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Reconstructing Ruins: An Exploration of the Grotesque in Mid-twentieth Century American Architecture
Helen Thomas
Architect (Liverpool University). Has taught Architectural History and Design at University College London, University of North London, Winchester School of Art and Middlesex University. Currently doing a PhD in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex
Introduction
There is an essential interval that occurs in the life of the meaning of an object or place. During this time it has no substantial import in the present, acknowledgement of its presence is suspended and it is less significant than it has been previously. In the mind of the perceiver it produces a response of emotional ambivalence; the object is grotesque. Barnett Newman was fascinated with the grotesque and its usefulness, displaying his hand whilst discussing the growing aesthetic appreciation of pre-Columbian art ... as works of art rather than as artefacts of history1 This inaccessibility of original meaning and the impulse to disregard it anyway had been noted a hundred years earlier by another influential American, Henry David Thoreau2: One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels, he says, but is it out of choice?
The 'return to origins' that has been so important and so controversial for thinkers in twentieth century America, both North and South, is really the key to this discussion - but the question is whose origins were they referring to, and where could they come from in a place so new? Origins are especially ambiguous and complex in a New World, as America was, where an intense awareness of the value of discontinuity and difference from Europe was combined with a simultaneous denial and fascination with a 'defeated' indigenous culture. The outcome was a sometimes defiant, often utopian and self-conscious attempt to create a rupture from the Old World, whilst at the same time reinterpreting the old as an articulation of the new. There is an implicit rejection of linear historical development and progress in this intention, which challenges perceptions of geographical unity and coherence stemming from a Eurocentric view of the world.
PART ONE: EXCAVATION
Only that which has been conceived can be seen: but that which has
been conceived has been invented3 quotes Edmundo O'Gorman,
reflecting upon the origins of America and the reconstruction of Mexico
in particular. Some of the fruits of the American land were the archaeological
ruins hidden beneath hills and woodlands, most especially in MesoAmerica
and including El Pedregal. Acknowledging them involved a process of excavation
and reclamation, construction and reconstruction. This was both explicitly
physical in the sense of recreating objects and places and actively conceptual
in the sense that they represented an ancient, mythologised past that
could be used in the construction of new national identities. In Mexico
this process was very clearly on the post-revolutionary political agenda,
essential in the making of a new mestizo nation inhabited by a 'cosmic'
hybrid race. The rebuilding of ruins such as Teotihuacan both preceded
and ran concurrently with the rebuilding of a history. In the process
of reconstruction the condition of their existence was fundamentally transformed
from mythological, magical, mysterious place to a site of scientific discovery
and cultural reconstruction. New origins were invented, imagined before
they were rebuilt, and reconstructed for a new audience. In North America
the necessity for these ruins was less obvious, but no less important.
During the twentieth century reuse of local and MesoAmerican artefacts
in both a visual and a formal sense was prevalent, as we shall see.
Until the nineteenth century pre-Colombian artefacts and ruins in MesoAmerica
were generally ignored, especially by the Spanish. When they were acknowledged
they were reviled - horrible, abhorrent, fascinating, in other words,
grotesque. Sometimes they were hastily reburied, so disturbing was their
presence and its implications. This response was both aesthetic and cultural,
since they represented the barbarous and primitive religions of pre-Hispanic
Mexico (evoking images of hearts being ripped out on altars for example)
which still resonate in contemporary histories. Oriana Baddeley looks
at this phenomenon in her thesis on the Cacaxtla Murals whilst contemplating
the relative obscurity of the Aztec and Mayan ruins for three centuries
during colonial rule. As she points out, they only emerged as sites of
investigation in the nineteenth century, whilst acknowledgement of aesthetic
validity and a Mexican art history only started to emerge at the beginning
of the twentieth century4.
Frank Lloyd Wright
One of the first architects to exploit the charged value of ruins previously
only interesting to archaeologists was Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959).
This attention to America's past manifests itself in two essential qualities
of his work. A building's physical location was important to him both
visually and culturally. It involved his passionate interest in the idea
of 'nature' (in the tradition of nineteenth century transcendentalists
like Emerson), and it was also geographically specific. This belief in
the importance of ground and site is evident in his challenge to the 'old
English Colonial tradition' in his RIBA lectures of 1939 on 'Organic Architecture.'
He stated that there was an American alternative to the idea of the 'Classic'.
