12 minute read

“GOOD MORNING BUILDINGS:” HOW MOMA INVENTED

from MCHAP The Americas 2

by Actar Publishers

from MCHAP The Americas 2, page 26

PARADISE SOMEWHERE: A CONVERSA...

Latin American Architecture

Patricio del Real

We are challenged to build here in this hemisphere a new culture which is neither Latin American nor North American but genuinely inter-American. Undoubtedly it is possible to build an inter-American consciousness and an inter-American culture which will transcend both its Anglo-Saxon and its Iberian origins.

— Henry Wallace, Vice President of the United States, 1939

In a moment of crisis, the United States turned south to Latin America to imagine its own future. The dawn of the Second World War saw the emergence of a new Western Hemisphere, imagined in US political and cultural circles as a united American continent, inheritor to and defender of Western civilization.1 Culture was mobilized to make evident a common geography of universal values, and modern architecture was enlisted in these efforts. A “Latin American” modern architecture appeared out of political urgency of the war.2 The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize continues this hemispheric project, testifying to its endurance and renewed political valence by threading contemporary architecture practices to an imagined community called the Americas.3 Does the positive fact that these practices happen to be in a particular geography make them of “the Americas” that is, part of and advancing a unique worldview that undergirds this geo-cultural category? The stability and usefulness of this concept is challenged by the tremendous diversity it aims to capture. Diversity—cultural, social, and architectural—holds together this imaginary called the Americas only by smoothing and muffling difference, that is, the pressing imbalances and contradictions the category unfolds, drawing alternative maps. In the dialectic between diversity and difference, architecture shifts between being a tool for geo-cultural constructions and a site of cultural debate.4 It is therefore critical to ask: which ‘Americas’ is being invented through architecture today? I aim to shed light on this question by looking at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and its engagement with Pan Americanism between the two world wars, and expose the historicity of architecture’s maps of the Americas. In the mid-twentieth century, modern architecture in Latin America crystalized into an identifiable style, distinct yet at the same time part of modern universal Western culture. So claimed US architecture historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, for whom architects across the region had produced a recognizable idiom, a “Latin American architecture,” that successfully and elegantly negotiated its early formal inheritance, which he attributed to Le Corbusier; embraced local customs and idiosyncrasies; and, most importantly, was open and receptive to postwar developments exemplified by the work of Mies van der Rohe in the United States. In short, architects in the region had reached maturity, he argued, being both responsive to local tasks and open to the world that is, to the United States. The proof was the works he included in the exhibition “Latin American Architecture since 1945,” which opened at MoMA in 1955. In the ten-year period covered by the exhibition, Hitchcock found the forms of a definable architectural aesthetic that gave evidence of the existence of Architecture. “We have an architecture still,” he had claimed in 1932.5 This was also the case in 1955. That this had happened in Latin America was to be noted, celebrated and contained. There is much to be said about this; my interest here, however, is to highlight the institutional character of the mid-Twentieth Century idea of Latin American architecture, which has much to do with the mechanisms of Pan Americanism of the interwar period.6 Born in the throes of the Great Depression, the fires of the Second World War and the hopes of the postwar, Latin American architecture was part of a project to imagine the Americas as a family of nations. Nelson A. Rockefeller championed this imaginary and advanced it through the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), which he directed from August 8, 1940 to August 25, 1945. Supporters of all things modern didn’t hold back their excitement; Rockefeller’s close ties to MoMA meant that his Washington DC appointment had doubled his power.7 In 1940, a cultural war had begun.

In the OCIAA, the celebration of an American continent of equal nations went beyond ritualized forms of Pan Americanism to mobilize cultural relationships under the Good Neighbor Policy.8 The OCIAA was envisioned as a tool for economic development. Culture, however, became part of its tool kit to bring the continent together. Competing with the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations, the OCIAA’s Cultural Relations Division, chaired by US architect Wallace K. Harrison, launched and enabled diverse projects at multiple levels and varied sites. The management of culture was a major point of contention between the two US government agencies.9 In

