To festoon a building’s surfaces, ornament has hardly any role, is given no place to invest within the brutalism of “Casa 1736,” completed by H Arquitectes in 2023. Simplicity and economy of means the firm opted for when conceiving it, precluded resort to decoration. Detailing bestowed upon the millwork, for example, has been put there to delight the attentive eye, not keep the inattentive busy, as decorative elements exist to do. Nor have the bespoke light-fixtures, another prominent item in this architectural ensemble, been designed that they might extrude themselves and steal the scene, beyond the proper role which their physiognomy does indeed play by summoning an association of ideas to convey the impression that these spaces are fortified. Perhaps, during the planning, this quality of fortification held decoration and the decorative urge most at bay: they and their indulgence would have been antithetical to fortification and its requirements. Hence, answering that aim, in the edifice as built the main material, concrete, actively repels decoration.
Fortifying: strengthening. To detract by ornament from the perception, conversely, would be to weaken the overall effect the building was meant to foster. Nearly a work of art in its own right, as an entirety the edifice hardly tolerates even the idea of serving as a backdrop for the display of other works, let alone the practice. No, these walls were made not to hang paintings on, but for their functional character which is best appreciated unadorned; the traces of construction, the marks of the frameworks into which the concrete was poured in situ, come best into view when bare, and thus in the aggregate they, these intrinsic striations, acquire something of the beauty of an abstract, a very abstract painting which draws more out of less.
Affixing works of art on the walls, however, might perhaps be done in some of the more private spaces, because in them the building is not nearly so palpable as an entirety, and then its own dissuasions are less pronounced. Accordingly, artworks could be hung here which in the end will or will not outlast the edifice but that now manifest in contrast to it the look of the ephemeral. Yet against even these backdrops they would run a dual risk, becoming ornament of the sort which mars and is marred by the surface behind it. Avoidance of this danger altogether is then probably the best, lest these pieces betray themselves and the rooms in which they are placed, devolving into the household trash one thoughtful architect more than a century ago abjured with a sharp coinage, ill-omened furniture (unglücksmöbel).*
* Adolf Loos, “Ornament und verbrechen”
But to avoid the topic of misfortune, since issuing prohibitions here cannot be my aim, let me opine about the type of art which might go well in the smaller rooms, and suggest that works in the vein of Informalismo,* prominent beginning in the nineteen-fifties as the Spanish variant of the Art Informel which took its first steps directly after the end of the Second World War in Paris,** whether paintings or objects less easily categorised, could perhaps find a proper home on these walls. Some pieces by the artist Antoni Tàpies, to whom an exhibition was devoted at the Reina Sofía in Madrid and subsequently at the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona, spring to mind in this connection. Although his works did not abjure all “form,” as those generic art-rubrics might suggest when hastily parsed, perhaps their “forms” are peers of the materials, coevals located neither before nor after, neither above nor below them in rank and possibly the order of time; so, if in fact they evince a rough equality of the matter and the form, this may align his art with the edifice sufficiently to be allocated a place within it. Such a modus operandi on the artist’s part would align with a programme by which at least the thicker walls were built with a crude grade of concrete made on the premises (els grans murs s’han construït amb formigó “pobre” fet a obra), mixed of very little cement and a selection of sands and gravels (molt poc ciment i una selecció de sorres i graves) to yield a monolithic, very robust substance (una solució monolítica molt robusta), that the perimeters meet the requirements of function, insulation in particular, while they also remain porous enough (prou porosa) to help maintain conditions inside the building within a pleasant range. The material that accomplishes all this does not efface the marks made by the processes of construction, imprints of the techniques for compacting and solidifying it, but shows the traces and thus its own character too, displaying the quality of form united to it, in an architectural embodiment of unlikely beauty.
