PAGE 6 Driehaus laureate urbanism and architecture projects by the next generation of contemporary Spanish traditional architects
PAGE 140 Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany on the evolution of Mediterranean architecture throughout Florida
fall 2022 Issue No. 4
PAGE 206 Historical perspectives on the architectural and landscape design of the 1915 CaliforniaPanama Exposition
Editors
Kate Chambers
Javier Cenicacelaya
Executive Editor
Carrie Rulli
Copy Editor
Heather Grennan Gary
Graphic Design
Christina Duthie
Editorial Committee Members
Stefanos Polyzoides
Selena Anders
Kate Chambers
Richard Economakis
Michael Mesko
Steven Semes
Paolo Vitti
Jonathan Weatherill
Samir Younés
Front cover: General axonometry of the intervention together with the access door to the Alcazaba de Guadix in Granada. For details, see page 86.
Back cover: Deconstructive axonometry of the interior of the building—access staircase to the Alcazaba.
Archives of New Traditional Architecture is prepared by the staff and research associates of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture and published twice yearly. ISBN: 979-8-9878979-0-4
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Traditional architecture exists in its many forms and iterations all around the world. The architecture of each place is deeply rooted in the history and culture of the place. In the Americas, part of that history is the story of how different forms of traditional architecture came to this place. This issue of ANTA specifically explores the story of the transference of Spanish architecture to the Americas through a historical and modern lens. We begin with the story of traditional architecture in Spain at the turn of the century and work our way to contemporary traditional projects in Spain. Following that, we explore how traditional Spanish architecture came to the two coasts of the United States through the perspectives of Florida and California. This exploration considers how traditions are shared and adapted through time and place.
The transference and propagation of architectural ideas across continents has taken many forms. The story of Spanish architecture’s arrival in the United States includes early colonization by Spain, travels by architects, books, photographs, and romanticized histories. It is not a linear or simple connection but one that is articulated in vastly different ways through time. As you will see, the development of this architecture in Florida and California is discrete and varied. This issue focuses on the historical development of the Spanish style in these two locations and examines how this architecture manifested—and still manifests—in each place.
Today, Spanish architecture continues its development in the United States. We present here contemporary architectural projects in Florida and California that describe the perpetual adaptation of traditional forms. These projects showcase the numerous applications of traditional Spanish architecture in contemporary life. In some cases, the use of Spanish traditional forms is nearly universal; in Santa Barbara for example, “Spanish Revival architecture” in fact was codified into law. In other places, Spanish architecture has become culturally codified and creates an architecture of place. The expression of these architectures varies based on the use and location of the building, with the highest expressions in civic buildings. However, we also chose to exhibit residential buildings, both single-family and multifamily, to show how Spanish architecture is applied at all building scales. This issue has four sections, three of which explore the different geographical locations (Spain, Florida, and California), and a separate section on urbanism. Each geographical section begins with essays that describe the historical development of traditional Spanish architecture in that location. The essays are an important introduction to the contemporary projects that follow. The projects include new designs as well as restoration projects of historic buildings. Some of the projects are not yet realized, but showcase how a younger generation is taking up the mantle of this tradition. The section on urbanism describes three important new towns that integrate the principles of traditional town planning. While we have created four discrete sections, they should be considered as a whole, describing the historical and current state of Spanish traditional architecture in Spain and North America, each place and scale continuing to adapt and inform the others through the continuous evolution and transference of these architectural ideas.
“Away from tradition there is no true originality. Everything that is not tradition, is plagiarism.”
Architecture may be the only major discipline and profession in the world today that, in its current dominant practice, categorically rejects the formative influence of all form-precedent.
For a few generations now, most architects have been educated to think that detaching architecture from any design rules deemed traditional is not only a silent obligation, but an active crusade. In practice, this has produced a self-inflicted and self-limiting detachment from the foundational values and principles of all architecture, not only classical and vernacular, but also early modernist. Unconditioned by the lessons of history, not only ancient but also recent ones, most contemporary projects are ever more detached from the central purpose of architecture: to produce shelter, beauty, and meaning on a constant basis, while striving to remain connected to its ideological beginnings. Instead, many contemporary buildings are shamelessly invariable, abstract, bland, indecipherable, and ultimately meaningless. Those buildings most extreme in their disconnection from past design principles and protocols are celebrated; it seems the more unexpected and brilliantly unprecedented a building’s form, the better.
