A "discours aux achitectes"? ; ¿Un 'discours aux architectes'?

Abstract

Like Fernand Leger at the 1933 CIAM IV, I find myself invited to this conference as an interloper: not as a painter, but as an art historian among architects, to deliver, like Leger, a "Discours aux architectes". A few years ago I published a book that tried to present an overview of anti-modernism in France between the two world wars. My argument was —succinctly put–– that reactionary issues such as the return to the soil, anti-urbanism, the questioning of technology and their ideological corollaries— agrarianism, regionalism, Corporatism— had a profound impact not only on mainstream French culture but on French modernism in the aftermath of World War I. This was the country that although victorious had been destroyed was thus psychologically and historically most inclined to try to restore its patrimoine. The Great Depression had only intensified the French disenchantment with industrialization. The "rural" came to occupy a crucial place in the French imagination in the 1930s. All these tendencies, I argued, slid imperceptibly, into the Fascist ideology of Vichy. The one other European country that played a role in my account was Spain. Spain, I claimed, functioned for the French as a purer, benign, less-industrialized, alter-ego in the 1930s, and indeed in the "imaginaire" of both the political Left and Right. Spain was the antithesis to the overly industrialized and commodified society of the United States. ; El artículo retorna sobre el profundo impacto que produjeron los temas reaccionarios en la modernidad francesa tras la Primera Guerra Mundial. Para ello, considera el regionalismo en las permutaciones de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y explica sus diferentes significados en Italia y Alemania como base interpretativa para el caso de España. Aplica la distinción entre el regionalismo, el parroquialismo y el provincialismo, considera su susceptibilidad a las condiciones de neo-, pseudo-, y faux-, y diferencia los conceptos de hibricidad y eclecticismo Beaux-Arts. Estas condiciones llevan a su fin la distancia de la obra de Le corbusier con el regionalismo en los años 30. Después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial lo vernacular reemplazó al regionalismo y Gran Bretaña emergió por su posición insular respecto a la vanguardia histórica europea, que por su antagonismo entre el romanticismo, nuevo humanismo, nuevo empirismo, nueva pintoresca y el abandono atropellado vernacular del nuevo brutalismo, consigue crear una ruptura con los años de entreguerras.