Rockefeller’s office the notion of reconocimiento—the need to know and to acknowledge in the United States the achievements of the “other American Republics”— was a key concept guiding its initiatives with a section dedicated to inter-American activities in the United States. The will to know the region was inflected by the awareness that difference had to be controlled so that culture could be properly disseminated. The OCIAA and enlisted the Mexican worker for the Allied cause.12 Although larger Latin American nations such as Venezuela, with its rich oil fields—and its links to Rockefeller family interests—demanded the attention of US political and economic circles, smaller nations, especially those in Central America close to the strategic Panama Canal, were not disregarded. Through its various departments, the OCIAA engaged a vast hemi- managed a vast array of formal and informal cultural technologies. It renewed and revamped Inter-American understanding and collaboration by identifying and celebrating “Latin American civilization.” In the idea of Latin American architecture, the notions of civilization and culture managed by the OCIAA played out in the dialectic between an international and local expression of architectural modernism. The Museum of Modern Art was brought into the fold of official Pan Americanism early on with informal and formal connections with OCIAA’s cultural and information projects. Rockefeller drew from his experience at MoMA and from its personnel. John E. Abbott, MoMA’s Executive Vice President and member of its Board of Trustees became head of the OCIAA’s Art Division and Monroe Wheeler, MoMA’s director of publications, of Publications Division.10 Before this, in the early 1930s, MoMA had engaged the artistic culture of Mexico, primarily painting. These first steps were fundamental in the development of the modern cultural projects and its proclivities to construct cultural geographies. With the help of Rockefeller’s Washington office, MoMA was able to extend beyond Mexico, bringing forth a new cultural geography and aesthetic world from which the idea of “Latin American” architecture emerged.

Born in the throes of the Great Depression, the fires of the Second World War and the hopes of the postwar, Latin American architecture was part of a project to imagine the Americas as a family of nations. Nelson A. Rockefeller championed this imaginary and advanced it through the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), which he directed from August 8, 1940 to August 25, 1945. Supporters of all things modern didn’t hold back their excitement; Rockefeller’s close ties to MoMA meant that his Washington DC appointment had doubled his power. In 1940, a cultural war had begun.

With the OCIAA, a clear hierarchy appeared in the “family of nations” that made up the Western Hemisphere. Brazil, with its immense size, apparently inexhaustible natural resources and strategic military importance came to the forefront of US economic and political interests. Zé Carioca, Donald Duck’s South American friend, led the Latin American parade. Panchito Pistoles, the sombrero-wearing, gun-slinging friendly rooster, however, was never far behind.11 The historic relationships with Mexico, its natural resources and labor force so close to the United States, brought both nations into a symbiotic friendship. The 1942 Bracero Program effectively mobilized sphere. It instituted programs in every independent Latin American nation. The Museum of Modern Art, working primarily within the field of modern culture, had to be selective, and focus its resources on initiatives that could operate at multiple levels, within national, Inter-American and international registries.

Contrary to the image advanced by official US-Pan Americanism, this cultural geography was not frictionless, but was rather a charged and contested politicized field in which regional powers produced their own local and Inter-American cultural projects. Argentina’s government, for example, remained officially neutral during the world conflict and mobilized alternative visions of regional unity that challenged the cultural imaginaries of US-led Pan Americanism. Initiatives such as the 1942 Primer Congreso de la Cultura Hispano-Americana (First Congress on Hispano-American Culture) celebrated not only cultural ties with other Latin American nations but also closer relations with Fascist Spain. In Brazil, the Ação Integralista Brasileira (Brazilian Integralist Action) had, in the early 1930s, established close ties with the Government of Benito Mussolini.13 The dictatorship of Getulio Vargas and the Estado Novo, broke Integralist’s nationalist dreams but fascist and authoritarian tendencies persisted. In the region, culture was highly charged with political and social debates over the nature of a national and trans-national Ibero-American culture. Architecture, both as practice and discipline, was not immune to these forces, and framed within the confrontation between a vital colonial tradition and the new architecture, it became enmeshed in the period’s cultural battles. In US political circles, the idea of Latin America served to counter the rise of nationalism.14 With MoMA, modern architecture was brought into the fold of US cultural politics. The museum’s formal and informal links to the OCIAA exposed the political nature of its cultural project, intertwining

The Fun Palace is not, however, without contradiction. Just as, through its drawings, it materialized an inhabitable version of the theatrical ‘black box’ on an urban scale, it can be argued that it also deployed a ‘blackboxed’ political technology for use by the society of the spectacle and of working-class entertainment. On the other hand, it can equally be claimed to represent a very specific way of understanding experimentation analogically by appealing to a particular type of active citizenry. Either way, the Fun Palace’s influence has been vast.

INHABITING THE ‘BLACK BOX’

In their exhibition “Spaces without Drama, or Surface is Illusion, but So Is Depth,”60 Ruth Estévez and Wonne Ickx investigated the range of affinities between a number of contemporary architectural practices and the stage, from their systems of representation to their conception of space. This is no coincidence: the theatrical conception of space has been a key issue in modern architecture, as Beatriz Colomina explains in her analyses of domestic interiors by Adolf Loos. “The inhabitants of Loos’s homes are both actors and spectators in the theatre of the family”. This is not only true of the Josephine Baker House (1928), which had been thought of as a performance space. Indeed, in other cases, “Loos eliminates the box seat of public theatre to place it in the ‘private theatre’ of the home”. Thus, at the Müller House (1930) or the Moller House (1929), the furniture, curtains, mirrors, openings, visual connections, etc. comprise stage-like interiors that trap and control the viewer’s gaze in this type of “home box seats.” This is an observational mechanism that “produces the subject” because it “precedes and frames its occupant.” In each case, the dwelling is projected as a machine that enables a certain ‘economy of visibility, for performing the “domestic melodrama.”61

