context, it is worth noting that art recuperates it social, public, and urban dimensions, abandoning the pretense of autonomy—“art for art’s sake”—and instead dedicates itself to fairness and civil justice. This upending of artistic autonomy, in turn, through a commitment to political, economic, and social welfare that many architects perceive as urgent and overriding is informed by the overwhelming immediacy of poverty. As a mechanism for mediation and negotiation, art becomes a tool for organizing civil demonstrations, allowing architects to disrupt the (dis)order of things; to return something of civil justice back to zones of urban, territorial, socio-economic, and labor exclusion. Art also becomes a central communication tool that helps to translate the complexities of urban reality through intelligible documents, and exposes the limitations of traditional methods of architectural representation. The maps and document that transcribe the lives, opinions, and morphological conditions of informal neighborhoods are embodied in the multiple media and formats used by artists establishing a fascinating dialogue between institutional spaces of art and/or architecture with the urban fabric, transforming them into subjects and objects of Art.

Ruin, Loss, and Revival One of the means through which architecture confronts modernism by way of art is memory. Architects, such as Alexander Apóstol, for example, trace the history of the ruins of modernity that persist in our cities today, revealing their

Fig. 3 / Alexander Apóstol. Rosenthal from the Residente Pulido series, 2001. Digital photograph (200 x 150 cm). Courtesy the artist.

before and after conditions. These narratives illustrate the degradation, even dilapidation, of various modern landmarks in Latin America. The after also reveals stories of demolition and substitution. Some of the most interesting cases trace the conditions that prompt abandoned high-rise buildings to become “slums.” If we take into account that modern architecture in Latin America was, above all, a symbol and aspiration, its future status (what is for us the present) as a ruin serves as a warning: when utopian ideals are put into practice, no matter how unattainable they may be, they must be constructed on real foundations, and must endure societal transformations over time. And yet implicitly, utopian visions are doomed to reproduce the same patterns of exclusion and bipolarity found in existing economic, social, and cultural systems. Our ruined modernity provides a view to the future project of modernization; a project that the region is not ready to abandon and which it resuscitates in current proposals, developments, and efforts toward infrastructural integration; an architecture with both an economy of means as well as social consciousness of space.14 Those same ruins, nevertheless, fuel the skepticism that brings many designers to question, prolong, or reformulate the modern project; given that to document, register, map, photograph, film, represent, communicate, and confront the ruined conditions of a once ebullient hope is to make a painful assessment of our current state of development. That simultaneous denial and nostalgia for the modern is transcribed with clarity in the demolition and permanent loss of a legacy to which we constantly position ourselves equally in contradictory ways. Along with those who reveal and critique the neglect and abandonment of our modern heritage are the interests of speculators and the market who bulldoze this heritage without a second glance. The unavoidable subject of architectural preservation emerges once again, but looking toward another era; no longer the colonial, nor the republican, nor the pre-Hispanic; but rather in the domain of what remains unchallenged. Maybe it is that same aggression toward the modern that is leading us to reclaim its value and revive its contribution, leading us to reproduce its postures and proposals in a contemporary architecture deeply entrenched in its precepts—such as the style of the Japanese, who perpetuate the existence of a structure not by preserving it, but by reconstructing it. These questions emerge: Do we demolish modernism’s aspirations when we demolish its architecture? Is the social project lost with it? Do we resuscitate it when we empty it into the new containers of contemporary architecture?

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The Principle of Austerity

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What to do with a legacy that has become a ruin in time and a favela in space? Just as seminal works of modern architecture are demolished, their forms, their plans, their values are reproduced in a new modernity—yet another paradox of contemporaneity and preservation in Latin America—which lets go and reconstructs, overturns and reproduces, annuls and reaffirms. And at its core is that affiliation with the value of the primitive: the last refuge of the myth of the noble savage, of the savage whose populations shrink at the behest of modernizing processes that we refuse to abandon as symbolic containers of our advancement. Has the moment arrived to let go? Of what? The places? The cultures? The primitive? Or of our unchanged notions of modernism; of “development”? Or do we let go of everything? Or nothing? In the midst of these questions, we inevitably return to the root that sustains modernity and there we find its reflection and complement in the primitive. The notion that the primitive is the height of sophistication is found underlying the origins of the modern movement itself. It is found in radical approaches to the design of space and in the temporal conditions that gave it life.15 It can be located in those vectors that gave it momentum and force, such as Picasso’s cubism, with its simultaneous points of view depicted alongside characteristic facets of African art in painting and sculpture; it was in the pairing of the primitive and the civilized where he found the basis to express the modern condition. The primitive goes hand in hand with the essential, the elemental, the distilled—traces that contemporary architects of the region continue to celebrate in their work; traces of a culture that embraces a fusion of original (innovative) and of origin (seminal). Contemporary architecture in Latin America remains deeply linked with abstract art through its pursuit of the universal, the gestalt. Often, travel excursions created abstraction. These travels went hand in hand with journeys of the past, particularly looking toward the pre-Hispanic past and its basic geometries (in art and architecture).16 More than a few contemporary architects continue to explore the fertile territories of abstraction’s legacies in Latin America: there are the young descendants of Concrete art in Brazil, the legacy of dynamic and optical art made by Jesús Rafael Soto in Venezuela, and the dimensionalismo of Estuardo Maldonado in Ecuador, among others. To this we must add that in Latin America, at the heart of the explosive social chemistry enlivened by our cities, our constructed environments and social exchanges are precipitated by a historical point of view; a synthesis of

our colonial legacy, a construction of a society based upon an interpretation of otherness: the articulation of the myth of the noble savage, always marked, as we are, during our travels abroad and by foreigners in our cities, by their gaze, by the agreements and disagreements, which the process of colonization implies, by the discrimination and exclusion that we are still strangely and clearly sealed into, which is inscribed upon our cities by those unshakable exotic perceptions of our realities. Resting upon the myth of the noble savage is the construct of the modern savage. Our favelas can be interpreted as an indomitable modernism, “untamed,” deeply affiliated with the customs and forms of the vernacular, and the rural; and in various contexts, indigenous or African. The work of Juan Downey in the Amazon, for example, is a lively celebration of the most sophisticated culture of the jungle. By definition, the savage is not cultivated, tamed, or domesticated yet he is refined over the centuries. The “savage” does not cease to be cultivated, he is highly attuned to spatial contexts of enormous complexity, like the jungle; and for that reason, he is key to the conceptualization of the jungle’s future development. Perhaps it was Levi-Strauss who found the most appropriate term to describe this perplexing condition, and how clever it is with its reference to the basic survival of human beings: the “raw”—which characterizes many of the artistic and architectural expressions in Latin America. It is expressed in textures and materials. It is found in the manual imprint of our modernism; one tremendously akin to brutalism which succeeded it and is still in force in its hybridization: a combination of the primitive and the modern, by making the cultural artifice into something natural. Latin America’s fascination with the primitive, the primary, the savage, the elemental, the essential, the raw, does not cease. Just how connected is this fascination with our territories that were until recently remote, less travelled, less explored (submitted now, once again, to the butchery of the raw materials market) with the masonries, monoliths, and pre-Hispanic pyramids of our past; an aesthetic which reinforces itself through the frugality of monastery walls and Catholic convents, those silent preachers of the austere and refined.

Hyperbolic Territories Despite the western trappings of our modernism, from its beginnings we were aware that Latin America was never a tabula rasa (perhaps another type of postmodernity, a sort of premodernity within modernity?). It can be argued that in Europe (Old World), and even in the United States (northern New World), the

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landscapes are artificial or highly domesticated (wilderness included); in South America there still persists a series of “savage” territories, although these territories shrink daily under the advances of imitative and “progressive” development. Architects, like Downey—who submerge themselves in the vastness and beauty of an ecology like the Amazon (the geographic subconscious of South America), Patagonia, the Pantanal, the Andes Mountains, the deserts, or the Orinoco, Plata, and Magdalena river basins as well as in cultures that are native to our geographies—slide, inexorably, into the fields of art, whose folds and turns allow for the questioning of everything learned in architecture manuals, and permit the exploration of alternative forms of representation and planning that, in addition to being beautiful, functional, and structural, they are geopoetic, ethnographic, ecological, biological, economic, and more. In this encounter with our expansive territory, art and architecture converge, join forces, fuse, sing. If to confront modernism today is to confront the ruin of modernity, then to do so in space, is to be faced with the entropic; and its collateral are some of the planet’s most majestic and rich ecologies. In Latin America the favela is not only an urban phenomenon, it is the principal mode of occupation of rural zones throughout the interior of the continent. Browder and Godfrey, in their study of the contemporary process of urbanization around the Brazilian Amazon river basin—one of the urban frontiers with the most accelerated growth—note that 80 percent of its development amounts to a “favelaization.” Our history of modernization is again repeated in the processes of informalization with historic precision.17 As occurred with the best of the modern international culture, the best of Latin American modernism was always conscious of its intervention in a specific territory, a particular place with its own culture. Since early on, modernity was characterized by the accumulation of grand human concentrations; mega-urbanisms; geographic establishments; socio-natural constructions. Latin America was one of the first regions to experience the effects of hyperagglutination: our cities grew like colonies of anemone that cling to a geological reality like vegetation, multiplying ad infinitum. The same condition of the favela, like that of the megalopolis, is territorial. For five decades our region has demonstrated the effects of a geographic and territorial modernism that has exploded since the 1990s in all the emerging economies, including India, China, South Africa. One of the peculiarities of architectural practice in Latin America is that its professional communities had to face problems of stacking, selfconstruction, and urban exclusion long before other populations, the majority of whose cities remained moderate until a couple decades ago.

To these literal territories one must add the figurative or “virtual” ones that emerge from the geopolitical conditions of our continent and generate different states of emptiness as hyperbolic as their tangible counterparts. I am referring to the territories of exile, for example, that led Tomás Saraceno, son of Argentine exiles in Italy, to occupy and construct the only space in which he felt belonging: the sky, the air, the void above our feet. Saraceno began to colonize this territory and continues to do so. Everything in Saraceno’s work—up to his social ecologies—floats, crosses, or inflames, or is pneumatic, suspended, or structured as a manifestation of the invisible and the interior in the upper ether. Its space is an apparently apolitical, neutral space, a product of the abstractions of science. Nevertheless, inside that dwelling in the sky lies one of the most innovative and potent territories that can emerge from exclusion especially given that our region has come to represent a territory of oppression, forced migration (due to the economy or politics), and involuntary exile.18 Who would have imagined that behind Saraceno’s molecular, antigravitational, insufflated, and stellar etherealities is a world, informed by a territory that was denied to him by his motherland as much as by his adoptive land. Saraceno is Argentine and Italian; and yet neither Argentine or Italian; from more than one place and from nowhere— a condition shared by many artists in the modern world who are for various reasons the product of countless movements and migrations, and who make their art one of universal expression, in empathy with time, while narrating their particular stories. Teddy Cruz is based in another of these unique territories, incomprehensible and impossible to transcribe: the threshold between the United States of America (the North) and Mexico (the South). That line which serves as solid border into a territory that once belonged to Mexico and is now the membrane of tension between two countries whose exchanges are ancestral and profound. It is a porous border that nevertheless acts as a dam against the flux of all those who want to migrate to the North, against the current, from bottom to top (or from top to bottom?), to attain access to the American dream. Migration, like Latin American modernism, is also aspirational. That nonexistent line between the United

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MODERNISM AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN LATIN AMERICA

Fig. 4 / Tomás Saraceno. TS _P09053 - Sunny Day, Airport City. © Collage of Tomas Saraceno (2009).

ANA MARÍA DURÁN CALISTO

States and Mexico, which has become as thick as the Berlin Wall, is played out at a continental and geopolitical scale—echoing the same borders that divide the urban archipelagos of Western influence and prosperity in Latin America from their “informal” counterparts at the urban scale. These worlds of privilege, of gated communities, the upper strata, the high-rises with their door men are distinguished from the rapid growth of self-built neighborhoods, realized thanks to community networks based on partnership without which basic survival would not otherwise be possible. Despite its geo-political specificity, it is not surprising that Teddy Cruz’s work of analysis, documentation, and planning has led to a socio-aesthetic manifesto of global significance. There are also the efforts of Laura Janka, who, in collaboration with Víctor Saez, traversed the political border of Mexico City, documenting it in digital, geolocalized photographs “through a continual and collective walk of its entire length.”19 From this project a city as spectacular as Mexico City, produces another equally interesting cartography: at 1:2000 scale, Janka’s project attempts to make the reality of one of the world’s largest and informal megacities intelligible to its citizens.

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The Principle of Fertility and Multiplication, or Baroque Modernism and Domino Kitsch Paradoxical as it may seem, the baroque, whose abhorrence of emptiness and taste for exaggerated ornamentation, has found a place in our day and amid a celebration of austerity. But then so is Latin America, for its hybridity cannot avoid but being paradoxical—it is capable of melting up what can not be mixed, such as the synthesis of communism and religion in liberation theology. In art, the abstract is figurative and the figurative, abstract; the austere becomes excessive and the ornate can reflect a simple complexity. Le Corbusier’s domino system is oftentimes filled with the spirals, architraves, and twists of prefabricated classicism (just one more indication of our aspirational nature); and, thanks to the global market in which we live, it is also incorporated in elements of popular consumer culture that allude to the suburban architecture of the North (this occurs in all social strata) as well in a domino-kitsch where symbols of status and desires reign over corporal human needs (perhaps our kitsch is a neobaroque or neorococo of consumption?). In reality, our modernism in its various iterations was always baroque, curved, irreverent in its celebration of organic form—the jungle, the desert, the pampa, the rocks— these elements became distilled to inform a modernism forged in the absence

of industry. The urban, is likewise, a “ruralization” and “territorialization” confronting imaginings of the hinterland finding room in a new rational, geological structure. The best of Latin American modernism is baroque and our critique of international modernism is in the very seed of our modernity and is perhaps an explicit denunciation of the absence of the baroque and a denouncement of subtly and refinement. Again, the issue emerges that our modernism was born as a postmodernist critique, or simply never was modern. In Andean cosmology, the lowest number is two, not one. The universe is meaningless if it is constructed around a single unit; it is a bi-verse; even a quadri-verse, to the extent that the number four, with its spatial equivalent the quadrant, constitutes the minimum number for social construction. The root of the principle of fertility runs deep in Latin America, and it seeps into the most Atlantic of her cultures, being as it is enhanced with mestizaje as a hybridizing impulse. The baroque was tremendously aligned with this principle, capable, as it is, of recognizing, assimilating, and integrating it all. The great enigma is how a culture founded on these principles to which inclusion and reproduction are inherent, continues to establish itself as one of the most segregated on the planet; constructed by great spheres of marginality and impervious to the mixture that it denies and conceives of as denigrating. And, as the etymology of this last term signifies, deep down, the separating force is racial:20 no one wants to “African-ize” or “indigenize” themselves as if the very negation of what so many of us in this region are permits us to participate in our Western development. Racial segregation in space is one of the pending projects of a real (post)modernity. The most important thing is that many of us do not give up and continue advocating for the construction of more just and equal territories—from architecture, from art—in a continent that is on the verge of developing its best moment in history.

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Notes

1/ The empirical and statistical perceptivity of María Inés Rodríguez and Holly Block, the curators of the Beyond the Super-Square symposium held on October 29, 2011, led us to speculate on this phenomenon. 2/ See Ana María Durán Calisto, “A Dictionary of Received Ideas for the Word Slum,” in Extreme Urbanism 1: Reimagining Mumbai´s Back Bay, ed. Rahul Mehrotra and Victor Saez (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2011).

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3/ Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London, New York: Verso, 2006), 27. Original citation: “Although some slums have long histories—Rio de Janeiro’s first favela, Morro de Providencia, was founded in the 1880s—most megaslums have grown up since the 1960s.” 4/ See Valerie Fraser, Building the New World: Modern Architecture in Latin America 1930–1960 (New York: Verso, 2001). 5/ See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 6/ See John Habracken, Supports: An Alternate to Mass Housing (n.p.: Urban International Press, 2000). Reprint of the 1972 English edition.

7/ See Equipo Arquitectura (EqA; García Huidobro, Fernando; Torres, Diego and Tugas, Nicolás), ¡El tiempo construye!: el proyecto experimental de vivienda (PREVI) de Lima: génesis y desenlace (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2009). 8/ See Alejandro Aravena and Andrés Iacobelli, Elemental, Manual de vivienda incremental y diseño participativo (Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz, 2012). 9/ See Ana María Durán Calisto, “Las ventajas de la desventaja: sobre la tectónica de lo informal,” in IV Taller Internacional de Vivienda Popular (Quito: Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Artes de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, 2007). 10 / See Iwan Baan and Cees Nooteboom, Brasilia—Chandigarh: Living with Modernity (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010). 11 / See Ana María Durán Calisto, “A Design Policy: The Road to New Urban Centers,” in A Line in the Andes, ed. Felipe Correa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2012). 12 / See Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1932). 13 / See Alan Colquhoun, La Arquitectura Moderna: una historia desapasionada (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2005).

14 / See Ana María Durán Calisto. “A-SAP: The Urgency for Territorial Projections in South America,” written for the exposition and the symposium “Rompiendo fronteras: nuevas arquitecturas latinoamericanas,” curated by Ivan Shumkov and the Latin Pratt, spring 2011. 15 / See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 16 / If pre-Hispanic expressions can be considered exaggerated and baroque, then, in our imagination, the purity of Mesoamerican pyramids or Incan stonework plays a major role. 17 / John O. Browder and Brian J. Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 18 / See archives from the encounter between Olafur Eliasson, Tomás Saraceno, and the curator of “la Muestra The Divine Comedy, el teórico y crítico de la arquitectura,” Sanford Kwinter. GSD; Harvard University; April 8, 2011. 19 / See www.laurajanka.net and www.196925.com, accessed: January 3, 2013. 20 / In the original Spanish, the word denigrating (denigrante) shares a root with the word black-ify (ennegrecerse). Therefore, the author makes a connection between the two words as they relate to the color black, or “negro” in Spanish.

From the Internal to the Radical Autonomy and Alterity in the Local Modern

The alterity, the radical heterogeneity of the other, is possible only if the other is other with respect to a term whose essence is to remain at the point of departure, to serve as entry into the relation, to be the same not relatively but absolutely. Emmanuel Levinas

The other is inside or outside, not inside and outside, being part of our interiority while remaining exterior, foreign, other to us. Awakening us, by their very alterity, their mystery, by the in-finite that they still represent for us. It is when we do not know the other, or when we accept that the other remains unknowable to us, that the other illuminates us in some way, but with a light that enlightens us without our being able to comprehend it, to analyze it, to make it ours. Luce Irigaray

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Javier de Jesús Martínez

JAVIER DE JESÚS MARTÍNEZ

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This essay is an attempt to reformulate the principle of political and disciplinary autonomy as evident in a series of projects designed by German-born architect Henry Klumb and built between 1948 and 1958. Klumb—an apprentice and, for a brief period, collaborator of Frank Lloyd Wright—arrived in Puerto Rico in 1944. He immediately became enmeshed in the political and social upheavals that would change Puerto Rican society and lead to the island’s new voter-approved constitution in 1952. Klumb was a key figure behind the emergence of a modern style that articulated the island’s new political status and sparked intellectual debate that helped shape a new modernity in Puerto Rico. Three projects—the Faculty Center (1948), Klumb’s private residence (1948), and the Student Center (1948–58)—stand as examples of how the postwar cultural, political, and physical climate helped bring about a new aesthetic and ethics in architecture in Puerto Rico. In this series of projects, autonomy—as both a concept and an ideology—is neither privileged nor neglected; instead it becomes an experiment in itself. In this essay, I will analyze the radicalization of autonomy in Klumb’s work in reference to a framework of three moments of autonomy: internal, exchangeable, and radical. Instead of becoming a process that negated exteriorities and differences, Klumb’s radicalization of autonomy directs us toward the recognition and reconsideration of otherness as related to the place of Puerto Rico in politics and discourse in the postwar era.

The Possibility of a Critique: Conjunction of Ideological Discourses The collective aspiration of development and progress of Latin American societies is evident in the concurrent projects of modernization in the middle of the twentieth century. These projects aspired to formulate a new discourse in the arts and architecture that would project the goals and vision of a new era. From Mexico to Brazil, Latin America became a laboratory of urban and architectural experiments as postulated by the modern movement. With their designs and master plans for cities and universities, modernists like Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Mario Romañach, Richard Neutra, and Henry Klumb loom large in the history of twentieth century architecture.1 The modernist project in Puerto Rico opened up the possibility of a critique of the modern movement. Indeed, Klumb’s arrival in Puerto Rico facilitated a new way of thinking about architecture and society at a transformative moment in Puerto Rico’s history, offering an opportunity to re-

FROM THE INTERNAL TO THE RADICAL

Fig. 2 / Henry Klumb on the Klumb residence balcony. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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Fig. 1 / Interior view of the patio at the Faculty Center, University of Puerto Rico. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

Fig. 3 / Henry Klumb. Student Center, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Elevation view. October 18, 1948. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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evaluate the established conventions of modernism at a time when Puerto Rico assumed political autonomy. Arguably, the confluence of measures, ideologies, projects, and agendas created a complex space that made it possible for a new architecture that combined elements of culture, history, and nature to emerge.2

The Historical Backdrop

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In the early 1940s, Puerto Rico underwent dramatic social, political, and economic changes. Influenced by the policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the events of World War II, and the emergence of the island’s Popular Democratic Party (PDP), the administration and public political arenas went through a “peaceful revolution” that facilitated an accelerated modernization of the country.3 The coming together of a new social ideology, made possible by the radical ideologists of the US government’s New Deal, and the Puerto Rican government’s introduction of a new policy of modernization (tabula rasa) to erase any trace of memories of historical referents, catalyzed the endorsement of a modern architecture by the mid-1940s.4 Scholars of that period commonly agree that the creation of an image of what is modern went hand in hand with a project of concurrent social, economic, and political modernization in mid–twentieth-century Puerto Rico. From this perspective, the image of what is modern must be studied through the lens of the creation of a spatial policy, of the continuity and ruptures that this new discourse inserted in contemporary architectural processes, structures, and operations. More than sanctification and canonization of what is modern, the Puerto Rican version of modernism would be transversely diagonal so as to unweave its contributions through discursive, spatial, representational, and constructive transgressions. The economic reconstruction of Puerto Rico—orchestrated as a political extension of the New Deal by Governor Rexford Tugwell, former president of the Planning Board of New York and a member of Roosevelt’s brain trust—began at a time when the resolution of the island’s status was at a standstill. This delay, caused mainly by the realities of World War II, intensified an ideological debate that coincided with an increase in governmental measures for the island’s economic development. The arrival of the PDP, backed by the North American executive power, introduced a new era of economic rehabilitation and social justice. In 1942, during a ninety-five-day session, the Puerto Rican legislature formulated the institutional structure of the peaceful revolution. The establishment of the Junta de Planificacion (Planning Board), the Compañia

de Fomento Industrial (Corporation of Economic Development), the Autoridad de Fuentes Fluviales (Electric Works Authority), the Corporacion Publica de Transporte y Comunicacion (Public Transport and Communications Corporation), the Negociado de Presupuesto (Budget Department), and the Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados (Water Works Authority) constituted the governmental scaffold that would propitiate a complex modernization process. Puerto Rico’s economic reconstruction also helped finance an intense urban development. The development of housing and a potential tourist economy were part of the policy of the New Deal and key in the island’s process of modernization.5 The creation in 1942 of the División/Comite de Diseñio de Obras Publicas (Division/Committee for the Design of Public Works) in Puerto Rico constituted a structural and operative element that derived from the economic and social reforms of the new policies. Created by Governor Tugwell’s executive order, the committee—which included Stephen Arnenson, Mason Barr, Richard Neutra, Joseph Blumenkranz, Henry Klumb, Frank Beck, Somon Breines, Isadore Rosenfield, and Paul Schum—was instrumental in the creation of master plan for state buildings. The committee’s architects were responsible for the design of schools, hospitals, and housing developed and financed by the state with fifty million dollars during a three-year planning period.6 The island’s economic progress, underwritten by industrial interests, unfolded an intense strategic development model for postwar North America. In their book Empire, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that during the postwar period and as a result of the economic and social reform established under the North American hegemony, the imperialist policies of the dominant capitalist nations underwent notable transformations. The new global order was defined and organized by three mechanisms: (1) the decolonization process, which gradually restructured the world markets under US hegemony; (2) the progressive decentralization of production; and (3) the construction of an international relations background that, in its successive evolutions, extended the disciplinary productive regime and the disciplinary society throughout the world.7 In Puerto Rico, as in other countries in the process of development, equivalences such as “liberation = industrialization” were established that marked the physical evolution of these territories.