This new architecture -an earnest search for reality was to be
based not upon the old traditional ... Pseudo-classic architecture
(that) ... really hates the ground and looks as though its did so.
It was to spring from the premise that any building that is built should
love the ground on which it stands5. His critique was against a classical
heritage based upon a formal historicism, unmediated by the present and
its location. He was also reacting to contemporary art practices in Europe
that focused upon the abstraction of these very conditions. Terence Riley's
critical analysis of Wright's relationship to Modernism6 looks at how
this was represented in an architectural sense by the International Style
and the work of Le Corbusier, advocate at least in principle of the tabula
rasa - the opposite in conception to Wright's idea of site.
If we look selectively at one of Wright's sources (he was very eclectic
throughout his life) - pre-Columbian ruins - we can detect an emerging
acknowledgement of the usefulness of archaeological artefacts, and their
release from a grotesque existence. That an idea, object or building was
original to the American continent, both 'authentic' and preceding the
classical origins of European colonialism, was important to Wright. This
reference is evident in his early 'pre-Colombian' houses in California,
such as the Hollyhock House, 1917-21 and the Freeman House 1923-4. These
buildings have very particular relationships with their sites - their
formal courts, terraces at different levels and ambiguous boundaries are
analogous to the isolated and compact worlds of the ruins to which he
was referring. These substructures constituted a 'landform' language
that acted as an architectural extension of the natural topography and
connected the temple to the earth7. He described them as:
mighty, primitive abstractions of man's nature ... the ancient arts of the Mayan, and Incan, and Toltecs. Those great American abstractions were all earth-architectures: gigantic masses of masonry, great stone paved terrain all planned as one mountain, cosmic as sun, moon, stars.8
Wright was also interested in the decorative surfaces of Mayan buildings. Later references to pre-Columbian architecture draw from the more familiar vocabulary of surface pattern and decorative relief. They extended to the superficies of the ruins, which he saw as being a plastic extension of their structure. He incorporated this idea in his own conception of the organic - by more plastic we mean the building treated as a whole instead of manifestly being joined up of many features and parts. In organic building nothing is complete as the part is merged physically into the larger expression of the whole9. During 1923 he developed this idea as a means to making structural planes, which he called the textile block construction system. He made several houses during the twenties using this system, including the John Storer and Charles E. Ennis houses of 1923-4.
During the twenties, at the same time that Wright was exploring the potential of pre-Columbian architecture, a more populist fascination was flowering in California and the South. It was generated by the reproductions of Mexican ruins made for various national architectural competitions and exhibitions, including the Panama-California Expo of 1915. This is known as the 'Mayan Revival Style'10, used most commonly in buildings for popular entertainment - like the Aztec Theatre at Eagle Pass, Texas, and the Aztec Hotel, Los Angeles 1925. Originally designed in the 'Egyptian Style' it was transformed after the architect saw Frederick Catherwood's book of 'Ancient Monuments in Chiapas and Yucatan' 1844. The Mayan Theatre was consciously designed as a pastiche of decorative elements depicting the exotic spirit of the highest culture reached by ancient people. It was considered grotesque by the press of the day.
Defining a Place - National Histories
In Mexico concurrent interest in pre-Columbian architecture took on much
more serious overtones. The reproduction of Mayan ruins had been prevalent
since before the Revolution, during the Porfiriato, in the construction
of a self-consciously 'national' architecture. The Mexican Pavilion at
the 1889 International Exhibition in Paris and the Monument to Cuauhtémoc
are two important examples. The primarily agrarian Revolution of 1910
(-21) in Mexico provided a new opportunity to recreate the country's history,
which was enacted through a transformation of the urban environment in
particular. The use of ruins now played an important part in the reconstitution
of a Mexican identity. One of the most interesting examples of this neo-Indigenism
in architecture is the Mexican Pavilion designed for the Seville Expo
in 1931 by Manuel Amabilis. Constructed to represent Mexico to a European
audience at the place of origin of Mexico's colonisation, the use of pre-Columbian
motifs was both powerful and defiant. It was a building intended to be
both exotic and hence grotesque in its unfamiliarity.
The most influential project excavating and reconstructing pre-conquest
Indian culture was that of the Muralists in the twenties and thirties.
