Beatriz Colomina is a woman who radiates energy and vitality. With an intelligent and close smile we began this interview, which followed the conversation we had with Mark Wigley a few minutes before in the The Populist bar at the Alt-Bomonti cultural complex in Istanbul. This interview is a result of last autumn's Biennial, but it is also much more, and tries to know better one of the most interesting and influential women of our contemporaneity.
Q. question. José Juan Barba
A. answer. Beatriz Colomina
A. answer. Beatriz Colomina
Q. Congratulations, Beatriz. I came here being skeptical of a design biennial. I did not know what I was going to find here and after seeing the exhibitions in its different venues and hearing how Mark Wigley and you, as curators of the biennial, have explained it, I was very pleasantly surprised.
A. Thank you very much.
Q. I would like to start this interview by looking back a little and asking what was the context in Barcelona when you became an architect and what motivated you to go to the United States.
A. Yes, yes. I think it's important to go even further back because, in fact, as I'm sure you know, I'm from Valencia and my family currently lives there. I could have studied at the School of Architecture of Valencia. In fact, I started to study architecture there, but I had always wanted to know what existed beyond my hometown. I was not very satisfied with the Polytechnic School of Valencia, a school that had just opened, a school that was very intellectually poor. My father had been dean of the old school of architecture.
When I arrived in Barcelona I felt a huge liberation. The university had a longer history and was much more complex in terms of what was politically happening at the moment being. From the beginning I found myself gravitating towards the Department of History and Theory, of Urbanism... Where all the controversies of those moments were being forged. There was Quetglas, there was Ignasi de Solà-Morales ... there was this really fantastic group of teachers that opened my eyes to a world completely different than the one I had in Valencia.
That planted a seed, once you move from the place where you have been born, you are capable to make any other leap. That was what allowed me, to some extent, to make to make the leap from Barcelona, where I had already done everything I the place could offer.
Q. It was complicated to be a woman architect at the time.
A. In Valencia I was the only one in my class. It was amazing, when we started the program we were 2,000 students, because it was a polytechnic type of program, the German type. In the second semester we were only 200 students left and then I was left completely alone, there was absolutely no other woman. There were only 20 of us left in the third semester, and once again, I was the only woman there. So I said to myself "I'm leaving this place”, not because I had no friends, on the contrary, but because I felt claustrophobic.
When I arrived in Barcelona and saw that huge university with 5,000 or 6,000 students, you were no longer anyone. That was very liberating for me. You had to develop yourself, and you really did it through your work, not because people knew you.
Then I started working at the departments of Urbanism and History and Theory, in fact translating Tafuri with a friend who knew Italian perfectly. We started translating two texts for the department, and before I graduated I was already working. The department of urbanism hired me the same year that I graduated,. And you know how things work in Spain: once you are a full time assistant professor as I was, then you go up to an assistant professor... So, I did not leave Barcelona because I had no job. I had a job, I actually had a job that many would desire.
"The United States, despite what they say, is a much more sexist country than Spain"
Q. And so, what makes you leave to the United States?
A. I had the feeling, at that moment, that there was a world beyond that was important to know. In fact, I made several attempts of going abroad. First, I tried to go to Paris. Then I made another request to go to the AA. Neither came out. The third attempt was successful, but also by chance.
I went to New York one summer and stayed there for a month. A professor at the school, Rubert de Ventós, had said to me, "Since you're going to New York, meet and say hello to my friend Richard Sennett”, and I thought, "This Rubert, how am I, practically an architecture student, going to say hello to Sennett?"
I stayed at the house of a friend from Barcelona, a very nice house located in Washington Mews, which is a small street with very low houses. My friend told me "do you know who lives in front of me? Richard Sennett". I thought that was a sign. Living Sennet in front of me, it was not so difficult anymore to cross the street and say hello to Sennett.
He told me very nicely to come in his house. You know how Americans are. He told me about his Institute for the Humanities which he organized at NYU. It was a very interdisciplinary place, atended by people like him, but also like Carl Schorske, who had written "Vienna at the End of the Century" or Susan Sontag, which later became a fundamental influence for me... there were a lot of people involved. There was Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who had written "Journey, the Train Story", which was a fascinating story, there were writers... There were many of people.