Ideological Confluences and Atmospheres The three mechanisms—decolonization, decentralization, and the disciplinary society—constitute windows for the interpretation of the mid–

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FROM THE INTERNAL TO THE RADICAL

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twentieth-century ideological atmosphere in Puerto Rico. These three mechanisms characterized the imperial power of the New Deal and marked the expansion of the alternative model for overcoming the economic crisis of the 1930s beyond US borders. In the postwar period, the New Deal evolved from an alternative model to a global paradigm. The political relations between Puerto Rico and the United States favored the premature introduction of this new paradigm and its mechanisms to the island. The economic development promoted by the local government sustained progress and initiated a process of exteriorization, resulting in a “tax-free paradise” that initiated the decentralization of production sites and economic flow.8 While decentralization contributed to the government-funded evolution of the economy and architecture of the 1940s and 1950s, decolonization fueled the local political debate at the time. For the sake of argument, I will take a closer look at the ideological confluences and atmosphere that this postwar mechanism stimulated. At an international level, the creation of the United Nations (UN) would initiate a new order in a world polarized by the beginning of the Cold War. The emergence of the UN as an international organization, with the purpose to “promote relations of friendship among nations based on respect to the principle of equal rights and the free determination of nations,” opened the possibility of initiating decolonization processes. This period of radical change, particularly at a local level, made evident the problem with the definition of the principle of autonomy as an ideological foundation, converging in a fertile context for the reformulation of modernity and a project of modernization. The consolidation of the PDP in the 1940 elections and the party’s electoral victory in 1944, confirmed the place of this ideology in the political arena. The autonomous intentions of this new political institution, which worked alongside the United States toward decolonization, were evident in its ideological platform. The autonomous disposition was evident on various levels, from congressional lobbying, to the operative creation of the most important state units, to the power struggles for political selfdetermination. The operative manifestations that derived from these intentions were evident at the various levels of the Puerto Rican government. In 1942, during World War II, the law governing the public university system of Puerto Rico was reformulated as part of the peaceful revolution. Also, the autonomists’ tenacious political lobbying had an impact on the amendment of the Jones Law that, in 1947, allowed the Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor.9

FROM THE INTERNAL TO THE RADICAL

During the 1930s, the modernist orthodoxy experienced a setback, with specificity of site suddenly gaining prominence, not only because of climatic and topographic considerations, but also because of the evident ideological and political strands that modernist architecture absorbed from the establishment of a new status quo. Architects of the so-called third generation introduced a critique of modern architecture when they reintroduced the notion of place. In the evolution of modern architecture, site was originally articulated through a consideration of climate, materiality, settings, events, landscape, and flow. Later, as industrial mechanization became ubiquitous transportation metaphors—trains, airplanes, and automobiles—extended an attitude of irrelevance to the surroundings. Architecture practice then went through a crisis, turning attention back to the autonomous considerations proposed by early modernism. The organic tradition present in Wright’s work is reborn in the critique that this generation established. The reconsideration of place represented an extensive atmosphere that sustained the development of an architecture that included contextual considerations and defied the autonomy promoted by the modern movement and canonized by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, curators of the seminal 1932 exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This is the architectural discourse Klumb introduced to architecture in Puerto Rico. Yet, it would be naïve and reductive to consider Klumb’s projects a mere extension of this Wrightian influence. Klumb’s work is also influenced by the first and second generations of modern Latin American architects and exhibits traces of a Corbusian spatial language in addition to the Wrightian considerations of topography, climate, and landscape which are evident in his work. The result of this discursive conjunction is a tension between autonomy and otherness. This tension becomes evident in the architect’s own work after his arrival in Pureto Rico. Klumb’s evolution in his philosophical and theoretical views of design can be traced in his own writings. Klumb’s 1944 text— “Architecture: Art or Rational Reality?,” written shortly after his arrival on the island that same year and presented as a policy statement before the design committee—clearly reveals an architectural discourse of an extreme autonomous basis. The objectivism, functionalism, rationalism, developmental optimism, rejection of historical considerations, and absence

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Otherness and the Encounter of Differences: Klumb’s Critique of Traditional and Modern Orthodoxy

JAVIER DE JESÚS MARTÍNEZ

of cultural considerations intermingled to establish the basis of an organicist discourse that was almost undecipherable: The architect is no longer free to impose his personal artistic idiosyncrasies, often mistaken for genius, nor should he be free to impose indiscriminately the ideas of the past. The “Great” architecture of the past has logic only in relation to its time. It expresses in its achievements beauty, perhaps, but realistically it has too often ignored the social and economic needs of its time. Social and/or economic reality should determine the extent of junction, which in turn affects design—the final form. Architecture must be reduced to rational reality—to total planning, even the smallest unit, which by necessity is a part of a larger whole . . . using material, method, and a man at hand to achieve the ultimate of an impersonal solution in building should be the architect’s fundamental consideration, the same as his consideration for all design in any structure should be the social and economic conditions into which the building is to be projected.10

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Two decades later, in 1966, Klumb inserts a cultural and organicist depth to his architecture and theoretical discourse, defending the values of architecture as art and his social and spiritual commitment: “We must be willing to use the benefits of our industrial, technical, and scientific advances not only to intellectually determined ends but also for man’s social and spiritual development so that he may obtain through his creative efforts the signification of man expressing himself with joyous and religious fervor through his art— ART—as an organic part of life, at the root of being.”11 In the 1970s, Klumb is more open to consider cultural influences on works of architecture: To glorify the past without accepting the present, to ignore the existence of each by being only concerned with the future, denies the essential interplay of forces necessary to an organic growth of culture. True culture, as nature, is full of surprises and contradictions, evolves and grows through the interplay of the seemingly beneficial as well as the seemingly detrimental, is always in fluctuating conflict of interaction one with the other. . . . Cultural values can and must influence the approaches to solutions to our problems by yielding to the human needs, thus strengthening in a natural and organic way the determination to shape a future which will provide, in addition to material gains, also the conditions and environment for man’s well-being and the stimulation for his cultural and spiritual growth.12

According to the design philosophy expressed by Klumb, an architectural structure does not have any meaning on its own; it must be projected and understood in relation to a context. The organic approximation expressed here is a radicalization of modern thinking colored by the acceptance of cultural, historic, and ideological differences and particularities. Klumb radicalized his architectural

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discourse with a double criticism: an initial critique to the a-critical extension of historical models in new architectural representations, and a second critique of the modern orthodox tendencies, which underestimated considerations of context and place making. The ideological atmosphere in the postwar era, both at home and abroad, and the political infrastructure catalyzed transformations in the traditional symbolic and spatial concepts. The design committee’s proposals and the beginning of the professional practice of many of its members marked a dramatic change in the course of local architecture. Amidst a political setting of fundamental importance for the future of Puerto Rico, the university began a process of ideological and physical transformation. The creation of a new university law, the appointment of a new visionary chancellor, and the participation of an innovative architect, assured an institutional take-off and development for the main center of higher education. The legislative, and academic reforms that began in 1942 with Jaime Benitez’s appointment as chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico, paralleled the physical-spatial innovation introduced to the campus beginning in 1945.

Fig. 4 / Henry Klumb and Chancellor Jaime Benitez with the master plan model for the University of Puerto Rico Rio, Piedras campus. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

Fig. 5 / University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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Klumb’s designs for the new structures at the university signal the introduction of a new ideological flow and a new spatial discourse. Klumb’s designs would have an intense and extensive impact at different levels on the physical environment of various campuses of the University of Puerto Rico. Locally, the contemporary political processes and ideological discussions aired philosophical concepts relevant to the emergence of a new architectural discourse. Internationally, the growing criticism directed at the modernist orthodoxy invited new experimentation in architecture in Puerto Rico based on Klumb’s (and Wright’s) ideas and practice. These processes are not exclusive to longitudes, latitudes, or political or cultural conditions, but begin at the moment of complex historical and ideological junctures. These responses to established conventions of modernism are not instantaneous, and even less immediate is the understanding of a cultural condition that requires the design and planning of its architectural works. The process of radicalization of the concept of autonomy is evident in the changes of formal and spatial strategies of three structures designed by Klumb that reflect a shift in attitude in reference to context (cultural, physical, natural, and ideological). The significant change in concept, composition, and projection of his architecture (1905–84) reflects three autonomous moments. First, a relationship that I classify as internal autonomy because of its response to formal imperatives and arbitrary or internally referenced compositional logic. Second, I postulate the emergence of another relationship in an experimental shift of attitude, which I call exchangeable autonomy due to its operational ethic of association and consideration of context that arises from it. The experimentation and transformation of a structure with the intention of relating it to the outside (with an exterior, with a context) gleans an operative methodology. This ethic movement towards the exterior—to define an identity on the basis of a process of attachment, connection, and continuity with what is different—will be the methodological basis of the third level of autonomous intensity, which I call radical autonomy. Radical autonomy compels a consensual bond of the architectural artifact with its context rather than just being the result of a process of differentiation, distinction, and isolation from something else.

Internal Autonomy: Logic, Composition, and the Containment of the Exterior The Centro Recreacional de la Facultad (Faculty Recreational Center, 1948–52), later known as Centro de Facultad (Faculty Center), is one of the first structures

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designed by Klumb for the Rio Piedras Campus. After designing faculty housing and a new building for the College of Natural Sciences, Klumb began an intense design process for the campus. The Faculty Center reflects, from my point of view, a level of internal autonomy. The organization, distribution, and composition respond to arbitrary or internally referenced formal imperatives and a compositional logic.

Internal Formal Logic

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The Faculty Center was designed for construction at the east side of the Museum of History and Anthropology, northeast of the historic quadrangle. The design of the museum and the center began in 1948 and exhibited the restrictive programmatic formal and informal extremes typical of Klumb’s building designs. Although these building were designed simultaneously, they did not adhere to a single vision or master plan; instead they exhibit autonomous qualities based on distinct factors related to the needs of the program. The Faculty Center has an internal and autonomous organizational structure. The grid of pilotis, laid out at intervals of thirty feet, punctuates the horizontal plane of the two-story structure. From its entryway, the diagonal of free planes, hallways, squared-off areas, and pivots determines the sequential flows, breaking with the hierarchy and formality dictated by the grid. The contraposition of grids and free planes generates a tension between structure and volume that defines the interior of the building’s first floor. The tension between these two elements is always in relation to the internal and autonomous resolution of a composition, of an internal geometric interplay. The utilitarian informality and the programmatic flexibility contribute directly to its arbitrariness and formal clarity.

The Representation of the Exterior: Association Strategies The spatial logic is dictated by a spatial centrifugation, set up by the structure’s entrance that jams diagonal planes and forces the perspective to an indeterminate and spatial center. From this starting point, the building’s formal logic develops into

Fig. 6 / Axonometric plan analysis of the Faculty Center floor plan. Drawing by Adolfo Norcisa.

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a series of strategies that brings its exterior into the architectural composition as a group of multiple frames; these frames are part of the building’s design and noticeable when looking from the interior toward the surrounding landscape as well as when looking from the outside inside the building. The gradual representation of the exterior is achieved through three principal spatial strategies: free planes patio, vertical and horizontal planes with geometric fenestrations, and panoramic perception. The compositional control is evident in how the exterior is managed from within the interior spatial organization. On the first floor of the Faculty Center, the exterior is clearly introduced into the interior through vertical and horizontal fenestrations, and by means of patios delimited by free planes. The flexibility provided by the structural grid allows these planes to delimit exterior spaces as projections of the interior space and to be fenestrated to present the exterior as if in a pictorial frame. Likewise, the horizontal planes are subject to free fenestrations allowed by the systemic structural grid. The framing of the exterior occurs as a horizontal recollection of the external landscape and in a vertical sense through the light and pictorial introduction of the zenithal landscape.

Fig. 7 / Faculty center main facade and entrance. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

Gravitation and Location The strategies of association with the exterior in this structure are identifiable and quantifiable. Nevertheless, we should ask ourselves: What is considered exterior here? Is it a generic, universal, and pictorial exterior? Is it an impersonal, objective, and quantifiable exterior? The answer is yes to all of the above. While Klumb was working on the design of the Faculty Center, the university administration decided to change its location to a much less prominent site at the east side of the campus. Despite the structure’s relocation, the core design of the building remained basically intact. Does the exterior, its magnitude and meaning, have a geographic dimension that can make a design autonomous and legitimate from one location to another? The contextual consideration of the first location, much more symbolically and formally determined, appears to have had little impact on the design decisions of the Faculty Center.

Fig. 8 / Axonometric drawing of roof, vertical planes, and structure for the Faculty Center. Drawing by Adolfo Norcisa.

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That said, an understanding of the exterior seems to demand an analysis at a concrete, objective, and quantitative level. The dynamism of the internal free planes does not necessarily direct the sequential flow of the spatial continuum, where a person can walk freely from one end to the other. Here the exterior can be seen, perceived, portrayed, and pictorially represented, but there is no movement from the interior to the exterior. There is a formal and spatial difference between the exterior and the interior, but they are not interlocutors in the formation of a work of architecture.

Exchangeable Autonomy: Identity through Openness Fig. 9 / Exterior view of the Faculty Center. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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The strategies of association and exteriorization present in Klumb’s designs for the university can be traced back to the design of his own residence. The Klumb residence, a traditional wooden structure located within an exuberant natural landscape, became a spatial experiment as well as a symbol of Klumb’s architectural projection.

Dematerialization of the Vertical Plane The position of the residence within the landscape stimulated an exploration of the various relations between the structure and its environment. The elimination of existing vertical planes to connect the interior spaces of the house with the surrounding natural boundaries (such as the tree canopy, site gradations, rock formations, and so on), initiated a second level of autonomous experimentation. The dematerialization of the vertical boundaries permit the definition of a hybrid identity between external and internal, between nature and construction, between what was there and what is new. The original structure, the old residence of a pineapple landowner, was a box of domestic spaces built upon columns and completely surrounded by a veranda. Klumb’s experiment consisted in taking the interior of the house, the existing structure, and connect it to the exterior. From absolute private to absolute public space, the identity of what was previously

Fig. 10 / Exterior view of autonomous planes at the Faculty Center. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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defined by a constructed vertical plane is now defined by a natural vertical plane. The variety of colors, textures, and aromas provided a new depth, not only quantitative but also qualitative and phenomenological, to the interior living spaces.

Synthetic Organs

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This new constructed space, where interior autonomy interchanges with the exterior, permits the creation of new identities as well as a stimulus for the creation of new protagonists. The balcony was transformed from a space for contemplation and circulation to a space of active participation with the external landscape. The fusion of interior spaces with areas of the veranda generated new conditions of special identity and intimacy. The furniture, modern objects of industrial design, also gravitates toward and becomes contextual within the new organism. In these newly generated spaces used as living and dining rooms, furniture contributes to the autonomous space. In the dining area, located at the southeast side of the house, Klumb designs a new, synthetic organ. The dining table assumes the outline of an indeterminable windmill. Around one of the structural pillars of the house, Klumb designs a curve-shaped table that allows the potential redefinition of space. The functional object, the object that is at the center of everyday domestic necessities, is intended to link the subject with the new identity every time it is used and thus constructing a hybrid identity of the known and the unknown—the one and the other.

Radicalization of Autonomy: Liberating the Vertical and the Horizontal In 1948, Klumb began to design his most important work: the Student Center at the University of Puerto Rico. The center was part of a series of structures commissioned by Jaime Benitez, chancellor of the University of Puerto Rico. However, it was not until 1953 that the Student Center began to play a central role in the design of the campus master plan. Klumb’s role and historical importance is due to various reasons, including the center’s location on campus, its special program, and the institutional space of the structure. The particular complexity of the Student Center has been attributed mainly to its geometric base that organizes the horizontal surface of the structure. These organizations help explain geometric formal aspects that lead to an isolated understanding of the building’s internal logic. Vertical manipulation of geometry, topographical responses and the use of light defy

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the logic of formal autonomy and redefine modernist formal strategies used by Klumb in his earlier work. While this internal logic is discernible in the arrangement of the structure in the adaptation of the horizontal plane, the platforms and the gestures of the vertical plane create a dramatic tension between the autonomy of formal logic (overall) and the range of horizontal and vertical planes. It is this tension that makes searching for a new relationship with the outside possible. The façades of the Student Center become adaptable surfaces that are not determined exclusively by formal logic a priori. These vertical planes while responding to or arising from internal formal logic, manage to differentiate themselves and claim the autonomy of the limits. It is these limits that can negotiate autonomous contact between the exterior and interior of the structure.

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Fig. 12 / Klumb residence (site plan). Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

Fig. 13 / Klumb residence (sections). Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

Fig. 14 / Henry Klumb. Student services building, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Location plan. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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Fig. 11 / Sketch of the Klumb residence. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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Fig. 16 / Henry Klumb. Sketch of student services building, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

Fig. 17 / Henry Klumb. Student services building, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Building entrance and floor plan. October 18, 1948. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

Fig. 18 / Henry Klumb. Student services building, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Lower floor plan. October 18, 1948. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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Fig. 15 / Henry Klumb. Student services building, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Elevation view. October 18, 1948. Courtesy Architecture and Construction Archives at the University of Puerto Rico (AACUPR).

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Notes

1/ Alberto Sato, Ejercicios (Simulacros) Urbanos. Revista Informa, vol. 1 (San Juan: Escuela de Arquitectura, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2001). 2/ See “Henry Klumb finds an architecture for Puerto Rico: A Wright student develops his own regionalism under the warm influences of the Caribbean.” Architectural Forum 101 (1954): 122–27. 3/ See Luis Muñoz Marín, Memorias: Autobiografia pública 1940–1952 (San Germán: Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, 1992).

6/ Enrique Vivoni Farage. “Este es mi Occidente. El tránsito de lo moderno en la arquitectura de Puerto Rico.” Revista Informa, vol. 1 (San Juan: Escuela de Arquitectura Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2001). 7/ Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Imperio (Barcelona: Editorial Paidos, 2002). 8/ See Luis M. Díaz Soler, Puerto Rico: Sus luchas por alcanzar estabilidad económica, definición política y afirmación 1898–1996 (Isabela: Isabela Printing, 1998).

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9/ 4/ Enrique Vivoni Farage, “Palimpsesto tropical: vetas de la arquitectura en el Puerto Rico del siglo XX,” in Polifonia Salvaje: Ensayos de Cultura y Politica en la Postmodernidad, ed. Irma Rivera Nieves and Carlos Gil (San Juan: Editorial Postdata, 1995). 5/ See Enrique Lugo Silva, The Tugwell’s Administration in Puerto Rico, 1941–1946 (Rio Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1955).

Ibid.

10 / Henry Klumb, “Architecture – Art or Rational Reality? Policy Statement for the Committee on Design of Public Works (1944),” Henry Klumb Collection, box 84.11, AACUPR. 11 / Henry Klumb, handwritten statement, circa 1966, Henry Klumb Collection, box 8A, AACUPR. 12 / Henry Klumb, “My Architectural Design Philosophy,” paper presented at the 65th Annual FAIA Convention in Florida, October 2, 1979. Henry Klumb Collection, box 8A, AACUPR.

Brazilian Machineries (or the Collapse) of Pleasure Architecture, Eroticism, and the Naked Body

Since the early 1940s, Brazilian modern architecture has received worldwide attention. Its reception, however, has varied from laudation to opprobrium. From Brazil to the United States, from Europe and throughout Latin America, critics, curators, editors, and historians were either fascinated with its regional wisdom, formal inventiveness, and technical audacity or troubled by its frivolities and inconsistencies.1 As a result, a certain number of rather sophisticated and attractive works have entered the international canon to mold a certain image of Brazil’s contributions to the modern movement: the Ministry of Education headquarters in Rio de Janeiro (1936–43), the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939), the Pampulha complex in Belo Horizonte (1940–43), the Pedregulho housing project in Rio de Janeiro (1946–52), and a few other satellite objects (mostly carioca in their DNA) would converge to establish a coherent narrative about the origins and development of Brazilian modernism and its sudden extinction soon after the completion of Brasilia.2 These representations and their historiographies have not been challenged and continue to operate on architects’ collective memory, imagery, and aspirations. What I have in mind here is to aim at one specific topos often remarked as a typicality of Brazilian architecture: its sensual overtones, an allegedly Brazilian characteristic—exuberant, extravagant, adventurous, irrational, instinctive, highly subjective—finding its epitome in the work of Oscar

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José Lira

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Niemeyer (1907–2012). Eventually praised for the mastering of a basic sexual duality while referring to a generic Brazilian woman as a sort of counterpart to nature, the tropics or a non-European bias,3 Niemeyer was recently proclaimed the “sensuous modernist.”4 His early refusal of straight lines, his seductive appeal to emotions rather than to judgment, reason, or logic, and his arrestingly sensual gestures or unencumbered spontaneity—all of which were the focus of the centennial celebrations that paid tribute to Brazil’s famed architect in 2007— have struck a cord since the 1940s.5 Indeed, Niemeyer has confessed to alluding to or drawing his inspiration from women’s bodies while exploring the plasticity of reinforced concrete in the curve lines and surfaces sinuously spreading out onto, or contrasting with, Rio’s lush landscape; at times, these forms would literally—or architecturally— allude to anthropomorphic fetish images. This body-mimicking operation in architecture appears to have provided the perfect antidote to a climate of international boredom with ascetic functionalism, where audiences were looking for fresh ideas and all too willingly indulged in the excitement and exoticism of the tropics. In spite of the undeniable charm and fertility of Niemeyer’s drawing board—and the fascinating challenges his work has posed to the Western aesthetic, spatial, and constructive imagination—it always seemed to me that this topos was quite reductive; at least in regard to an understanding of his own work as well as an approach to the erotic theme in architecture. Not to mention the paternalistic and chauvinist outlook on Brazilians and women it entails. The goal of this article is not to focus on such correlated narratives and self-narratives, but to follow some deviations and slippages out of them that might help push the discussion on eroticism in architecture in a different, less stereotypical direction. By examining two noncanonical works that were designed and built in the midst of the international hangover with Brazilian modern architecture, I intend to grasp some shifts from the canonical discourse on the body to other approaches, to its constructive rules and vital powers and motive, both visual and tactile, as in a work of art always rooted on space: João Filgueiras Lima’s Darcy Ribeiro Memorial, AKA Beijódromo (Kissingdrome) in Brasilia (1996–2010), and Lina Bo Bardi and Edson Elito’s Teatro Oficina in São Paulo (1982–84). These buildings may not be among the most outstanding architectural achievements in Brazil—nor among their designers’ own works—yet they embody the topic in mind with their provocative themes. Their elementary design gestures—basic forms, low technology, and hybrid materials—seem to challenge our understanding of modern architecture and its Brazilian counterpart. While operating some

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critical socio-technical and spatial devices, they call for the revision of our notions concerning the meaning of architecture and its relationship to the body—the physical and self-perceived body; the working body; the material body of things, buildings, and sites; bodies in buildings and around them; acting among other bodies, human and nonhuman.