The intention was to make an art that ideally was of, and communicating
to the people of Mexico. The deliberate removal of the sites of their
paintings and murals from the private and privileged place of the home
or gallery to the public realm - schools and academies, town halls, the
National Palace, the airport was part of this. The studios of Diego Rivera
and Frida Kahlo were full of artefacts both ancient and modern, their
paintings dominated by popular cultural references. Rivera, with Juan
O'Gorman as technician, built a large, pyramid-like Indigenist museum
at the edges of El Pedregal during the thirties. This was called Anahuacalli,
made to contain his vast collection of Indian art and artefacts.
The native Indian tradition subsequently became a model for the socialist
ideal of an accessible, public art that presented a unified vision of
Mexico. Denial of the academic references to the indigenous characteristic
of the Porfiriato was important. As Siqueiros stated We must absorb ...
the constructive vigour of their work, in which there is evident knowledge
of the elements of nature whilst at the same time avoiding the lamentable
archaeological reconstructions (Indianism, primitivism, Americanism) which
are so fashionable today and which are leading us into ephemeral stylisations11.
The use of indigenous culture as a tool of historical construction in America was not limited in geographical origin to Mexico and the South. At the beginning of the twentieth century in North America a vogue for Native American Art started, that was to reach its peak in the thirties. In 1931 the 'Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts' was held at the Grand Central Galleries in New York, and permanent exhibitions were set up at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of the American Indian. At the same time the cultures of the New Mexican Indians were gaining increasing attention amongst the art community, centred on the town of Taos. Pueblo life offered a communal, utopian alternative to the competitive and individualistic approach to life encouraged by industrial capitalism, and a colony of artists and intellectuals, including Georgia O'Keefe and John Collier. In the Canadian west the painter Emily Carr used the connection between the land and indigenous culture extensively in her work. She portrayed Canada through the Indian motif, using myths and artefacts - house poles, masks, and ceremonial objects - not in the European sense as exotic, but as an exploration of their intrinsic relationship with the semi-wilderness where she lived12. The country that she was painting was a land in transformation, however, not timeless as it seemed - industrialisation, population expansion and new settlement, road construction and tourism were breaking down the ethos of preservation by isolation.
Reclaiming the Grotesque
Later, during the forties and fifties, the North American group of painters
called the Abstract Expressionists used Native American and pre-Columbian
art as a basis for their own work. They, more than anyone before, exploited
the discontinuous meaning of 'primitive' artefacts13. Their primary concern
was with the powerful aesthetic value that they had as grotesque objects,
intrinsically different from the modern, the political and the civilised,
closer to nature and the essence of man's existence. They were a brutal,
violent means of reconstructing modern man, separate from the rational
world: spontaneous, existential, beyond. Through their work they ostensibly
found the sublime within themselves.
The Sublime is now wrote Barnett Newman in 194814, drawn to the
grotesque and sacred properties of ancient artefacts and their sites.
For him their indeterminate and hidden meanings were essential, transcending
the present; their ugliness and distortions of taste disrupted the desired
harmony of refined judgement and accepted canons of beauty. His purely
aesthetic perception of the objects denied the prosaic, anthropological
meanings that had previously defined them. Rather than confirm the material
nature of everyday life that archaeology was concerned with, he used the
interval of meaning that they embodied as a means to explore the separation
of man from his physical world.
PART TWO: EL PEDREGAL
Developing from this discussion of the use of ruins and ancient artefacts
in American architecture, in both their grotesque and reclaimed manifestations,
we will now explore these issues in the context of a specific site. This
place is the vast and previously uninhabited lava field of El Pedregal
at the south western fringes of Mexico City. Product of an eruption of
the volcano Xitle about two thousand years ago15 the land here is an uneven,
seemingly uncultivable hard rocky covering, a ground surface hiding secrets.
El Pedregal has played an important role in the imagination of Mexico
City's inhabitants as a place on the edge of civilisation, product of
a natural disaster the possibility of which is a constant threat. Ancient
stories about it talked of the 'fuegos fatuos' (will 'o the wisps) and
the 'brujas' (witches) which inhabited the desolate, lonely and silent
wastelands16. More recent mythology stems from the rocks as home to bandits,
criminals and revolutionists. The pyramid of Cuicuilco lies at its eastern
edge, the most important of the remains found of the archaic period around
El Pedregal from 1884 onwards17. Others were discovered in nearby mines
at Copilco and Tlalpan. There is no surviving tradition of the culture
before the eruption amongst the Indians, and all artefacts subsequently
remain open to speculation and invention. Before its appropriation by
the city in the mid-twentieth century it was a place to be feared and
avoided, a location that encapsulated all the qualities of the grotesque
noted by Oriana Baddeley in her discussion of Mexican archaeological discoveries.
