No Pasarán! Moneomentality for our times : on the work of Rafael Moneo

• What's in a name? First name Rafael alludes to a message from Up There. Surname Moneo is Latin for 'I remind' and also 'I admonish'. Seldom can an oeuvre lit ils maker's name as well as this - at least, when we consider Rafael Moneo as a builder of monuments. Adolf Loos considered tombs and memorials to be the only kinds of architecture that could be classed as art. In all other respects, the duty of architecture was to be useful. He took this standpoint because he wished to free architecture from the countless pseudo-artistic compulsions that obscured the true nature of the craft. Measured against the bloodless functionalist rhetoric of the Modern Movement, the influence of Loos' ideas was overwhelming. In declaring war on Ornament, Architecture seemed to be saying goodbye to Art. To judge by their words, the members of the architectural community actually came to believe this was what they had done. But in retrospect, were they not deluding themselves? In its highly successful role as purveyor of universally lifeless slabs and boxes, Modernism looks not unlike a movement for the promotion of the necropolis. lts crowning product has been the dormitory suburb, with apartment blocks like serried ranks of tombstones, modular facades like neatly stacked funerary urns, and a population piled up as though already resting on the Far Side. Parallel to the early Modern Movement, there were still some traditionalists who wilfully resorted to the monumental. Architects varying from the social democrat Berlage to the fascist Speer designed consciously monumental structures to express higher artistic principles. That was their job as artists, after all. And it was not long before some architects within the necropolistic ranks of Modernism became aware of a need for a similar, explicit monumentalisation of the anonymous slab. We can see traces as early as the forties. For Giedion el. al., the sober visual programme of the architectural gravediggers had become a little too successful. Post-Modernism has pursued this idea of the monument as a unique work of art, developing it into what urbanist Bernard Huet called 'a fist in the belly' of the contemporary city. So this was architecture's aesthetic answer to the ethical plea of Adolf Loos (an answer Loos provided himself anyway by his own monumentality and his wish to express pro· grammatic 'moods'). Loos warned architects that il they fel! they had to make art, then they would find themselves restricted to those areas where image and function were identical (and where it also served as a physical and spiritual receptacle for the past), namely the tomb and the memorial. In that case 'architecture' would no longer be concerned with life and the world and would thus have abandoned ils utilitarian function. But in an age marked by extreme specialisation and social compartmentalisation, the role of the artist is a much more attractive one than servitude to utility. Only the artist is free - and you don't give up a position like that for an ethical revival, even if you do choose to suggest the opposite. Loos thought that having drawn his distinction, the conclusion was simple: live in truth. But subsequent generations of architects preferred to live in falsehood rather than give up being artists. Hence the necropolises and the monuments.This view of Modernist architecture is admittedly a provocative one and we could obviously sketch a different, more flattering version of the history of twentieth century architectural utilitarianism (a version which has many more adherents). We could also define the role of the artistic calling in architecture differently. But if we can point to anyone whose preference for monumentalism fits our version of history, then it must be Rafael Moneo. 

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

The Invisible in Architecture

Rafael Moneo

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