Catalan Architect Research Articles

Opening borders. Spanish design in MD Moebel Interior Design (1961–1970)

In the late 1930s, Spain suffered a civil war that led to the establishment of a dictatorship until 1975. In 1959, after the first stage of isolation from other Western powers, the country began the second period of openness to the outside world. In this context, Spain began to participate in several international exhibitions. At the same time, in the 1950s, great personalities such as Sartoris, Zevi, and Ponti visited the country, providing Spanish architects of the time with a breath of fresh air. This international contact and an atmosphere of openness led to the consolidation of design as a discipline through two organizations, SEDI (Sociedad de Estudios para Diseño Industrial [Society of Industrial Design Studies]) and IBID (Institut de Disseny Industrial de Barcelona [Barcelona Institute of Industrial Design]), created in 1957. This institution created the Delta Awards, in 1961, which recognized, throughout its duration, many icons of Spanish design. That same year Catalan architects Bohigas and Martorell began an interesting collaboration with the German magazine Moebel Interior Design. Martorell, Bohigas, and Mackay, the latter joining in 1963, were the magazine’s Spanish correspondents until 1970. During this period they published around thirty reports showing Spanish achievements in the field of design. This paper sets out to analyse this episode, exploring the events that led to it, as well as the clues to understand the magazine’s interest in Spanish design and the image that it projected abroad, as a sign of the opening up of both, the country and the discipline.

Maps are plans: re-evaluating territorial hermeneutics through Manuel de Solà-Morales’ project of description

During the late 1970s, Catalan architect Manuel de Solà-Morales focuses his research on understanding territory as an architectural construct. Influenced by post-war French urban geography and, especially, by the Italian debates about the città-territorio and Henri Lefebvre’s notion of total urbanization, Solà-Morales seeks to define methods of territorial analysis and description with the purpose of understanding how architecture can contribute to articulate an urbanized territory. The crucial piece of this intellectual quest is the research ‘La forma d’un país’ (‘The Shape of a Country’), an atlas in which the production of maps is simultaneously understood as an act of territorial description and territorial design. In Solà-Morales’ terminology: maps are already ‘plans’; their conception needs to move from the ‘literal’ to the ‘literary’. The goal of this article is to interrogate this cartographic project, by asking what its value is both within Solà-Morales broader theorization of territorial production, and for a contemporary understanding of the relations between architecture and territory.

Review: Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires, by Ana María León

Review: <i>Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires</i>, by Ana María León

Architectural "Constants" from Toni Gironès

The presence of Mankind on Earth is marked by the continuous conquest of space. The ground we walk on has long witnessed our passage or permanence in certain places. Hence it is on that ground that we encounter the traces of those who preceded us and where, at the same time, we build contemporary projects. Caring for the place we inhabit implies acknowledging these time frames. Architecture mediates them in the present, providing them with a renewed condition of habitability. This can be perceived in the work of Catalan architect Toni Gironès, particularly in the context of archaeological remains. Using his lesson of the constants as a starting point, potentially in parallel with Fernando Távora, this paper uses these as mechanisms for triggering sensorial experience, also drawing on Peter Zumthor and Luis Barragán. Then, through the memory(ies) of the ruins of Vilassar de Dalt and Seró, the place is considered here as a means of enabling individual perception and collective, perhaps even global, identity. Finally, some questions are put forward to problematise Toni Gironès’s habitability over the porosity of time, associating past memories, present experience and the unknown future.

Nikolaus Pevsner, Photography, and the Architecture of Antoni Gaudí

International knowledge of the work of Antoni Gaudi increased during the postwar years and with it was an ongoing interest in positioning the work of the Catalan architect within modern historiogra...