* vide Jorge Luis Marzo and Patricia Mayayo, Arte en España, ch. 2,
“El informalismo, el estilo liberador” and “El informalismo español”
** vide esp. Jean Dubuffet, “Notes pour les fins-lettrés,” and
Michel Tapié, Mirobolus Macadam & C ie and Un Art autre
La construcció en tàpia consistia en l’execució in situ per part dels tapiadors de murs a través de la compactació de la terra crua dins d’un encofrat que s’anava desplaçant a mesura que el mur anava creixent.
— Ferran Estrada i Bonell and Fabien Van Geert,
“Les contribucions de l’arquitectura tradicional a la
construcció del paisatge,” “L’arquitectura productiva,”
“L’horta i les planes de regadiu”
Pointers, moreover, the architects suggest, came from old modes of construction. Thus, mixed of various coarse materials, the building’s concrete was applied by a compaction technique much as with walls of rammed-earth (aplicada amb una tècnica de compactació similar a la de la tàpia).
Tàpia, a venerable composite material known to rural and small-town architecture in Catalonia and beyond (in Spanish the word is written without an accent), stood model for “Casa 1736” along the concrete walls of which, the striations telling just where the edges of the frames it was poured into were, a plain beauty is revealed. Not so poor a venue, then, if only in the smaller rooms, to place works by Tàpies.
More than might otherwise happen with a brutalist building, this version of the substance and the mode of giving it a form,* brings a serene quality far from all that is onrushing, even a hint of momentary timelessness, into this metropolitan domicile. The small irregularities traced with some regularity on the walls, do not merely stem from the coarseness of stone and sand, but also show a likeness to stratifications known from geology. Whether this similarity was intended by the architects, one hesitates to say. – “Figurative,” in any event, the wall-patterns are not: if the “representation” does “suggest” earth-strata at all, it remains “abstract.”
* The English term “rammed-earth” only approximates the reference of “tàpia.”
Augmenting, indirectly, the overall impression the building makes, materially and formally, the tàpia techniques do imply that some portion is subterranean, by an inference from the markings on the walls. Yet this illusion would complicate the architects’ programmatic hope that “Casa 1736” be urban or urbane (urbana) and thus a house that aims to restore the rapports with everything around us (una casa que intenta recuperar les relacions amb allò que ens envolta). Why, the domicile itself might then be heard to ask, inwardly, should a city “surround” an urbane existence, whether ours or someone or something else’s, rather than stand at a distance from it (even vertically)? Must urbanity always profile itself as part of a whole that is the city? Could a link of another kind connect and separate the two?
Considered not as being a part of the city but as linked to it in another manner, a house might prove able to restore its and its residents’ relations to everything – to all that is set at a remove from them, not situated around them on every side and encircling – englobing them continuously or intermittently, statically or kinetically. What a city sought to ensnare, some better type of rapport could rescue or retrieve.
Misuse of spatial metaphors beyond what they and their prepositions can sustain? Well, “Casa 1736,” an artwork in its own right and nonplussed (to personify it) even by the idea of hosting most visual art within its walls, may help to clear the point up. Because the porosity of the deliberately “poor” concrete should regulate and stabilise the acoustics of these spaces (regular i estabilitzar l’acústica dels espais), the quality of the material itself would call for the treatment that thoughtful architect proposed, in order by an acoustical mystery to improve its very substance, and therewith the rooms’ resonance, lastingly: much good music ought to be played in them to bring about its sonic impregnation.* Once this effort is underway, they will gradually become more suitable as locales for performances, and although none might ever rise very far up in the ranks of venues for chamber music, nonetheless their share of urbanity increases, precisely as the aural insulation distances them from the city by which they, accordingly, no longer are surrounded. Separate from and perhaps still more urbane than the city itself, they could renew or restore as deemed proper their urban connections.
* Loos, “Das Mysterium der Akustik”
Encompassed by a building as an insulating ensemble, its spaces are remote from the city outside. These rooms the urban exterior does not “surround” (envoltar): it is not their “environment.” – Ought it be called one at all? Cities remain externally distinct from their constituents, yes, but these relations the word “around” fails to describe. Imprecision could convey impertinence, for, applied to them heedlessly, that term or its variants might come across as a slap in the face, or even worse.*
* If, as has been alleged, pronouns give offence, why should prepositions not?