In June 1930, during the Fourth Pan American Conference of Architects, held in Rio, Flavio de Carvalho (1899–1973)—a Brazilian engineer who had studied in England and, since 1928, had become engaged with the São Paulo–based Antropofagia avant-garde group6—presented a thesis entitled “The nude man’s city.”7 The title was quite provocative for its time, and reportedly caused a stir in the audience. Carvalho launched a severe attack on what he called “the Christian concepts of family and private property,”8 ending with a plea to “the delegates of the Americas to cast off their civilized masks and to show their anthropophagic tendencies, which were repressed by colonization”—and by architectural education as well—tendencies that, according to him, were once “our pride and joy and possibility to stride without God to a logical solution to the problems of efficient urban living.”9 For Carvalho, the cities of the future made for the man of the future would be totally other than our bourgeois organism fit for the “Machine-man of classicism,” molded by repetition of ancient Christian rites, western taboos, monotonous routines, limiting desires, and sparing “no effort in annihilating all love of life, all enthusiasm to produce things, all desire to change.”10 Such an anthropophagic man—naked and free of scholastic taboos and outdated philosophies, free of reasoning and “to search for a mechanism of thought that would not block his desire to penetrate the unknown”—demanded a totally new urban mechanism: “a gigantic engine in movement, permanently at work, transforming the fuel of ideas into the needs of individuals, meeting collective desires and producing happy affections out of the understanding of life and movement.”11 This “anthropophagic metropolis” to be born in America (no longer as fortresses of colonial conquest) “will be a center for natural sublimation, for breathing life into worn-out desires; for production, selection and distribution of useful forms of energy to human beings, for research into the substance of the universe, into life, soul and the unknown.”12 Eroticism would thus play a vital role in this utopian model: an “erotic zone” being conceived “as a huge laboratory where a wide range of desires” would

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Anthropophagic Techno-Eroticism

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be “moving and stirring themselves in all directions, liberating energies, with no repression.” It would be a place “where the nude man” would “realize his own desires, discover new desires, shape his new ego, guide his libido” and “thereby reaching out . . . (to) the sublime anguish of the unknown in the nonmetric changeability.”13 It is relevant to note that this local appeal to the primitive was in touch with French anthropology and avant-garde art at the time. Since 1922 Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), the main leader of the Antropofagia literary movement with which Carvalho would soon be associated, had been spending extended periods of time in Paris, where he seemed to have developed a taste for the primitive.14 In Paris he also met Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), who had just published his Anthologie Nègre and who would become a regular visitor in São Paulo after 1924 and a close friend to many of the local modernists.15 Cendrars—like his contemporary Le Corbusier (1887–1965), another important reference to the Brazilian avant-garde—alluded to the potential cultural revolution in these nude men from South America: free of tiring labor and of all kinds of fetishes, open to the future, essentially antinostalgic, the opposite of a museum man. “L’homme tout nu,” writes Corbusier, had gotten rid of all external contingencies through the development of his own tools.16 We know through his American Prologue, written after his 1929 tour in Brazil, that he spent some time with the local anthropophagic youth, who introduced him to the idea of an indigenous rite of devouring collectively the flesh of the most valuable enemies, a rite of communion with those who had devoured their ancestors before them.17 A few years later, in 1935, when Carvalho himself had become a major leader of experimental art in town, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) disembarked to Brazil to teach at the recently founded University of São Paulo. He would stay there until 1938, when he engaged on the only anthropological fieldwork he would ever endure throughout his life. His ethnological interests and antievolutionist beliefs—along with the missions he undertook among the Kadiweu, Bororo, and Nambikwara in Central Brazil—seem to have permeated the courses he would be in charge of in the city: they did cover a wide range of subjects comparatively treated, but clearly focused on the study of elementary forms of social life related to kinship, myth, and totemism.18 Although there is no evidence of contact between him and the local Antropofagia avant-gardists, a basic surrealist background seems to have operated on their common criticism of anthropocentrism.19 In tune with such appeals to fragmentation, alterity, and unexpected juxtaposition of cultural values, the anthropophagic avant-garde in São

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Bodily Scales, Labor, and Pleasure João Filgueiras Lima (b. 1932), AKA Lelé, is known to be the only example of an architect in Brazil able to assume the whole production chain of architecture.22 Indeed, his architecture is remarkably successful in terms of integrating design and technological investigation, prefabrication, construction work, as well as the use and maintenance of buildings. In part due to the creation of factories focused on the production of modular components—such as panels, slabs, beams, gutters, trusses as well as furniture, lifts, and so on—and the establishment of local offices in charge of monitoring every system of buildings or larger ventures. Experimentalism and the commitment to a social agenda on public architecture are some of the attributes that often distinguish his approach to the fragmented and unstable industrialization process in Brazil. Since the 1970s he has been in charge of an enormous amount of public commissions—including schools, hospitals, day nurseries, community centers, court houses, bus terminals, walkways, bridges, stairways, infrastructure, and sanitation devices—all across Brazil. Formalized like opened systems23 consistent with procedural logics and practical needs, economically and quickly executed, extremely well finished and maintained, adapted to climate conditions, comfortable and energetically efficient, apparently there isn’t a

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Paulo had a cosmo-corporeal connotation. As its Parisian counterpart it was intrinsically anticolonialist and antiethnocentric, refusing all monolithic national projects. Nevertheless, while standing for a cultural hybridism it would convoke the powers of technological civilization on the cosmological feast prepared by those who Oswald de Andrade called the technobarbarian men. More than merely a ceremonial meal, anthropophagy would be proclaimed in the Anthropophagous Manifesto as a way of thinking, a “participating conscience, a religious rhythmic . . . the touchable existence of life, the pre-logical mentality to Mr. Levy-Bruhl study. . . . Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. . . . (T)he permanent transfiguration of Taboo into Totem.”20 In other words, a sort of “metaphysics that imputes a primary value of otherness. More than that, which allows the switching of points of view between me and my enemy, between the human and the nonhuman. It would not thus be an exclusive attribute of the Tupi-Guarani peoples, but rather could be recognized as an Amerindian way of thinking and living,”21 that is, a kind of philosophy, which contemporary Brazilian ethnology has described as an “Amerindian perspectivism.”

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single trace of exoticism, extravagance, or luxuriousness in his concerns. It is hard to believe that he was a student of and close to Niemeyer. After he graduated in 1955, Lelé moved to Brasilia’s building site two years later to build the 108 South Superblock, with 456 apartments, designed by Niemeyer. His task was to put his hands on the building site. 24 After the new capital’s inauguration in 1960, he moved back to Rio, only to return to Brasilia in 1962, invited by anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro (1922–97), then President João Goulart’s (1919–76) minister of education, to work at the recently created University of Brasilia’s building site under Niemeyer’s supervision. He became secretary of the University Planning Center and was immediately enrolled in the School of Architecture’s faculty, directed by Niemeyer himself, to teach building technology.25 The plan for the university involved prefabricated casts, then rarely employed in Brazil: “The university was created in a somewhat more organized manner. At least compared to Brasilia’s building site, which was chaotic.”26 In order to do so, Darcy sent Lelé on a mission to the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia to study their experiences in that field.27 The aim was to implement a factory on campus, which was never materialized, though some buildings were actually made using prefabricated systems. In 1965, a year after the military coup, while the Central Institute of Science was under construction—under a project conceived by Niemeyer in 1963 and developed by Lelé—the university was invaded by police forces, Darcy, the university’s first president, was forced into political exile, and almost 80 percent of the faculty members, including Niemeyer and Lelé, resigned collectively. Darcy Ribeiro made his debut as a public intellectual through anthropology. Indeed, since the 1950s he had been publishing about the Kadiweus’ and the Kaiapos’ knowledge, art, and mythology. His fieldwork in Central Brazil and the Amazon region was closely connected to his academic career and political activism on national policies concerning indigenous peoples, ethnicity, and public education. 28 His engagement on education policies seems to have been clearly connected to his anthropological outlook on the civilization process: the unequal evolution of the American peoples and especially his concerns related to contemporary prospects for indigenous populations. Although fundamentally based on functionalist theoretical models and nationalistic optimism, Darcy seems to have been one of the very first American anthropologists to suggest the understanding of indigenous cultures as unavoidably and disastrously merged with European, capitalist, and technological values, molding a national identity out of what he called a state of “no-oneness.” In fact, in his last book, The Brazilian People, the praise

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Fig. 1 / João Filgueiras Lima. Darcy Ribeiro Memorial, aka Beijódromo (Kissingdrome; 1996– 2010). Brasilia, Brazil. Courtesy Fundaçao Darcy Ribeiro.

Fig. 2 / João Filgueiras Lima. Darcy Ribeiro Memorial (1996–2010). Rear elevation view. Brasilia, Brazil. Courtesy the author.

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Fig. 3 / João Filgueiras Lima. Darcy Ribeiro Memorial (1996–2010). Front elevation view. Brasilia, Brazil. Courtesy the author.

58 Fig. 4 / João Filgueiras Lima. Darcy Ribeiro Memorial (1996–2010). Interior view of Riberio’s library. Brasilia, Brazil. Courtesy the author.

Fig. 5 / João Filgueiras Lima. Darcy Ribeiro Memorial (1996–2010). Brasilia, Brazil. Courtesy the author.

of the Brazilian people’s miscegenation, joy of life, and sensuality is seen as inseparable of the colonial ethnocide, born within the appalling soil in which Brazilian society, its institutions, power techniques, labor regimes, and life practices were to be built. 29 In 1996, consumed by cancer to which he succumbed one year later, Darcy invited Lelé to design what he expected to be his own memorial inside the University of Brasilia, to which he had donated his 30,000-volume library, including his archives on education and anthropology and his collection of Amerindian art. Darcy himself suggested an architectural program: on the ground floor, a hall for exhibitions and seminars and on the upper floor, a mezzanine, a totally flexible space destined to host his estate. The building should be connected to an outdoor amphitheater, which he named Beijódromo, so that the cultural institution would “not seem too hoary, but correspond to what I had created in Rio as the Sambadrome (designed by Niemeyer in 1983, during Ribeiro’s term as state secretary of culture). It is a large open air stage for serenades and poetry and theater readings, in front of a grandstand for 200 people to look at the full moon and exchange caresses.”30 In a letter to Darcy, Lelé described his main ideas as such: “This is my conception of a worthy house to keep your books, your Beijódromo and all you can imagine. It reminds me slightly of a flying saucer or of a mixture of a Xavante hut with those of the Kamayurá that you admire so much. Its main characteristic is a large roof that is thirty-four meters in diameter and a hollow central circle of twelve meters, covered with transparent polycarbonate with outside fiberglass blades that avoid the transference of heat to the interior.”31 The building was basically conceived as a bulb-shaped tent, an indigenous hut, that inspired by Darcy Ribeiro he had discovered while teaching in Brasilia: “the construction of such big huts from Xingu, with their ventilation systems and pre-stressed rods.”32 Lelé, however, never really employed such a model until the 1990s, when his experience with prefabrication had evolved into more hybrid solutions with the creation of the Technology Center of the Sarah Network Hospitals in 1992: an industrial unit, composed of several workshops on metal, wood, reinforced cement, plastic, and fiberglass, responsible for the expansion, modernization, furnishing, and maintenance of the hospitals’ network.33 As the factory’s chief designer and technical coordinator, Lelé was responsible for the integration of all levels of design and construction and the work of different professionals, including architects, landscape architects, industrial and graphic designers, civil, mechanical, and electric engineers, and all kinds of building technicians and craftsmen. Since then, his architecture has undergone important conceptual, technological, and aesthetic changes. Based on the contiguous disposition

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of horizontal free-plan pavilions, the ideal of a total modulation has been thoroughly balanced with the development of metal, plastic, and fiberglass components and the exploration of different assembling possibilities giving consideration to site, program, accessibility, therapy, natural light, and air. This system was later used in other public ventures (by universities, municipalities, and states), and a new generation of buildings has risen in different parts of the country to create these abstruse and waving landscapes of white hermetic blocks of linear texture. It was in the midst of such profound typological investigation undertaken by Lelé—comprising spatial, constructive, and ornamental levels—that the indigenous dwelling came to play an archetypical role, appearing in some of his projects since then like the Sarah Kubitschek Rehabilitation Hospital in Brasilia (1995) or the Bahia Electoral Court (1997). Though not explicitly appealing to any Edenic motif, the notion of a primitive hut seemed to be mythically renovated as a source of telluric and immemorial knowledge as well as of instinctive technological invention: “It was so adequate to their social situation. Its dimensions, the way it keeps and protects (the indigenous) from the heat. The building technology itself, which I find extremely intelligent in face of the rough materials they employed.”34 The Darcy Ribeiro Memorial is defined by an elongated rotunda over a round two-floor plan. But it would not be built out of rough material; instead, Lelé employed contemporary technology, alluding to a futuristic habitat imagery. The roof is structured on steel frame and covered with plastic slabs, a lighter and more economic system. On the ridge, it is perforated by a vast skylight, under which there is a lush water garden forming a patio that integrates both pavements. The ceiling sits on a hybrid structure as well: the first floor is a monolithic platform made of reinforced concrete, itself anchored on junctions on top of the several steel pillars in the periphery. The whole building rises from an outdoor surrounding water pool, like a primitive lake dwelling, designed to aid with the temperature control and the mechanical nebulization and ventilation of the interior during the dry season. Although a modest result of a broader professional endeavor, the building benefits from Lelé’s recent work, including those two or three aspects that seem to me to represent an important shift in the approach to the human body, clearly displacing it from a purely visual connotation. On the one hand, even here, where the architect may not avoid the monumental character of the building, it is unique the way he is still aware of the workers’ and builders’ bodies, taken as the primary measure to the whole design process, closely following up the forces, energies, and gestures to be engaged on construction,

from factory to the building site. On the other hand, it is remarkable the attention he devotes to the bodies of actual users. His original concerns with the physical limitations of patients actually seemed to offer an amazing laboratory to deal with the human body. Not even in a hospital should bodies be reduced to their vulnerabilities, but seen instead as any other body, of health servants and of healthy bodies in general, full of needs and potentialities in terms of sight, hearing, touch, reaching out, motion, and emotion. The enjoyment of builders, patients, doctors, nurses, families, and users in general at the Sarah Network of rehabilitation centers is something very intriguing when compared to any other building sites, hospital architectures, or public facilities in Brazil. Moreover, in the Beijódromo, this prototypical approach to architecture and the body seems to have been awarded with another level of excitement, culturally and politically meaningful, arising from its inspirer’s early bet on another kind of sociality based on the collective pleasures of encounter with the other: a place of gathering and alterity, a sort of “exchange-site of social activity,” or “of erotic activities,”35 or an erotic symbolism instituted above all, like in any other city centers, by the young. As such, with very few modifications, the Darcy Ribeiro Memorial was inaugurated at the end of 2010 by President Lula himself. The speed with which it was constructed was criticized by the students, who were demanding the same agility on their housing programs. But since then the whole building has been nicknamed as the university’s Beijódromo, becoming a sort of informal core within the campus, hosting cultural and political events, demonstrations, lectures, concerts, theater performances, a cinema club, leisure activities, serenading, dating, night meetings, kissing protests by homosexuals, and various kinds of community activities. According to Laura Murta, Darcy Ribeiro Memorial’s first director, “the idea is that the building be effectively and affectively used. No ways of kissing will be prohibited,” she promises. According to a gay couple at the inauguration, “the symbolic aspect of the Beijódromo is relevant in a moment when gays are hearing everywhere that such and such places are not convenient for this or that practice.”36

Acting Bodies amidst Ruins Lelé met Lina Bo Bardi (1914–92) through Darcy Ribeiro during the construction of Brasilia University.37 She was living in Salvador at the time. The 1960s were not easy for her as an architect. Granted, two of her major projects—the new premises of the São Paulo Art Museum and the restoration of Solar do

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Unhão in Salvador—were underway; but after her heyday in Bahia—where she polarized a fantastic cultural network around the new local Modern Art Museum at Unhão, engaging on theater, popular culture, design, music, cinema, art, criticism, and museography—architecture no longer seemed to be her primary interest. The 1964 military coup frustrated her. She had to leave Bahia and return to São Paulo—and to her husband Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–99)—for political reasons. Charges of subversive activism were leveled against her. In 1968 she was under suspicion for being close to and helping out guerilla leaders, some among them were architects.38 Through filmmaker Glauber Rocha (1939–81), she was introduced to playwright and director José Celso Martinez Corrêa (b. 1937), commonly known as Zé Celso. He invited her to create the set design for his production of Bertold Brecht’s play In the Jungle of Cities, written in the early 1920s. Set in Chicago in 1912, the play sketches two men in mortal combat: a modest librarian, fond of Rimbaud’s poetry, and a Chinese lumber manufacturer. Paradoxically, the first years of dictatorship between 1964 and 1969 coincided with relatively radical and creative cultural productions in Brazil.39 Since the late 1950s, Zé Celso had been the main leader of an experimental theater group called Teatro Oficina. In 1958 the group rented a house at 520 Jaceguay Street in Bixiga, a central neighborhood in São Paulo. The place was renovated under the guidance of architect Joaquim Guedes (1932–2008), who planned a theater with two auditoriums facing each other separated by a central stage. In 1966 it was burned down in a police-backed right-wing attack. A year later, two young radical architects—Rodrigo Lefevre (1938–84) and Flavio Imperio (1935–85), who also was an important scenographer—embarked on another radical project.40 They maintained the nineteenth-century building’s original projection, which was basically defined by a large concrete grandstand, sitting on top of an entrance area, whose portal was designed as a heavy structure, evoking a sort of bunker. Both architects were members of the group Arquitetura Nova and followed the group’s poetics: brick walls, concrete structure, and lights and stage mechanisms were left apparent.41 The Italian stage at the back was equipped with a revolving platform in the center. The renovated theater was inaugurated in 1967 with a play written by Oswald de Andrade in the 1930s, “O Rei da Vela,” a violent anthropophagic parody of the national reality, whose staging by Teatro Oficina—grotesquely incorporating different elements and genres (the farce, the musical, the opera, and Hollywood) and explicit sexual references—became an emblem of the Brazilian Tropicalia movement. It was in this theater that Bo Bardi worked on the scenery for “In the Jungle of Cities” in 1969. She would draw upon her previous interest in the

“poor architecture” and “rough” design found in the Brazilian Northeast. An interest which, for Lina, was not at all romantic though attentive to the unique popular values still found in that region as a possible basis for a new conception of industrial design in an underdeveloped country. After all, according to her, those traditional values found in that region of Brazil were irreducible to the Western concept of handicraft.42 Her idea was in tune with Teatro Oficina’s conception of a “poor” theater, relying on very simple means of expression. In fact, the play would mark a turning point in Teatro Oficina’s history, leading beyond their earlier didactic work to what Zé Celso called an “inspiration’s theater,” more provocative and open to the audience.43 A struggle thus lived both inside and outside the theater: inside, there had been struggles about the group’s change in dramatic attitude and organization; outside, society was under a dictatorship. In addition, in 1969, a huge elevated expressway was under construction—the Elevado Costa e Silva, known as “Minhocão,” which runs from east to west through downtown São Paulo and right in front of the theater—causing enormous destruction, especially to the older parts of the city, like Bixiga. According to Zé Celso, the project was a slum clearance operation directed at its hot spots and “fantastic marginalia.” Bo Bardi’s production set was sensitive to those political and urban circumstances.44 The play’s aggressive theme would lead her to a thorough study of the actors’ places and their relationships to the audience. She transformed the main stage into a boxing ring, placed small brothel tables and huge tree trunks on its sides, and duplicated Imperio and Lefevre’s stepped seats so audiences on both sides of the stage would face each other. The walls were stripped of their original coverings and decorated with wooden boards that were covered with nonsense graffiti: “Moon is not made for Indians.” “Don’t cry, Ana!” A mixer would pour concrete onto the stage. The daily performance, divided into eleven rounds, would result in the destruction of the entire scenery, taxing everyone involved: the actors, stage hands, set designers, and the audience, all were vulnerable to the aggression lived out on the stage as chairs, tables, and other props as well as pieces of the set were thrown across the theater. And every day, the people involved in the production would collect bricks, pieces of wall, concrete blocks, wooden boards, torn-down trees, trash, wires from the neighborhood devastated by the expressway building site and haul it back to the theater. Even the urban noise and odors would be part in the play. Drawing upon much of the context and consciously operating as a sculptor,45 Bo Bardi would break with any idea of representation to reinforce the space/time of the play as a large sensory experience. The main idea was to emphasize the exchanges within the cast,

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Fig. 6 / Set view of the play In the Jungle of Cities with Othon Bastos and Renato Borghi (1969). Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi.

64 Fig. 7 / Action in the boxing ring from the play In the Jungle of Cities (1969). Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi.

between actors and the public, with the objects around them and with the city out there, regardless of whether those interactions were productive or destructive, or, at times, quite risky. A few years later, in 1974, the police would close the theater and Zé Celso was forced into exile. When he returned to Brazil in 1978, the building had been mortgaged to the government by its owners and was about to be sold to a huge broadcasting and financial company, the Silvio Santos Administração e Participações Ltda, which at that time had bought up nearly the entire block on which the building was located. Zé Celso would fight with Silvio Santos over the building until 2011, when a huge financial fraud led Santos’s companies to nearly buckle. In 1980, though, in order to defend their premises, the group had started a public campaign both for preservation and expansion.46 In 1981 it became a municipal landmark. One year later, in his petition for preservation on the state level, Zé Celso clarified his understanding of cultural heritage: “We do not appeal for its architectural preservation but rather for the protection of its continuity and growth as a collective cultural good, at a moment when it precisely demands a substantial architectural transformation which may allow its contemporary existence.”47 In 1983 the building was declared a monument by the state of São Paulo, which later expropriated it from its former owners to be used by the Teatro Oficina. Interestingly, the report that recommends the building’s preservation mentions that over the years the theater had undergone different structural changes; these changes were an essential part of Teatro Oficina’s own theatrical research; its protection, then, should not freeze its spatial conformation in order not to strangle the theater group’s future propositions.48 It was in the midst of this debate that Bo Bardi proposed, together with Marcelo Suzuki, a recent graduate, a design for the new theater. According to her, “from an architectural point of view, the Oficina would search for the real meaning of theater—its physical and tactile structure, its nonabstract element— which profoundly differentiates it from cinema or TV, at the same time allowing the complete use of these media.”49 Although this project didn’t evolve much, several of its ideas would be maintained, including the concept of a stage as an alley running along the entire lot. According to Edson Elito, an architect invited by Bo Bardi to develop the project with her later on, “there was a healthy, sometimes complex process of integrating cultural and aesthetic differences: on one side us architects and our modernist education, the concepts of formal simplicity, the purity of elements, less is more, constructive rationalism, asceticism; and on the other, Zé Celso’s theater, iconoclastic, baroque, its symbolism, cannibalism, the senses, emotions, desires for physical contact between actors and audience.”50

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Fig. 8 / Lina Bo Bardi and Edson Elito. Teatro Oficina perspective (1984). Watercolor, pen, marker, graphite on cardboard (33.2 x 48.0 cm). São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi.

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Elito referred to its main concept as “a street named theater.” Extending the sidewalk to the inner space, the street-stage suggests continuity with the urban space. Jaceguai Street, the areas under the Minhocão expressway and the neighboring lots, many of which vacant or continuously being emptied, were actually claimed and several times occupied by the company. The space of the theater is totally transparent and offered a contiguous and uninterrupted experience of the theater in its urban setting. The forty-meter-long stage was built on dismountable wooden boards, suspended one and a half meters from the ground and slight inclined from the higher street level, in such a way that the space beneath it could be dramatically explored. The new roof was built over a steel structure juxtaposed against the concrete reinforced brick walls, and received a sliding steel surface eventually to be opened to the sky. A few elementary resources mark the ground floor: a mechanical fountain, pouring water into a concrete pool through seven iron pipes, a pyre fed by a gas network, and a small garden, alluding to the original backyard of the 1920s construction, from which a huge ancient tree grows outward through a large window pane on one of the side walls. The audience was imagined to occupy both sides of the alley on the ground floor and on three levels of lateral galleries built as scaffoldings with pipes and laminated wood. Equipment for scenery lighting, sound, video projection, and electronic controls were

situated on the mezzanines on the back, and the wardrobe being suspended along the ceiling. The architectural trench turned out to be decisive, both for theatrical purposes, as well as to the reinvention of theater in the urban environment, reassuring the rights of acting—artistically, politically, and erotically—in the city. The project certainly benefits from Bo Bardi’s use of the urban morphology. Here, once more, she reinterprets local skyline and the fragmentary built environment in terms of mass, volume, weight, shade, light, and texture. Recurring to its various temporal strata, the solution opens up to the unavoidably mutable reality envisioned; and in such a way that it doesn’t really seem to have been built entirely. Differently from Lelé’s monumental Beijódromo—framed, fit, interlaced, weaved, entwined—which preserves a bit of the life of arcs and plants, the Teatro Oficina was built in face of what was already there, its dwellers, their movements, practices, needs, and desires. Not quite finished, not fully designed, partly unbuilt, partly ruined, and mostly piled up, gathered, attached, excavated, cleared, the nudity of its people being apparently protected by the hybrid velvet of architecture, their bodies artfully stealing away from the gaps, the cracks, the crowd, and all the surrounding paraphernalia, as if undressing themselves from a huge and heavy stone gown.51 Capable to distort cultural constructions of theater space, it ends up playing a vital role on the activation of the physical site, the material devices, and the rites of performance. Combining the quest for simplicity and transparency with dramatic appeals to fantasy and excess and merging historical and structural perspectives, architecture here doesn’t seem to follow any iconographic, typological, or symbolic model—neither of space or building nor of the primitive, the body, the passions. Rather it seems to refer to a whole cosmology where theater, life, death, birth, city, nature, fight, pleasure, power, failure, bodies—human and nonhuman—reconnect to one another.

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Notes

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1/ Carlos Alberto F. Martins, “Hay algo de irracional...,” Block, no. 4 (December 1999): 8–22; Jorge Francisco Liernur, “The South American Way,” ibid., 23–41; Ana Maria Rigotti, “Brazil Deceives,” ibid., 78–86; Maria Beatriz C. Cappello, “Arquitetura em Revista: arquitetura moderna no Brasil e sua recepção nas revistas francesas, inglesas e italianas (1945–1960),” PhD dissertation, FAUUSP, São Paulo, 2006; Nelci Tinem, O Alvo do Olhar Estrangeiro: o Brasil na historiografia da arquitetura moderna, João Pessoa: Ed. Universidade Federal da Paraíba, 2006; Monica Junqueira, “Brazilian presence in the historiography of Twentieth Century architecture,” Docomomo Papers, no. 34 (March 2006): 66–71. 2/ Phillip Goodwin, Brazil Builds, Architecture New and Old, 1652–1942 (New York: MoMA, 1943); Lucio Costa, Arquitetura Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Saúde, 1952); Henrique Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro/Amsterdam: Colibri, 1956); Yves Bruand, L’architecture contemporaine au Brésil, PhD dissertation, Université Paris IV, 1971; Paulo Santos, Quatro Séculos de Arquitetura (Rio de Janeiro, Valença, 1977); Carlos Lemos, Arquitetura Brasileira (São Paulo: Melhoramentos/ EDUSP, 1979); Adrian Forty and Elisabetta Andreolli, eds., Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira (London: Phaidon, 2004).