ИДЕИ И ПРОЕКТЫ В ОБЛАСТИ АРХИТЕКТУРЫ И УРБАНИЗМА ИЗ МАТЕРИАЛОВ КАТАЛОНСКИХ ПЕРИО-ДИЧЕСКИХ ИЗДАНИЙ ВТОРОЙ РЕС-ПУБЛИКИ

Catalan architects who were members of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. associa-tion and the Association of Architects of Catalonia (SAC) were con-cerned about social, demographic and sanitary issues. Specialists were engaged in the development of new strategies in the field of urban planning, the creation of comfortable and safe spaces that solved prob-lems associated with high population density. Catalan architects were engaged in the development of functional projects that could solve a number of fundamental problems, such as the lack of a sufficient num-ber of hospitals, schools, housing, factories, places for leisure, etc. They presented these projects in two magazines Actividad Contempora-nea and Arquitectura i Urbanisme, which are investigated in this article. In them, the architects proposed a new way of life, consonant with the ideas of the Second Republic about equality and social justice.

M. Michaelis: la fotografía como testimonio. Érase una vez en El Garraf

With the arrival of modernity, treatises and manuals were abandoned, giving way to histories, narratives, stories that could explain and justify the approach and formal evolution of buildings. The role of photography in this context became fundamental. In 1935, the Austrian photographer Margaret Michaelis captured, through a series of photographs, the recently inaugurated weekend homes in the Garraf, designed by the GATEPAC architects Josep Torres Clave and Josep Lluis Sert. The study of these images allows us to value the contribution of the work of the catalan architects in their interest in carrying out modern architecture with references to the popular and rural Mediterranean architecture. Through the construction of 3 weekend homes, defined from the combination of the same recognisable elements, the architects configured an architecture, that today can only be visited in Margaret Michaelis´s photographs. The aim of this work is to contribute to the recovery and enhancement of her point of view, anonymous and scarcely recognised until the time. Published in the magazine A.C: Documentos de Actividad Contemporanea —exhibited after Gropius or Helen and Szymon Syrkus works— only some of these photographs will travel in time and become a reference of interest among architects in the following decades, until our days. The current state of the buildings, and the remarkable changes on their configuration and context nowadays, make the photographs taken in 1935 a relevant testimony for the historiography of modern architecture, and can be considered its last reality.

Contemporary Strategies of Urban Restoration in Complex Historical Environments

文章梳理分析了关于建筑更新理念的演变过程,从19世纪欧洲的约翰·罗斯金和维奥莱·勒·迪克的思想,到20世纪初现代主义革命后的有机方法论,均可看到“语境”所发挥的作用,考虑到这个词最广泛的意义——不仅是关于建筑本身,还涉及文化、社会、历史等层面,这些在当代最成功的建筑和城市更新案例中逐渐变得愈加重要,以至于最终成为使得当代建筑和城市更新案例取得成功的关键性因素.在简要界定了历史背景之后,列举了一系列当代欧洲的研究案例以助于更好地说明这种方法,包括瑞典建筑师古纳尔·阿斯普朗德和加泰罗尼亚建筑师恩瑞克·米拉莱斯的作品.

Esfera Pública y Exposición

Este artículo trata de cómo se exponen durante quince meses (entre julio de 2018 y octubre de 2019) quince fotografías de gran tamaño (3 x 4,5 m) al aire libre en el Parc Fluvial del Besòs, uno de los ejemplos más sobresalientes de restauración fluvial (‘vía azul’). Las quince fotografías son de esa comarca misma, el bajo cauce del Besòs, y fueron hechas por su autor, Manolo Laguillo, un año antes, en 2017. Forman parte de su proyecto ‘Levantamiento fotográfico del Besòs’, que le fue encargado por el Colegio de Arquitectos de Catalunya. Quienes caminan a lo largo del río se ven confrontados con unas fotografías de su entorno habitual, algo que nunca ocurriría si estas se mostrasen en una galería o un museo. El enorme detalle de estas fotografías en blanco y negro permite adentrarse en el paisaje de una manera distinta a la observación con los ojos desnudos.