Not least because they are delicate, individually and in the aggregate (it need not be a whole), these rapports invite reflection (they can arouse wonder). Moreover, let me submit, tentatively, such consideration does uphold that afterthought to the common notions of civilisation and culture, urbanity. – Urbanity is also an attitude. As such it can become visible, tangible, audible, embodying itself in realities noted here or there, now and then within the city. Elsewhere too they are strewn about! Which are the observers who know beforehand how they will find them? Much urbanity even the littlest items may harbour. Many are the surprises of the urbane.
Unannounced they can overtake one anywhere. However, without self-reflection bestowed on its relations, the rapports whereby the urbane are coupled with and distanced from themselves (whether people, things, works, etc.), could urbanity itself still thrive long? One suspects it would not, but then, because all these scenes do evidently persist, spread throughout the cities more of this self-reflection exists than one thought at the outset. With such a number of urbane entities, the sum of their relations seems immense, and so reflection on them is inconspicuous in more than one way. How would anyone detect it, where, and when? – salient questions, especially if, like the architects of “Casa 1736,” one seeks it out in the same manner as it presents itself, inconspicuously. Urbanity usually skirts excesses of attention.
Yes, perhaps not merely the rooms within a building, but the latter as an ensemble can qualify as urbane. Likewise coupled with and distant from the city, for it too the latter is no “environment,” nor would that elastic notion “around” be any less misleading, misplaced, mistaken. Each such ensemble, furthermore, might in some sense be older than the city, to which its rapports evince a character other than dependence, unlike those that tie the parts to the whole when all is said and done. In this case both the city and the building sustain and nourish the other, though as complements. And if these relations burgeon, the result can be non-synchronous.
Barcelona, built up from antiquity on, contains immobile items and elements of architecture that are older, whether inconspicuously or in other ways, than the city. Urbanity and its relations, therefore, along with the reflection without which they would not long continue to be, exist here for those who know to find them.
Architecturally ancient is the Via Augusta. It has remained from the Roman times, continuing to arrange the urban space there where it runs and in its vicinity: in so doing the route exerts an influence far more than nominal. Thus, in various ways, the quality of its age registers still today, though of course most of the constructions alongside, atop, in and on it are of more recent date. The very survival of the Via and its name furnishes inter alia a pledge of continuity to the city, while the sheer fact of this endurance strengthens urbanity further. Then, at just this carrefour of ideas, the existence of untold moments of reflection moves into view, while behind them resound scores of immemorial histories of self-reflection on the urbane. For, variously configured as are its spaces, were they not accompanied throughout by the urbane’s reflection on them and on itself – note how this last thought wells up nearly as an ἀναγνώρισις! – none of it would ever have come abidingly to be.*
* Hopefully all this will persist recognisably under the hallowed place-names or their variants wrought subsequently by the very slow natural action of time.
Relatively recent in Barcelona, to be sure, yet manifesting the solidity of that which seems always to have been there already, are the large swathes devised on a grid, though these were built frequently with the city’s characteristic choice of diagonals rather than sharp corners at the crossings of the streets, which with this become more like meeting-points or places to loiter than intersections strictly speaking. Such an extended exercise in city-planning was as though tailor-made for flâneurs; and so, evident throughout all this construction is an idea, or rather, it all is an idea rendered into materialised form, and this idea thus deposited is itself older than these zones of the city. What idea is it? Anyone who knows something of history will recognise its provenance immediately: it hails from the plan for Paris devised and implemented beginning in the early years of the Second Empire and followed long after as a model, even into the Entre-deux-guerres. Zones of a city so arranged are built as habitats for urbanity, and thus also as occasions – better, springboards for the self-reflection about it, the consideration without which all that is urbane would soon melt into air or wither away. Or rather, when regarded from an angle whereby their best aspect comes to the fore, as it might have been in their heyday, such was seemingly the raison d’être at their inception; though how far urbanity became a reality and a topic of reflection subsequently, insofar as it was embodied in the layout of these zones, modelled on a Parisian pattern, is another question.
