Text for the book The Stadium, the Pavilion and the Palace. Domènec, An Intervention at the Barcelona Pavilion, edited by Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2023.
By and large, when Domènec’s work is being discussed, it is interpreted as a reflection on the failure of the avant-garde – in particular of the architectural avant-garde – which is deemed to have succumbed under the weight of its own utopian tenets. This widely held view stems from a supposition that is generally not disputed, namely, the good faith of the avant-garde. Its vast plans for the emancipation of humankind were, it is believed, thwarted by a kind of insuperable gap between the ambition of its projects and the miserable reality of a world ill-equipped to make use of them, less still to understand them. The history of the rise and fall of the Modern Movement – written by its own leading lights, in which the rise is presented as a legend of heroic feats and the fall, all too evident to be denied, as frozen in an endless wait, in an eternal cogito interruptus in which there is always room for ‘second vanguards’, ‘third vanguards’ and so on – ends up turning its architects into colonists or noble savages of a sort, no less ingenuous than those who, though they never succeeded in learning why the whole world was against them, found in their nobility the cause of their demise – in general, a slow death full of melancholy – and their architecture a necklace of gemstones whose gleam does not redeem, as was hoped, but does console, at least the few permitted to enter the private gardens of this ‘modern architecture’. In short, that the architectural avant-gardes – the classic avant-garde, the seconds and the thirds, etc. – have been the victim of the incomprehension of society, history and the world.
However, one only has to look with even a passing glance at Domènec’s works to see immediately that, whereas many of those who comment on his art adhere to that interpretation of history as legend, he himself does not. Belief in the good faith of the avant-garde, in the ingenuousness of architects, always seen as unheeded prophets crying out in the desert, in the necessarily endogamous persistence of a ‘victimised architecture’, does not by any means figure among his intentions. The Modern Movement works he has chosen in order to develop his projects have profoundly telling profiles: buildings intended to provide a solution to the ‘housing problem’, such as the Narkomfin Building (Fig. 01) and the Casa Bloc (Fig. 02); buildings that went on to become metaphors of the regeneration of society through the literal healing of its sick individuals, as occurred in the Paimio and Barcelona tuberculosis sanatoriums (Fig. 03); buildings shown off at the start of the Cold War, when the borders of the blocs were not yet fully drawn, as the result of some newly achieved collective work, as exemplified by the Caisa cultural centre in Kallio (Fig. 04-05); and monuments – to the Third International, to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (Fig. 06) – of a new era marching ever forwards – this was the era of movements, the Modern Movement among them – which, however, not only has its martyrs but also its architecture, in other words, as always, its heaviest burdens – mummies and pyramids.
In this essay, I will not go into the specific complexity of each one of these projects of Domènec’s, which is much greater than might be deduced from a mere inventory of them – in which I have not even respected their chronology – but I do wish to point out that the way he himself draws connections between them should in itself make us think of an ‘other’ history, or better still, of an other ‘present’.
At times, this relationship develops in the form of a circle that is closing, as when Domènec proposes to us an earthly use of works whose brightness could only come from above, could only be produced in the heavens – heavens dotted, of course, with stars of steel. The fact that a monument – the one dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht – should transform into an example of existenzminimum (Fig. 08) means that the endpoints of his interest touch: the solemn block of bricks of the monument is stripped of its symbols, resized and hollowed out to become a small abode that already points to other blocks of minimal housing – the Narkomfin Building and the Casa Bloc (Fig. 01-02) – that would come ‘later’. I say ‘later’ because I have no doubt that Domènec interpreted the occupation of the monument as a form of resistance to the ‘scientific resolution’ of human habitation. What the latter proposes is that the residents should come to their homes in order to learn how to inhabit, to be shaped by the rules that their homes impose on them as bit players in an abstract, objective abode that is always new yet always the same – that is, nothing more and nothing less than the way in which utopia is consumed (literally in the form of a will-o’-the-wisp) in the market – whereas the former, in contrast, extolling its position as a refuge, its state without statehood, which is perfectly circumstantial and fleeting, talks about the human capacity to triumph over any monument – meaning any imposition, the phantasmagorical presence of mummies and the crushing weight of pyramids – and to become ‘self-made’, without the need for prophets or for avant-gardists, for that matter. This minimised monument brings to mind those minor characters, always dressed in rags and tatters, who prowl about the Roman ruins in prints by Piranesi: they are not there, as is often remarked, to draw attention by their smallness to the impressive scale of the ancient monuments, but instead to demonstrate the fragility of these self-same monuments, defeated by the tiny root of the blade of grass lodged in their cracks and all the while attacked and conquered by bodies of flesh and blood, striving and suffering – free – who make room for themselves in them.
