Homage to the Spanish experimental scene

Amplified by a yearning for freedom in the face of cultural and social paralysis imposed by the dictatorship in place, these experiments converged with international experimental trends(1) of the moment: “Interaction with the environment," "spatial organization closer to the individual," "technological repertoires oriented towards lightness and transformability..." They remained, however excluded from the global debate: a general rejection of everything produced under that political regime(2) on the one hand, and the authors' own lack of awareness concerning the specific nature of their manifestations on the other, condemned the Spanish experimental scene to be overlooked and isolated. Added to this is the difficulty of identifying this production within the context of controlled freedoms, where there was a condition of silence and dissimulation for all experimentation. Spanish architects communicated their intentions by minimizing any openly flagrant changes to their work: "Everyone had become accustomed to speaking in a cryptic language, reading between lines, disguising what was being said behind the guise of ambiguity.”(3) The absence of critical discourse from the Spanish scene, exceeding the simple field of architecture, disconnected it from the global approach then lead by figures such as Archigram or Ant Farm.

The lack of recognition for the experimental expression in Spain is also due to a specific lack of visibility for the country’s domains of innovation. Work by Spanish architects— those Peter Cook would have qualified as "gradual evolvers”(4)— is heterogeneous by nature. International influences re-emerge in light of traditional architecture and the reality of construction, inducing an expansion of experimental territory, from the field of thought to that of materialization and vice versa. The hybrid character, combined with the isolated and dispersed nature of these practices has prevented a clear overall vision of the experimental scene in Spain, which still remains to be constructed.

After 30 years of cultural isolation, echoes of international agitation were heard in Spain during the last decade of the dictatorship (1965–1975). Though apparently punctual and eccentric, events such as the ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) organized in Ibiza in 1971 and the Encuentros de Pamplona in 1972 announced the emergence of the Spanish experimental scene. The Centro de Cálculo [Calculation Center], created in 1966, was certainly the most significant creative space at the time. Oriented towards new technologies, it was able to anticipate what was only in its gestation phase. It rapidly became a fundamental nucleus of artistic research where musicians, artists and architects converged to affirm themselves as a collective experimental structure, in a context where the gathering itself "had a particular, almost subversive signification."

The theoretical and scientific explorations around Language and creative processes were the most important research fields at the Centro de Cálculo. Relying particularly on the legacy of Spanish experimental poetry, it allowed writing to new experimental horizons, together with music and fine arts. Their operative strategies were also based on Max Bense’s information aesthetics and the generative grammar from Noam Chomsky "as a possibility of understanding and creative exploration."

The incorporation of the computer into the creative processes in music, painting, or architecture, clearly showed the need to logically and systematically analyze the languages of each discipline, to attempt to discover elements that intervene during the creative processes of each and formulate laws that "anticipate coherence.”(5)

The mathematical procedures used at the Centro de Cálculo allowed for primary forms to be automatically generated, and to obtain the geometrical schemes on which artists, musicians and architects founded their work. José María Yturralde, in Figuras Imposibles (1972–73) used multidimensional geometries calculated by a computer before transferring them into a pictorial space. He studied these structures as meaningful and emotional images that altered perceptual and visual experience while creating sensory conflicts. Among the architects, Javier Seguí de la Riva defined minimum living units according to the method developed by Ian Moore and Neville Longbone. He also created different spatial organizations (social order, biological order, cosmic order), so that all architectural configurations would derive from the aggregation of these units through determined laws governing their actions or manipulations.

The research done at the Centro de Cálculo supported experimenting with Spatial Systems of Organization for the habitat that appeared as a counter to functionalist, totalitarian, and inert urbanism. Conversely, they intended to refocus reflection about the individual so that everyone "could project directly onto the form of the city.”(6) During the second half of the 1960s, singular contributions in relation with the threedimensional module and its combinatory rules—systems of indefinite modular growth— allowed the generation of a more organic fabric of the city, at the scale of a Ciudad en el espacio [a City in space], a line of research mainly pursued by the Taller de Arquitectura.

Beginning in the 1970s, the experimental trends in Spain gradually diverged from systems of spatial organization towards large-scale climate control. The model of a habitat as an open-air technological encampment integrated into the imagination of a generation that sought to unite technology and nature onto the same level.