More or less as old as those zones, or even somewhat younger, are the examples of the Art Nouveau Barcelona is renowned for, Modernismo (the term may perhaps give rise to confusion). These buildings, it seems, did indeed aim to foster urbanity, if only in that they would not relate to the city as a part to a whole, but made every effort to distance themselves from what no longer were their “surroundings.” The fantastical integrity of some of these edifices, and those by Antoni Gaudí above all, consisted largely in underscoring the separation. Each did so exuberantly, with an overall impression that at first comes across as very conspicuous and yet which soon enough passers-by cease to notice so distinctly; what then stand out are some of the details, while the thinking about the urbane that accompanied the building’s conception and indeed helped to bring it to fruition, is shielded from too obvious an exposure. During such an edifice’s young phase, a few years had to pass before those details, especially the more flamboyant, were copied with a bit of variation by other buildings, in an homage which made patent their ornamental character, not well noticed until then. After a number of such repetitions, the Modernismo they instantiated was made démodé, while more particularly these borrowings started to exert a retro-active effect to the detriment of their sources, drawing out into the open something previously latent or even nearly non-existent in them, their – sit venia verbo – gaudiness. But the salient point is not the denouement as such, but rather that developments like these already were foreseen by the thinking about urbanity without which Gaudí would not have conceived his buildings. In his case, covertly, the self-reflection intrinsic to urbanity proved to be, in a word, prescient. And, I submit, covertly this prescience has long held the ornamental details in check, a delicate endeavour given what surfeits of them there are; even today it saves these works from the consequences (in the evocative Loosian term the “crimes”) that would otherwise have engulfed their overfull exuberance. Thus has the presentiment coeval with these buildings been amply rewarded. Lodged since their inception in them, peer to the eccentric qualities of beauty, anticipatory thinking it is which has sustained his ensembles’ power of attraction, their interest.
Let me stress that urbane self-reflection extends beyond the thought-processes of individuals. It too has its results. Items built, constructed, designed are amongst them: all results which, immobile or otherwise as they may be, in their turn can elicit further thinking. Precipitates of reflection on urbanity, in other words, and even if one finds it less than simple to formulate the ideas in them, the challenges posed during their interpretation are there to be overcome, as though to suggest that whatever things one does with these materials, they will amount to more.
Buildings, perhaps to bypass their immobility, imbue urbanity with energy by the thoughts that depart from them, without fixed course or destination, like flâneurs: the more discreet, the better may each fulfil its métier. What a criterion of vigour!
Fugitive as may have been some of the impressions made by pieces in the exhibit I mentioned before (occasioned by Tàpies’ centenary),* all the more so as the set of those displayed varied between Madrid and Barcelona, nonetheless several were loitering around (here the preposition is apposite) the topic of urbanity, pointing it out, discreetly, from their various angles, though not all at once. The attention they gave it, however, became most noticeable when the show at last arrived back in the artist’s home city, the artworks set against the native backdrop of its way of life.
* Alicia Pinteño (editor), Antoni Tàpies: La pràctica de l’art
To fathom the artist’s œuvre, one should not ignore his flexibility in the day’s large political questions* – his availability (disponibilidad/disponibilitat) regarding these affairs, some might call it. Indeed, amongst the urbane such a posture is frequent, and it may have taken him far, all too far. Yet since only a few of his works really seem to involve the thinking about urbanity which interests me, my focus remains narrow as regards him.
* vide e. g. Marzo, Arte moderno y Franquismo,
“1960. Formalismo y libertad” and “Una vanguardia colaboracionista”
Nor shall I venture comparisons, well-indicated though they may be, for instance between his ethos and the Art Brut espoused by Jean Dubuffet, an older peer, or between his methods and the brief sessions and the giant canvases “informally” preferred by Georges Mathieu, a near contemporary – even if a comparative approach might describe the maturing of the quasi-musical artistry of Tàpies.