The only seemingly willing inhabitant was the painter Gerardo Murillo,
or Dr. Atl as he liked to be known, who was fascinated by Mexico's volcanoes.
Jardines Del Pedregal 1944 - present
Dr. Atl was a friend of the architect and developer Luis Barragán,
initiator of the most famous architectural intervention into this place
that was called Jardines del Pedregal. In 1943 Barragán saw an
exhibition of photographs by Armando Salas Portugal which introduced him
to the aesthetic possibilities of the lava fields in their raw state.
Captured in an extraordinary white light, the exotic plants and shapes
appeared strange and enticing. He bought several of these photographs
for his collection and began a collaboration with Salas Portugal that
was to prove very productive as the development of Jardines del Pedregal
accelerated. Barragán's physical interventions into El Pedregal
began in 1944, when he made several experimental gardens within these
striking landscapes where he would lounge with friends like the painters
Diego Rivera and Chucho Reyes, and the historian Edmundo O'Gorman.
His initial intention was to keep its strange sort of beauty to himself
but he was soon to relent, initiating the development of a large part
of El Pedregal as a luxury residential area in 1945. The sublime and grotesque
qualities that had previously been such an unfavourable aspect of El Pedregal
became its charm. The volcanic rocks themselves were very important within
the gardens and the small number of houses which Barragán was involved
with. Overwhelmed by the beauty of this landscape he said in his Pritzker
Prize address, I decided to create a series of gardens to humanise,
without destroying its magic ... melted rock by the onslaught of powerful
prehistoric winds18. His concern was with the ground surface itself-
the qualities that made it uninhabitable. Its aridity, unevenness and
vast scale were fascinating. He countered this with fountains, steps,
and lawns experienced with the huge space of the lava field, viewed against
the volcanoes in the background.
Barragán's intentions for this ancient place did not anticipate
its destruction even as he determined its destiny. His dream landscape
lasted barely more than a decade before the momentum of profit -driven
development inundated the rocky surface. Sometimes, as in the house on
Avenida de los Fuentes that he built with Max Cetto, they would be an
integral part of the structure, penetrating the domestic interior. Artificial
horizontal surfaces acting both as foils to the rugged surface of the
rock, and as facilitators to its inhabitation, were equally as important
as his famous, much reproduced walls. These surfaces were composed through
various different means - perfect green lawns flooding the spaces between
rocky outcrops, with the lava itself sometimes formed into pavers, tamed.
Juan O'Gorman's House, 1956
At around the same time that Jardines del Pedragal was taking off, the
architect Juan O'Gorman (brother of Edmundo) began to construct an unusual
dwelling for himself at the edges of El Pedregal, in the village of San
Ángel. He called it a shout of protest in favour of humanism in
this mechanical desert of the 'marvellous civilisation' which we live
in today19. Very different from the highly aestheticised work of Barragán,
unafraid of the visually unsophisticated, it more directly embodied the
qualities of the grotesque as a denial of the very European rationalism
which had so fascinated O'Gorman fifteen years earlier. This house of
Juan O'Gorman's was, for him, the most important work of his career -
his 'fantasy house' - an act of defiance against the 'new academy' of
Mexican modernism. In an essay entitled 'Sobre la Arquitectura en Mexico'
written in 1967 O'Gorman describes the International Style (and presumably
the 'Functionalist' ideals which so impressed him as a solution in his
early buildings) as having become an 'academic style', taught in schools20.
Acknowledging Wright as he denounced Corbusier he made a curious translation
of his ideas of an organic architecture and plastic integration.
The focus of the house is a cave transformed into its principal space.
Almost grotto-like, the surface of the rock is covered in a layer of coloured
mosaic tiles that follow the contours of the cave even whilst obscuring
its surface. This cladding is purely decorative, connecting the site to
the house through its narrative, composed of an iconography both directly
and indirectly connected to El Pedregal. References are made to the extraordinary
flora and fauna of the place, whilst at the same time connections to its
cultural history are made through images of a pre-colonial past and its
mythologies.