And in other instances, this relationship is developed in the form of a ‘dialectical montage’, as when we discover the parallelisms – but parallelisms that extol the contrasts, parallels that grate – that occur between those canonical examples of the avant-gardes that I have just referred to, and ‘other’ cases, undoubtedly similar, analogous, that Domènec has used in his projects. The clearest example is the Les Minguettes housing estate (Fig. 09-10), built in the 1960s on the outskirts of Lyon, which is directly related to its predecessors in the 1920s and thirties – the Narkomfin Building and Casa Bloc – which I will discuss below. Before that, however, I want to make mention of projects Domènec has developed in relation to Palestine (Fig. 11-13) and which, in a more patent and, undoubtedly, more terrible way demonstrate the violence intrinsically contained in the discipline of urbanism and the reality of architecture as the ‘face of power’. The reforming aspirations of the avant-garde architecture chosen by Domènec, which proclaimed itself constructed on the tabula rasa of a ‘new’ society shaped by that self same architecture, are painfully reflected in the destruction of Palestinian villages in territories occupied by Israel, which consisted not only of razing the houses and expelling their inhabitants but of erasing their names, turning into a sinister reality – or hyperreality – that concept so beloved of avant-garde architecture and urbanism: nettoyage. Le Corbusier, for example, wrote that Adolf Loos, the author of Ornament and Crime, ‘swept right beneath our feet, and it was a Homeric cleansing [nettoyage] […] In this Loos has had a decisive influence on the destiny of architecture’. What might the urbanism and architecture that emerge from that terrifying nettoyage of those Palestinian villages be like – from a cleansing that truly was Homeric, truly corresponding to a ‘new spirit’ – if not irremediably modern? A tabula rasa for a tabula rasa’s sake, some might think. And indeed someone has concluded that the confrontation that Domènec’s work proposes between these seemingly extreme cases and others that are classic, admired by all, takes for granted that the former are a degeneration of the latter, a corruption thereof. In contrast with the tabula rasa that results from demolishing Palestinian villages (Fig. 14) right down to the bottom of their foundations, of wiping their places and their names from the 11 maps negative and ghostly topography and place names – the tabula rasa of the classic vanguards would be nothing more than a metaphor, a beautiful one if we think of it in terms of utopia, a moving one if we do so in terms of failure – utopia or failure, the line-up of heroes always wins.
However, the rapprochement that occurs in Domènec’s work between the immaculate model and its perversion does not allow for any thought of opposites. Rather, what it tells us is that the perversion was already contained in the model. In other words, the model was itself perverse. And how! In his report on the Baladia Ciudad Futura (Baladia Future City) project (Fig. 15-17), Domènec refers to an interview that the architect Eyal Weizman did with Avi Kochavi, at that time commander and instructor of the Israeli Paratrooper Brigade, who led military operations such as those undertaken in the Kasbah (old city) of Nabus or in the Balata refugee camp, and also an architect. During the interview, according to Domènec, Weizman ‘noted with surprise that the theoretical positions adopted by the Israeli army to develop new military urban warfare techniques were based repeatedly on writings by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the Situationists, among others, and he wondered about the use of these critical theories as “tools” in the hands of military thinkers.’ Surprise? To allay any surprise, one only has to begin to ask oneself of what exactly are the avant-garde the vanguard, bearing in mind that they have always exalted the tabula rasa, their lavish use of the prefixes of dispossession, de, des, etc., setting them up as linguistic pillars of their ideological projects, and the fanatical obsession with which they retroactively reconstructed history, turning it into a land of treasure waiting to be looted. Might not the confusion between art and life constantly upheld by the avant-gardes – who termed it ‘synthesis’ – attain its culmination in its ‘military’ use, for that is, after all, where the term ‘vanguard’ comes from, as we all know? The vanguard would, in keeping with this argument, be the continuation of ‘life’ by other means, though it should be said that those means are those of death. In the face of such a ‘surprise’, I cannot help but think – and this is just one of many examples – of what Martin Damus said when analysing the happenings of the 1970s, which was that if the first condition of the happening lies in subjecting participants to the rules of the game established by the artist, there will be some instances in which the participant would be unable to free themselves of those rules even if they withdrew, for example when the ‘event’ involved abandoning the disorientated participants in the middle of the night in the heart of a forest. In May ’68, Damus recalls, the Berlin police employed this game ‘seriously’ to terrorise – still more, if such a thing were possible – the people they had detained.