3/ David Underwood, Oscar Niemeyer and the Brazilian Free-form Modernism (New York: Braziller, 1994).

8/ Flavio de Carvalho, A cidade do homem nú (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2010), 21.

4/ Alan Hess, “The Sensuous Modernist,” in Oscar Niemeyer Buildings (New York: Rizzoli, 2009).

9/

Ibid., 29.

10 /

Ibid., 27.

5/ Cf. Peter Buchanan, “Floating form, fluid space: the poetics of Oscar Niemeyer,” ArqTexto, nos. 10–11 (2007): 6–19; Fares El-Dadah, “Niemeyer: sem retas” and Hanno Rautenberg, “O ultimo utópico: por que Niemeyer apostou numa arquitetura da liberdade,” in Tributo a Niemeyer, ed. Roberto Segre (Rio de Janeiro: Viana e Mosley, 2009).

11 /

Ibid., 25.

12 /

Ibid., 27.

13 /

Ibid., 28.

6/ Luiz Carlos Daher, Flavio de Carvalho e a volúpia da forma (São Paulo: Editora K, 1984); J. Toledo, Flavio de Carvalho: o comedor de emoções (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp/ São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994); Carolina Rossetti, Flávio de Carvalho: questões de arquitetura e urbanismo (São Carlos, SP: EESCUSP, 2007). 7/ Flavio de Carvalho, “A cidade do homem nú,” Architectura: mensário de arte, no. 14 (August 1930); Flavio de Carvalho, “Uma these curiosa,” in Diário da Noite, São Paulo, July 1, 1930.

14 / Benedito Nunes, Oswald Canibal (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979). 15 / Aracy Amaral, Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os Modernistas (São Paulo: Ed. 34/ Fapesp, 1997); Alexandre Eulálio, A Aventura Brasileira de Blaise Cendrars (São Paulo: EDUSP/ Imprensa Oficial, 2001). 16 / Le Corbusier, L’Art decoratif d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Arthaud, 1980), 22. 17 / Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état present de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier/ Altamira, 1994), 17. 18 / Fernanda Peixoto, “LéviStrauss no Brasil: a formação do etnólogo,” Mana 4, no. 1 (April 1998): 79–107.

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25 / Andrey Rosenthal Schelee. “O lelé na Unb (ou o Lelé da Unb),” in Olhares: visões sobre a obra de João Filgueiras Lima, ed. Claudia Estrela Porto (Brasilia: Ed. Unb, 2010), 151.

20 / Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropofago” in Revista de Antropofagia, no. 1 (May 1928): 3, 7.

29 / Darcy Ribeiro, O Povo Brasileiro: a formação e o sentido do Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995).

21 / Renato Sztutman, “Apresentação,” in Encontros: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ed. R. Sztutman (Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, 2008), 14. 22 / Ana Luiza Nobre, “João Filgueiras Lima: arquitetura no limite,” in Olhares: visões sobre a obra de João Filgueiras Lima, ed. Claudia Estrela Porto (Brasilia: Ed. Unb, 2010), 37. 23 /

Ibid., 45.

24 / Giancarlo Latorraca, ed., Joao Filgueiras Lima, Lelé (São Paulo/Lisboa: Instituto Lina e Pietro, Blau, 2000), 15.

26 / 17.

Latorraca, Joao Filgueiras,

27 / João Filgueiras Lima, O que é ser arquiteto: memórias profissionais de Lelé (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2004), 51–56. 28 / André Luiz Borges de Mattos, Darcy Ribeiro: uma trajetória (1944–1982) (Campinas, SP: Unicamp, 2007).

30 / Darcy Ribeiro. Letter to Lelé, apud Schelee, “O lelé na Unb (ou o Lelé da Unb),” 162. 31 / 246.

Latorraca, Joao Filgueiras,

32 /

Ibid., 17.

33 / João Filgueiras Lima, ed., CTRS—Centro de Tecnologia da Rede Sarah (Brasilia: Rede Sarah de Hospitais do Aparelho Locomotor, n.d.), 12–14; Max Risselada. “A pesquisa paciente: o CTRS como laboratório,” in A arquitetura de Lelé: fábrica e invenção, ed. Max Risselada and Giancarlo Latorraca (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 2010), 105–10.

34 / João Filgueiras Lima, O que é ser arquiteto: memórias profissionais de Lelé (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2004), 97. 35 / Roland Barthes, “Semiology and Urbanism”, in Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Ockman, Joan (New York: GSAPP/ Rizzoli, 1993), 417. 36 / Carta Capital, “Beijodromo da Unb, espaço da paixão,” PDT, December 14, 2010, http://www. pdt.org.br/noticias/carta-capitalfala-do-beijodromo-da-unbespaco-da-paixao. 37 / João Filgueiras Lima, O que é ser arquiteto: memórias profissionais de Lelé (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2004), 81. 38 / Silvana Rubino, Rotas da modernidade: trajetória, campo e história na atuação de Lina Bo Bardi, 1947–1968, PhD dissertation, IFCH-Unicamp, Campinas, 2002; Juliano Pereira, A ação cultural de Lina Bo Bardi na Bahia e no Nordeste (1958–1964) (Uberlândia: EDUFU, 2007). 39 / Roberto Schwarz, “Cultura e Politica, 1964–1969,” in O pai de família e outros ensaios (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1978), 61–92. 40 / See SESC/ Sociedade Cultural Flavio Imperio, Flavio Imperio em Cena (São Paulo: SESC, 199?); Marcelina Gorni, Flavio Imperio: arquiteto e professor (São Carlos, SP: EESC-USP, 2004).

41 / Pedro Fiori Arantes, Arquitetura Nova: Sergio Ferro, Flavio Imperio e Rodrigo Lefèvre, de Artigas aos mutirões (São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2002); Ana Paula Koury, Grupo Arquitetura Nova: Flavio Imperio, Rodrigo Lefèvre, Sergio Ferro (São Paulo: Ed. Romano Guerra, 2003). 42 / Lina Bo Bardi, Tempos de Grossura: o design no impasse (São Paulo: Instituto Lina e P.M. Bardi, 1994). 43 / José Celso Martinez Correa, “Enquanto o teatro agoniza,” in Primeiro Ato. Cadernos, depoimentos, entrevistas (1958–1974), ed. Ana Helena Camargo de Staal (São Paulo, Ed. 34, 1998), 147. 44 / Mateus Bertone da Silva, Lina Bo Bardi, arquitetura cênica (São Carlos, SP: EESC-USP, 2005); Carolina Leonelli, Lina Bo Bardi (experiencias): entre arquitetura, artes plasticas e teatro (São Paulo: FAU-USP, 2011). 45 /

Leonelli, Lina Bo Bardi, 100.

46 / Yan Michalski, “O Oficina ameaçado: não basta preservar, é preciso crescer,” Jornal do Brasil, November 15, 1980. 47 / Secretaria de Estado da Cultura/ Condephaat. Processo no. 22368, Tombamento do imóvel sito à rua Jaceguai, no. 520 (n.d.), 50.

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19 / In France, since the end of World War I, a connection between anthropology, art, and activism had been paved both by the ethnographic surrealists and the first generation of academic ethnologists, including George Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaulle, Paul Rivet, and Alfred Métraux. See James Clifford, “Sobre o surrealismo etnográfico,” in A Experiência Etnográfica: antropologia e literatura no século XX (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. UFRJ, 1998), 132–78; Fernanda Peixoto, “O Nativo e o Narrativo: os trópicos de Lévi-Strauss e a Africa de Michel Leiris,” in Novos Estudos no. 33 (July 1992): 187–98.

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48 /

Ibid, 70.

49 / Marcelo Ferraz, ed., Lina Bo Bardi (São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e Pietro Maria Bardi, 1993), 258. 50 / Lina Bo Bardi, Teatro Oficina: Oficina Theater: São Paulo, Brasil, 1980–1984 (São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e Pietro Maria Bardi/ Lisboa, Blau), 1999. 51 / Lévi-Strauss’s memories on Bororo’s dwellings and their nudity are surprisingly relevant to this mater. See Claude LéviStrauss, Tristes Trópicos (Lisboa: Edições 70, 1993), 201–2.

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Concrete Modernity in Venezuela

Here in the happiness of the tropics, modern architecture finds the perfect environment to flourish. In other places architecture is a complicated refuge, a shelter in the landscape; here architecture is a wing under which one can live in an earthly paradise. Gio Ponti

Modern architecture in the South has been classified as exotic and peripheral by the canonic historical texts on art or architecture which were written mostly by English or American authors and usually include a reference to the work of Oscar Niemeyer or Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Their works are viewed as interesting variations on the original European object. Most historians now acknowledge that the South had a fundamental role in the formation of new modernisms in art and architecture as Europe and North America were engaged in war production and propaganda. Is it possible to establish a modernity that is multifocal—one that does not need to negate the regional? Can we have a future without the subaltern? Which art, architecture, and literature that was produced during the 1950s in Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Habana, and Ciudad de México speaks to a

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modernity that is multivalent? To what extent were these cities the location of an international movement that incorporated avant-garde art and architecture within the heart of the city? In 1928, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropofágo (Cannibalist Manifesto) advocated a “metaphorical cannibalism” as a defense against cultural colonialism. This vast territory called Latin America has been producing art and architecture for the past six centuries and is increasingly celebrated for its contributions to the modern project thus beginning a discussion on what makes this modern art and architecture unique using an Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean point of view. Venezuela’s role in this complex modernity begins with the transformation from an agrarian economy to a mineral one. The immediate tomorrow for Caracas began with the death of General Gomez in 1936. In 1939 Venezuela participates in the New York World’s Fair “Building the World of Tomorrow.” The Venezuelan pavilion was designed by the young American architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM). This pavilion was his first major commission and according to historian Carol Krinsky, Bunschaft considered it to be the second-best pavilion after the celebrated Brazilian Pavilion by Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Paul Lester Wiener.1 The Venezuelan pavilion incorporated a 170-foot-long mural by Venezuelan artists Luis Alfredo López Méndez and Francisco Narvaez with the assistance of the young painter Miguel Arroyo. The figurative painting was executed on the under-side of the building’s slab-like canopy, which projected at an angle above the rectangular glass box of the pavilion that exhibited a gift from George Washington to Simón Bolívar—a lock of his own hair and some orchids and petroleum. The huge mural painted on the underside of a tilted roof plane was similar in spirit to the social realism of his contemporaries in Mexico: Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros. During that year in New York, Miguel Arroyo began a lifelong friendship with Gordon Bunshaft that would flourish when he became director of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. The pavilion served Venezuela well and facilitated an exchange of goods and ideas between the United States and Venezuela. In the postwar era, the exchange of goods and ideas with Europe would intensify as well, and an influx of Italian and Portuguese craftsmen in the postwar era would help to build the Venezuelan modern architecture from the 1950s until the 1990s. The cultural values shared by artists and architects of this period, specifically in 1950s Caracas, can be illustrated by comparing two private residences that achieved—albeit through different means—a complex symbiosis of art within architecture in a way that enriches the residents’ daily lives: Quinta Caoma and Villa Planchart.

Quinta Caoma, designed in 1952 by Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva for his family of four children, sits on a small urban lot approximately 60 feet wide and 180 feet deep. Villa Planchart, designed in 1953 by the Italian architect and editor of Domus magazine Gio Ponti for a couple without children, sits on a promontory overlooking the entire valley of Caracas. These two houses are preserved today thanks to foundations created for this purpose, allowing us to experience directly the architect’s intentions and the role of architecture, art, and design in the domestic life of Caracas in this period. By comparing these two houses, many of the values that were present in the architectural and artistic culture of the 1950s in Caracas are made evident. Quinta Caoma was built by Carlos Raúl Villanueva for his family in La Florida in 1953, a new subdivision to the east of the colonial city center that was developed in early 1928 by his father-in-law, Juan Bernardo Arismendi, and Luis Roche for the growing upper middle class of Caracas. The upper middle class was in the process of migrating from the older residential neighborhood of El Paraiso to the southeast side of the city. The street Los Jabillos was named for the enormous and shady trees that lined the wide pedestrian sidewalks of this well-planned neighborhood designed by the architect Manuel Mujica Millan, a recent exile from Franco’s Spain.

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Fig. 1 / Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Quinta Caoma, exterior view (1952). Caracas, Venezuela. Courtesy Fundación Villanueva.

Fig. 2 / Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Quinta Caoma, interior view (1952). Caracas, Venezuela. Courtesy Fundación Villanueva.

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The architecture of Villanueva’s Caoma is deceptively simple: The ground floor is a three bay open plan punctuated by a grid of columns that are then engaged into walls or left free standing. The entrance, through the front door or through the open space of the garage, leads into an entry space lit by an interior patio. Villanueva liked to sit here at the entrance table and sketch. The living and dining spaces seem to float above the garden and the strong tropical light is filtered by the trees directly in front of the large louvered doors. A separate circulation route for servants on the north side gives direct access to the back garden, the bathroom and bedrooms, the kitchen and a staircase leading to a laundry patio hidden on the second floor with direct access to the master bedroom. The second floor accommodates a family with four children with the usual hierarchy of bedrooms and bathrooms, smaller nanny’s room, and a library. The floor plan of the house is oriented toward the garden using the elevation change in section and the diagonal inflection in plan to make the interiors less orthogonal and more dynamic. The openings toward the north are generous. The ones to the south and east are smaller and controlled by louvers, and the strong western light is filtered by the generous tropical plants that act as a buffer. Villanueva conceived the interiors as a landscape formed by the intimacy of the relationship of the architect with the art and furniture made by his close friends and colleagues. The traditional domestic environment is altered by the predominance of abstract art and the by the nonspecific placement of the furniture. The fluid arrangement of art objects and furniture determines the spaces more than the architecture per se and it is this second layer of architecture and landscape that determines the setting for the social functions of the house. Quinta Caoma is the antithesis of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art. Unlike the early houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, Villanueva’s residence was not conceived as an integration of the art of design and craft. Instead of using matching or complementary interior objects of different sizes as his starting point, he began with a spatial concept. The structure is a reinforced concrete frame using a hollow clay block infill that is then hidden behind white painted stucco. The details of the railing or the louvered windows are to some extent generic or vernacular—they do not call attention to themselves. They are very sensitive to necessity of filtering and controlling the strong tropical light. This house integrates art, light, and landscape—a subtle design creating intimacy for friends, family, and art. The integration of modern art and architecture within an open and flexible space works to serve the daily rituals of family life. Villa Planchart is, in my opinion, the best work of Gio Ponti. He was given the perfect site and very unusual clients who understood his architecture and who challenged him to realize his theory of finite form on this tropical

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Fig. 3 / Gio Ponti. Villa Planchart, interior view (1953). Caracas, Venezuela. Courtesy Gio Ponti Archives.

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promontory overlooking the entire valley of Caracas. This villa is very much a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk in that the architecture although abstract is used to represent the idealized couple as portrayed by the leitmotifs of the sun and the moon. These two images are present at different scales from the ceiling frescoes to the plates made by Ginori. The house as a temple dedicated to the union of the sun and the moon. The extraordinary plans drawn by Ponti show all the possible positions of the couple inhabiting each of the spaces defined by the placement of furniture and all the possible vistas as arrows. Ponti’s theory of finite form demands that each surface is independent of the adjacent one. The non–load-bearing exterior walls are open at their seams appearing to float in a space of weightlessness. At the same time as these discrete spaces are defined by the floors and walls, they exist within the open spatial sequence creating an architectural promenade that is always alternating between interior and exterior. This was the result of a long and careful dialogue between architect and client as seen in the cablegrams and the illustrated handwritten correspondence between architect and client. This dialogue continued during the process of construction; Gio Ponti was present on a monthly basis and adapted the plans to change openings to align with the vistas he found in the landscape. This house was designed and constructed with flawless execution as collaboration of architecture and craft. The architect in charge of the construction for Gio Ponti was Graziano Gasparini, the historian, photographer, painter and restoration architect. Ponti worked with ceramic artists such as Fausto Melotti, de Poli, Rui, Fornasetti, Chiesa, Gambone, and Venini who decorated different portions of the house. The house became a living museum of Italian industrial craft and furniture mostly designed by Ponti. Each element of the house was considered almost autonomously as a separate object. The design of the handrail or the richly patterned floors made of different brightly colored marbles imported from Italy. For Ponti the most important element is how the house is sited gently on the land much like a butterfly. This is accomplished by a complex concrete frame that allows the house to cantilever beyond its foundation wall. Like a Florentine villa or belvedere the walls are protected by a generous cornice that seems to hover in the air.

Fig. 4 / Gio Ponti. Villa Planchart, exterior view (1953). Caracas, Venezuela. Courtesy Gio Ponti Archives.

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Fig. 5 / Gio Ponti. Plan for El Cerrito or Villa Planchart (1953). Caracas, Venezuela. Courtesy Gio Ponti Archives.

The villa succeeds in representing the fantasy of man within nature—a nature that is contained and framed by the artifice of design and architecture as the container of all the arts. As Anala Planchart once put it, “to live in a modern house one has to be modern first.” This house is a testament to her vision and her life. The art objects create a secondary interior landscape that was the perfect setting for her extensive collection of orchids as well as the art by Soto, CruzDiez, Alejandro Otero, Calder, Léger, Arp, Vasarely, Valera, Narvaez, and Morandi. Villanueva’s architecture was very concerned with the space that is created by structure and made alive by the controlled use of light and air. Gio Ponti believed in the supremacy of the object. The theory of finite form brings into focus Gio Ponti’s identification with design in relationship to architecture. Gio Ponti’s work as a designer of furniture and as an editor of a magazine dedicated to design and architecture allows us to view Villa Planchart as his best work of architecture and interior design. To showcase the work of his contemporaries in Milan he carefully curates the artwork that is positioned strategically within his interiors. This house made the owners very happy and Anala Planchart’s collection of orchids and tropical plants animate

the spaces and do not challenge the totalizing vision of the architect. This Gesamtkunstwerk is complete in itself. An example of this totalizing vision takes place in the library where Gio Ponti invented a mechanical showcase that allowed Mr. Planchart’s African trophies to be hidden and then appear dramatically. The idea of a finite form as applied to architecture believes in an artifact determined by the boundaries of its form and material. This fundamental vision serves Ponti well in his furniture and industrial design, but when applied to architecture it can be counter-productive, particularly when the decorative pattern takes primacy over the space. Modernity in the 1950s in Venezuela was not concerned with the creation of a national identity or style. It was the universal language of abstraction that was shared by architects and artists and their collaborations transformed both the public and private spaces of the city. The problems of identity evident in Mexico and Brazil are not of a primary concern in the “immediate tomorrow” of Caracas. The new ideal city of the 1950s was built by Venezuelan artists and architects, often trained in Paris, together with American and European architects who found this country anxious to be modern. Beginning with the regime of General Gomez, the Ministry of Education recognized the need to make good education available and accessible to all Venezuelans. The Central University City by Carlos Raúl Villanueva built by the military dictatorship under General Marcos Perez-Jimenez became the foundation of a Roman ideal where public space is defined by the interplay of art, architecture, and landscape. Caracas can be regarded as an open city because of an extraordinary natural site, a prototypical colonial grid plan, and the expanded site of a hybrid modernity that is concrete, abstract, and alive. Moreover, the Caribbean nature of a culture open to influence, trade, and goods makes Caracas not a ruin of a lost modernity but an exemplar of concrete modernity that promises to survive against all odds.

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Notes

1/ Carol Herselle Krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owens & Merrill (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988), 9.

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Integrating Vanguardisms Dialogues between Art and Architecture in Modern Cuba

When the sculpture of La Giraldilla, a weathervane, was placed on the top of the watchtower of La Fuerza castle in 1632, a mutually enriching dialogue between the arts and architecture began in Cuba. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, while the island was under Spanish colonial rule, wall paintings, colorful stained glass windows, sculptures, fountains, and other artistic elements were an equally important part of the architecture, not just decorative elements. Wooden ceilings typically had inlaid decorations, the walls of churches were frequently covered with religious paintings, and the main entrances of houses and other structures were profusely ornamented thanks to the so-called portadas. Statues, monuments, and obelisks adorned the public spaces of cities to enrich the urban environment. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Art Nouveau and eclectic architecture continued to incorporate elements of the decorative arts, albeit in a different fashion. The inclusion of sculptural elements in residences and in public buildings continued unabated, a new conception of stained glass emerged within the Cuban context, using more subtle colors than was the case in colonial times. Art Deco infused Cuban architecture by the second half of the 1920s, stylizing and breaking the lines, while keeping them as a basic element in the composition of colored façades, which included reliefs bearing a new expression according to the roots and principles of the style.

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With the emergence of rationalist architecture in the 1930s, a schism between art and architecture emerged. For a brief period, the condemnatory judgment by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos—“Ornament is a crime”— presided over the work of Cuban architects, who would exclude from their buildings anything that even would hint at a decorative intent, but not for long. Cuban idiosyncrasies did not easily assimilate with cold, bare surfaces, and as the architectural forms became more complex, an interest in the applied arts as a medium to complement and enrich buildings resurfaced. A conceptual rationale was needed to erase the ethical prejudices, and the necessary integration of art and architecture was discussed and theorized. By the 1950s the importance of finding new ways of integrating the arts and architecture had gained new momentum, especially in light of recent developments in that field in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela. Cuba was ready to join a comprehensive, integrative, and unprecedented avant-garde art movement that had surfaced on the continent. The visual arts avant-garde had emerged in Cuba in the extraordinary decade of the 1920s, starting with the painter Víctor Manuel García. He was soon joined by Carlos Enríquez, Antonio Gattorno, Eduardo Abela, and others who formed the first generation of pioneers opposed to the academicism represented by the San Alejandro Academy. Almost all the protagonists of the Cuban artistic renewal went to this school at one point to acquire rudimentary technical skills, but soon became defiant and left for Paris, where they studied the work of Picasso, Cézanne, and others. The Paris School would exert a huge influence over this first generation of Cuban artists who would develop an interest for the exotic as a topic, which upon their return to Cuba would become an interest in local themes. The generation of Cuban artists that emerged in the mid-1930s included Mariano Rodríguez, René Portocarrero and Alfredo Lozano, among others, and was influenced by the strong Mexican muralist movement. Mariano, a painter, and Lozano, a sculptor, spent time in Mexico and upon their return to Cuba shared their discoveries with fellow Cuban artists. The works of Mexican artists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros became well known and promoted in Cuba, and Siqueiros himself spent several months teaching and painting in the island. By the 1940s the Cuban art scene showed traces of abstractionism, but it wasn’t until the end of the decade that it would gain momentum. By the 1950s, abstractionism had become a widespread trend. The first group that openly embraced the abstract artistic vocabulary as a collective belief was “Los Once”. In their wake, painters from earlier generations began to renew their language and to assume the new tendency now in vogue. This for

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the abstract visual language applied to form permeated many artistic works integrated into the architecture made at the time. The importance of attaining a creative integration of the arts and architecture was manifested in 1940 when Luis Bay Sevilla proposed “to include a member of the National Architects Association in the National Institute of Fine Arts, who will be responsible for achieving a more fruitful and lasting spiritual approach between painters, sculptors and architects.”1 In 1952 the Cuban government approved a law that established that 6 percent of the cost of all state-owned public buildings and 3 percent of the cost of all private buildings such as cinemas and hospitals must be used for the inclusion of paintings and sculptures by Cuban artists. Although not everyone always complied with this decree, it signals a clear interest among architects, painters, and sculptors to work together. To this quick overview of the artistic evolution in those decades, the support and encouragement of key elements should be noted, including: the patronage of María Luisa Gómez Mena; official support from the government which sponsored certain endeavors; frequent study trips, sometimes sponsored by scholarships; and regular exposure in specialized journals, including those dedicated to architecture.