I told him "well, all of this is very interesting" and he replied "if you are interested, you could come a year and I become a fellow,” and I thought "what does that “fellow” mean?". So, I came back to Spain in July, when an scholarship from the Ministry of Education and Science was about to reach its deadline. I asked for it and in August they told me that they had granted it to me. Then I called Sennett and I said, "Well, I do not know if what you told me was a joke, but now I have a scholarship" and he said, "Yes, yes, come, come, because I can make you a fellow." Then I entered the program. That experience opened my eyes to a completely different way of doing research.
Q. So, this is the field on which you focus. More oriented to theory, knowledge and thought. The pertinent question is not only how you made the leap to the USA, but what do you do after your Spanish academic training, especially focused on projects. The risk is not only to cross the ocean, but also, in a sense, your reinvention from that previous training.
A. We had all done architecture projects, the finishing project of the degree was very important, and the approach was obviously as you say, in architecture. But there were also other role models that I had already set my eyes on, also by my own identity. My father was a professional architect who taught at school, and I wanted to differentiate myself from that.
So the attraction I felt towards the field of theory was also very important to me, because it allowed me to define myself. I recognized myself in figures like Quetglas, a thinker, a writer, a teacher... I also recognized myself in Ignasi de Solà-Morales, who had an architectural studio... And thinking about it, Tafuri also studied architecture, Frampton. There was, of course, no woman among all these models.
Q. All these models, your context at the time, are clearly men. How does a woman invent herself, how does she claim her space in a context so mentally open but so closed in a matter of gender? I mean, your thinking, your process of thought, your way of how to focus and what you have later done and demonstrated, is uniquely different from the processes that your male colleagues could have done at the time. How did you feel in a male context? ?
A. Yes, it can be. I mean, I took me a long time to be aware of that. In Barcelona I felt perfectly fine, in fact I have already told you, that when I was studying, despite being many fewer women than men at the architecture school, I did not feel marginalized at all, but on the contrary, empowered. And in fact, when the call for two places in the Department of Urbanism as an assistant professor came out, there were a lot of people who wanted them and it was two women the ones who got them: Ada Llorens and I, so it seemed to me that there was no problem on that issue.
When I arrived in the United States, I thought it was only for one year. At first I did not realize it, but the United States, despite what they say, is a much more sexist country than Spain. It was at the USA where I realized that there actually were barriers, and that I had to deal with them. From the institute, I went to Columbia University as “visiting fellow” with another La Caixa scholarship. I got a scholarship from the ministry, and I stayed at NYU with Richard Sennett and this small and completely interdisciplinary group that completely changed me in the way that research. This group handled literature, painting... my best memories are from this moment, because in many ways, my working process still comes from there, it was incubated in that center.
Q. There has always been the discussion about the divergent positions each generation of architects choose, looking some groups looking to the French/Anglo-Saxon, while others tend towards the Italian/Germanic worlds.
A. When I was studying I did not see it that way. When I studied in Barcelona, I was only interested in Italy. I was very close to Tafuri and the whole world of theory. While the group of which I was part, the "carrer de la ciutat", which came out just after Franco's death, was only looking towards Italy. France a little, but specially Tafuri...
Q. In that sense, the discussion between the North of Italy and the Anglo-Saxon world, Banham vs Rogers, when you arrive in the United States...
A. This was “Arquitecturas Bis”, Barcelona-Milan-New York. This was the connection. For us, the center of the world was in Venice, around Tafuri, while I was also connected to Frampton and to the whole group of Peter Eisenmann through Bohigas, Solà-Morales... with the whole world of "Oppositions" because it was a world of "networks" like the contemporary one of the magazines.
Q. Every important figure of the 70’s could be found in "Oppositions". When you see any of the photos around those elongated tables we can see all the main current figures.
A. I did not arrive to the USA until the 80’s, in 81. 1983 was the last year of “Oppositions”. Of course, I arrived on time to a lot of things from the Institute. It was a place where everyone from around the world came to give lectures, there were exhibitions of Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi... all these figures that you had studied in Barcelona giving lectures in New York.
Q. In that sense, your academic training was made in a public university and when you arrive to the Anglo-Saxon world, you find that the most important universities are private universities.
A. Columbia.
Q. Well, you have continued in your advance, you are in Princeton now... A student is always left in front of the question of whether a public or a private university is better. It depends on the European or American context, the contexts change everything, how do you live that duality, especially in moments of such radical changes in the privatization of education as it is today? For a hypothetical European architect, what is their different vision of the public and the private? In the United States, I think that Virginia is the best public university regarding architecture, and is only placed as the fifth in rankings.