However, I said earlier that I would refer, albeit briefly, to Domènec’s project on Les Minguettes (Fig. 09-10). What emerges from what Domènec presents us with is not very different to what I have just remarked, though seen now from the opposite point of view. Let me explain. Les Minguettes is a grand ensemble built in the 1960s on the outskirts of Lyon to provide housing for the immigrant population arriving from France’s former colonies – housing for ‘cannon fodder’ in huge residential tower blocks with minimal services and amenities. The history of Les Minguettes runs parallel to that of other housing estates of this type in France and elsewhere around the world: turned in short order into symbols of marginalisation, social breakdown, crime and urban violence, they were later demolished in whole or in part, events that became huge shows broadcast live that constituted a kind of auto-da-fé by a histrionically contrite and penitent – in other words, and as always, hypocritical – modernity. However, the history that Domènec records in his work is subtly different: it turns out that the ‘instability’ of Les Minguettes – though we could also extend this to other cases – stems from the social movements that developed there from the 1980s onwards, centred above all on combating and denouncing racism, the main source of which is the institutional organisation itself of society. So, the ‘return to order’ has, as always, taken place over two phases, the first serving as justification of the second: firstly, the stigmatisation of protest; and secondly, the blowing-up of its material world, its humous, thereby making it clear to the millions of viewers who saw how those blocks collapsed instantly in a vast cloud of dust at the press of a button exactly who has the monopoly on destruction.
In the histories of architecture and of urbanism, and we are reminded of this by Domènec as well, the demolitions of these estates have been interpreted as the symbol of the failure of those utopias of the Modern Movement that I have already mentioned, etc., etc., so I will not be returning to that. I remarked earlier that Domènec offers us a different point of view, because here, in truth, what fails? If there are two fundamental books in the history of modern architecture and modern urbanism, they are those that Le Corbusier published in the 1920s, Vers une architecture and Urbanisme. In the second, after a tribute to Louis XIV, whom he describes as a ‘great urbanist’, Le Corbusier concludes by declaring ‘one does not revolutionise by revolutionising; one revolutionises by solving’; in the first, more clearly still, after setting forth the dilemma between ‘architecture or revolution’, he proclaims ‘revolution can be avoided’, attributing to architecture soothing powers which, ultimately, would not only end up equating architecture and life – through the subsuming of life in architecture: the human being as an intermediate point on the chain of evolution stretching from the monkey to architecture, as Georges Bataille put it – but also equating the architect with the great manager that modernity needs and demands. Watching the residential tower blocks on estates, the grands ensembles, being blown up, one might say, however, that no, revolution cannot be avoided or at least – let us not be so optimistic – that architecture cannot accomplish everything, that it does not temper, that it does not mitigate. So what kind of failure are we talking about? Who or what, precisely, is failing? A noble utopia? Or a ‘plan’? I have just been referring to Le Corbusier, but I would like to move on to Mies. At the time when his buildings were being constructed on the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, Le Corbusier wrote to him – confidentially – in a letter saying that he was proud that the two of them were being accused of being poets by functionalist architects, by architects of the machine. ‘They have told me countless times over the last two years: “Beware, you are a lyric poet, you are delirious”’, Le Corbusier wrote in 1927. Who said such a thing to him? Or, rather, how, based on such an utterly chimerical accusation, is the history of the rise and fall of modern architecture constructed? Lyricism and delirium: these are the extremes of the ‘plan’ of ‘architecture as victim’.
Domènec’s entire body of work reveals to us the strategies of capitalism through avant-garde architecture and urbanism, including in those places where few have delved. What should we say, for example, about his work on the cultural centre in Kallio, built by volunteers who, as he himself points out, ‘gave over 500,000 hours of their lives’ to construct it, but all that is remembered is the name of its architect, as if he were a new Zeus from whose head Athena, his work, was born, completely finished? Here it is no longer a matter just of failure but of fraud. ‘The names of kings appear in books’, but who actually built ‘Thebes of the Seven Gates’? Slaves, as we already know. What we perhaps do not know or have paid no attention to or do not want to think about is that many modern works were also constructed by slaves (Fig. 04-05): Domènec reminds us of this here and there, in the most unexpected place, in the architecture most loved by the lovers of ‘form’, for example, in the panopticon.