Artists, Architects and Some Collaborative Achievements Practically all of the most important artists from the 1930s through the 1950s produced works in one form or another related to architectural projects. The results did not always succeed in seamlessly integrating art with the form and function of architecture, but many churches, banks, schools, offices, and residences were built that provide excellent examples of artists and architects coming together to create and design structures that were both artistically and functionally pleasing. As for the architects, few of the leading ones at the time refrained from participating in this collaborative practice. Mario Romañach worked with Roberto Diago, Nicolás Quintana with Domingo Ravenet, Aquiles Capablanca with Amelia Peláez and Domingo Ravenet, and Ricardo Porro with Portocarrero (in addition to some failed attempts with Henry Moore and Alfredo Lozano). Eugenio Batista, a pioneer of the Cuban modern movement, not only created excellent murals with national subjects but also repeatedly teamed up with artists Rita Longa and Diederich Kortlang. Antonio Quintana, perhaps the architect who insisted the most, and with success, on this practice, obtained

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very good results working with Mariano and Wifredo Lam, the most prominent figure among Cuban painters. Nicolás Arroyo and Gabriela Menéndez, in a series of commissions for public buildings, did not hesitate to integrate the works of important painters and sculptors, including the sports-themed frescoes by Rolando López Dirube in the Sports Palace (1957). In addition to Dirube, sculptors like Rita Longa and Alfredo Lozano together with the painter Amelia Peláez stand out because of the sheer number and exceptional quality of their works. Also of importance are René Portocarrero, Mario Carreño, Cundo Bermúdez, the Spaniard Hipólito Hidalgo de Caviedes, and Juan José Sicre. Nineteen hundred and thirty-seven was an important year for the arts and architecture scene on the island. Influenced by his experiences in Mexico, Eduardo Abela created the Free Studio of Painting and Sculpture. The studio became the center for the teaching of mural painting techniques in Cuba. That same year, Amelia Peláez, Fidelio Ponce de León, Carlos Enríquez, and others painted a set of murals in the José Miguel Gómez school, and another set was painted in the Normal School for Teachers of Santa Clara by Ravenet, Peláez, Abela, Mariano, Portocarrero, Jorge Arche and Ernesto González Puig. The accomplishments of these artists marked a milestone in Cuban muralism that would not be repeated in the following decade, despite some significant moments. It was only in the 1950s when the previous achievements were surpassed. In 1951 the Esso company building, designed by architect Amadeo López-Castro, was finished in El Vedado. The building is of little interest from an architectural viewpoint but stands out because of the inclusion of murals on every floor by some relevant Cuban artists. Lam, Peláez, Portocarrero, Carmelo González, Jorge Rigol, Enrique Moret and Carlos Enríquez painted murals in the hallways leading to the offices. The clash of themes is surprising for the interior of an office building: for example, the work by Carmelo shows a family of impoverished peasants in miserable living conditions; the mural by Lam recreates his particular Afro-Cuban cosmology; and the art by Carlos Enriquez, with its “creole romanticism” themes stands out not only in this context but also in the country’s art landscape in general. The National Museum of Fine Arts, designed by Alfonso Rodríguez Pichardo and completed in 1954, offered a unique opportunity for the integration of the visual arts. Its function was propitious, and both its architect and its investor, the state, facilitated the opportunity. Thus, one of the most significant examples of blending art and architecture in Cuba was achieved, at least quantitatively. The entrance to the museum is enlivened by Rita

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Fig. 1 / Alfonso Rodríguez Pichardo. National Museum of Fine Arts (1954). Havana, Cuba. Courtesy the author.

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Longa’s sculpture Forma, Espacio y Luz; above it stands what is perhaps the most successful work of the group, a balcony inspired by Afro-Cuban musical instruments by Mateo Torriente Bécquer. The corners at the top of each side façade shows cantilevered slabs with sculptures by Teodoro Ramos Blanco, Ernesto González, Lozano and Sicre. For the vestibule, Enrique Caravia made a great mosaic in the Byzantine style representing the classic and contemporary arts. On the facing wall there is another balcony sculpture, by Eugenio Rodríguez. Jesús Casagrán made some female figures in relief located above two doors, and Ernesto Navarro made an abstract frieze, also in relief, around the façades of the courtyard. Other public buildings achieved attractive and creative solutions, such as the Office of the Comptroller by Aquiles Capablanca, which coherently incorporates the bronze piece Integridad by Ravenet2 and a colorful ceramic mural by Peláez with abstract geometric forms; and the Medical Insurance Building by Antonio Quintana, with murals, also in ceramics, by Lam and Mariano. In Mariano’s work the abstract treatment is very suggestive thanks to the allusion to a boomerang as the main element of the composition, in reference to the circulation of people entering and exiting the lobby where the work is located. Very valuable works were achieved as well in residential architecture, although of lesser impact because of their limited exposure. Rita Longa created an extensive series of sculptures and fountains in several houses, and López Dirube integrated some sculptural murals with themes reminiscent of Afro-Cuban culture into other residences in a functional and artistic way. One of the most relevant experiences is the residence of Eugenio Leal, built by Eduardo Cañas Abril and Nujim Nepomechie in 1957. The game room features an excellent ceramic mural by Mario Carreño on the exterior, with abstract motifs and defined geometric shapes that are multiplied and distorted when reflected on the pond beneath it. Inside the same room the terrazzo floor has images from a deck of cards inserted into it, a similar theme to the one used by Peláez in the fresco on the wall behind the bar (unfortunately no longer in existence). Religious architecture was also a favorable setting for painters and sculptors to explore their ideas thanks to

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its implicit intense symbolism. A key example is the simple chapel of the Baracoa beach in Havana by Eugenio Batista. The work has an almost minimalist asceticism characteristic of the work of Eugenio. In an environment of extreme sobriety, the colorful glazed mosaic of Our Lady of the Charity of El Cobre by Portocarrero stands out. The same artist worked with less traditional forms on the Via Crucis. Its fourteen stations, conceived initially to be made of ceramic tiles were created only on wood, as studies (but still of great value). On the whole, and in general in Cuban religious art, the extraordinary Christ carved in wood by Lozano stands out and becomes the center of the composition because of its location, suspended over the altar, and its artistic quality. With a more modern expression than the mural by Portocarrero, the fresco by Rodríguez Pichardo in the Guatao church, designed by Olga Echezarreta Mulkay, is noteworthy. This mural is comparable in its conception and design to the best contemporary religious art in Latin America. Finally, hotel architecture, favored by the tourism boom of the 1950s, also produced some very interesting examples. Their function, sometimes understood beforehand as banal, led occasionally to solutions close to kitsch, such as in the Havana Riviera Hotel, built in 1957 by Polevitzky, Johnson and Associates. Artists who contributed to this hotel included López Dirube, Cundo Bérmúdez, Hidalgo de Caviedes, Enzo Gallo, and Florencio Gelabert. The fine arts works made the following year by some of the most outstanding Cuban artists for the Habana Hilton hotel, designed by the North American architect Welton Becket in association with Arroyo and Menéndez, were of greater relevance and impact. Portocarrero, Carreño, Cundo Bermúdez, Juan David, and Peláez created murals for this hotel. Undoubtedly, the mural by Peláez is the culmination of a stage of progressive advancement in the field of murals integrated into architecture. Assembled out of Italian ceramic tiles, it reproduced with strong colors the geometry and the typical Cuban themes that were the essence of her paintings. Its central location on an exterior wall above the main entrance, and its huge size, helped this work to attain the biggest visual impact in the urban context of the city of Havana.3 It is also one of the main symbols of the achievements reached in the 1950s in the integration of art and architecture in Cuba.

Fig. 2 / Amelia Peláez del Casal. Mural for the Habana Hilton, now Habana Libre (1957). Havana, Cuba. Courtesy the author.

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The triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959, and the establishment of a new government on the island, marked a significant change in the way art and architecture were conceived and practiced. By extension, this momentous event also recalibrated the meaning of public art to reflect the spirit of the new political reality. During this time, the facades of several public buildings were covered with murals charged with political content covering social issues, events, and personalities from the Revolution. Unfortunately, the quality of these artistic expressions suffered and was less celebrated than previous efforts achieved by the country’s best artists during the most productive years of the 1950s. Several of these highly recognized artists had established a solid reputation that followed them into exile. Among them are Rolándo López Dirube, Alfredo Lozano, and Cundo Bermúdez. In addition, many of Cuba’s best architects who frequently integrated art into their schemes also emigrated as part of a mass exile initially thought to be temporary. A few of them were Eugenio Batista, Eduardo Cañas Abril, Nujim Nepomechie, Nicolás Arroyo, Gabriela Menéndez, and Ricardo Porro.4 Porro, in particular, had spent the last years of the decade in Venezuela and returned to Havana following the triumph of the Revolution. Following his arrival, he was appointed the main designer of the National Art Schools, and he designed the Schools of Visual Arts and Modern Dance. On this project, Porro had the extraordinary opportunity to develop, at a large scale and with few constraints at first, his personal vision of architecture as art—a vision aspiring to transcend functional and constructive limitations. Porro’s artistic ambitions are exemplified in his two schools by the overall configuration and sequencing of classrooms, corridors, open spaces, squares, gardens, patios, and, most importantly, the sculptural water feature placed in the main courtyard of the School of Visual Arts. In this project, Porro conceived a program that understood creation as the central impulse of an art school, aligning the

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Fig. 3 / Ricardo Porro. National School of Plastic Arts (1961–65). Havana, Cuba. Courtesy the author.

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concept of artistic creation with the supreme act of conceiving life. As such, the school is animated with references to human sexuality and, in particular, the female anatomy. Porro’s sculptural fountain is a stylized representation of the female sexual organ, placed at the center of the main plaza and surrounded by a winding path that connects the studios covered by domes resembling large breasts. Meanwhile, at the School of Modern Dance, Porro chose to express not only the dynamic development of the dancers but also the energy of an entire nation embroiled in revolutionary change. He created a composition of apparent disorder at the center of which is a courtyard with a large planter that assumes the shape of shattered glass in its footprint. The campus’s severe angular shapes, along with a vaulting system resembling sails inflated by the wind, lend to a visual effect of forward movement, a metaphor of Cuban society under the revolution.

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It is precisely the set of architectural buildings born from the National Art Schools project that have brought renewed attention to Cuba’s modernist architecture by local and international artists who impart reflections on the political and social reality of Cuba. Such is the case with prominent American photographers Robert Polidori and Andrew Moore, who in their photographs have illustrated the profound depths of the National Art Schools in various stages of decay, a project that was once the architectural dream of a government poised to serve a redemptive role of national life.5 That architectural dream turned nightmare has become a recurring theme in the work of Felipe Dulzaides, who in several films and performances has documented the decline of the National Art Schools. A project whose construction remains unfinished, whose initial meaning was stigmatized by powerful critics, whose appearance has been considerably damaged by a lack of maintenance and neglectful inaction, whose restoration and completion in 1999 became a priority of the state, and whose fate is to be decided today once again. Two of the most significant among the many actions performed by Dulzaides have been the reconstruction, inside art galleries, of a fragment reminiscent of the National School of Drama (Roberto Gottardi, 1961–65), with the suggestive title of Invitation, and on the other hand, the performance Next Time It Rains, developed and filmed at the National School of Ballet (Vittorio Garatti, 1961–65). In this latter work, Dulzaides cleans the gargoyles and water

Fig. 4 / Felipe Dulzaides. Invitation installation view. 2004. Bricks, benches, and video projection. Courtesy the artist.

channels after decades of neglect and widespread abandonment. Thanks to this action, water again begins to circulate through the rain gutters, using available means: buckets, jars, bottles and the cooperation of a local resident.6 Among the most outstanding Cuban artists of greater international recognition for their profound reflections expressed through architectural subjects are Carlos Garaicoa and Alexandre Arrechea (Jaca). From the beginning, the work of Garaicoa has traced a path of great consistency in the discovery of areas of conflict between the social project and Havana’s physical reality using different materials and various media, including photography, drawing, and architectural models. His works always points to a critical reading of the environment, its history, and its present, while maintaining a high level of artistic elaboration that allows him to produce exquisite architectural abstractions of events and situations relevant to national affairs. The viewer, therefore, must personally unravel Garaicoa’s complex ideas through their own experiences, always navigating through emotional discoveries and aesthetic qualities. Despite frequently drawing from tragic and macabre events occurring in the public realm, Garaicoa’s work is far from political propaganda. The effect of his unexpected representations of old

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buildings often contain the potential to inscribe new meaning upon the built environment through a process of intense and thoughtful reflection on an unfortunate reality, one that is both evident and inevitable; a situation without an immediate solution. His works are a chronicle of loss, not a recovery attempt.7 This situation of failure and impotence is alluded to in Garaicoa’s Sin Título/Untitled (La Internacional), wherein the shoe store California (Silverio Bosch and Mario Romañach, 1951)—located on Galiano Street, Havana’s high-end commercial hub—appears in its current state, a far cry from its former glory as one of the most important and prestigious leather goods retailers in the country. Only vestiges remain of what was the original store; the most significant alteration undoubtedly being the renaming of the store now called La Internacional, a two-fold play on words. First, Internacional (International), a reference to the revolutionary international workers union, is in direct opposition to the original name, California, with its North American connotations. Second, after 1959, California/La Internacional was dedicated to selling clothes of higher quality than that typically found in the usual proletarian stores; however, the goods available at California/La Internacional, were exclusively reserved for those who, for reasons of work or as a reward for their job performance and political allegiance, were permitted to travel abroad—as ambassadors of sorts, expected to leave a positive impression. A paradox is thus posed: in a system that promulgates the equality of all citizens, a social strata is made publicly visible through the institutionalization of clothing vis-a-vis those who are allowed to travel and those who are not. On the photograph, Garaicoa has drawn a sentence with pins and thread: “Up, down, to the side, without, the world’s poor,” in clear reference to the hymn of the International workers of the world. Since his time as founding member of the art collective Los Carpinteros, Alexandre Arrechea has used architecture as a vehicle to circulate messages— with various levels of meaning and interpretation—to carefully examine Cuba’s constructed reality and its current condition. Now working as an independent artist, Arrechea continues to employ references to architecture, often using iconic examples of Cuban modernist architecture to support his expressive reflections on contemporary life. An outstanding example of this is based on the FOCSA Building in Havana (Ernesto Goómez Sampera, 1956), a structure that occupies an entire downtown city block in the El Vedado district. At the time of its construction, the building’s V-shaped tower rising up thirtyfive stories made quite an impression not only because of its size, but also for offering a plethora of urban amenities: a lower level with offices, shops, and

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INTEGRATING VANGUARDISMS

Fig. 5 / Carlos Garaicoa. Sin Título/Untitled (La Internacional), 2009. B/W photograph mounted and laminated on gator board and using pins and thread (151.8 x121.8 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, New York. Courtesy the artist.

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services spread over two floors, and a large raised garden with swimming pool and playground designed for the children of the building’s residents. These large dimensions, in addition to its unprecedented design and central location, determined that the building would become one of the quintessential symbols of modernity for the capital and by extension, the nation. A 2004 proposal by Arrechea entitled Public Art considered hanging large white sheets made of porcelain from the balconies and windows of the FOCSA in the manner of twisted and knotted ropes forming long ribbons suggestive of the frequently used means prisoners had in the past to escape from their cells. The piece recalls a song by Gerardo Alfonso made popular as the theme song to the television show Walking Havana produced by the Office of the City Historian of Havana. The song’s refrain repeats the phrase “white sheets hanging from the balconies,” an observation by Alfonso of Havana’s streets filled with white linens hanging out to dry from the balconies of the city’s beloved historic buildings. However, when hanging sheets from the facades of the FOCSA Building, Arrechea represents a common feature of Havana’s historic core as a broader metaphor for Cuba’s recent history. By twisting the sheets and transforming them into a means of escape, Arrechea references the country’s mass migration that has haunted Cuba since the triumph of the Revolution. With these simple gestures Arrechea’s piece transforms the meaning of the FOCSA Building as an inspiring symbol of Cuban technological progress in the 1950s and repositions it as a comment on the mass exodus associated with Cubans wanting to flee the country’s contemporary crisis.

Fig. 6 / Alexandre Arrechea. Arte Público (Public Art). 2004. Watercolor (114 x 228 cm). Courtesy the artist.

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Notes

1/ Luis Bay Sevilla, “Tres siglos de arte en Cuba,” Arquitectura, nos. 80–81 (1940): 32. 2/ This sculpture recently was removed from its original location when another work, a poorly conceived relief, was attached to the façade of the building. 3/ Shortly after it was completed, the mural suffered structural problems, which prompted its total removal. A new mural, which followed the original design by Amelia Peláez, was put up in the same location in 1998.

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4/ For a discussion of the works of these and other Cuban architects of the 1950s see Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, The Havana Guide, Modern Architecture, 1925–1965 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000). 5/ See Robert Polidori, Havana (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2001) and Andrew Moore, Inside Havana (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002).

6/ See Felipe Dulzaides, Utopia Possible (Miami, FL: Miami Dade College and Miami International Film Festival, 2012). 7/ See Carlos Garaicoa, Okwui Enwezor, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, and Sean Kissane, Carlos Garaicoa: Overlapping (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010).

Secret Lines Interweaving a New Territory

“I am an abstract with memories.” Paul Klee.1

To study modernity in Caracas inevitably leads to the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900–75) and his monumental work, the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas (1944–70). Since the 1950s aspiring architects and artists in Venezuela have taken Villanueva’s masterwork and its great project of the integration of the arts as a starting point for their own explorations and goals.

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Hannia Gómez

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A Modern City within a Modern City

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The Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas was the result of the national modernization program introduced by General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who ruled Venezuela from 1952 to 1958, and the talent and vision of Villanueva. The immense wealth flowing into Venezuela from oil revenues together with Pérez Jiménez’s strong will to change the international image of the nation’s capital with monumental civil works, gave rise to the city’s golden age, which was marked by an unprecedented urban transformation and an unparalleled architectural building boom. By the end of the 1950s Caracas had emerged as a major capital of modern design, alongside Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. Villanueva’s campus had a huge influence on the arts scene in Caracas and the city’s urban landscape. It inspired architects and artists alike in their search for an artistic vision and expression of their own. Like parallel wefts, they went from architecture to art and vice versa, picking up the artistic threads and ideas exhibited in the university city and weaving them into their own practices and projects that would come to populate and transform the city of Caracas. Villanueva pioneered this vision of turning an urban landscape into a laboratory where architecture meets the arts. Having studied architecture in Paris in the early 1930s at the École des Beaux-Arts, Villanueva was no stranger to the ideal of the synthesis of all arts; over the years his work evolved from neoclassical and eclectic in the 1930s to rationalist and more modernist—even Corbusian—in the 1950s to culminate in a comprehensive urban and architectonic project that came to exemplify his ideal of the integration of the arts. Villanueva’s university campus abounds with examples of how modern architecture and the visual arts can enter into a dialogue and coexist in different ways, turning the project into a monumental modern catalog of innovative visual, aural, physical, poetic, phenomenological experiences for the integration of the arts. From the articulate merger of modern art and architecture, the Aula Magna with Alexander Calder’s acoustic Clouds (1955), to the most classic relationship between

Fig. 1 / Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas general view (c. 1955). Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Archivo Fundación de la Memoria Urbana, Caracas.

art and architecture, the rector’s office with Hector Poleo’s painted mural, each building had a work of art especially commissioned for it. The result was of such special cultural and physical significance that, in 2002, the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas was inscribed in the UNESCO’s World Heritage List of sites of outstanding universal value. Naturally, a Renaissance-like structure of such cultural proportions would not go unnoticed by the general population of Caracas. Indeed, since the opening of their enlightened, humanistic, and oneof-a kind campus, Caraquenians have become used to and embrace living in a city that integrates works of art in their public buildings and spaces. Following in the footsteps of the pantheon of heroes that contributed to the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas—including Villanueva, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Antoine Pevsner, Francisco Narváez, Pascual Navarro, Jean Arp, Oswaldo Vigas, André Bloc, Armando Barrios, Héctor Poleo, Henri Laurens, Carlos González-Bogen, Baltasar Lobo, Víctor Vasarely, and, particularly, Mateo Manaure and Alejandro Otero—were others who in their own way searched for new ways to integrate art and architecture to transform the city’s urban landscape. Paul Klee once said: “I am an abstract with memories.” Klee, an expressionist artist who also taught at the Bauhaus design school in Germany, conceived of landscapes that are capable of “speaking for any city” from the indelible traces of his secular Munich and his native Bern. 2 Who were the abstract artists with memories that spoke for modern Caracas, conceiving landscapes from the indelible traces of the city of Villanueva? How did their “secret lines” interweave with the spatial experiments of Venezuelan modern cities? And, what were these memories?

Fuori Le Mura: “The Role of the New Art Must Be Met in the Street” The first artists who “wanted to reinvent the city from within” in the 1950s, outside of the university campus, were Alejandro Otero (1921–90) and Mateo Manaure (b. 1926).3 As was tradition at the time, they traveled to Paris at a young age in search of fresh ideas and to improve their artistic practices. In the mid-1940s, while the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas was still in the planning stages, Alejandro Otero, Mateo Manaure, and other Venezuelan artists in Paris formed a group called Los Disidentes (The Dissidents). Villanueva contacted them, among other international artists, to be part of the team that was to work on the creation of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas’s spaces.4

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At the time, Otero was very interested in the work of Piet Mondrian. Several years before his arrival in Paris, he had seen Mondrian’s Boogie-Woogies in New York. To him they were “from the standpoint of color, symphonic paintings.” With this inspiration, he began a series of “free chromatic harmonies,” in which “the only mondrianesque thing was the use of straight bands on a horizontal-vertical position.”5 The result was his 1951 collage series Orthogonals, on colored paper. Soon, however, Otero began to feel that his collages were no longer mainly visual: they contained a new dimension that could no longer be contained within a two-dimensional medium.6 News from Caracas that an architectural movement of great importance and novelty was underway in the city, prompted him to return to Venezuela in 1952. Thanks to his knowledge of Villanueva’s work, he was able to move from studio work to onsite architecture projects, before Villanueva called him for the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. So he was already able to apply his research “to walls and volumes.”7 Once in Caracas, Otero would work on two key building sites: the José Angel Lamas Amphitheatre, designed by Julio Volante (1954), in Colinas de Bello Monte and the Unidad Residencial El Paraíso, designed by Villanueva (1956). For the amphitheater he created five mosaic and aluminum panels, the Murales (1953), and a monumental mosaic, Coloritmo, displayed on the stands. The colorful amphitheater, when seen from the hills or from the air, looks like a monumental urban lyre. Nevertheless, for Otero, the polychrome decorations were yet his best accomplishment. For his next project, the polychrome murals for the eighteen-story Unidad de Habitación (as for Unité d’Habitation) at El Paraíso—one of the first Venezuelan superbloques designed by Villanueva—he decided to apply a polychromatic mosaic on the façades, interwoven with their hollow-brick planes and structural concrete grid.8 Yet, another major polychrome experiment was to be performed in Caracas, at the same time as Otero embarked on his project, but closer to the historic city center: the 2 de Diciembre popular housing complex (better known as the 23 de Enero). This was the biggest project of the Banco Obrero’s Taller de Arquitectura

Fig. 2 / Alejandro Otero. Coloritmo at the José Angel Lamas Amphitheatre (c. 1955). Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Archivo Fundación de la Memoria Urbana, Caracas.

Fig. 3 / Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Unidad Residencial El Paraíso (1956), with a polychromy by Alejandro Otero (1956). Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Archivo Fundación de la Memoria Urbana, Caracas.

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(TABO), where Villanueva worked as a consultant director. This time Villanueva decided to work with Mateo Manaure, who worked on abstract constructivism (of which a good example is his Bimural (1954) at the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas), and who had just opened an art gallery, the Cuatro Muros Art Gallery, where he organized the country’s first International Abstract Art Exhibition.9 The huge 2 de Diciembre housing complex is “a complete city, with thirty-eight fifteen-story high superbloques and forty-two four-story high buildings standing over large terraces.”10 Here, Manaure decides to apply his search within abstract constructivism to the grid of the housing units’ façades, turning them into big abstract murals in color plane compositions. With his work, he emphasized, the image of the complex as a paradigm of modernity.11 With the works by Alejandro Otero and Mateo Manaure, the new art began to play its role in the streets of Caracas in accordance with the tenets of modern architecture.12

City with(out) Soto The great pioneer of kinetic art, Jesús Soto (1923–2005), a painter and sculptor, was already a well-known presence in the Caracas art scene when Villanueva

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Fig. 4 / Mateo Manaure. Abstract murals on the 2 de Diciembre housing complex (c. 1955). Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Archivo Fundación de la Memoria Urbana, Caracas.