Apropos this point, I would like, if I may, to mention a project designed at Elii, our architecture firm, to explain a slightly different theatrical conception of domestic living from the one described above. The Didomestic62 project (2013) was likewise conceived as “domestic theatre,” but not so much on the visual plane (to draw one’s gaze) as on the experiential plane, in its ‘performative’ dimension. Thus, rather than explore the relationship between the box seat and the stage, it explores the fly space high above the stage for hanging set pieces and its relationship with the stage. Didomestic is an “inhabitable ‘black box’” that in this case carries the experimental dimension of the theatre’s ‘black box’ over to the domestic space. Here, a small attic space located in downtown

Madrid, is conceived as a transformable stage that enables its user, a young woman who recently moved out of her family home, to test out a new life, to experiment with this new phase. Didomestic incorporates a number of elements to make the space easy to transform: walls, ceilings, and floors are equipped with a set of devices that enable multiple domestic configurations in order to intensify the performative and choreographic dimension63 of home, thereby enriching the experience of its inhabitant. Sliding panels, secret hatches, foldable contraptions, adaptable compartments, and furniture that dangles from the ceiling with pulleys and cranks are some of the elements that can deploy different domestic scenes and choreographies. The devices make up the rigging system of a “domestic theater” and enable the props and equipment of daily life to appear and disappear as needed. The project not only encourages the space’s functional versatility, it also enables—without requiring—experimenting with daily life.

Domestic spaces are part of a network of spaces that condition and guide the construction of personal subjectivity and identity. This domestic ‘black box’ (which is not devoid of technological ‘black boxes’) designs conditions for experimentation with that subjectivity and identity. In this domestic support, the users can experiment on themselves, ‘fictionalize’ their life, characterize themselves in different ways, try out ways of living, and challenge social norms. It is not so much about acting out “domestic melodramas” as it is about re-writing and experiencing them. Of course, the theatrical ‘black box’ is not the only experimental or flexible space possible. Other sorts of experiments require other architectures, some of them without rigging systems or moveable elements. But in this domestic ‘black box,’ however, the inhabitant also ends up being both the audience and the actor, viewer and performer, choreographer and dancer,64 though not so much at the moment of the performance, the re-presention of a social script, as happens with Loos’s interiors, but at the time of the process of creation itself.

It should come as no surprise that, in its relation to the space, this work draws on other stagings used in fiction, contemporary with Loos’s houses, such as the house in Buster Keaton’s The Scarecrow (1920),65 a transformable dwelling full of things that appear and disappear, where technology is at the service of the unexpected in a domestic space, where things are not literal, where—at the slightest physical provocation—anything can turn into something else. After all, theatrical ‘black boxes’ are, ultimately, the architectures of fiction. And, though they are not the only spaces where fiction can ensue or experiments can be performed, they do facilitate and accelerate both of those processes.

In one final version of the ‘black box,’ the flexibility of the space is due not to the use of certain theatrical technologies that users activate, but to a set of conditions that, together, heighten the space’s potential, inviting (and inciting) users to appropriate the space in different choreographies of bodies and objects. For Jun Aoki, projects that “allow people to imagine a more positive way to use a building and to they undertook a careful geometric study of the space and devised a felicitous systematic distribution of the different areas. That allowed them to expand points of interaction and to reduce server spaces, thus enabling things to happen, that is, heightening the potential of the spaces in a sort of “playground.” The publication you are reading right now features a number of projects that operate according to this logic. Alongside this article there is an account of Tower 41 (2012-14) in Mexico City, designed by Alberto Kalach.68 The building takes the shape of a set of seemingly undefined live”66 constitute a “different [form of] flexibility,” one that is being tested out in some works by Kazuyo Sejima, such as the Stadstheater in Almere (19982006).67 In that facility dedicated to stage productions, flexibility does not reside in the fact that “everything changes so that the use can change,” but rather in the notion that “nothing changes so that everything can change.” Rather than design a state-of-the-art device to alter the spaces literally, the SANAA firm came up with a spatial strategy based on indetermination. First, spaces ready to be defined through use. The dimension of each floor and the generous height of the various spaces resting on reinforced concrete walls and steel façade entails superimposing ambiguous environments that accommodate different uses. The design is thus in keeping with Aoki’s maxim, “flexibility is another word for adaptability.”69

In these projects, the private also enters into the domestic, not to reaffirm it, but to question it and turn it into an experimental ‘matter.’