Unfortunately, an inherent characteristic of all architectural form is that anything excessively idiosyncratic is not easy to emulate. Similarly, anything excessively normative is not worth emulating. As a result, architectural ideas that cannot be naturally adapted to new projects or contexts, physical or cultural, cannot be simply propagated. It is not surprising, therefore, that contemporary architecture as a whole has become barren and incapable of contributing to the continuing evolution of received models of design. By rejecting precedent, architects are producing disconnected and indecipherable works for everywhere and for everyone. The result is a long cycle of projects with reference to fashion and consumption, but not dependence on ideas. The traditional culture of architecture remains broken, and the consequences are truly epic. Along with urban sprawl, buildings of a ubiquitous, ugly, and disposable form, devoid of emotional or spiritual content, continue to erode the urban character and quality of life of most great cities and landscapes around the globe. At the same time, they have become key contributors to our climate change crisis.
Before 1945, architecture had advanced from generation to generation by means of a relay of type-centered ideas, generally communicated in drawings, models, and built form. Always searching for first principles, architects had sought to engage in design on a conceptual foundation that reflected the wisdom and knowledge of the ages. While the concept of type has had various definitions over the centuries, it has always been understood as the embodiment of the form-essence of objects. And there is no more intellectually appropriate manner to discern this essence than the guidance offered by the authority of precedents. The design process should begin as a search for a parti: an appropriate seed of an idea that allows the development of a project from the whole to the parts; and not from the parts to whole. The study of precedents is essential at this point, for it guides the architect to partis that can deliver responses to the programmatic, technical, and symbolic challenges of any project into mature form. But the power of precedents is more extensive than this. As the design process extends into examining the character of buildings, drawn or built precedents can offer direction regarding siting and town form, massing relative to other ranking buildings, the surrounding fabric and the public realm, and the scale and proportions of principal architectural components and climate-specific responses to environmental forces. At the third and last stage of design, when architects establish the nature of their personal imprint on a building, precedents can be mined to establish a range of material, ornament, color, and dimensional detail design options to be used in anticipation of finishing buildings in a form that eventually would be intimately experienced by others. Architecture practiced in this way is fecund: each project becoming a link connecting past and future, a new potential precedent-bearing form that enriches the DNA of architectural ideas going forward.
Little more than a hundred years ago, in the 1910s and 1920s, American architects engaged in a most extraordinary discussion regarding the purposes that their work would then serve. Under the patronage of a booming American industrial economy and an unprecedented effort to develop the American West, they directed their architecture to embody and symbolize both the spirit of their time and the unique cultural and environmental attributes of the places that this work was to grace. There was a novel scholarly method attached to the ambitions of this generation. Encouraged by the unprecedented boom in travel during this time, they sought to gather and document the kinds of cultural and environmental evidence around our country and the world that would eventually be used to inform and justify their projects. When they found that evidence, they recorded, published and shared it with their colleagues. When, for whatever reason, it was not available or visible to them, they imagined it, by supposing what may or should have been. The result was the first-ever period of high-quality, focused research on architectural design in the United States. Using this sophisticated knowledge, architects embarked upon the task of developing classical and vernacular projects of a form appropriate and emblematic to each of the regions of our country. Their combination of unusual depth of insight with artful drawing and manual skills, and the availability of new industrial methods that accelerated and refined the process of construction, allowed them, in the 1920s and 1930s, to deliver some of the most accomplished buildings, building ensembles, and places ever built in our country. It was part of this amazing track record of architectural and urbanist excellence that the emergence of a new architecture in the parts of the United States that were founded under the influence of Spanish and later Latin culture became possible. It is this extraordinary process of continuing cultural exchange and transformation that is captured in this issue of ANTA.
Beginning in 1929, the effects of the Great Depression, and then the shift in industrial emphasis to prefabrication and mass production during World War II, had a deep effect on American architecture. The traditional methods of education, design, and construction that had fueled the heroic architectural boom of the previous decades were weakened and eventually rejected. The search for speed, fashion, fame, and fast profit morphed into a mad drive for perpetual invention, a formalism without a basis in ideas. In the postwar period architecture went off the rails. Divorced from precedent, it has reached our day in an increasingly fragmented and perishable state. It is high time that the contemporary culture of architecture and culture at large reconsider the importance of precedence in form. It is only through this way of learning and practicing that architecture can deliver the cultural diversity, physical improvement, and spiritual enrichment that our country and the world so sorely need.