Antoni Gaudí – samotność geniusza

&lt;p&gt;Antoni Gaudí to kataloński architekt, wszechstronnie uzdolniony, innowacyjny, twórczy, uznawany za geniusza. Kim właściwie jest geniusz i czy musi być skazany na samotność? To osoba obdarzona wyjątkowymi zdolnościami, jej sposób postrzegania świata i działania wychodzi poza ramy tego, co uważa się za normalne, logiczne czy akceptowalne. Zazwyczaj nie jest mu łatwo funkcjonować w społeczeństwie, wśród mniej wybitnych jednostek, gdzie często ma do spełnienia jakąś szczególną misję. Patrząc na życiorys Gaudíego, można dostrzec zmagania z administracją, zleceniodawcami projektów, które nie zawsze były realizowane, czy z wykonawcami wątpiącymi w wytrzymałość konstrukcji. Jego budowle wielokrotnie wzbudzały emocje i były przedmiotem krytyki, były pożywką dla prasy i karykaturzystów, podobnie jak ich twórca. Czy Gaudí czuł się samotny? A może samotność geniusza nie jest taka, jak my ją pojmujemy czy definiujemy?&lt;/p&gt;

La casa Fernández de Tampico (1926) “La belleza será comestible o no será”

&lt;p&gt;La casa Fernández, emplazada en el primer cuadro del puerto de Tampico, fue proyectada y construida en 1926 por el ingeniero tampiqueño Bartolo Rodríguez Saunders (1896-1983), formado en el Georgia Tech, de la ciudad de Atlanta y por el arquitecto Aréchiga, de origen catalán. El tratamiento ornamentalista del edificio, próximo a la abundancia decorativa del modernismo catalán, podría estar asociada con el origen de Aréchiga. El promotor y propietario original de la casa Fernández fue Luciano Fernández Gómez. Carlos González Salas, cronista vitalicio del puerto de Tampico, señaló que la casa Fernández había sido conocida como “casa del pastel,” nombre que manifiesta la ironía popular resultante de la ostentación del inmueble, síntoma de la emergente prosperidad de los propietarios, en una sociedad marcada por el auge petrolero, cuando el proyecto cultural nacionalista -a pesar de ser hegemónico– no permeaba en todos los sectores de la sociedad mexicana.&lt;/p&gt;

BIONIC INNOVATIONS BY ANTONIO GAUDI IN ARCHITECTURE OF BOTINES AND CALVET TENE-MENT HOUSES

The article is devoted to the creative heritage of Antoni Gaudi y Cornet, the outstanding Catalan architect. The reviewed two tenement houses were made according to his design, in the tradition of Neo-Gothic style, Baroque and Catalan art Nouveau. Town-planning aspects, spatial structure and design solutions of these houses are studied. A special attention is paid to the architectural and compositional decision of their facades and decorations, in which, along with secular and religious motives, some of bionic principles were implemented. In these projects, A. Gaudi have only just begun to form basic features of the unique creative style. He revealed them in his later projects of House Batllo and Casa Mila tenement houses in Barcelona.

BIONIC ASPECTS IN CREATIVITY OF ANTONIO GAUDI

The article is devoted to the creativity of the prominent Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi y Cornet (1852–1926). The individual stories of his life largely determined his choice of future profession. The main stages are described for his professional education at the University and the Higher School of Architecture in Barcelona. Shown are his stylistic preferences in the world architecture and design, the specific features of his construction activities. Only the two most famous projects by Antonio Gaudi y Cornet on the urban development are considered. Their design is performed in the Catalanian art Nouveau (Modernisme) in combination with elements of bionic architecture. Among them is the Park Güell in Barcelona (1900–1914) and Colonia Güell Crypt, Santa Coloma de Cervelló (1898–1917.). The latter playes the role of scientific and experimental laboratory, in which Antonio Gaudi y Cornet searched for the original bionic forms and made constructive decisions, including the Cathedral of the Holy Family in Barcelona, which was his career.