Faced with a more "vernacular" approach to the surrounding environment that addressed the interactions with local culture and knowledge acquired from experience, new postures of international influence appeared, that demanded a type of architecture capable of reacting to energy and information stimuli from the environment. Young Spanish architects, including José Miguel de Prada Poole or Juan Navarro Baldeweg, began research on a new concept of "sensational urbanism," in which architecture was fused with technology and where control is established directly via the association of the body and environment.

Both J.M de Prada Poole as J. Navarro Baldeweg explored complementary sides of regulatory architecture "constructed out of mobile, flexible and controllable components that auto-projected, in real time, according to the random states of the environment and the activities desired by its users,”(7) with foundations that can be found in J. Navarro’s El autómata residencial, and from which, J.M. de Prada Poole planned and built Structures of Variable Morphology,(8) or Casas Jonás agrupadas (Pneumatic shelter), as sensory organisms, ductile extensions of its inhabitants.

Their work on what will be called atmospheric insularities aimed at delimiting an air enclave and stabilizing an ambient difference between the interior and exterior spaces, turned climate into project. Artificial oases protected by cupolas were thus designed to maintain or transform the living conditions. Climate control technology aimed at imitating the immateriality of skin, tenuous, vulnerable, ever changing, which appeared from then on as the unique "possible condition" for life.

These techniques of controlling the environment thus allowed colonizing territories considered hitherto uninhabitable or hostile towards humans such as the desert or the Arctic. J.M. de Prada Poole imagined the conquest of "extraterrestrial" environments, not only as guarantors of human survival but also as a promise of a "happy arcadia" (Eros City, 1968–1970), or even as a strategy to protect the earth's biosphere against human action by transferring human life onto a megalopolis in orbit around the Earth (Milky Way, 1975).

However, the field of experimentation that became the most developed in Spain was constructive Invention and material Imagination. The work of architects like Miguel Fisac, explored the expressive capacity of the constructive processes right through its imprint on materials, accompanied by a second field of investigation on dematerialization through the development of light structures and envelopes. Emilio Pérez Piñero performed an original research on spatial, demountable and transportable structures, while José Miguel de Prada Poole’s work on the development of pneumatic shelter diffused in real time the most innovative, foreign contributions. These projects, besides their prospective dimension on a technical level, encouraged a new way of life and a renewed relationship with the environment, based on "provisionality, flexibility, transparency and emancipation.”(9) Built in Ibiza in 1971 during ICSID, a prototype of an ephemeral and nomadic city entitled Instant City, addressed the challenges of both the vital experience, arised from the immediacy of the relationship between man and his environment, and the grand collective experience associated with self-building, a principle that introduces labor, craftsmanship and collective engagement as an activator of new forms of coexistence based on creativity.

Via a view free from historical distortions, the Biennale hopes to present and unveil expressions born out of this episode in Spanish architecture, lines that structure them, as well as motivations and collective interests that inspired their birth. For the first time, a constellation of Spanish architects and artists is being represented for the experimental dimension of their work, allowing to create links and interpretations that weave a unique common narrative between those who were considered, up until now, as insularities or exceptions.

The Biennale’s invitation to architects from the contemporary Spanish scene, Amid.cero9, María Mallo, Ana Peñalba, Takk Arquitectos, MAIO, and their confrontation with historical figures, opens a debate on the legacy and specificities of experimentation in Spain. As architecture is increasingly demanded to establish direct contact with the physical environment and the importance of an artisanal materialist conception is reaffirmed, it appears urgent we revisit the lines of experimentation distinct to Spanish culture, marked by the deep interdependence between innovation and reality. These creative processes, where there is circularity between experiment and direct experience of the world—now more than ever—resonate clearly with our contemporary aspirations.

The rue Jeanne-d’Arc, an emblematic street in the city of Orléans turned towards its cathedral, presents works of Spanish experimental architecture at the heart of a largescale exhibition. The event hosted in a highly visible public arena breaks the silence that historically oppressed this period of the Spanish architecture, becoming a bullhorn for its voice. The flags lining rue Jeanne-d’Arc are ambassadors from afar that superimpose themselves to memories and customs of the city provoking exchanges, and constructing a new emotional landscape.

This encounter aims to unveil the imaginary developed by the protagonists of experimentation in Spain, but also to bring them closer to other contexts. In doing so, the heritage of these architects is re inscribed as part of a more global culture, not as an exception enclosed by its particularism, nor as an immediate consequence of external tendencies, but as a series of possible narratives encompassing the local and international, building bridges between the past and the new experimental models of production needed in the XXIst century.
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