A. Of course, and public ones are moreover also very expensive. Because, for example, California, UCLA and Berkeley that are state-owned, are still expensive in relation to what public universities cost to the students in Europe. That is, they will not cost $60,000 like Princeton or Columbia, but they cost $15,000, which is not precisely for free, nothing is free, so there is a very radical change.
In Barcelona I was already teaching with 23 years. They give you a diploma and the next thing you do is to step on a platform in front of 300 students. When I arrived in New York while doing my thesis research, they asked me if I wanted to give a seminar because Kenneth Frampton was giving one and that year they had admitted more students than the usual, 25. The students then protested that the lessons were no longer a seminar, but a class. Then the university decided to divide the group in two, twelve for Frampton and twelve for me, and that's how I began to teach them. 25 seemed like an awful lot to them for a seminar, and that is the way I trained myself, giving classes to small groups.
In America it is not so much a matter of money. In fact, all Princeton students have a scholarship. This is something that many Spaniards do not know. The difficult part is not to pay, but that the university admits you, because there are many people who request it and very few vacancies. They are private universities that on paper cost a lot of money. In reality, it is not like that. In Princeton and in Columbia they pay for everything.
Q. Well, in fact, this is a comment that shows a certain university bubble problem, how to pay back the credits?
A. These are the ones that pay, of course, but this is a problem of the United States in general, college is when they really get most of their debt. The reason is that unless your family really needs it, you do not have much help, except at Princeton, where there are scholarships even for undergraduates. But when you get to Graduate School you already enter with a lot of debt, which is hard to pay.
Q. Going back to your career, I was really interested in knowing a little about the construction of your own identity, that is, in what sense do you come to an especially critical reflection? One of your first texts that I met is your reflections on Ellen Gray and her House E-1027, her relationship with Le Corbusier... A relation also studied by Yehuda Safran from a different point of view. If I am not mistaken you expose certain misogyny from Le Corbusier towards a figure like the very Ellen Gray. What is it that makes you focus on that issue? It is not easy to find out. What makes you approach these type of topics?
A. By chance, like everything in life. In fact, it was not my first writing at all, I had already finished "Privacy & Publicity”. I had the manuscript almost finished when I found myself reflecting on a something I had written: for Le Corbusier the process was more important than the project itself. In fact, he drew and redraw projects he had already built and we know about. You continue to find drawings and sketches after the completion of the buildings, that is, the process continues.
The footnote said, "and this does not happen only in his architecture projects, but as well in other works, such as the murals he made in Cap Martin, in the house of Eileen Gray, who continued to draw and redraw all his lifetime". I finished the book, and when I was about to send it to the publisher, I found myself standing in front of that footnote and I thought, "But you can not leave this here, what does the drawing of those murals even mean? That is very different from redrawing projects". Pulling the thread, I discovered that the murals were in that house, that Le Corbusier had not asked permission to make the murals, and that Eileen Gray was obviously very angry because she considered this drawing as a violation, that all these murals he painted came from drawings that Le Corbusier had done in Algiers ... I mean, the whole episode begins to look like a soap opera. Then, I move a part of the note to the text where it has more space to grow, I begin to add details and I think "well, this is already another book, as is eating the chapter up" and I realized that this is one of the things that happen when one is finishing a book.
"In Spain is not so much a matter of gender, but a matter of social class"
Q. That you start the next book...
A. That it is necessary to stop at some point. This became a story that I developed when I had the first opportunity to publish, I called it "Violence and Space". There is where I developed this soap opera like relationship between Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier, which, by the way, has nothing to do with Yehuda’s approach. This type of start of a new book also happens after I gave "Sexuality and Space", the conference I gave at Princeton in 1992 and that became the book "Sexuality and Space". This book is also interdisciplinary and comes from many people from other fields, such as cinema, anthropology, literature, etc.
Actually, when I came to the United States, returning to the topic of feminism, among the artistic groups that were important to me were the "guerrilla girls". They calculated all the statistics of what a woman had to do to be exposed at the MET (to be naked on a painting), or at the MoMA... they opened my conscience to a reality I had not noticed.
There was a very interesting director at the library of Columbia University. She was born in Mexico, being the daughter of a Spaniard who had to exile during the Spanish Civil War. She was a fascinating woman, I talked to her a lot and one day I told her, "I always thought that in Spain they would be much more sexists than here, but I realize now that women here really have a problem.” Which is more than explicit, when the society cannot still tolerate the idea of a woman like Hillary Clinton, perfectly prepared. ”For example, there are no women at Congress. You can appreciate the barriers that still exist in relation to Spain, or with another European country, and this situation increases at universities". She then told me something that blew me away and in which I had not thought previously: "of course, this is because in Spain is not so much a matter of gender, but a matter of class." This affirmation really surprised me.