That the artist himself was no stranger to the thinking a sight met by chance while afoot in the city might summon – open to the pleasures of a more cerebral sort of flânerie – one photograph featured in the exhibition catalogue evidently suggests.* (Assuming, of course, that the moment was saved by the lens, not staged.) Here legibly to be seen are the wheels of thought turning in Tàpies’ mind, set in motion by the rudiment of an unintended pattern on a wall, seemingly an insignificant phenomenon most other people would never notice as such. (One could wonder by what were those markings made. Ornaments they are not, clearly, but perhaps remnants left by crime.)
* Pinteño, p. 84 (“Antoni Tàpies observant una façana, Barcelona, 1954”)
Though the temptation is large to try out various theoretical notions on his works, as if by invoking modish constructs past and present one will attain the height of urbanity, the effort most likely would end pretentiously, and so I shall eschew it. Hence I do not suggest that the “informal” character of his art generally, and more particularly its deliberate resort at times to elements that are ugly, opens a portal for the spirit of negation or the force of negativity to enter into a civilisation or a culture that has slowed down, become stationary, grown stale, in order to enliven them dialectically, if only in the shape of comic relief, that their development may accelerate again.* Neither will I say that the lowly, cast-off materials featured in a few works have been included precisely on account of their duality with respect to systems of order, as some anthropologists contend, falling outside these collective frameworks which are both mental and practical and yet able to establish them anew.** Nor should I, transfixed by an “altérité innommable,” aim to analyse what the disgust signifies which some of these works seemingly arouse with their choice of materials redolent of viscous things or waste substances, mud, mire, etc.*** No, if his works are urbane, and at least a few might be, another approach is called for.
* compare Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetik des Häßlichen, Einleitung
** consult Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, esp. ch. 10
*** vide Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur
Theoretical hors-d’œuvres one after another could defer the plain meal of this art, finally supplanting it entirely. – Si us plau, no! – Another hunger can awaken with the air of antiquity wafting through a number of these works, the feeling that long, very long affiliations sustain them. For instance, when some opt for the colours of Attic vases and vessels, black, ochre, and white, the reference will be grasped by better spectators, while the memorable quality of those ancient objects, transferred over by the borrowing, enlivens the “informal” canvases, bolstering their urbane attitudes towards the provenance of civilisation and culture, tied amongst their other Mediterranean sources back to Athens at its acme. Urbanity appears, on the viewer’s side, inconspicuously, when anyone recognises these borrowings as such, i. e., what they are and where they come from, while granting it remains obscure what the artist’s aim in introducing them was, and why he did so: this urbane attitude involves holding in balance an awareness or even clear knowledge of discrete items and a discreet acceptance that much does remain undetermined. Barcelona, beneficiary of a lineage stretching back to antiquity, built up on the model of the capital of the nineteenth century during the Belle Époque, may move urbanity like this to prosper and flourish, whether urbane people are meandering through an art museum or a gallery, or afterwards out afoot in the city, reflecting on the visit at leisure. A humane repast! All the more troubling, then, whenever their sophistication, relatively unobtrusive and understated in comportment, is disfigured by fashionable ideas heedlessly applied to it and its objects. Ornaments those would be, gaudy in the better cases and deliberately criminal in the worse.
Unchecked, time and theory might make an ornament of everyone. Urbanity and its art can apply a brake; perhaps then other thoughts, other tendencies could pick up speed. – But this is unseemly speculation. – Let me turn now to three paintings, and firstly to one which makes a foray unusual for the artist into very bright blue.
