The Universal Dimension of the Hispano-American Architectural Legacy

FERNANDO VELA COSSÍO

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.”

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- ture.15 This interest in the work of Noel is not surprising; he was the author of an architecture with strong Hispanic roots and an organic spirit, based on open constructions around patios and gardens. He used in the interiors the traditional wooden roofs of Mudejar imprint, the Spanish-style kitchens with large bells and Talavera tile cladding. The eclecticism of his work united cultured and popular references, historicism and folklore.16

Noel, who had been trained in Paris, published in 1915 the article “Comments on the Birth of Spanish-American Architecture”17 and was the author of one of the first works on the history of Spanish-American architecture.18 Lampérez himself recognizes this when he echoes his book by commenting that “[S]tudies and publications of the informative magnitude of those of Mexico are lacking for the Viceroyalty of Peru ( . . . ). The most comprehensive of those that have been in my hands is by the Argentine architect Martín S. Noel. He is the main source of my knowledge.”19

It will be the written production and, above all, the built work of Martín Noel that will give the neocolonial style its true nature. In the aforementioned 1915 text, he leaves no room for doubt about his position regarding the characteristic mestizo condition of HispanoAmerican art, on whose legacy a new Hispano-American architecture would develop in the twentieth century:

The Arab and Castilian genius, under the auspices of the Renaissance, transplanted by the bizarre conqueror to the American soil, began the evolution that was later to formulate the new archetype. In the flamboyant cities of the viceroyalty arose constructions of rancid Hispanic flavor, Mudejar arches, plateresque ordinances ( . . . ) a fusion, a wise communion was to be operated as the resultant of two powerful forces ( . . . ) although our admiration for the Spanish architecture is not the same as that of the Renaissance ( . . . ) although our admiration for the work accomplished, due to the just inspirations of the American artists, leads us to ponder and exalt its merit and creative force, we consider it indispensable to point out on the other hand ( . . . ) how well predisposed Spanish architecture was in the fifteenth century, that is, at the time of the conquest, to germinate in the American continent fruits of such precious originality ( . . . ).

A constant and methodical work on the study of Spanish and American architecture, based on classical knowledge, would perhaps be the formula, the true point of support from which our first essays could start. For the realization of these new programs the good intentions that guide the new generation of artists are well in evidence, given that to their zeal we owe the founding of this Journal, whose aims will pursue the generalization of knowledge and Americanist tendencies.20

Thus, the historical study of Hispano-American art and architecture would run in tandem with the very built experiences that would channel the neocolonial style in Ibero-American architecture in the first third of the twentieth century. In order to understand the flow in which these experiences took place, we must consider two fundamental milestones: the San Diego International Exposition (1915) and the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville (1929).

Opposite page, top: First page of the “Comentarios sobre el nacimiento de la Arquitectura Hispano-Americana,” Revista de Arquitectura no. 1 (Buenos Aires, 1915: pages 8–12). Bottom: Cover of the publication of Vicente Lampérez’s lecture, “La Arquitectura Hispanoamericana en las épocas de la Colonización y de los Virreinatos” (Madrid, V. H. Sanz Calleja, 1922).

of Seville

The San Diego International Exposition, called the Panama-California Exposition because it was organized to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914, opened on March 9, 1915,21 coinciding with the great Universal Exposition of San Francisco, held between February and December 1915. San Diego had reached 70,000 inhabitants at the time and was the closest US port infrastructure to the new interoceanic canal. The exhibition, which was attended by 3.8 million visitors, took place between March 9, 1915, and January 1, 1917, on the 640 acres (260 hectares) of San Diego’s City Park, renamed Balboa Park in 1910 in honor of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, Vasco Núñez de Balboa.

Architecturally, the San Diego International Exposition was destined to become an important test laboratory for the so-called “Spanish Colonial” style,22 known in North America as the Spanish Colonial Revival style, which would experience its period of greatest splendor between 1915 and the beginning of World War II, developing especially in Florida and California,

This page: San Diego International Exposition (1915). View of the facade of the Foreign Arts Building, a building of clear Hispanic affiliation by architect Carleton Monroe Winslow (1876–1946), located in the center of the main axis of the complex (El Prado at the corner of Plaza de Panama). In the foreground is the magnificent bronze statue dedicated to “El Cid Campeador” (1927), work of Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876–1973), erected on July 5, 1930, at the northern end of the esplanade of Balboa Park in the city of San Diego, in front of the new building of the San Diego Museum of Art (1926), work of the architects William Templeton Johnson and Robert W. Snyder. It replaced the Sacramento Valley Building initially built on this site.