Actually, when I came to the United States, returning to the topic of feminism, among the artistic groups that were important to me were the "guerrilla girls". They calculated all the statistics of what a woman had to do to be exposed at the MET (to be naked on a painting), or at the MoMA... they opened my conscience to a reality I had not noticed.
There was a very interesting director at the library of Columbia University. She was born in Mexico, being the daughter of a Spaniard who had to exile during the Spanish Civil War. She was a fascinating woman, I talked to her a lot and one day I told her, "I always thought that in Spain they would be much more sexists than here, but I realize now that women here really have a problem.” Which is more than explicit, when the society cannot still tolerate the idea of a woman like Hillary Clinton, perfectly prepared. ”For example, there are no women at Congress. You can appreciate the barriers that still exist in relation to Spain, or with another European country, and this situation increases at universities". She then told me something that blew me away and in which I had not thought previously: "of course, this is because in Spain is not so much a matter of gender, but a matter of class." This affirmation really surprised me.
Q. It is always necessary for someone to see these situations from the outside.
A. Sure, that's probably true. Or rather, that barrier is so strong that the second one has no significance, and when it breaks it’s easier. I did not realize that because we are not aware of what does not affect us.
"Playboy did much for the acceptance of architecture and modern design in the United States"
Q. Another exhibition that has made you, not more popular, but more visible, is the "Playboy" exhibition.
A. “Clip Stamp Fold” had also a lot of impact. And later "Radical Pedagogies", which won a prize at the Venice Biennale ...
A. Yes, that was wonderful. Did you visit it in Barcelona?
Q. Yes, I went to see it, although I have to admit that "Playboy" raises different issues: like gender and habitat. It focuses around a situation of a certain degree of conformism that changes when is put under the prism of something that provocative, like Playboy. Does this make any sense, or did you work with other parameters?
A. Yes, it does totally make sense. Moreover, an exhibition is now open in Barcelona by Rosa Ferré and Adélaïde de Caters, -who is another student of Quetglas- called "1,000 square meters of desire" at the CCCB. I participate in it as a consultant of the 20th century .
"Playboy" is very important, it did much for the acceptance of architecture and modern design in the United States, which had always been a country quite reluctant to modernity. In fact, only a very elitist minority accepts modern architecture after Johnson's exhibition on the "Modern Style". Unlike Europe, Americans are very conservative in their relationship with architecture. Precisely at a time when all the magazines like House & Garden, House Beautiful ... promoted this conventional house and targeted housewifes and ladies in general, Playboy targets men without any shame. It then becomes acceptable that man is interested in interior decoration with the only condition that the interior has to be modern. Seduction is not Victorian architecture anymore, seduction is modern architecture. At that moment Playboy begins to have a huge diffusion - it gets to sell seven million copies -
Q. I can imagine... it's like magic.
A. There is actually a huge amount of architecture and modern design in Playboy at a time when America was very reactionary. For example, House Beautiful launches a series of diatribes against Mies van der Rohe and all European immigrants which resonate with today's times: "they are going to destroy our way of life", "they bring this modern architecture where nobody can live in"... It was at that time, when many criticisms of modern architecture from the most conventional magazines concentrated when Playboy says, "no, no, what is really modern is..."-
Q. And how do you get to all of that?
A. Completely by chance, as always. In life, everything is pure chance.
Q. Well, they say that inspiration has a flat ass.
A. I was investigating, as you know, the magazines of the 60s and 70s. I had invited Chip Lord, one of the survivors of the group "Ant Farm", to come to Princeton. As usual, he then sent us his CV, I read it and I said “how curious, Ant Farm was published at Playboy", but I left it as a curious thing.
Hans Hollein, who was also part of "Clip, Stamp, Fold", came to Princeton as well. He told me the story of when he went to Moscow to interview Leonidov or Mélnikov, I do not remember, to prepare a special issue in their magazine about the situation in Moscow. At the end he thought that the easiest thing would be to take away all Mélnikov documents in the suitcase and to reproduce them later. He told me that when he arrived at back the border with all this material he was confiscated... I feared that the documents of Mélnikov... but his Playboys.