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embarked on the design of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. Villanueva knew and admired Soto’s work, and once wrote the following about the man himself: “Half magician, half geometer, Soto has managed to make surfaces vibrate, and continues conquering countless unknown dimensions with great pleasure.”13 However, “within the great project of the Ciudad Universitaria, Villanueva did not include Soto. Visiting the campus today, one can only find a single work of his: Estructura Cinética (Kinetic Structure, 1957).”14 Significantly, though, it is located in the School of Architecture. Villanueva had taken the first step in his architecture practice to open the door to modern artistic experimentation.15 In this process, the more he abstracted his designs, the closer he brought them to contemporary art. As Soto himself acknowledged: “Villanueva could understand that architecture had to make an abstract work, eliminating the wall to create open space.” Meanwhile, Soto had become interested in painting as space; he began to realize that any artist who can feel and love space can become an architect. He understood that “art should have the same monumental scale and the same ambitions” as architecture.16 According to Paulina Villanueva, the architect’s daughter, Soto’s absence from the university project was due in part to political reasons. During the years 1944–46, when the plan of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas was hatched, Soto was in Paris, although he was not a member of The Dissidents group. Within that universe of Venezuelan artists living in Paris, he managed to remain an individual, a spectator who, with great interest, watched from afar the gestation of Caracas’ modern process. While in Paris, Soto’s development as an artist took him to extremely original findings. He was seriously interested, for instance, in following up on the spatial conquests of cubism, particularly in in relation to the so-called analytic cubism. Continuing his personal quest, he wished “to understand the fourth dimension that cubism incorporated.”17 He was interested in finding out what happened after 1915: “I investigated who had gone further than Cubism. I was told that the Bauhaus, Mondrian, and some French artists. I quickly realized that the fourth dimension was time, movement, and that I had to bring it to painting. In 1955 when I found a way of moving the image.”18 That year, Soto was invited to participate in the exhibition Le Mouvement, organized by the pasirisian Galerie Denise René with Agam, Bury, Tinguely, Calder, Duchamp, Jacobsen and Vasarely (most of them artists who were invited to contribute to the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas). That same year he anticipated his architectural constructions and his Penetrables in the three virtual squares and distinct striures (streaks) game of La Cajita de Villanueva (Villanueva’s Box, 1955), an homage to the Venezuelan architect.

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Fig. 5 / Jesús Soto. Installation for the Venezuelan Pavilion at the 1967 World Exposition, Montreal, Canada. Courtesy Fundación Villanueva.

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About this work, he said: “I discovered that between the bottom of the drawing and the center of the drawing a whirlwind of light was created. And I saw that it was there that space was revealed.”19 Soto was dazzled by architectural space: “Architecture is a positive plastic result, where walls disappear in order to give way to light, where space does not end in a wall but continues as a stream of air that passes through it. This idea of an open architecture required a similar art at the same level.”20 These words are almost a description of the development that was underway at the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. The foundation for Soto’s dialogue with architecture and the city was set—as was his virtual dialogue with Villanueva. Despite not having been a part of the original Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas team, Soto was able to benefit from being in Villanueva’s circle and working on urban scale artworks Although Soto might be physically absent from the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, the spirit of his artistic vision is present, haunting the campus just like it haunts the work of Villanueva. For his part, the architect will not delay to pay greatly for his absence. The result was the commission for the Venezuelan Pavilion for the 1967 World Exposition in Montreal, where Soto hung from the top of Villanueva’s cube a great waterfall of vibrations, a column of light that cascades at the center of the pavilion space. 21 Soto is responsible for many artistic interventions in Caracas—as his most successful installation, Volumen suspendido (Suspended Volume, 1979), built inside a Jonhson and Burgee building the Cubo Negro (Black Cube, 1975). But there are public works of all kinds, and specially, many projects of a virtual architectural nature: optical walls, white walls, progressions, rotations, squares in space, cube metamorphosis, concentric squares, kinetic structures, metallic boxes, vibrant columns, suspended volumes, virtual elements, totems, ambiguous planes, open spaces, pools, black writings, scales, murals, atmospheres, extensions, trapezoids, spirals, rhythms. These works continue to be a source of ideas as well as a challenge for future architectures. But most of all, they teach us “how to ‘de-materialize’ a city to turn it into a field for visual exploration.”22

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Gego, Architect

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Since the 1950s, a fourth artist has left a mark with her work on the modern art and architecture of Venezuela: Gertrud Goldschmidt, better known as Gego. Gego differs from the other artists in that she was an architect. Since her arrival in the country in 1939 from Hamburg, Germany, she worked as an architect in Caracas. But from 1947 on Gego turned to art to explore new ways of building spaces, which never ceased to be architectural. Gego was not part of the original Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas team of artists either. However, like Soto, a beautiful work of hers, El Chorro (The Jet, 1974), fills the double-height space of the School of Architecture’s library.23 This tribute to her work is also very significant—few artists were as influential as Gego in the development of modern art and architecture in Venezuela. Thanks to the success of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, works of art for public spaces and buildings were in increasing demand in Caracas. Gego had many commissions too. But her integration projects were different. She installed her sculptures in other architectures, turning what would otherwise be a static sculpture into a dynamic dialogue between art and its site-specific urban context. They are parallel “buildings”: using their host-guest architectures as urban settings. In 1961, for the courtyard of a New York art gallery, she imagines a structure of parallel lines (Reticulárea Between Buildings I) that climb up the walls and twists, transforming the space. A little later, she would design a second one for another narrow New York street. Between 1961 and 1962, inside the headquarters of a bank designed by architect Martín Vegas Pacheco, she built her first actual installation. In a large and very vertical courtyard flanked by railings and stairs, she proposes a large sculpture, a second “stair” made with aluminum tubes that competes with the architecture itself.24 Those were years for fantastic architecture. Gego admires the expressionisms of Félix Candela, Bruce Goff, Erich Mendelsohn, and Frei Otto.25 These examples of architecture will soon begin to resonate in her own artistic production. Thus, in front of a neutral brick building in Caracas designed by architects Bornhorst and Neuberger (1965), she builds a great tower, the Torre Cedíaz (Cedíaz Tower, 1967), with parallel lines stretched between two circular rings. Similarly, following a visit to the city by Richard Buckminster Fuller in 1960, Gego creates in another Caracas shopping center, the Centro Comercial

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Fig. 6 / Gertrude Goldschmidt (Gego). Reticulárea, 1969. Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas. Photo: Paolo Gasparini. © Fundación Gego.

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Chacaito, an aerial structure Flechas (Arrows, 1968), using the tensegrity system developed by Fuller in that same decade, inspired by spider webs that “float in the hurricanes.”26 In 1969, at the base of an office tower by architect Tomás Sanabria, she created a mural that played with the rhythm of the façade’s brise-soleils.27 Then, in 1972, she builds the work Cuerdas (Strings) inside the Parque Central complex, by the architecture firm Siso and Shaw. Here, even the commission was already architectural. The structure, tensioned across a reflecting pond, refers to Frei Otto’s wire membranes landscapes of double curvature. From 1969 on Gego creates the great Reticulárea. This fluctuating environmental sculpture is a huge compendium of all her previous work and, more importantly, also a splendid metaphor of the city: featuring canals, ports, inland seas, ships and castles in the air, but also flying Prouns reminiscent of El Lissitzky, neoplastic crosses, Naum Gabo’s surfaces and twists, and Antoni Gaudí’s inverse vaults. The Reticulárea is a fantastic urban utopia, suspended in the air like Frederick Kiesler’s City in Space. In the 1970s her networks multiply. In 1973 she devises a fluctuating environmental Reticulárea of triangular modules for a 1967 mall, Paseo Las Mercedes, by architect Walter J. Alcock.28 Then, in 1974, she makes for the Pasaje Concordia, Nubes (Clouds), an environmental sculpture suspended on the passageway’s double-height public staircase. In addition to these examples of how to integrate art with architecture, Gego will also develop an important educational work that will leave an indelible mark on all architects that came out of the school of architecture in those years. In the curriculum of the workshop, the Taller Gego (1959–66), the memory of her formal education in prewar Germany, was always present. The two architecture schools that stood out in the German scene at the time when Gego was a student, were the Bauhaus in Dessau and the Stuttgart Technical School. Although the Bauhaus was closed down in 1932, 29 its influence lingered on in the imagination of many contemporary artists and architects, including Gego.30 Gego, who had studied in Stuttgart, Germany, under Professor Paul Bonatz (who favored a radically simplified neo-Romanesque style), will always evoke it. It was

Fig. 7 / Fantastic cities. Student works from Taller Gego at the School of Architecture, Ciudad Unversitaria de Caracas (1962). Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Gego © Fundación Gego.

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impossible to remain immune to the radiance of these avant-garde examples of architecture. The young woman would be exposed to the Bauhaus influence as soon as she arrived in Stuttgart and would wander by the modern scenery of the Weisenhof, the housing estate built for exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927.31 The main interests of the Taller Gego of Basic Composition were space as a determinant of form, three-dimensional structures, the dialogue between the living and technical structures, and the relationship of modern architecture with structural form. Gego’s activity in the architecture school was intense. The workshops were kept fresh by integrating emerging ideas and new approaches advocated by Serge Chermayeff, Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Giedion and Charles Moore. The workshop results were plastic objects intended to bring “mental abstractions into real space.”32 As in the Bauhaus, students were exposed to constructivist methods of teaching. Once completed, even the most abstract of student projects, stripped of any functional data and built in space with only what was strictly necessary, took on the visual and structural features of buildings and cities. Gego herself photographed the works of her students all together on many occasions, building with “secret lines” (her words) countless fantastic cities within the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas.

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1/ Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

9/ Mateo Manaure, http:// www.centenariovillanueva.web. ve/CUC/Sintesis_ Artes/Artistas_ Nacionales/.

2/ Klee Cities, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 22–September 5, 1999; cited in “Sin título,” Arquitectura, EL NACIONAL, Caracas, September 13, 1999.

10 / Carlos Raúl Villanueva “Urbanización 23 de Enero,” Fundación de la Memoria Urbana/ Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural, in: Preinventario Arquitectónico, Urbanístico y Ambiental de Caracas 2005–2006 (Caracas, 2007), http://fundamemoria. blogspot.com/.

3/ José Balza, Alejandro Otero (Milano: Olivetti, 1977), 54. 4/ Hannia Gómez, “Soto, Ciudad y Arquitectura,” in Soto a gran escala, catalogue of the exhibition Soto a gran escala, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber (MACCSI) (Caracas: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume / MACCSI, 2003). 5/

Balza, Alejandro Otero, 46.

11 / Hannia Gómez, “Imposing, Transposing, Erasing: the Making of a “Revolutionary” Caracas (1998–2010),” Transnational Latin Americanisms, Liminal Places, Cultures, and Power (T)here conference, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia Univsersity, New York, 2010.

6/

Ibid.

12 /

7/

Ibid., 54.

13 / Quoted in Sofia Imber, “Jesús Soto,” in Nueve Artistas Venezolanos, ed. D. Alvarez (Caracas: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1974).

8/ Carlos Raúl Villanueva, “Unidad Residencial el Paraíso,” in Preinventario Arquitectónico, Urbanístico y Ambiental de Caracas 2005–2006 (Caracas: Fundación de la Memoria Urbana/ Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural, 2007), http://fundamemoria. blogspot.com.

Balza, Alejandro Otero, 54.

14 / Hannia Gómez, “Soto, Ciudad y Arquitectura,” in catalogue of the exhibition Soto a gran escala, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume / Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (Caracas: Sofía Imber MACCSI, 2003), 30–35.

15 / See Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Escritos (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1965). 16 / Juan Pedro Posani, “La experiencia de la integración de las artes,” in Arquitecturas de Villanueva (Caracas: Cuadernos Lagoven, 1978), 26. 17 / Jean-Moulin Raoul, “Jesús Rafael Soto ne se pose que des questions de peintre,” L’Humanité, February 12, 1997. 18 /

Ibid.

19 / “Paleta insolente. Cultura y Sociedad con Jesús Soto,” in Brecha (Montevideo: n.p., n.d.). 20 /

Ibid.

21 / Paulina Villanueva and Ricardo De Sola, Crónica. Tres Cubos en Montreal (Caracas: Fundación Villanueva, 2007). 22 / Roberto Guevara, Arte para una nueva escala (Caracas: Maraven S.A., Litografia Tecnocolor, 1978), 30. 23 / See El Chorro (1974), http://www.fau.ucv.ve/obras_ arte/arte.htm.

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Notes

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24 / Hanni Osott, Sistemas estructurales: Líneas paralelas, Gego, exhibition catalog (Caracas: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 1977), 24. 25 / Ulrich Conrads and Hans G. Sperlich, The Architecture of Fantasy: Utopian Building and Planning in Modern Times, trans., ed., and exp. Christiane Crasemann Collins and George R. Collins (New York: Praeger, 1962). 26 / Buckminster Fuller and Robert Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, “Tensegrity” (New York: Anchor Books, 1973), 57–58.

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27 / Galería de Arte Nacional, catalog of the exhibition Tomás José Sanabria Arquitecto (Caracas: GAN, 1995), 127. 28 / Hannia Gómez, Alcock, obras y proyectos 1959–1992 (Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional, 1992), 38–39.

29 / Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History. The Bauhaus: The Evolution of an Idea 1919–32 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 124. 30 / Iris Peruga, “Gego, el prodigioso juego de crear,” in Gego 1955–1990 (Caracas: Museo de Bellas Artes, 2001), 24. 31 / Josefina Manrique, Sabiduras y otros textos de Gego (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts and Caracas: Fundación Gego, 2005), 191, 229. 32 / Peruga, “Gego, el prodigioso juego de crear,” 31.

Two Brazilian Architects Bo Bardi and Artigas

Lina Bo Bardi The Italian-born Brazilian architect Lino Bo Bardi creates, in her Factory Community Center, located on the low-income edge of São Paolo, a recreational community center. The center, set in a no longer used “brutalist” style concrete factory, was a familiar landmark for the community users. Bo Bardi’s design deconstructs the old factory building, cutting holes into one of the building’s now glass-less windows while creating in an adjacent building, an artificial lake landscape, which employs both natural and industrial materials. Neighborhood users can enjoy a community-oriented, recreational space while also entertaining memories of their old workspace. Instead of constructing a modernist, utopian imposition of a new clean community center, the new center recollects derelict factory buildings into a new mixture consisting of pleasurable cafés, restaurants, sports facilities and a library. In this artificially reconfigured setting, a brutalist concrete bridge traverses the space between two factory buildings. This walkway, as well as the open holes of the other building, is open to fresh air and light. The cut-open windows are organic forms busted out of the concrete, emitting light and fresh air as opposed to conventional glass windows. These

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Dan Graham

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are closed off with large sliding grill panels painted bright and playful colors. Bo Bardi’s crude cuts into the preexisting material fabric of the building to create voids and light shafts prefigure the later work of Gordon Matta-Clark. While Matta-Clark’s cuts are basically forms of agitprop, Bo Bardi’s openings are functional. In one building, a yin/yang configured reflective pool on the yin side creates an artificial landscape by using natural large-sized pebbles, partly submerged under a thin layer of water. The floor on the nonwater yang side gives the appearance of being a hard and slick industrial surface.

João Batista Vilanova Artigas

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While Bo Bardi’s factory expressed a post–World War II communitarian socialism, Vilanova Artigas’s São Paolo University architecture building evinces a democratic, Marxist-collectivist feeling. The building’s interior open core features progressively stacked, set back terraces; each floor level allows students (and instructors) to view each other. This nonhierarchical scheme breaks open the traditional closed-off classroom cells associated with university architecture. The building recalls Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin building (1903), the first twentieth-century atrium form office building. In Artigas’s University Building, continuously slopped ramps connect all the floor levels. Artigas also designed various lower middle- and middle-class apartment buildings, which characteristically incorporate ground level changes and often disparately link interconnected floors in bricolage-like configurations. These plans also incorporate a circulation system of open-air terrace balconies to move people to differing levels of the building. Typical of Brazilian architecture of this period, the exterior façades of Artigas’s apartment buildings often utilize bright, primary colors, which relate to other surrounding public façades, functioning as popular urbanistic decorative signs.

Time of Cohabitation

The last country to enter the history of Western-style industrialization, Brazil still bears the marks of the prehistoric period and of Africa, rich in popular élan. All the contradictions of the Western fallacy came immediately to the fore in the course of Brazil’s modernization process, leaving strong vestiges of a situation undergoing crisis. A process that took centuries to unfold in industrialized nations, here lasted only a few years. An abrupt, unplanned industrialization, structurally imported, led the country to experience a redoubtable natural occurrence, not a process created by people. The sinister diktats of real-estate speculation, the non-existing planning for low-income housing, the speculative proliferation of industrial design: gadgets, most of which useless, bear heavily on the cultural state of the country, leading to severe restraints, making it an offence right now, cultural decline is upon us. If the economist and the sociologist can carry out diagnoses with detachment, the artist must act as an element connected to active people, as well as to the intellectuals. A review of the country’s recent history is called for. An assessment of Brazilian “popular” culture is required, even if it is considered poor in the eyes of high culture. This assessment isn’t the assessment of folklore, always paternally supported by high culture, but an assessment “from the other side,” a participatory assessment. It’s Alejadinho and Brazilian culture before the French Mission. It’s the people from the Northeast with their leather and empty tins, the dweller of the “vilas,” Blacks and Amerindians, the mass of inventions, which contribute something that is tough, dry, hard to swallow. This urgency, this “can no longer wait,” is

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the real basis of the Brazilian artist’s work, a reality that doesn’t need artificial stimuli, a cultural abundance that is close at hand, a unique anthropological wealth, heavy with fundamentally tragic historic events. Brazil became industrialized; in order to be studied, the new reality needs to be accepted. It is impossible to bring extinct social bodies back. Lina Bo Bardi, “Ambient Planning, Design Impasse”1

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Lina Bo Bardi (1914–92), together with her husband, the Italian art dealer and art critic Pietro Maria Bardi (1901–99), left her native Italy for Brazil in 1946, lured by the promise of prosperity. Given her background—a graduate of the Rome College of Architecture and editor of Domus magazine—intellectually Bo Bardi belonged to the first twentieth-century European artistic and political avant-garde. As part of a generation who worked with the available materials and preexisting elements, Bo Bardi recognized in Brazil—particularly in the Northeast—the power of popular culture to improvise, simplify, and invent which permeated her whole work. She explored the cheap, simple, and local situations in her work—toward a culture of survival and recycling, alongside other artists in Brazil including Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, theater director José Celso Martinez Corrêa, and filmmaker Glauber Rocha—as opposed to the conception of progress and consumption, which was part of the overwhelming development ideals of a “Modern Brazil,” a project driven by the state and society throughout the period of 1930–60, culminating with the construction of Brasília as the new federal capital. For her, being an architect included drawing, writing, editing magazines and books, teaching, directing museums, setting up exhibitions, designing jewelry, clothes, graphic design, furniture, objects, getting involved in cinema and stage design for theatre, designing projects from houses to mainly public buildings and urban projects, ranging from SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, to the public spaces in Salvador da Bahia, to the bowl chair and the Glass House. Bo Bardi and her husband came to São Paulo, invited by Assis Chateaubriand—a Brazilian entrepreneur and the most powerful local media mogul at that time—to become part of the first modern museum experience in Brazil. The Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) was founded in 1947, one year after their arrival, housed in an existing building downtown. The building was conceived as both museum and school. It represented a provocative space, alive, polemical, and part of the city’s daily life. Pietro M. Bardi was its cofounder and its director and curator for forty-nine years until 1996. Bo Bardi was responsible not only for the architectural project, but also for the various exhibitions and she became deeply involved in the museum’s cultural-educational programs.

The museum’s eclectic collection was composed of paintings and sculptures, from the baroque to modernism, coming mainly from European collections devalued in the face of the precarious postwar situation. As Pietro Maria Bardi summed up, there was no institutional sponsorship of the arts in São Paulo at that time, yet São Paulo was the place where the money from the emerging industrialization came from, and also where the new financial elite who could contribute to the institution took up residence. Many stories abound about the strategies used by Chateaubriand in “convincing” the new financial elite to invest in the museum, including blackmail. 2 With the growing collection and MASP’s strong didactic role in society, a new place was necessary. Bo Bardi played a fundamental role in proposing to the mayor and the local elite the construction of a new building on a plot of land, which had been donated by a family to the city administration, at the city’s important intersection of Paulista Avenue and 9 de Julho Avenue. Coinciding with the migration of the city’s financial center from the historical downtown to Paulista Avenue in the late 1960s. MASP’s new building was conceived and built between 1957 and 1968, overlapping with the construction of Brasilia (inaugurated in 1960), and with the transition from a democratic regime to a military dictatorship (1964–84). When the construction process was temporarily suspended, Bo Bardi was invited to teach at the Federal University of Bahia and to set up and direct the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Popular Art in Salvador. This was when she intensely realized the intrinsic relationships between the Western projects of modernity and colonization, conceiving important exhibitions in São Paulo and in Salvador on popular art, with an anthropological conception about human invention, mainly the people in the Northeast: “When (MASP’s) construction site was reopened, I had become another person. I had lived in Bahia, had met authentic Brazil, not that of European immigrants. The frustrations after the crisis of 1964 did not make me give up the program of building something heterodox and provocative.”3 MASP consists of two structures—one raised and aerial, the other semiburied—that allow a view of the city from the park toward the valley to downtown, configuring this “empty space” as a public plaza and refuge in the midst of this horizon-less metropolis. It is a glass box with a 70-meter span, 29 meters wide and 14 high, suspended on four concrete pillars 8 meters above the ground.4 Up until the early 1990s, one could enjoy the openness of the belvedere span before walking down the stairs into the lower part of the building to get admission tickets, and then use the elevator or the stairs to go up to the main

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Fig. 1 / Lina Bo Bardi. Museu de Arte de São Paulo view of exhibition hall with glass easels by Bo Bardi (c. 1968). São Paulo, Brazil. Photo: Paolo Gasparini. Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi.

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picture gallery, the pinacotheca, on the second floor of the floating glass box. It was always a pleasure to enter the vast open gallery, which held a constellation of paintings, more than one hundred, floating in glass panes fixed on cubic concrete bases, all facing the entrance. The gallery was filled with daylight that entered through partially opened shutters that revealed the metropolis in the distance. Instead stepping through “staged” period rooms or a space devoted to a historical art movement, visitors were at liberty to choose their own, personal itineraries and in the process make new connections with the works of art, as they pass, for example, a portrait of Modigliani, The Student painting by Anita Malfatti, a Hieronymous Bosh painting, or a Renoir dancer sculpture. Each artwork would contain a short description on the back. The building and objects seemed to levitate, as if space and time were suspended. Bo Bardi’s architecture created a reciprocity that allowed for a dialogue between time periods, movements, artists, visitors, and the city itself. Both building and glass easels are composed of two sections: one aerial and floating, and the other opaque, grounded, and made of concrete. The glass exhibition easels operate as a synthesis of Bo Bardi’s understanding of art as part of daily life, in which we all recognize ourselves as creators and producers, and not only as consumers and spectators.5 According to curator Roger Buergel, the way the artwork was radically singularized, as an image of

artistic labor, on these transparent panes attested to “the migratory destiny of the pieces, but also, and more importantly, to a lack of institutional framing. Art’s ontological status was no longer treated as a given.” As if there was no way to any “systematicity (be they by chronology, genre, style, -isms, national school). It laid any universal claim about the Western idea of art to rest.”6 A specific notion of time would come to bear in all its potency at MASP, linked to the experience of daily life. Olivia de Oliveira argues that time is Bo Bardi’s raw material. In the open picture gallery, the artworks cohabited the same space freed from any predefined systematization, breaking “with the hegemonic idea of progress and with the Western model of historical time, linear, homogeneous and irreversible, always directed towards the future.”7 As Bo Bardi remarked, “linear time is a Western invention, (but) time is not linear, it is a marvelous entanglement where, at any time, points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning or end.”8 It seems that nonlinear time has always been Brazil’s historical time, some places and people are in 2014, other cities may live in 1976 or in 1984, and much of the elite economic centers like São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro keep acting as if it were 1953 or 1964.9 Bo Bardi passed away in March 1992. It was my first month as a student of architecture, and I remember the silence, the suspension of time in the midst of the metropolitan buzz, of seeing her body arriving at MASP’s span, an image that is still burned into my memory, as if preannouncing the changes to come. At the time, Brazil was undergoing the transition from dictatorship to a democratic regime and experienced the opening of its economy to international capital. MASP and Paulista Avenue were considered São Paulo’s epicenter for cultural meetings and political demonstrations. Prized at that time as the city’s chief museum and best collection in Latin America, the museum’s span also provided a space for the international cinema festival screenings, music performances, flea market, informal meetings, as well as seminal civil and political movements. In the following year, the Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi Institute (formed in 1990) organized the first major exhibition on Bo Bardi, which opened at MASP and later traveled to Europe. As her work gained growing international recognition over the past twenty years, her architectural work—built in São Paulo and in Salvador da Bahia—was seriously altered or destroyed, including MASP. In 1994, architect Júlio Neves was elected MASP’s president. Under his leadership, which ended in 2008, MASP experienced its greatest institutional and financial crisis. Between 1996 and 2001 the museum’s administration underwent a polemical and wide-ranging refurbishment. Notwithstanding the

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necessary conservation of artworks, they completely disfigured Bo Bardi’s original architectural project. The glass exhibition easels were replaced with a conventional wall system and “refined” materials. The seventy-meters long empty span was partially obstructed by barriers, screens, ticket booths, and a cloakroom counter. These interventions destroyed Bo Bardi’s design strategies both physically and conceptually. The president architect has designed over five hundred buildings around the city. To help raise much needed funds, he proposed the construction of a tower 125 meters (410 feet) high, which he would design “for free” on the site adjacent to the museum. That site had been purchased by a Mexican mobile telephone company for the sole purpose to associate its brand with the museum, and the tower was called MASP VIVO (MASP Alive) (VIVO is the name of the mobile company). A “lighter” retrofit version of the existing former residential building on this plot seems to be under way, albeit very slowly.