STEFANOS POLYZOIDES Professor and Dean The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture
ESSAY
Fernando Vela Cossío
page 8
Lander Uncilla Cortaberria
page 18
Jean-François Lejeune
page 26
Javier Cenicacelaya page 36
Alejandro García Hermida
page 44
PROJECTS
espinósfernándezcid
page 52
Oronoz & Iparraguirre
page 64
Jiménez & Linares
page 78
César Portela
page 90
RESTORATION
Javier Rivera
page 96
Sergi Bastidas
page 102
Juan de Dios de la Hoz
page 106
Leopoldo Gil Cornet
page 118
The year 2023 marks the centenary of the founding of the Revista de Occidente by José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). Born in 1923, the publication immediately became an essential reference for the dissemination of contemporary Spanish-American thought. It stopped publication at the start of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), but resumed in 1963. After another brief hiatus in the second half of the 1970s, it continues to be published on a monthly basis to this day.
During the fourth year of its second season, an extraordinary issue (No. 38, May 1966) was entirely dedicated to Latin America. It included texts by authors of great importance, such as Gabriela Mistral, Pedro Laín Entralgo, José Gaos, Julián Marías, Rafael Lapesa, and Luis Díez del Corral, among others. The History of Art was addressed in a text by George Kubler (1912–1996) on “Indianism and miscegenation” and another by the architect Fernando Chueca Goitia (1911–2004), related to the “Invariants of Hispanic American Architecture,” which is what interests us now.
Fernando Chueca was at that point professor of the history of urbanism at the Institute of Local Administration Studies (IEAL) and of the history of plastic arts and history of architecture and urbanism at the Madrid School of Architecture, where he would become chair in 1968. He was already the author of Invariantes castizos de la arquitectura española (1947), one of his first books, an outstanding and widely disseminated historiographical work. It was followed by decisive works on the Cathedral of Valladolid (1947), Juan de Villanueva (1949), the architecture of the sixteenth century (1953), and Andrés de Vandelvira (1954). In his long and fruitful career, Chueca would also cultivate the systematic study of Spanish-American architecture in a very prominent way,1 as we will soon see.
A disciple of Leopoldo Torres Balbás (1888–1960), Chueca enjoyed extraordinary academic recognition from Spanish and foreign institutions, receiving, among other distinctions, admittance to the Order of Letters and Arts of the French Republic, the Society of Architectural Historians of North America, and the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence.2 He was the translator of Historia de la Arquitectura Española (1950) by the Englishman Bernard Bevan (1903–1995)—a work with which the generation of architects trained at the School from the 1950s to the early 1960s learned the history of architecture—and author of History of Spanish Architecture: Ancient Age and Middle Ages (1965)—with which the following generation was formed. His extensive written work indelibly marked the teaching of the history of architecture and urban planning in Spain during the second half of the twentieth century.
The text published in the Revista de Occidente3 provides us with a faithful testimony of his perspective on different aspects and features to consider in the study of the architectural legacy of Spain in the New World. Chueca considered Spanish-American architecture:
An art that imposes itself and rules over an entire continent, marking it with an indelible mark. Next to Architecture, the other major arts, Painting and Sculpture—ex-
cept for their relative values—lack global importance. If viceregal art were measured today by what sculpture and painting have left behind, it would not go beyond being a very poor appendage of peninsular art, naive, primitive and provincial, which would hardly claim the interest of some curious people, of few specialists dedicated to marginal phenomena and some snobs who like what primitivism and rudeness mean. But instead, architecture raises above all this somewhat reclusive and confined panorama, its gigantic presence.4
He especially emphasized the unity in which his evolution takes place:
Breathing the climate of America in points as far away as the Pampas and the Mexican highlands, Guatemala or Paraguay, the impression I have felt, both absorbing and overwhelming, has been the suction produced by an uncontainable force of unity. The return to Spain is, on the other hand, like a distension. The various regions of Spain once again give you the gift of their multiple flavors and the surrounding world is diversified into picturesque and pleasant facets. America is left behind as a world too strong, in titanic tension, standing firm in its unshakable unity.