The hosted architectural documentary on British television: Ian Nairn and the personalization of place

Film and television are uniquely able to convey architectural experience. Through camera movements, editing, framing, tracking through space, and/or isolating details from a larger whole, these moving images produce space. On the one hand they are a decent proxy for the experience of actually being in a place; on the other they provide a representational means of going beyond the capacities of individual experience. Films about architecture can construct the experience of buildings, and can give us new subjective positions from which to consider them. Take, for instance, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s theatrical documentary Antonio Gaudí (1984), a meditative look at the celebrated Catalan architect’s buildings, in particular as they define the visual townscape of Barcelona. Part of what endears the film to critics is its reliance on style and aesthetics to build the Gaudí experience. Dore Ashton writes of Teshigahara’s ‘wonderfully paced rhythmic sequences’ that evince ‘the precision of a good art historian’, such that style matches the demands of content, as when ‘his craftsman’s eye for detail […] scans with his camera the particulars of Gaudí’s sculptural fantasies’.1 Linda C. Ehrlich describes the success of the film by way of its voluntary limitations: ‘Most of Antonio Gaudí is without any narrative explanation except for the occasional subtitle to identify a building, set to hypnotic music by award winning composer Takemitsu Toru, as well as European processional music’.2 The architecture critic Paul Gapp, while praising the film for its absence of editorial overlay, also recognizes the ability of moving images to capture the essence of the built environment: ‘A motion picture about Gaudí's buildings is not only a delicious visual experience but also reveals far better than still photography the engineering skill of the Spanish master and the virtuosity of the artisans who followed his plans’.3 The discourse around Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is that it is successful in its capacity as a ‘pure’ film about architecture, one unadulterated by the potentially muddling and pedantic commonplaces of documentary production such as talking-head interviews or an excessive reliance on decontextualized archival footage.

Toni Gironès. Arquitectura e intuición

Entrevista realizada al arquitecto catalán Toni Gironès, cuya obra sirve para ilustrar el concepto “construcción mínima / intervención máxima”. El objetivo es mostrar las cuestiones teóricas que sustentan su proceso de diseño y construcción, como la idea de habitabilidad, que es entendida como una mediación entre los habitantes y el medio en el que viven, con sus características biológicas y ambientales, pero también con unas determinadas prexistencias que se intentan revelar. Situado en el pensamiento analógico y con la intuición personal como herramienta, Gironès proyecta con dos elementos clave: el límite, como espacio de trabajo, y el tiempo, como parte de la construcción de su obra.

Interstitial Occupancies: From Industrialization to Informal Urbanism in Monterrey, Mexico

As the third largest city in Mexico, Monterrey is a manufacturing hub that offers a provocative counterpoint to industrial cities in developed countries. Suburban sprawl, political instability, violence, social injustice, and de-industrialization illustrate increasing fragmentation—or terrain vague—where the conventional urban fabric unravels and less formal occupancies unfold. Defined by Catalan architect and theorist Ignasi Solà-Morales, terrain vague is expressed through obsolescence and various organic practices that react to depopulation and under-productivity. Investigating production and city-building, this article positions post-industrial Monterrey as a place of difference reflecting hybridized Latin American and American normative conditions. It surveys processes of industrialization and changing technology to situate iconic European and American architectural and urban precedents as forerunners of similar conditions in Monterrey.

Both broken and joined: subjectivity and the lyric essay

The lyric essay is a protean form that allows writers to evoke and explore aspects of personal memory and individual subjective experience with great immediacy, while also addressing more general and abstract ideas. The use of the term ‘lyric essay’ has been questioned but still successfully serves the purpose of suggesting the kind of work that proceeds not as a conventional essay does – through logical argument – but rather through the juxtaposition of sometimes contradictory tropes, often presented as fragmentary, suggestive and even ‘poetic’. Such essays render an impression of the happenstance and provisionality of lived experience. They raise questions about the coherence (or otherwise) of the multiple perspectives informing an individual’s subjectivity. The authors’ practice-led Mosaics project examines the lyric essay’s multiplicity of viewpoints, fragmentation and faceted nature through investigating the mosaic-like nature of its form and content, along with the extent to which such mosaic-like patterning may make the lyric essay especially well suited to the rendering of particularised subjective experience. In doing so the project references the example of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí in his work on the Palau Guell and Parc Guell (with Joseph Jujol), where he incorporated fragmented and broken tile and stone pieces into his mosaics. Such mosaics, in creating extensive and ever-evolving patterns, may be seen as closely analogous to the lyric essay’s own expressive patternings and techniques.