Then I started to understand why a whole generation was wearing Playboys around. Why did they read Playboy? On the one hand, of course, there were the women, but on the other, Playboy was also a super progressive magazine. It was a magazine that had interviews with Martin Luther King, with Malcolm X, with Jean-Paul Sartre, with all the most important figures of the moment. It was a really important magazine because from its beginning, and I'm talking about the year 1953, when other conventional publications criticized Mies, they publish Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies… the entire generation of the 50's. It makes Saarinen, the Eames accessible to the general public... and suddenly you realize that in the 60/70 they take that leap and start to publish things like "Ant Farm", totally avant-garde architecture. For example, the MoMA organized an exhibition about the "New Domestic Landscape", where they present Archizoom, Superstudio... Two weeks later, Playboy already publishes about it, achieving a huge diffusion, with women sitting in chairs that spice it up, color printed...
"Design is the instrument through which humanity becomes itself"
Q. Forgive me the comment. Rem Koolhaas must have looked to it when he decided that he was going to publish in Taschen instead of elsewhere.
A. Koolhaas was fascinated by this Playboy research.
Q. I had no idea, but I can imagine. In that same period of Playboy there are a series of actions that I think can be relatively perceived in this Istanbul exhibition: the first exhibitions of the Smithson: "This is Tomorrow". There are quite a few parameters of those exhibitions that can be seen at this biennial.
A. Mass culture...
Q. The search for the primitive and the vanguard...
A. Pop, British pop, ads with breasts as well...
Q. The contemporaneity of the moment, in what sense does it have continuity with their line of discourse? And in what sense has this exhibition of the Biennial of Design changed, compared to that of the Smithson?
A. I think the Smithson here, now that you mention it, are of vital importance in the sense that they are architects who also saw the primitive in the modern. That is to say, that they truly lived their moment, they collected "advertisements". As Alison said: "but today we collect ads".
After World War II, precisely due to the catastrophe it represents and the atomic bomb, many of them, from Kiesler, who writes "Magic Architecture" to the Smithson and the Forum magazine group in Holland, return to the primitive. Even a historian like Giedion, just after the war and after having written about modern architecture and industry, shifts its interests to the caves of southern France. They are all interested precisely in antiquity.
Q. All this relationship between the old and the new, the new visions about femininity or the new opening that new technology entails, how have you translated it in this exhibition?
A. I think there is a parallelism between that generation that lived the Second World War and the possible destruction of mankind with us, now that we are aware of the fact that our existence on the planet may not have much time left. We are living in a moment of such a crisis that it is necessary to return to our origins as a species. How have we come to this, as humanity, as a species, how have we been able to reach this level of self-destruction? We are surely the only species among animals that has managed to destroy itself. We are on the way to create a planet that will be uninhabitable for ourselves.
Q. In which we lose identity?
A. Not that we lose identity, but that we cannot breathe. We are extinguishing.
Q. There is one thing that has interested me a lot, and it is the reformulation of the concept of place posed in the 70s, based on the relations of the individuals between themselves and with the space. In this sense, at the exhibition that you are proposing, the protagonists are not objects, which would have been one of the first things that could have disappointed me, but it focuses, on the contrary, on the individual.
A. Yes, and on the visitor himself. In that sense, the exhibition pretends to be a mirror. The visitor sees himself in that mirror.
Q. That is to say, you surpass the concept of place that arises in those moments, surpassing the condition of space, to identify architecture and design linked only to the conception or ideation of the individual as such.
A. Exactly, design is the instrument through which humanity becomes itself.
Q. But that is a very radical affirmation.
R. Do you think so?
Q. It not that I believe it, it is. In the schools of architecture, they still speak of space as a unique parameter, not even talking about the place, the people, the condition of the people, or the ability to influence the design of cities and in the design of architecture... such approaches are still in question. Here you are posing it as something much more obvious.
A. Yes, yes.
Q. I do not know if the exhibition really seeks to generate more questions than answers.
A. Obviously we seek to generate more questions, rather than to find answers. But at the same time there is a clear question, we do not simply design objects but the objects design us. Design is at the beginning of mankind. But we do not mean it in the sense that it has always been said of "man designs tools: man designs tools and in that action, he distinguishes himself from animals”, which is not true because animals also have created instruments: monkeys, ants ... is not exactly that, but rather the opposite. Objects design us, have a much more radical sense in our case.
Q. Well, this is a fantastic ending to the interview, Beatriz. Thank you very much.
A. You are welcome, I am always delighted to speak with you.