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Suspended Time of a Provisional State Marcelo Cidade’s (b. 1979) installation tempo suspenso de um estado provisório (suspended time of a provisional state, 2011)10 reintroduces Bo Bardi’s legendary glass easels with the exception that the glass pane that provides transparent support for the paintings, here is bulletproof and bears shotgun marks. Tempo suspenso was first shown during the SP Arte art fair in May 2011 at Oscar Niemeyer’s Fundação Bienal de São Paulo building (1951) in Ibirapuera Park (which bears a strong symbolic charge from the city’s and Brazil’s modernizing and developmentist thrust of the 1950s), audiences would traverse about ten or so shotgun glass easels, in a series suggesting a domino set pattern. Does the criticism proposed by the artwork refer to Bo Bardi as part of the establishment? Or does it denounce, by means of the easel its very dysfunction? The bulletproof glass pane and shotgun marks decidedly evoke a context of violence: the violence that has caused the city’s financial elite to self-segregate—territorially and socially—and seek shelter in armored cars and houses; the violence against Bo Bardi’s vision

Fig. 2 / Lina Bo Bardi. Lina Bo Bardi hiding behind glass easel (c. 1968). São Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi.

Fig. 3 / Marcelo Cidade. Tempo suspenso de um estado provisório (2011). 20 mm glass with PVB (polyvinyl) and EVA (ethyl vinyl acetate), application of containment spray of shrapnel marks, 38 mm projectiles, and concrete base with wood (160 x 100 cm / measurement of base: 38 x 38 x 38 cm). Courtesy the artist.

and legacy, manifest in the removal of her glass easels from MASP and the disfigurement of the building; but also violence against the public that now is subject to more predictable and spectacular exhibition experiences. These views of and disdain for the work of Bo Bardi and others is representative of a narrow-minded mode of thinking that has permeated Brazilian society for some time now. However, do we have better conditions today for a possible counterpart against these socio-economic forces born in the industrializationdevelopmentalist process already lived by Bo Bardi? The placing of the shotgun marks on the glass surface was to be anticipated. Is this predictability of the shotgun’s domino pattern ironic, or is it an entrance to a game that reifies precisely what is already given? For the artist, “the idea was not only to give each piece singularity, but to compose the intensity of each ‘chance’ in a concrete and rational manner, so as to ponder on that São Paulo artistic movement (Concretism) with a certain critical acidity as one considers Bo Bardi’s easels loss of functionality, inverting their purpose of supporting modern pieces, and proposing them instead as the support/victim of a hail of São Paulo bullets, thus constituting this game of domino or perhaps of domination.”11 Bo Bardi’s glass easels with its “floating” paintings, as if suspended in time and space, evoked a notion of time linked to our daily lives and of the possibilities of art. More than fifty years after Bo Bardi’s creation and some fifteen years after its destruction by the museum’s authorities, Cidade’s installation challenges us to experience the suspended time of the provisional state of things and social relations in Brazil, to confront the radical societal mutations and its repetitions of creating and self-destroying. Instead of confronting art (as was the case with Bo Bardi’s creation), we confront the silent/loud and invisible/ visible violence of everyday life in São Paulo: Which or whose provisional state is Cidade alluding to? The provisional state that endures in the precariousness of Brazilian cultural institutions? Of the current “international boom” of Brazilian contemporary art? Or the provisional state of the very ouvre of Bo Bardi? Bo Bardi used to say that São Paulo was “the world’s champion of self-destruction.” The title of Cidade’s work ironically entangles crucial issues at stake, establishing a connection between Brazil today and the Brazil of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Woman and Her Glass House: A Family of Things The Glass House was Bo Bardi’s first building (1951), located on the top of a hill overlooking a green valley and the city of São Paulo in the distance. The

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Fig. 4 / Laura Erber and Laercio Redondo. The Glass House (2008). Courtesy the artists.

Fig. 5 / Laura Erber and Laercio Redondo. The Glass House (2008). Courtesy the artists.

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Morumby neighborhood was a suburb at that time, but today it is completely urbanized by favelas, low-income housing units, an elite and high middle-class residential area close to the main current financial district, and, since the mid1990s, media headquarters around Berrini Avenue. It is composed by two bodies: the first is upfront, holding the social areas, floating, made of glass, supported by very thin columns, close to the modernist lexicon. The second preserves the house’s private area, with a white wall protecting it, it is settled on the ground, built with traditional materials and techniques. The Glass House (2008) work12 by artist Laercio Redondo (b. 1967) in collaboration with artist Laura Erber (b. 1979) features two simultaneous film projections set contiguously on a corner at a 90-degree angle: two loops of approximately ten minutes that seek to trace the same parcours within the Glass House by showing the building in a time lapse of almost ten years—one loop was shot at the end of 1999, right after the death of Pietro Maria Bardi, and the other in 2008, when the house was in a fragile state of conservation, undergoing maintenance and restoration work. The two projections show the single image of the small pond with the river stones in the middle of the tropical garden, as well as the ground next to the driveway. The soundtrack consists of an ocean-like buzz (an experimental musical piece by artist Goh Lee Kwang) and a dialogue between a man and a woman that resonates on many levels: a dialogue between Laercio and Laura, between Pietro and Lina, between the bodies of the house, between nature and the objects, between the soul of the eyes and the soul of the body,13 between the house and the metropolis, and ultimately between both film loops in time.

As we enter the house, however, both projections diverge and overlap. In both, the camera follows a continuous, floating movement. On the left, in the film from 1999, the camera gravitates around the objects and furniture, as well as around the paintings on the white façade that separates the social from the intimate spaces, as if the present and past times were cohabiting. The interior of the Glass House is populated by a collection of furniture, lamps, paintings, sculptures and statues, objects of popular art. We see a lived-in house, filled with time in a constellation of things to which Bo Bardi and her husband kept adding on over the years. Each object vibrates.14 Elements from different contexts and modes of existence occupy the same space, whether they are Western European paintings and objects, Asian sculptures, African or indigenous objects, popular objects invented in the northeast of Brazil, or modern furniture designed by Bo Bardi and her contemporaries. On the right, we experience the film in a moment during which the house seems to be dying, “an itinerary that was once familiar now lies undone.” The objects, the works of art, and the remaining furniture are boxed up and covered by black plastic sheets, and the house’s structure reappears. The camera loses track and forgets the path taken years before, and it is the transparent glass surface and the green of the tropical gigantic trees that catch the soul of the eye. Remembrances and forgettings. “The past for Lina was something forever alive, something occurring in the present.” For her it “was synonymous with memory, individual or collective, memory being an innate human sentiment.”15 In that year of 2008, with the house “nearly gone,” past and present seemed not to exist, memory—individual or collective—had been erased, existence seemed to have been paralyzed. After the death of Pietro Maria Bardi in 1999, the Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Institute claimed the Glass House as its headquarters (since 1995). Despite the recognition of its status as historical heritage, the institute had experienced family disputes of inheritance, institutional crises, and financial difficulties. The Glass House finally has been restored and the institute is constructing its sustainability and potentialities. However, the frailty of the house (in a museumbecoming?16) renders evident Brazil’s enduring cultural-institutional ambiguities and challenges that Bo Bardi had already pointed out in the 1970s.

About the Tension of Holding Incompatible Things Together The Glass House with the art objects floating in space is analogous to MASP’s glass easel–suspended paintings. In both, Bo Bardi’s specter always

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hovers between the aerial and the grounded, where glass is a transparent and reflecting surface, allowing spaces to be modified and adapted to exterior events. In the Glass House as well as in MASP, one witnesses the deep collaboration between Pietro and Lina as well as the ambiguities and ambivalences of their marriage and partnership. While Pietro M. Bardi had connections with the European migrants and the local financial elite, Bo Bardi pursued questioning these connections and aligning herself with the Brazilian “popular soul” and nonmodern ontologies. For anthropologist Bruno Latour “the history of modernity is based on the shared feeling that there exists an arrow of time that thrusts forward, thus defining a front line that differentiates an archaic past from a more advanced future.” He reminds us that we are no longer living in the modern time of the present, of societal changes over time, but the time of space, of cohabitation, in which “a very different past, a very different future, and a very different comparison between collectives become possible.”17 The works of both Cidade and Redondo (with Erber) question and actualize poetic and political dimensions of Bo Bardi’s work and her approach to art, time, and space as cohabitation of multiple collectives (representative of an entanglement between the modern movement, the Northeast’s popular knowledge, and the emergent tropicalism), creating an opportunity to arouse a different awareness toward the challenges mobilizing us today and our capacity of holding incompatible things together. The country has undergone accelerated social, governmental, and economic transformations that were unimaginable in the early 2000’s, with deep epistemological transformations. Bo Bardi used to say that the new reality has to be accepted, calling for an urgency of inventing a present. Faced with the expressive power in her work as a critical and real confrontation with a contemporary state of affairs—political, social, economic, scientific, and artistic— and celebrating her hundredth birthday in 2014, we have to ask ourselves: What present are we to invent now?

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This text is dedicated to Dona Maria Gertrudes and Kabila Aruanda. 1/ Quoted in Olivia de Oliveira, ed., Lina Bo Bardi: Obra construida/Built Work (Barcelona: 2G, 2002), 223; originally published as “Ambient Planning, Design Impasse,” in Malasartes 2 (1975/76). 2/ See Fernando Morais, Chatô—O Rei do Brasil (São Paulo: Ed. Companhia das Letras, 1994). 3/ Bruno Zevi, “Incontro con Lina Bo Bardi. Un supervisore con mitra e speroni,” L’Espresso, May 27, 1973, 28. 4/ de Oliveira, Lina Bo Bardi: Obra construida/Built Work. 5/ Architect Olivia de Oliveira places Bo Bardi in the context of comparable experiences in 1930s Italy, alongside Franco Albini and Eduardo Persico, or Frederick Kiesler in Vienna in 1924, whose “spatial exhibition method” sought to create an ambience of proximity between the pieces, as well as between the works of art and the visitors. Olivia de Oliveira, Lina Bo Bardi—Sutis Substâncias da Arquitetura (São Paulo: Romano Guerra Editora Ltda., 2006).

6/ Roger M. Buergel, “ ‘This Exhibition is an Accusation’: The Grammar of Display According to Lina Bo Bardi,” Afterall (spring 2011), 57. 7/ Olivia de Oliveira, “Lina Bo Bardi: Toward an Architecture without Borders,” in Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, ed. Jean-François Lejeune (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 201. 8/ de Oliveira, Lina Bo Bardi: Obra construida/Built Work, 201. 9/ I thank Marcelo Rezende for the careful reading and suggestions for this text. 10 / For more on Marcelo Cidade’s works see http://www. galeriavermelho.com.br/pt/ artista/40/marcelo-cidade. 11 / E-mail exchange with the artist Marcelo Cidade, October 2011. 12 / For more on Laercio Redondo’s work see http://www. laercioredondo.com; for Laura Erber’s work go to http://www. lauraerber.com.

13 / See Els Lagrou, A fluidez da forma: arte, alteridade e agencia em uma sociedade amazônica (Kaxinawa, Acre) (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks Editora, 2007). See also Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 14 / “It is objects that condense actions, relationships, emotions and meanings, because it is through artifacts that people act, relate, produce themselves and exist in the world.” Els Lagrou, Arte indígena no Brasil: agência, alteridade e relação (Belo Horizonte: C/Arte, 2009), 13. 15 / de Oliveira, Sutis Substâncias, 339–61.

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16 / After being closed to the public for many years, the Glass House was open to the public again. In August 2011, the exhibition project “The Insides are on the Outside” by Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, in collaboration with SESC/SP and the institute, was announced. About forty artists and architects were invited to create projects in the Glass House—and at SESC Pompéia—that were on exhibit in 2013. It was the latest in a series of domestic interventions by Obrist for whom “Lina is one of the great women architects of the twentieth century, and her major contributions haven’t been recognized enough.” It is interesting to note how this project became part of a dynamics between precarious and ambitious, global and local state of affairs. See Charlotte Burns, “Lina Bo Bardi: The Artist’s Architect,” The Art Newspaper, August 1, 2011, http://www. theartnewspaper.com/articles/ Lina-Bo-Bardi-the-artistsarchitect/24389.

17 / Bruno Latour, “Summary of the AIME Project—An Inquiry of Modes of Existence,” http://www. bruno-latour.fr/node/328. See also “There is no Terrestrial Globe,” interview by Jean-Christophe Royoux in Cosmograms, ed. M. Ohanian and J. C. Royoux (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005), 211–22.

From Utopia to Abdication Juan Downey’s Architecture Without Architecture

Every now and then the Machine Aesthetic will produce a burst of creative speed, but in general this grand old vehicle is nowadays just sputtering its way to the junkyard. Reyner Banham, The Machine Age and After1

The edifice projected by Juan Downey’s invisible architecture is an elusive one—barely apprehensible through a small number of sparsely documented happenings and performances, drawings, and a few published writings and personal notes. Notwithstanding, architecture is constantly addressed throughout much of Downey’s work and writings, and although his few architectural works stand out as somewhat marginal in terms of his extensive video production, they demand critical reappraisal. This essay unravels an intricate web of influences and contexts in an attempt to piece together fragments of Juan Downey’s invisible architecture, by drawing lines between seemingly disconnected points constituted by the diverse instances of his engagement with the built environment. The intent is to offer a glimpse into his elusive edifice; one as invisible as the energy fields that were its building blocks, and which today elicits more questions than it provides answers.

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Invisibility and the Problem of Inscription

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Downey’s architectural work and writings could ostensibly be inscribed within the utopian ideas that animated some of the most ambitious and often unrealized architectural projects of the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, an epoch marked by a redefinition of architecture vis-à-vis technology and communications—Yves Klein’s Air Architectures, Yona Friedman’s Spatial Cities, Frei Otto’s Suspended City, Archigram’s Walking City and Plug-in City, Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, the aerial and oceanic architectures of the Japanese Metabolists, Buckminster Fuller’s Dome over Manhattan, among many others. And although the absence of a substantial body of work is problematic when it comes to the evaluation of Downey’s real contributions to the field, it is quite symptomatic of many of the radical reformulations of architecture at the time that approached the art and science of building not from the standpoint of production but of a reflection on the ideological and social role of architecture within society at large. This was especially the case of the Italian radical architecture groups, Superstudio and Archizoom, who were prominently featured in the 1972 MoMA exhibition curated by Argentine architect Emilio Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Germano Celant’s essay for the exhibition catalogue calls for a conception of architecture beyond the edifice or the object, stating that “a silence in performance, a nonrealization of one’s own ideas and projects . . . would not constitute an inclination for lethargy, immobility, and abstention, but rather a desire to clarify, philosophically and ideologically, what design and architecture should be and what they should do.”2 An architect by training, Downey taught architecture courses at Pratt Institute throughout most of his artistic career, but aside from his teaching activities, and other scattered episodes such as his close relation to Ant Farm’s Doug Michels and Chip Lord, and his scarcely documented involvement with James Wines and Alison Sky’s SITE,3 Downey never had a formal architecture practice, and only a handful of his projects can be considered strictly architectural. Yet, in the early 1970s he described himself, in one of his notebooks, as an “artist active in the fields of architecture and communications.” In fact it was during this period—between 1970 and 1975—that he developed most of his architecture-related projects including his experiments with electromagnetic fields, which form part of his general

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conceptualization of invisible architecture. In locating his practice within the field of architecture—not as an architect but as an artist—Downey divested himself of the imperatives of construction and program, and established his position toward architecture as an ideological one, which very closely resembled that of the radical Italian architects described by Celant. Moreover, for Downey architecture and communications were not only indissociable, but could also become considerable forms of artistic and cultural agency.

Uncovering Downey’s elusive edifice requires a closer look into his early years as an artist and architect, to find clues as to the exposure he had to some of the aforementioned ideas while in Paris and how these experiences contributed to the ideological underpinnings of his future practice as an artist.4 While in Paris, studying as a very young architect at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, Downey met a number of people who were not only experimenting with art and technology but also producing work that aimed to challenge conventional modes of spectatorship and engage the active participation of the public: from the photographer Harry Shunk—who introduced Downey to Yves Klein at the time that Klein was developing his Air Architectures in collaboration with Werner Ruhnau and Claude Parent—to Julio Le Parc and other members of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV).6 The encounter with Le Parc would undoubtedly be fundamental for Downey’s later electronic sculptures as well as his works with electromagnetic fields and “invisible architecture” that also relied on participation and interaction—all of which are clearly indebted to the participatory experiments of the GRAV. More obscure, but equally important, is the fact that he worked for three architects during his Parisian sojourn: Gérard Grandval, André Gomis, and Emile Aillaud. Little, if anything, is known about Downey’s experience working with these architects, however, a brief glance into their practices and the context in which they were working may shed some light on Downey’s early architectural influences. Though in no way the leading figures in France’s radical urban and architectural refashioning during the postwar decades known as les trente glorieuses, Grandval, Gomis, and Aillaud were working in a similar direction to the developments that reconfigured the French urban and suburban landscape during this period; in fact all three contributed important buildings and grands ensembles7 in several Parisian and French banlieues; and Gomis was close to members of the Groupe International d’Architecture Prospective (GIAP).8

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Some Parisian Beginnings

JULIETA GONZÁLEZ

In this context, it is not difficult to imagine Juan Downey being influenced by this effervescent and interdisciplinary scene. We can only speculate as to Juan Downey’s degree of involvement in this artistic and architectural revolution greatly informed by technological advances, mass communications, and the emergence of a leisure and consumer society, which peaked around the mid-1960s at the time of Downey’s departure from Paris; though it would be safe to assume that he would have been familiar with Schöffer’s cybernetic works, the utopian architectures of Friedman and Maymont, the books and writings of Michel Ragon, as well as the efforts of other architects working in this direction at the time, either through his friends at the GRAV or via his experience working for architectural firms. The Parisian experience is perhaps of more significance than meets the eye, and appears to have inflected Downey’s later works and his writings on architecture, technology, and communications.

Beyond the Visible Spectrum

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Downey left for Washington, DC, in 1966, although the American capital was not exactly a hotbed for radical ideas concerning art and architecture; quite the opposite, as Douglas Davis states in his text How to Go to a Happening (Event, Danger Party, Urban Environment, etc.): “Washington may be the most difficult town on earth to make an Event in, because it is so dedicated to sobriety, in art, politics, life.”9 With Davis, Downey founded the New Group, along with Ed McGowin and other artists. As a member of the New Group, Downey participated and organized a series of happenings in Washington, DC, including collaborations with Doug Michels and Douglas Davis, where the notions of feedback and energy transformation already began to emerge as operative principles. At that time, he also began working on his electronic sculptures, in which his diverse interests in cybernetics, communications, and audience participation would finally begin to crystallize. In 1968 he participated in a competition organized by Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT),10 with a project done in collaboration with Fred Pitts (an engineer) titled, The Human Voice: A Time Space Situation for the Ears, also known as Invisible Communication. Works such as this one, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Some More Beginnings in 1968, mark a shift in his practice that would eventually be conducive to his experiments with Invisible Architecture. Downey’s electronic sculptures engaged in diverse acts of communication and energy exchange, and increasingly relied on

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Fig. 1 / Juan Downey. Video/ Space/Time. The Human Voice (1968). Colored pencil, graphite, and ink on paper. Photo: Harry Shunk. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

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electromagnetic waves that were outside of the visible spectrum. These sculptures—which also anticipated Downey’s later transition to video as they operated on the basis of feedback—modulated the spatial relation between spectator and the work, fostering participation; ultimately they were mainly the means for relaying a host of “invisible energies,” and spectator interaction with them triggered visual, and more often sonic, manifestations that were a translation of these invisible energies into perceptible form. Working with electromagnetic waves, radiation emissions, and radio frequencies led Downey to conceive of invisible networks that took the imperatives of the architectural megastructure a step further; as megastructures had sought to dematerialize the city turning it into a web of infrastructure from which diverse programmatic functions could be sustained, Downey imagined a completely dematerialized network made up of electromagnetic waves, which he describes in his essay “Technology and Beyond” in terms that could ultimately be translated into everyday life experiences:

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The Dematerialized City is the electronic communication’s network, the neural circuit that binds individual selves despite distance, thus providing an understanding of relativistic space-time. Teilhard de Chardin describes the future humanity as a socialization of the mind, and Paolo Soleri defines the city as a thousand minds. I define the Dematerialized City as that group of minds neurally connected

Fig. 2 / Juan Downey. An Electronic Urban Environment (1969). Colored pencil, graphite, and collage on paper. Photo: Harry Shunk. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

to me. The structure of our city is the means of communication that maintains our unity. My family in Chile is part of this invisible city when we speak by phone via Telestar. Thus, the satellite and its orbit around the earth exist as a living neural cell.11

This particular conception of the dematerialized city is at the base of what could be considered some of the first iterations of his invisible architectures12—Electronic Urban Environment (1969) and the unrealized Invisible Energy in Chile Plays a Concert in New York (1969), in which interurban and international radio and satellite transmissions played an important part. Downey subsequently performed13 two other invisible energy/architecture works: Invisible Architecture (Energy Fields), at 112 Greene St. in New York City, and at Marta Minujin’s Interpenning which took place at MoMA, also in 1972.