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If, as I have just said, Domènec’s work in general puts us on guard against the liberation utopias of the avant-garde and against the responsibilities of urbanism and architecture in modern terrors, his intervention in the German Pavilion goes further along the same lines. This intervention consisted of two changes: the Barcelona Chair – in reality a throne – was replaced by a pair of tubular Steel and Formica chairs; and the black carpet and red drapes were substituted by clothes pegged up on lines (Fig. 18). Domènec thus evoked the laundry hanging out to dry that always appears in photographs of the shacks that for decades filled the areas of Montjuïc left free by the 1929 International Exhibition after it closed – and even before it – and of the buildings left standing used by the authorities – papal, uniformed or civilian – as ‘temporary housing’ – perpetually temporary – for immigrants and all kinds of outcasts, though in fact they functioned as veritable prisons from which those detained, without any guarantees or time limit and in accordance with the total arbitrariness of the authorities, were ‘returned’ to their places of origin or wherever – the Palau de les Missions, for example, living up to its name (palace of the Catholic religious missions), was turned into a sinister ‘indigents classification centre’ – or as enclosed complexes for ‘relocating the thousands ousted from other neighbourhoods or shanties in the city when these were finally ‘urbanised’ – in other words, handed over to the market – as was the case of the Belgian Pavilion and the Olympic Stadium. The title of Domènec’s intervention echoes an article written by the great Josep Maria Huertas Claveria published in Destino magazine in 1966, ‘L’estadi, el Pavelló i el Palau’ (The Stadium, the Pavilion and the Palace), a vivid condemnation of the situation we are discussing. Reproduced as a facsimile by Domènec in the publication in newspaper format and on newsprint made available free of charge to visitors, the article was illustrated by just two photographs. The caption of one read, ‘The stadium outside: cracks’, while the other photograph was captioned ‘The stadium inside: laundry hanging up’ (Fig. 19). This would say everything there is to be said, and the laundry hung out by Domènec in an ‘other’ pavilion, reconstructed without time or history, gleaming with its new stones and marbles, inside and out, and, in short, triumphant – the ‘new and triumphant pavilion’, in effect – would have to reveal to us metonymically everything left below ground and which here too, in our own land, like the topographies and toponyms of those Palestinian villages, has been wiped from the map: the ‘unclassified’ bodies of flesh and blood, of the outcasts who built Thebes – and who fitted in these shirts and lay on these sheets that we still see in the photographs. Or it should make us think of the fact that ‘indigent classification centres’ continue to exist today.
Although, having said this, which is something Domènec makes perfectly clear in his publication and in his work, we are going to try and unearth other strata, ones more connected with the discipline of architecture. The laundry hanging out at the German pavilion – those garments of every kind and those sheets hanging vertically between the travertine, marble and onyx walls – bring to mind Gottfried Semper’s theories on the origins of architecture. This is no exaggeration, I assure you. On the one hand, Semper said that the first principle of any human culture is fabric (the knot, the garland, the border); and on the other, at the start of construction there is the wall, not seen as a support but as an enclosure. And what were those first walls, the ‘vertical enclosures that man invented […] making them with his hands’, but ‘the pen or sheepfold and the fence or hurdle obtained by interlacing and plaiting stakes and branches’? From this point, ‘the transition from the interlacing of branches to that of plant fibres […] and from there to the creation of fabric’ could not be more obvious to Semper and no less so to his two most faithful ‘modern’ followers, Adolf Loos and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both of them sons of stonemasons and both of them keen, as no other Modern Movement architect was, on fine woods and marbles. Loos, in particular, summed up Semper’s theories in what he termed the ‘principle of cladding’: Loos says the first thing humankind discovered was – and note the supreme paradox here – cladding and, more particularly, textile cladding – ‘the covering is the oldest architectural detail’. Only later came the walls, which fixed the shape of spaces that fabrics, tapestries or drapes had previously defined. Modern architects, in contrast, work very differently or even precisely the other way round, according to Loos. First, they ‘imagine’ the spaces, then they enclose them with walls and lastly they choose the surfacing.