Spanish America has become one and one it remains. Its suction force is so great that it reduces everything to unity: one religion; one language; one genuine artistic expression. I conceive Spain ceasing to be Catholic before Hispanic America will cease to be so, also us losing Castilian as a common language before they lose it, and us, too, losing our artistic sameness before they lose it ( . . . ) Spain could disintegrate while the unity of America would remain intact ( . . . ).
In the architecture of that continent we find perfectly expressed that feeling of a unit.5
Applying the method he used fifteen years earlier for the elaboration of his 1947 Invariantes castizos de la arquitectura española (a work of which he says, “It was a provisional essay that more than once I have thought of revising,
extending and updating”),6 Chueca proposes to consider the most evident features of our architecture from the perspective of SpanishAmerican architecture. He affirms that all that has been done in Spanish architecture has been in conflict with the cultured contributions coming from outside—“In this exhausting struggle it has made itself”—and speaks of re-Spanishization of the Spanish in America, highlighting the character of an architectural body that came essentially from the metropolis and accepted only the Americanization of the decoration. He insists on emphasizing the importance of Mudejarism, a true invariant of all Hispano-American architecture, highlighting its validity in the peninsular and overseas baroque itself: “The manifestations of the Hispanic and Hispano-colonial baroque are still attached to the same Mudejarism notorious in the Elizabethan, Manueline and plateresque art ( . . . ). Wherever we go in the history of Hispano-American architecture we will find many vestiges of Mudejar expansion.”7 It is a Mudejarism, “white, sober and whitewashed,” that comes from Andalusia and that transcends from ornamentation to architecture and to its dispositions and structures. It generates wide churches, sometimes extraordinarily long, with multiple naves and roof trusses, in brilliant manifestations. “The limits imposed by the length of the timber beams in the pair-andknuckle trusses force the construction of narrow bays, and in order to obtain a capable space, it is necessary to develop in length.”
This page, left: Cover of Revista de Occidente no. 38 (May 1966), an extraordinary volume dedicated to Latin America.
Right: Cover of the book Invariantes castizos de la arquitectura española (1947).
For Chueca, Hispano-American architecture developed around a fundamental style: the baroque. And although extraordinary examples of Elizabethan art have been preserved, as well as notable examples of metropolitan plateresque, mannerism, and Herrerian architecture, Chueca writes that “what is important in America is the baroque, and it is through it that the continent acquires the highest artistic hierarchy.”8
Some of the most characteristic features of Spanish architecture in the New World include richness in mass and in the administration of space; predominance of volume, austerity, nudity, and sober economy of means; and importance of the silhouette and of the systems of grouping domes (of the octagonal and low drum type). It is an architecture that expresses itself in a timeless way throughout three centuries: “The plural art of Spain that in the peninsula keeps a certain chronological sequence, loses it in America and becomes a timeless art in which the diverse styles that have lost their historical significance coexist to reach a transhistoric or intrahistoric sense.”9
In the introduction to the text, Chueca emphasizes how “the esthetics of Architecture,
an esthetics more historical than theoretical, has had much greater development in our sister countries than among us.” In a brief overview of the main American historiographic contributions, he mentioned those of Rafael García Granados (1893–1956), Manuel Toussaint (1890–1955), Jorge Enciso (1879–1969), Justino Fernández (1904–1972), Francisco de la Maza (1913–1972) and Víctor Manuel Villegas (1913–2000) for Mexico; those of Martín S. Noel (1888–1963) and Mario José Buschiazzo (1902–1970) for Argentina; those of Emilio Harth-Terré (1899–1983) and Augusto Benavides Diez Canseco (1889–1975) for Peru; and those of Graziano Gasparini (1924–2019) for Venezuela, recalling also how these works had aroused the interest of North American researchers, among whom he cites George A. Kubler (1912–1996) of California; Sydney David Markman (1911–2011) of New York; Pàl Kelemen (1914–1993), a Hungarian living in the United States since 1932; and Erwin W. Palm (1910–1988), a German-Latin American who worked for fourteen years in Santo Domingo.