Between Designer and Design: Parametric Design and Prototyping Considerations on Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia

Digital technologies have enabled new design methods, casting a reassessment of current theories of design. Rivka Oxman proposed five paradigmatic classes of digital design models according to the various relationships between the designer, conceptual content, applied design processes, and the design object. Kotnik states that catenary curve computational thinking is changing the way we think and design in architecture; it can be distinguished by three main levels of “computability”: representational, parametric and algorithmic. Kolarevic clarifies that new digital approaches to design (based on computational concepts), construction and prototyping can be achieved by computerised numerical control process (CNC). The study aims to promote the integration of theory and practice in search of a feedback loop that promotes the scientific method of knowledge production. The theoretical work intends to develop an updated understanding of the use of digital technologies. The practical experimentation analyses the Sagrada Família, designed by Antoni Gaudí, and proposes to compare digital (through the software Rhinoceros and the plug-in Grasshopper) and handmade physical models from the concept of catenary used by the Catalan architect. Referring to the Sagrada Família, Burry believes that “the continued contribution of the craftsperson is judged as a crucial partner to the digital dialogue” (Burry, 2005)

Architecture that bows to the artist: Musée Soulages

This paper examines the museum dedicated to Pierre Soulages and its relationship with Soulages, the city of Rodez, the Forirail Garden (which is the site of the museum), and the ideas and practices realised by Catalan architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta (RCR). The Musée Soulages is defined by the colour black and the luminous fluidity of steel as designed by RCR Arquitectes; it is also aligned with an environmental ecology that literally and figuratively represents the town of Rodez with its Notre-Dame Cathedral. The central thesis is that the Musée Soulages inducts the visitor into a role of active participation and exchange in an atmosphere of transcendental logic, and, ultimately, a new way to experience black as a colour rather than the lack of one. A visitor to the Musée Soulages becomes part of a theatrical event in which two actors —one French abstract painter, three Catalan architects—communicate in physical terms about the metaphysical environment, and the relationship between the scenographic and the tectonic in architecture. The Musée Soulages is a fascinating metaphorical representation of not only Pierre Soulages's character and his work, but also of the role of the built environment and material culture that is intertwined with the body of Soulages's expressive works. This essay focuses on the material and symbolic gestures created by Pierre Soulages and RCR Arquitectes to maintain and promote their particular world views, and examines the ways in which their expressive mediums and ideas are by turn harmonious and contradictory.

Early Onset of Chronic Rheumatic Disease May Lead to Creative Expression: The Stories of Antoni Gaudí and Maud Lewis.

Many famous artists had rheumatic diseases. Among them, the popular French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Russian expressionist painter Alexej von Jawlensky, and the French fauvist and “painter of the light” Raoul Dufy were diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and Paul Klee, a highly renowned Swiss-German painter, with systemic sclerosis. Their medical histories have been widely discussed, and they are examples of how creative art may help in coping with the disease1,2,3,4,5,6. Autoimmune diseases such as RA seem to occur with a higher frequency in artists, and exposure to toxins, such as those found in painting materials, and smoking have been discussed as contributing factors7,8,9. Would a chronic inflammatory pediatric rheumatic disease possibly influence artistic work? Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) and other chronic rheumatologic conditions with childhood onset have a significant effect on health-related quality of life and physical function, imposing a societal and psychological burden, especially in the prebiologic era10. Art therapy has been shown to be beneficial in adults and children with chronic diseases by reducing stress and pain and enabling the expression of the cognitive and emotional ideas of the patients11,12,13,14,15. To our knowledge and in contrast to the many artists with adult-onset autoimmune rheumatic conditions, there are only 2 famous artists with known chronic pediatric rheumatic diseases: Antoni Gaudi, the unique Catalan architect, and Maud Lewis, one of Canada’s best known and most loved folk art painters. The medical literature discussing Gaudi’s articular symptoms is scarce and we are not aware of any publication on Lewis’s medical history16,17,18. Dufy experienced an episode of self-limited arthritis in childhood, but he remained …