Antoni Tàpies, “Pintura blava amb arc de cercle” (1959)
Though the title offers a key to what the painting may depict, comprehension does not actually require it. As one possibility, this is an arched portal opening onto a body of water, though one abstracted in the rendering, which would augment one’s sense of peering at a sharp angle down at the waters and the things which appear to float there. But remarks fit for the subject-matter of impressionist paintings are out of place as regards this one; urbanity could respond to it in another manner. Why not ask instead what could be arriving at or departing the docks of the city, if not ships singly or in something like a flotilla? An issue perhaps of some importance, and not only commercially. From the back of an urbane mind (or else fathoms down on its ocean-bed) and drawn out by this painting to ponder, there might be a version of one bit of ancient wisdom, salvation comes via the sea. Of course it is an ambiguous message, for the deliverance could eventuate in an awful peace of the graveyard, and this intimation reverberates back upon the painting itself, whose form then does change before one’s eyes, with the arched portal one saw at first now resolving into a tombstone. (Oh, a blue tombstone is a peculiar sight, true enough, but reveries of theory alight on even stranger things.)
The city figures rather obviously in the second painting, indeed at least twice, in layers juxtaposed to one another. Most evident is what seems to be the front door of an apartment building, noticeably worn down in the course of years, damaged and defaced by vandalism or other destructive acts, yet still solid and functional.
Antoni Tàpies, “Construcció amb línia diagonal” (1966)
Quickly, however, this sight and the angle it is seen from do change. As if unfurled and regarded from above, it resembles (so one imagines) the rough sketches and modelings for a first plan of the municipal grid, that bequest of the Belle Époque. Akin to a document of the city’s archæology, rendered on a horizontal plane, then mounted on a wall: an entrance of another sort, a portal is opened onto the topic of the bases of some zones of the city, the architectural programme by which streets were laid out and the superstructures that are the buildings erected. Reflection on this subject and those close to it soon brings one to consider the diagonal line cut through the blocks set up on the grid principle. One then notes the broad avenues thus arrayed, and above all the one whose very name states its orientation, were inked in atop an underlying, regular pattern, perhaps not as afterthoughts, but possibly as late acknowledgements that a grid-system as such (regardless how the several streets may happen to be named or numbered) constitutes an antithesis to a thoroughfare meant to accrue a history of its own and to perdure sempiternally, much like the Via Augusta. Hence there was superimposed over the urban grid, in contrast, even in full contradiction to its sheer regularity, at least one such avenue.
Insulated from the outside, it seems in a room without windows, are the elements of a setting shown in the third painting. Nor does one see any doors, or where the corners if any might be, not to mention people; and the lack of definition arouses a sense of foreboding, as if some occurrence soon shall take place, or it has already.
Antoni Tàpies, “Ni portes ni finestres” (1993)
As graphical elements, the plus-sign (if it is one) and the three crosses (or letters x) augment the idea and the feeling of a funerary event. Perhaps this room remains as it was after its occupant has gone? – or, in a more sinister vein, had it been the scene of a crime, locale of a murder or suicide? Without a body, of course, one can do no more than guess, and ape the puzzling poetry of detective fictions. A better urbanity might then intervene, routing the train of thought in another direction. Something has been done away with here, yes, but must it be someone? Why not instead an idea: defunct is the very notion that the city surrounds every part of it as the whole otherwise known as an environment. Those concepts, imprecise as they were, have been rubbed out. Now there is room enough and space to think anew about the rapports which both distance and connect items of architecture, a building, an entrance or exit, a door, etc., to the city which one can or cannot say is their coeval. Even the tracery of architectural form in a cast-off object, this refuse of industrial production adding another layer of relief (disorderly, even comic) to the surface, relates to the city when it is so considered. Out in the city, any such hint of imagery might suggest an archway; at a remove from it, an impassible gate.
Enclosures on and against whose walls likenesses of things outside may become legible: at least one philosopher has had words for them. Zones, whether observed in two dimensions or in more, to enter which not a little must be abandoned, can seem disconcertingly strange on a first acquaintance. Yet that anyone ensconced amidst those inward semblances refrain from taking them to be furnishings, or worse, take them for granted as ornaments, an urbane attitude could intervene to turn it all inside out. Interiority, if this term is not hopelessly outdated, might then find itself at home in the open, propelled into motion amidst city streets which in accord with urbanity it makes more hospitable (if not less the scenes of crimes).