Fig. 3 / Juan Downey. Energy Fields. Performace at 112 Greene Street, New York, NY (1972). Photo: Peter Moore. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

FROM UTOPIA TO ABDICATION

Apart from Downey’s detailed and schematic project drawings for these invisible energy/architecture performances, very few records exist in the form of announcements, brief descriptions, and photographs; the live and experiential nature of these works is forever lost in their precarious documentation. Nevertheless, what emerges from these works, and Downey’s increasing interest and use of technology in them, is his understanding of the world from the perspective of the subatomic; the technological revolutions of the “second machine age” were formulated on the basis of miniaturization, microsystems, and circuits.14 We begin to understand Downey’s precise notion of invisibility through his heightened awareness of the fact that the future lay in the micro, and his desire to “to involve the invisible, while liberating art from the parameters of the visible spectrum.”15

If we were to find a common ground in the few works from Downey’s production that can be openly considered architectural undertakings, it is in the attempt to materialize a relation between technology, communications, and the environment. Works pertaining to his “Life Cycle” series are crucial in this direction, in particular Life Cycle: electric light + water + soil > flowers > bees > honey (1970–71), and A Vegetal System of Communications for New York State (1972). Though not dealing with architecture per se, these works clearly manifest Juan Downey’s interest in the interrelation between technology and nature. Made in 1972, A Vegetal System of Communications for New York State was shown in the 1975 exhibition A Response to the Environment, at the Rutgers University Art Gallery in New Jersey. The installation consisted of a large panel with a map of a portion of New York State over which Downey had painted in white the areas that were devoid of vegetation, or that indicated “the absence of woods-brushwood.” Adjacent to this map was a copper planter; he used copper to insulate the plants (philodendrons), which had electrodes attached to their leaves. Each electrode was assigned a musical note, and depending on the energies it received from the public the plant would respond and its reaction would be translated into a specific sound. The communications utopia envisioned by Downey resided in total, telepathic communication between man and the natural world,16 and was articulated throughout his writings. Architecture, Video, Telepathy: A Communications Utopia contains a reference to the underlying principles behind A Vegetal System of Communications for New York State: “Due to its

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Life Cycles

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Fig. 4 / Juan Downey. Life Cycle (1971). Colored pencil, graphite, and collage on paper. Photo: Harry Shunk. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

126 Fig. 5 / Juan Downey. Proposal: A Vegetal System of Communication for New York State (1972). Colored pencil, acrylic, and collage on paper. Photo: Harry Shunk. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

FROM UTOPIA TO ABDICATION

Fig. 6 / Juan Downey. Life Cycle: electric light + water + soil > flowers > bees > honey (1971). Video installation. Installation view at Electric Gallery, Toronto, ON, Canada in 1971. Photo: Bill Gerstein. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

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fully electromagnetic fiber the future is artificially natural. An aspiration to a man-made and natural harmony expressed in a media environment. An enjoyable landscape where each plant talks about a higher order of proportions, numbers, energy, through each one of its petals.”17 Likewise, in “Technology and Beyond” we can find another expression of this symbiosis of man and environment, “I conceive of a future, without a technological crutch, in which ultra developed human brains are deeply woven into the energy paths and patterns to an extent where disorder, war, waste, and crime are out of context. Human beings would share with all other species the benefits of natural cycles: communicant balance.”18 Life Cycle: electric light + water + soil > flowers > bees > honey, y instead, was an experiment in video feedback and how it could be used to create artificial and topological environments. An environment was created inside the gallery space (at the Electric Gallery in Toronto) with beds of flowers and beehives; cameras and television monitors were connected into feedback loops that created an alternate space-time continuum. According to the description of the project in the IVAM exhibition catalogue, the feedback loop created an environment that the bees easily adapted to and they even produced honey. On a more programmatic note, an important precursor to these projects and to his more concretely architectural endeavors was the life cycle Downey installed in his own home, A Clean New Race e (1970), using specific lighting situations of his loft’s architecture to create different environments that would foster plant and animal life. The experience was documented on Super 8 film and the project only survives in the drawing with the same title, where we can see how a combination of natural and artificial light situations could enable plants to grow inside the domestic space, providing oxygen, and food for animals (fish, poultry, goats, dogs) and the apartment dwellers (in this case his family). Downey would later make drawings for his beach house in Quintero, Chile (Mi casa en la playa, 1975),19 where a similar division of functions modulated the spatial distribution of the building; the sea water would provide, through desalinization, clean drinking water for the house, while a windmill in the form of topological “Klein strips” (he probably meant Moebius strips, although the

JULIETA GONZÁLEZ

Fig. 7 / Juan Downey. Section AA “scale ½” (Mi Casa en La Playa Series of 4) (1975). Colored pencil and graphite on paper. Photo: Harry Shunk. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

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Klein bottle can transform into a Moebius strip) would harness aeolian energy to power the house. These drawings also evidence his interest in lightweight membrane-like structures, and indeed, the house seems to be the application of the design principles he mentions in his essay “Invisible Architecture”: “later developments of lightweight structures such as domes, inflatables/membranes/ shells/tensegrities are proof of an irreversible trend. Finally, interior space, exterior space and the separating frontier become one integral. Topology permits a building environment, and human interaction; a responsive ecology.” The life cycle structure—where nature, man, and architecture enter a symbiotic relation of positive interdependence and exchange—is at the core of the program for what could be considered his only other architectural projects: the proposals for the Roosevelt Island Housing Competition and for the expansion of the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM) in Houston. In his notes for each of the projects, Downey delineates a program that hinges on the circulation and recycling of air and water, producing steam energy to heat and refrigerate the buildings without the use of fossil fuels. The CAM drawings and notes show a rooftop garden and water conduits that were sandwiched between the glass panels of the façade; this would enable the building to collect energy from the sun and self-regulate its temperature as needed. Downey envisions a more radical proposition for the Roosevelt Island Housing Competition;20 the life cycle program is connected to a social one, that is, it

Fig. 8 / Juan Downey. F. D. Roosevelt Island Housing Competition, NYC (1975). Colored pencil, graphite and collage on paper. Photo: Harry Shunk. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

defines not only housing but also the specific labor conditions of its inhabitants. He describes it as a complex sustained by twenty-story-high concave mirrors that collect energy and contain the housing units in a garden terrace configuration. The central space is empty as it conforms the visual axis that communicates Roosevelt Island to both East 73rd Street and Queens, and also becomes the conduit, through an elevator shaft, to the sunken factories where the “community works at post-industrial disassembly lines . . . where industrial gadgets are melted back to pure chemical elements.”21 The above architectural projects (CAM, Roosevelt Island Competition, and Mi casa en la playa) signal a clear departure from his earlier experiences with invisible energy/architectures created by means of electromagnetic waves. In these projects Downey the architect asserts his presence over Downey the artist, and the unfeasibility implicit in his invisible energy/ architectures disappears to give way to a desire to materialize his architectural ideas. Moreover, these proposals can be seen as early examples of posttechnological sustainable architecture. Today—with the impending threat of global warming—terms like green, environmentally responsible, and low-carbon footprint are common currency. We can also see an increasing trend in rooftop gardens, wall gardens, living machinery, and solar and wind architectures, all of which are gradually changing the face of our cities. To say that these ideas were not circulating in the 1960s and 1970s would be inaccurate; yet, like the megastructures, mobile architectures, and other utopian proposals of the period, technologically sophisticated green buildings were not being built at the time, 22 and it is perhaps here that we can locate Downey’s real contributions to the field. In Downey’s project for his beach house, we find the embryonic idea for photosensitive smart-skins, which are now being developed for intelligent buildings, and the design of water and air recycling devices for his projects anticipate concepts such as the use of nanotechnology combined with living plant organisms to produce “living machines” that employ the cleaning mechanisms of algae and other forms of vegetation to clean water of toxic residues. When we look at his project for Roosevelt Island (sunken factories aside23), we can see its future incarnations in buildings that range from Emilio Ambasz’s Prefectural International Hall in Fukuoka (1994) to the building for the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (designed by the corporate and anonymous CPG Consultants of Singapore). All but invisible or immaterial, could we consider these projects Downey’s most straightforward attempt at an invisible architecture? If, as I mentioned before, one reads his notion of invisibility as anchored in a heightened

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perception of the world from a subatomic perspective and beyond the visual spectrum, then these projects are, indeed, part of Downey’s program for an invisible architecture, as the technologies that would have enabled them unequivocally stem from this conception of the micro.

Topology

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Jordan curves, Moebius strips, Klein bottles, and toroids are not part of the terminology we normally associate with Downey’s work, and only recently has the subject of topology been discussed briefly in relation to his production. Aside from the design of the windmill blades that incorporated Moebius strips, and a passing mention in his essay “Invisible Architecture,” extended and overt references to topology are scarce in Downey’s works and writings. However, the passage from “Invisible Architecture” that I quoted earlier in relation to Mi casa en la playa, may hold the key to an appreciation of the influence that these notions had on his work, and to ultimately understand the crucial role that an expanded conception of topology in the social sphere had in his definitive departure from architecture. In this text, Downey rather obscurely states that “finally, interior space, exterior space, and the separating frontier become one integral. Topology permits a building environment, and human interaction; a responsive ecology. The passage to triadic architecture finally resolves the mass/space diadic (sic) dilemma.” He does not explain the conditions under which topology is related to “responsive ecology” or triadic relations, nor does he define “triadic architecture.” Perhaps he did not feel the need to: topology, triadic relations (a mathematical example of which are cyclic orders), and their relation to video, and in particular to the feedback experience, were widely circulated ideas at the time, most notably through Paul Ryan’s videos, performances, books, and his articles in Radical Software.24 Ryan’s book Birth and Death and Cybernation: Cybernetics of the Sacred, published in 1973, 25 is a compendium of many of the ideas he published in Radical Software and other publications, and contains descriptions of some of his artworks, including

Fig. 9 / Cover of Radical Software 2, no. 5 (1973). From left to right: Beryl Korot, Ira Schneider, Frank Gillette, Andy Mann, Juan Downey, Marilys Belt de Downey, and Elizabeth (Titi) Lamadrid. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

FROM UTOPIA TO ABDICATION

The Point of No Return In a quest that took Downey from the architectural conceptions of the period based on megastructures, tensegrities, microtechnologies, continuous surfaces, and topological spaces to the video feedback experiences and their promise of a spacetime continuum, paradoxically he encounters the most perfect incarnations of invisible architecture among the indigenous peoples he visits on his trips to South America. Impermanent, entropic, mobile, ever-changing, and “deeply woven into natural

Fig. 10 / Juan Downey. Shabono (1976). Photograph. From the archives of the Juan Downey Foundation. Courtesy Marilys B. Downey.

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Everyman’s Moebius Strip (1969), in which he translates the concept of the Moebius strip into a video feedback experience.26 In the book he outlines the role of video feedback, not only in terms of his artistic concerns—“sculpting time and space,” “participating in your own audience participation”—but also in regard to a wider project for social agency—“strategy for schools: feedback process,” “videotape in the classroom.” The book also introduces us to Ryan’s more complex topological explorations and to the notion of infolding, in a series of topologic triadic models that establish a three-fold relationship between part contained, part uncontained, and part containing, which he explains in relation to different forms of video feedback and playback. The influence of these ideas on Downey cannot thus be confined to his notion of invisible architecture, or to his writings on the subject, quite to the contrary, they inform, in a wider sense, his transit to video and, more specifically, the video feedback experience that he would undertake in Video Trans Americas, structured on a three-fold relationship model, similar to that described by Ryan, as “a videotaped account from New York to the southern tip of Latin America. A form of infolding in space while evolving in time. Playing back a culture in the context of another, the culture itself in its own context, and, finally, editing all the interactions of time, space and context into one work of art.”27 Ultimately, topology functions in the work of Downey as a trope where his diverse interests in architecture, communications, politics, and anthropology finally converge.

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cycles,” the reed architecture of the Uros in Lake Titicaca, and the Shabonos of the Yanomami in the Amazon rainforest, fulfill the social, ecologic, and topological imperatives of his invisible architecture, yet without the mediation of technology. Moreover, the social utopia he envisioned as originating from an invisible architecture seemed to materialize in the social structure represented in the shabono. The architecture of the communal dwelling of the Yanomami regulated the social organization of the community—governed by no one, freed from the constraints of physical labor: the perfect leisure society. The Yanomami live in a society that is by definition anarchic . . . there is a complete absence of government. . . . Yanomami social structure is best illustrated by the shabono or communal dwelling place, which can be defined in terms of function and of symbol. The large, circular lean-to with its unroofed central courtyard is communally built of biodegradable materials and is quite simply a model of the Yanomami universe. . . . Built wholly of materials that in a matter of a few years decay, it is meant only as a temporary shelter . . . the shabono is the communal skin that holds the group together, but it is a skin that is periodically shed and built anew.28

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Downey often spoke of culture shock, and this encounter brings him face to face with a fundamental dilemma: technological progress or the return to a primeval condition. He decides at this moment that he would like to be devoured by Indians in the Amazon rainforest, “not as a self-sacrifice but as an ultimate expression of invisible architecture.”29 After this encounter with the primordial architecture of the shabono, Downey’s work underwent yet another shift, this time in the direction of semiotics; architecture would seldom reappear in his work except in the form of scripts for unrealized video projects on the indigenous architectures of the Americas (“Permanence and Change,” “The Blueprints of Power”). It is interesting to note that Downey’s abdication from his program for an invisible architecture takes place at almost the same time that the architectural technoutopias of the “second machine age” were dislodged by the semiotic acrobatics of postmodern architecture, which dotted the contemporary urban landscape with monuments to icons of mass culture and consumption. The general sense of foreclosure that surrounded the demise of these techno-utopias was expressed by architectural historians and architects alike. In 1972 Reyner Banham announced that “the megastructure is dead, and thus the time has come to write its history.”30 Downey seems to have shared this sentiment, and would no longer return—in his writings or in his works—to his techno-utopian architectural propositions.

Notes

1/ Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980). 2/ Germano Celant, “Radical Architecture,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ed. Emilio Ambasz (New York: MoMA, 1972). 3/ Aside from appearing in the annals of SITE as one of their members, Downey published his essay “Invisible Architecture” in a SITE publication entitled: ON SITE 4: Fall 1973 “NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of . . .” The publication, which explored issues regarding “extending perception” and “the metaphysical, the metamorphic, the invisible, the dematerialized and the de-architecturized,” also featured contributions by Robert Smithson, Rafael Ferrer, Peter Eisenman, Les Levine, Peter Hutchinson, Allan Kaprow, Alan Sonfist, and James Wines, among others. 4/ There are discrepancies as to the actual dates of his move to Paris, probably encouraged by fellow Chilean artist and architect Nemesio Antúnez who had worked with Hayter at Atelier 17. Some biographies state that he arrived there in 1961 while others claim it was 1963. According to Marilys Downey, he first traveled to Paris in 1961 but returned to Chile for a few months in 1962 due to his father’s illness. He then went back to Paris and remained there until 1965.

5/ Downey had graduated from the Universidad Católica de Chile in 1961 at the age of twenty-one. 6/ The GRAV members included Horacio García-Rossi, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joël Stein, and JeanPierre Yvaral. 7/ Influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities, the grands ensembles—a term coined by Maurice Rotival in 1935—were the result of urban policies that addressed the dearth of housing in France’s already teeming cities by building citadels connected to the city centers by railroads and highways. Today their success in terms of urban planning has been strongly questioned. 8/ The GIAP was founded in 1965 by Yona Friedman, Paul Maymont, Georges Patrix, Michel Ragon, and Nicolas Schöffer, and expanded to include visual artists, such as Stahly, Gilioli, Szekely, the Argentine Gyula Kosice, and Mexican Mathias Goeritz, among others, as well as critics such as Pierre Restany. 9/ In Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls (Valencia: IVAM, 1998).

10 / An important episode in the alliance between art and technology in the United States, founded in 1966 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, EAT aimed to “maintain a constructive climate for the recognition of the new technology and the arts. . . . Eliminate the separation of the individual from Technological change . . . and precipitate a mutual agreement in order to avoid the waste of a cultural revolution. Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver, EAT Statement of purpose, http://www.fondationlanglois.org/html/e/media. php?NumObjet=6610. 11 / Juan Downey, “Technology and Beyond,” Radical Software, Winter 1973, 2–3. 12 / I will subsequently refer to these as invisible/energy architectures to distinguish them from his general conception of an invisible architecture.

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13 / I use the word perform to describe Downey’s invisible energy/architectures because they entailed a complex performative structure, which usually included dancers who would interact with the electromagnetic waves that delimitated the invisible architectures. The performative aspect of these works would require a detailed and longer discussion, but overall, it stresses the temporary manifestation of these structures, their contingency on the participation of the public and the performers, and the explicitly nonprogrammatic character that underscores their unfeasibility as architectural forms. 14 / “Up until the 20th century reality consisted of everything that humans could see, smell, touch, and hear. Then at the entry into the 20th century the electron was discovered. A century after the time of Malthus much of science became invisible with the introduction of an era of electronics, electromagnetics, and atomics. These invisible micro- and macro-exploring cosmic instruments provided for rearrangements of atomic interpositioning whose metallic alloying and chemical structuring produces ever more powerful and incisive performances per pound of physical matter employed.” R. Buckminster Fuller and E. J. Applewhite, SYNERGETICS: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975).

15 / Downey, “Invisible Architecture.”

21 / Taken from Juan Downey’s notebooks.

16 / The idea of telepathic communications features prominently in Buckminster Fuller’s introduction to Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1970).

22 / Paolo Soleri, whose ideas influenced Downey, formulated the concept of “arcology,” a synthesis of architecture and ecology. His Dome House (1949) Earth House (1956), and his city of Arcosanti (initiated in 1970) are some early examples of built ecological architecture.

17 / Juan Downey, “Architecture, Video, Telepathy: A Communications Utopia,” International Review of Video and Mass Media, Journal of the Centre for Advanced TV Studies 5, no. 1 (1977): 1–4. 18 / Downey, “Technology and Beyond,” 2–3. 19 / Unrealized. Some of the drawings I mention are in his notebooks and are unpublished. 20 / Among the architects who participated in the 1975 competition were Robert M. Stern, Peter Eisenman, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas with Elia Zenghelis of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and the team comprised by Mario Gandelsonas, Diana Agrest, Rodolfo Machado, and Jorge Silvetti. The Roosevelt Island drawings, related to the original competition entry, by different members of OMA, Koolhaas, Zoe and Elia Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriesendorp, are featured in Delirious New York and are part of MoMA’s collection.

23 / The idea of which seems somewhat preposterous and dystopian. 24 / Paul Ryan was perhaps the most vocal speaker in this regard, and in this essay I refer to his writings mostly due to Downey’s mention of the dyadic and triadic in relation to topology. One should credit, however, Radical Software and the founding members of its “parent organization,” Raindance Corporation—most notably Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Michael Schamberg, and Beryl Korot—for the dissemination of these ideas in general. Radical Software was in turn largely inflected by the work of Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan, among other thinkers, whose ideas inform a great part of the content of the magazine. 25 / Paul Ryan, Birth and Death and Cybernation: Cybernetics of the Sacred (New York: InterfaceGordon and Breach, Science Publishers, 1973).

26 / Ryan had presented the work in the 1969 exhibition TV as Creative Medium at Howard Wise Gallery; it is, in fact, the first work he showed in a gallery space. See letter to Howard Wise in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, accessed March 23, 2011, http://www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/viewer/paul-ryanletter-to-howard-wise-9940. 27 / Juan Downey, “Travelogues of Video Trans Americas, 1973–75,” Journal of the Centre for Advanced TV Studies 4 (1976). 28 / Juan Downey, “The Blueprints of Power: A Documentary of Permanence and Transition in the Architecture of the Indians of the American Continents.” Proposal for a fiftyeight-minute color documentary for Public Television, August 1987. 29 / Juan Downey, The Laughing Alligator, 1977–79. 30 / Reyner Banham at a conference at the University of Naples in 1973.

Contributors Antonio Sergio Bessa Antonio Sergio Bessa is director of programs at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. A distinguished curator, Bessa has organized several critically acclaimed exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including Paulo Bruscky: Art is Our Last Hope (2013) and Intersections: The Grand Concourse at 100 (2008) at the Bronx Museum; Re: La Chinoise, Baumgartner Gallery, New York (2002); and Animating Fahlström, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (2002). He is the author of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing (2008). Bessa received a PhD in art education from New York University.

in New York (1984–85), and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he taught Latin American Architecture, 1929–2012. Brillembourg is actively involved in contemporary architectural discourse, organizing conferences at the New School on the subjects of Globalization and Architecture and Nature and Architecture, as well as the seminar, Latin American Architecture 1929–60: Contemporary Reflections, a collaboration between MoMA and the Vera List Center of the New School. Brillembourg has been a contributing editor for Bomb magazine since 1992. He received an MA in architecture from Columbia University in 1975.

Ana María Durán Calisto Holly Block is executive director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Since 2006 she has led the New York City cultural institution through a period of major programmatic and structural expansion, including the implementation of the institution’s free admission policy in 2012. Recent projects include an exhibition of new works by artist Sarah Sze for the US Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, for which Block served as cocurator. Between 2010 and 2012, Block oversaw smARTpower, a partnership between the Bronx Museum and the US Department of State that sent eighteen American artists around the world to execute art projects in collaboration with members of local communities. Prior

Ana María Durán Calisto is an Ecuadorian architect, writer, and researcher. She is coprincipal of Estudio A0, a design firm cofounded in 2002 with her partner Jaskran Singh Kalirai in Quito. Dúran Calisto’s research interests focus on the urbanization process in remote areas of the Amazon Basin and the Galapagos Islands, the impact of the infrastructural integration of South America, and the forces shaping contemporary Latin American design practices. She currently teaches at the School of Architecture, Design and Arts of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture,

to her role at the Bronx Museum, Block was the executive director of Art in General.

Planning and Preservation. Dúran Calisto was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design during the 2010–11 academic year.

Carlos Brillembourg

Hannia Gómez

Carlos Brillembourg, FAIA, is a registered architect and principal of New York City–based Carlos Brillembourg Architects. He has taught at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,

Hannia Gómez is a writer, architecture critic, curator, and preservation activist. She studied architecture at the Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas and urban design at the Graduate

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Holly Block

CONTRIBUTORS School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City, and holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD). She is founder and president of the Caracas-based foundations Centro de la Ciudad and Fundación de la Memoria Urbana, and founder and vice president of the Venezuelan chapter of Docomomo.

Julieta González Julieta González is currently senior curator at the Museo Tamayo after serving as associate curator of Latin American Art at Tate Modern, London. She studied architecture at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas and at the École d’Architecture Paris-Villemin in Paris. From 1997–98 she was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney

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Independent Study Program, and curator of Contemporary Art at the Museo Alejandro Otero and Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (1999–2003). González has organized over thirty exhibitions including Tomorrow Was Already Here at the Museo Tamayo (2012), Juan Downey: El Ojo Pensante at Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile (2010), and Farsites at In-site San Diego/Tijuana (2005), among others. In addition, González serves as adjunct curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Dan Graham Since his emergence in the 1960s with the seminal work Homes for America (1966–67), Dan Graham has inspired generations of artists with his multivalent art practice, which encompasses curating, writing, performance, installation, video, photography, and architecture. Graham’s groundbreaking pavilions, begun in the 1970s, established a critical typology used today by both artists and architects as a means to explore complex relationships between society and the built environment. He has had retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2006), Museu Serralves, Porto (2001), Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1997), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1993), Kunsthalle Berne (1983), and the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (1981).

Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez is a Mexico City–based architect, writer, and curator. In 1994, he was selected to participate in the prestigious fellowship program of FONCA, the National Fund for Art and Culture in Mexico. He has designed exhibitions and participated in major world architecture biennials including Rotterdam, São Paulo, Canary Islands, and Venice. He was the editor of Trazos magazine and a regular columnist for the Reforma newspaper. HernándezGálvez is coauthor of 100×100: Arquitectos del Siglo XX en México and author of Sombras, sombreros y sombrillas: algunos principios de la arquitectura. He is professor in the schools of architecture at the University of Anahuac and the Iberoamerican University, both in Mexico City; in addition, he currently serves on the editorial board of Arquine magazine.

Javier de Jesús Martínez Javier de Jesús Martínez is dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Puerto Rico and president and founding partner of Adaptable Paths, Inc. Recently, he served under the governor of Puerto Rico as an advisor on urbanism, infrastructure, and the environment. During his tenure, he led the conceptual development and strategic implementation of large-scale urban projects including Ciudad Mayor, Mayagüez 2010, the Knowledge Corridor, and RAMA (Red Ambiental Metropolitana). His creative urban outlook coupled with an ample understanding of government processes allowed him to lead and coordinate the investment of over six billion dollars in public and private projects.

José Lira José Lira is director of the Center for Cultural Preservation and an associate professor in the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP). His research endeavors focus on housing and planning history, the cultural history of modern architecture in Brazil, architectural historiography and criticism, and Brazilian social thought. He authored Warchavchik: Fraturas da Vanguarda (Cosac and Naify, 2011) earning him the book award at the 8th Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo in

CONTRIBUTORS

William Morrish William Morrish is professor of Urban Ecologies, Design Strategies in the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. Morrish is a nationally recognized urban designer whose practice encompasses interdisciplinary research on urban housing and infrastructure, collaborative publications on human settlement and community design, and educational programs exploring integrated design applied to a wide range of innovative and community-based city projects. He is the author of “Civilizing Terrains” and coauthor of “Building for the Arts,” “Planning to Stay,” and “Growing Urban Habitats: Seeking a New Housing Development Model.”

Ligia Nobre Ligia Nobre studied architecture at the College of Architecture and Urbanism, Mackenzie University in São Paulo and subsequently received her MA degree in histories and theories of architecture at the Architectural Association in London. She cofounded the nonprofit cultural organization EXO experimental org (2002–7), a platform for research in the field of art and urbanism in São Paulo. She is the coeditor of “Guia do Copan” by Pablo Leon de la Barra (2006) and is one of three contributing authors found in Contemporary Latin American Architecture (Phaidon Press, 2009). Nobre served as cocurator of the X Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo in 2013.

Eduardo Luis Rodríguez Eduardo Luis Rodríguez is an architect, architectural historian, editor, and exhibition curator. He is the author of several books including La Habana Colonial: Guia de Arquitectura (1993) and La Habana: Arquitectura del Siglo XX (1998).

Mr. Rodríguez has been a visiting scholar and lecturer worldwide and has served as curator of several major architectural exhibitions including Illusion of a Perfect City: J. C. N. Forestier’s Works and Projects for Havana (2004). Among the many prizes and honors he has received are the award for the Best Book on Theory and History of Architecture at the Quito Pan-American Biennial (2000); the Editor award at the Venice Architecture Biennial (2000), and the Pierre Vago Award for Architectural Journalism from the International Committee of Architectural Critics (2008).

María Inés Rodríguez María Inés Rodríguez is director of CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux after having lead the artistic program at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City. As MUAC’s chief curator, she was in charge of the development of the public programs, collections, and exhibitions. Prior to her appointment in Mexico she was chief curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon (MUSAC) in Spain. There she developed a program dealing with the links between artistic production and historic, political, and social contexts. Parallel to her curatorial work, Ms. Rodríguez has organized a number of public lectures and exhibitions around the topics of printed matter and architecture.

Mario Torres Mario Torres was a Milton and Sally Avery Curatorial Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2011) and curatorial associate for Beyond the Supersquare at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2012–14). Trained as an urban planner and art historian, Torres uses social theory frameworks to understand art, architecture, and the built environment as structures of culture, politics, and economics.

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Spain. His writing appears in several international periodicals including Domus, Espaço e Debates, and Novos Estudos Cebrap. Lira earned a PhD from the FAU-USP in 1997; his dissertation focused on the cultural history of planning and housing in early twentieth-century Recife, Brazil.

Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism is made possible with major funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support from Furthermore: a program

The Bronx Museum of the Arts receives ongoing general operating support from the Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and the Bronx Delegation of the New York City Council; the New York City Department of Cultural

of the J. M. Kaplan Fund; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation; and the Venezuelan American Endowment for the Arts.

Affairs; the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the Cowles Charitable Trust; Lambent Foundation; the Liman Foundation; the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; and individuals.