Mies never glossed in this way the theories of the ‘materialist’ Semper – who never forgot the barricades he helped to raise during the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849, recalling them as the perfect example of useful and hence beautiful walls – but seeing the photographs of the maquette of his glass skyscraper of 1922 (Fig. 20), could we not interpret its curves as the fall of a curtain – or of a ‘curtain wall’, to be scrupulously precise, thereby, at the same time, closing the circle that links Semper to the great themes of modern architecture? And when some years later, in 1927, Mies and Reich designed the Café Samt und Seide for the Women’s Fashion show in Berlin (Fig. 21), these silk and velvet drapes which, displaying their pleats and arranged in opposite flat and curving planes, enveloped – or rather, dressed – the spaces of the tables and chairs, what were they doing if not bringing out as indisputable evidence that ‘principle of cladding’ I have just referred to? Semper spoke of the transition from fabrics made of branches to those of plant fibres, and from there to the warp and weft of textiles: this is the point that Mies and Reich arrived at in the Café Samt und Seide. We find the next step in Villa Tugendhat, for example: the semi-circular plane is made – or once again, literally, hyperrealised – of ebony and the straight plane of onyx, fine, hard materials par excellence, in which the tactile properties of silk and velvet are replaced by the solely visual qualities of pulchritude (Fig. 22). It is not that there are no curtains in this house, but it is clear that walls have ‘arrived’, and what walls they are!
Even so, the work that best encapsulates and culminates this imaginary chain that extends from the plaiting of branches to the interlacing of plant fibres, to fabric and lastly the wall, that showcases a ‘cladding’ in its fullest sense, apparently, always anticipated, is the German Pavilion. Rugs and curtains, marbles, travertine and onyx, steel and glass reveal, in their simultaneity, a path that is nothing other than that of the loss and erasure of those hands that humankind used for the first time 8,000 years ago to weave. Cut hands. Somewhere, though I do not remember where now, Pasolini said that when the last artisan dies, the world will have ended. Many years before Pasolini’s death – at the hands of society – the German Pavilion had already put a full stop to this terrible story. It is true, the pavilion was only built to last just a few months, but it was enough to look closely at what Ángel González described as a ‘contraction of the body of Germany’ to glimpse, in its dark flashes, what was looming on the horizon. How many saw it? When the pavilion was reconstructed years later, it was a matter, precisely, of not seeing, or rather, of forgetting.
To go back to Semper’s theories on cladding, what can we say about the shacks and, more specifically, about those that appear in the photographs in the publication Domènec issued as part of his intervention, copies of which were stacked on a pallet – in other words, on a base made of planks – so that visitors could help themselves? What we see are planks – precisely – and pieces of fabric, so we could say that due to some kind of historical inversion – which History has never taken into account – the ‘principle of cladding’ is the sole principle of the shack. Pieces of wood, fabric and clothes hanging out, of course, the last of these being the means through which the interior expresses itself, manifests itself, outside: in the sewing, in the scrap of fabric, in the repaired patch, in the knot, in the peg and in the face always imprinted on one of these sheets – in other words, in the wound. In bourgeois homes, or aspiring ones, clothes are hung out to dry hidden from view, relegated to small courtyards or rooftops, whereas in shacks they are in plain sight.
The clothing that Domènec hung out in the German Pavilion – all made by captive hands in some distant place in the East – triggers recollections without memory and deactivates other pieces of hanging fabric, like the flag of the United States in the collage with which Mies represented the interior of his project for the Convention Hall in Chicago in 1954: fabric which, rather than hanging, is ‘loaded’ (Fig. 23) – many would wrap themselves up in it. Many years earlier, in 1908, Loos had already ‘hung’ a glass American flag in front of a translucence alabaster wall on the façade of the Kärntner Bar in Vienna: the light shone through the flag and wall and filtered into the amber-coloured nooks and crannies of an immaculate conception (Fig. 24-25). And do the colours of the interior of the German Pavilion – the red of the curtain, the black of the rug, the yellow of the onyx – not represent, as is always said, quite cheerfully, the country’s flag, now perfectly petrified? There is no such thing as coincidence (Fig. 26).
‘I need to have a wall behind me’, Mies once said. He was referring, of course, to a wall as solid as a rock, that would not move; to a wall of fine marble – the epitome of idealism and the embodiment of eternity, according to classical tradition – or to a flag, equally rock-like, which, in addition to not moving – I am talking here of its essence – prevents anyone from doing so. Domènec makes it clear that, over and above the theories of cladding, the clothing hanging out is blowing in the wind not just to dry: all the while, it is throwing us off the scent, concealing, covering, tangling, spattering, fraying and disturbing.