Among the Spanish contributions, Chueca pointed out those of Diego Angulo Íñiguez
(1901–1986) and Enrique Marco Dorta (1911–1980) as the most outstanding at that time, and then referred to the Marquis of Lozoya (1893–1978) and Antonio Bonet Correa (1925–2020). And the truth is that, with some exceptions, these were in fact the only Spanish specialists who were then immersed in the study of Ibero-American art and architecture.
In fact, as architect and critic Ramón Gutiérrez has pointed out, the first two decades of the twentieth century had marked the awareness of the values of Ibero-American architecture and made possible the first incursions into the field of research and essay.10 In the case of Spain, the starting point of this historiographic enterprise is due to one of our great architectural historians: Vicente Lampérez y Romea (1861–1923).11 We find it in the conference held at the Prado Museum on March 17, 1922, on the initiative of the Ministry of Public Instruction and under the title “Spanish-American Architecture in the Times of Colonization and the Viceroyalties.”
The lecture can be consulted in the conference proceedings, made available by the publishers V. H. Sanz Calleja of Madrid (1922), and is also published in Raza Española, 12 the
magazine founded in 1919 by Lampérez’s wife, Blanca de los Ríos. In the text, the distinguished historian and architect stated: The subject is completely virgin in Spain ( . . . ) nobody that I know of has written or disserted on the subject ( . . . ). It is natural, in truth, that it is the American soil itself where these studies have had their development, by the vision and direct analysis of its monuments ( . . . ). My attempt is to present the general picture of SpanishAmerican architecture on the basis of Spanish architecture, systematically pointing out the relations of the former with the latter, as far as I am able, with the data I have ( . . . ). There is a chapter in this study of the influences of our architecture on that of other countries that is undeniable and, at the same time, of the greatest patriotic and historical interest: the one outlined in these pages, that of the influences of Spanish architecture in colonial and viceregal Spanish-American architecture.13
That same year, and in the same magazine, Lampérez published an article14 on the Argentinian architect Martín S. Noel (1888–1963), the main promoter of neocolonial architec-
Opposite page: Church of the Society of Jesus in Cusco, Peru. Photo by Max Uhle (1856–1944). Source: Max Uhle Legacy, Ibero-American Institute of Berlin. This page: View of the Plaza de Mexico (1797). Engraving by José Joaquín Fabregat (1748–1807). Source: National Library of Spain (Madrid).Notre Dame’s School of Architecture offers graduate degrees in both architecture and urban design and in historic preservation. There are three graduate degree paths for students seeking professional and post-professional degrees in architecture and urban design, including those joining architecture from other disciplines. The Master of Science in Historic Preservation program is a studio-based curriculum open to students with a previous degree in architecture.
All of the graduate programs offer extraordinary learning opportunities. Instruction is personal, and the learning environment is highly supportive. School and University resources are significant, and the content of the education is unique. Architecture is a part of the unity of all knowledge, and it operates in a cultural continuum. While its principles are time-tested and permanent, its renewal through every new generation of young architects, designers, and preservationists is as necessary as it is inevitable. Graduate education at Notre Dame involves learning that is based on this concept of architecture.
Students can expect to experience the following while attending the program:
• Receive a concurrent education in Architecture, Urbanism, and Ecological Design;
• Be taught by nationally and internationally prominent academic and practicing architects;
• Study the theoretical and historical foundations of architectural/tectonic forms and urban place-making;
• Understand how universal principles of design are manifested and applied to the vernacular and classical traditions of the world;
• Engage in one semester of study in our Rome program that began more than 50 years ago;
• Incorporate the important social justice and environmental issues of our day into design, by working directly with people in need and employing enduring, natural materials and techniques whenever possible;
• Design for communities and institutions in the US and abroad and engage with their varied cultures, physical settings, and resources;
• Integrate manual and digital techniques into design and graphic communication;
• “Learn by doing” through Dean’s charrettes, summer programs in the US and abroad, and other outreach projects;
• Have access to a world-class architectural library, furniture studio and 3D maker space, computer lab, and an architectural drawing archive;
• Be involved with architectural journalism through the publishing of academic journals;
• Be part of a school that sponsors the renowned Richard H. Driehaus Prize and Henry Hope Reed Award that lend international credence to our distinctive academic focus.
Learn more about the program at architecture.nd.edu/graduate.