The house is very much one of Thoreau's stranded vessels. Bought by one
of the young conceptual artists beginning to make works at that time,
the sculptor Helen Escobedo, the mosaics were painted over and substantial
works done to 'humanise' the disturbing aesthetic of the house and its
site. Interestingly Escobedo had recently been involved in the creation
of the Espacio Escultorico in the grounds of the nearby University. This
work was itself a fetishisation of the lava surface. In this case the
ground was scoured of vegetation and surrounded by a large circle of triangular
concrete monoliths that formed a contemplative space similar in scale
to the pyramid of Cuicuilco. For O'Gorman however, like Newman, it was
the ugly and the difficult which were important. The indeterminate and
hidden properties of the archaic cultures to which he was making reference
were essential and transcendent, their jarring distortions of taste disrupting
harmony. His bizarre mosaic wall surfaces had moved a long from both the
popular muralist project and the aesthetic fixation of Barragán
in their private references to another world.
CONCLUSION
Evident in the stories told here, whether situated in the context of the
American continent or focused on the specific site of El Pedregal, are
two very different scales of meaning. On one hand this reading of the
use of the grotesque falls within the vast scope of the philosophy of
history. It reflects the "use of ancient materials to construct invented
traditions" which interested the English historian Hobsbawm in the
context of Imperialist Britain as it desperately defined itself to new
and errant colonies21. E.H. Carr is another English historian concerned
with the meaning of evidence and artefacts, and the frailty of their relevance
as Historical Facts through time22. Our argument here seems to suggest
that the labelling of ruins, the naming of artefacts and the making of
knowledge by archaeologists, historians and others concerned with giving
meaning, claims them for the colonising culture, in this case the Spanish.
The bestowal of purpose negates the more local, mysterious and elusive
world which can exist during the 'interval of neglect' that Jackson refers
to.
But what of the minutae of the local and the personal? Is it always a
different, less coherent story that emerges - one that can begin to change
the reality of the larger scale, which is more concerned with the objective?
The stories of El Pedregal make connections between the two scales: Edmundo
O'Gorman's work as an historian uses the Imperialist framework for his
analyses of emerging American and Mexican identities. He also talked for
long afternoons with Barragán in his volcanic rock gardens, exchanging
ideas with Rivera and others. Another of his roles as a successful academic
was that of Juan's envied brother, and Juan's slightly embittered autobiography
dwells upon Edmundo's close relationship with his father23. Juan's posthumous
revenge, however, is his recently discovered importance within Mexican
culture as the architect of Rivera and Kahlo's studios and the UNAM library
(Enrique Krauze's new book on Mexico mentions him and not Edmundo, for
example24 making him more famous outside Mexico than his brother, for
the time being.
Notes
1. Newman 1990: p. 63.
2. Thoreau 1989: p. 11.
3. Heidegger 1961: p. 73.
4. Baddeley 1984.
5. Wright 1970: p. 9.
6. Riley 1994: pp. 32 – 54.
7. Fletcher 1996: p. 672.
8. Wright 1996: p. 38.
9. Wright 1962: p. 56.
10. Ingle 1984.
11. Siqueiros 1989: p. 155.
12. Tippett 1991: p. 86-99.
13. Leja 1993: pp. 49-121.
14. Newman 1990: p. 170.
15. Carrillo Trueba 1995: p. 48.
16. Fernández de Castillo 1913: p. 149.
17. Gamio 1920: p. 127.
18. Barragán 1996: p. 206.
19. O'Gorman 1973: p. 296.
20. O'Gorman 1973: p. 264.
21. Hobsbawm 1996: p. 6.
22. Carr 1961: pp. 7 –31.
23. O'Gorman 1973: p. 69 – 147.
24. Krauze 1997: p. 549.
References
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Barragán, Luis. 1996. Official Address, Pritzker Architecture Prize. in Rispa, Raúl (ed.) Barragán London: Thames and Hudson
Carr, EH. 1961 What is History? London: Penguin Books
Carrillo Trueba, César. 1995. El Pedregal de San Ángel Mexico City: UNAM
Fernández de Castillo, Francisco. 1913. Apuntes para la Historía de San Ángel y sus Alrededores Mexico City: Imp. del Museo de Arqueología, Historia y Etnología
Fletcher, Banister. 1996. A History of Architecture London: Architectural Press
Gamio, Manuel. 1920. Las Excavaciones d"el Pedregal de San Ángel y la Cultura Arcaica del Valle de México. The American Anthropologist vol. 22 pp. 127-143
Heidegger, Martin. 1961. quoted in O'Gorman, Edmundo The Invention of America Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1996. The Invention of Tradition Cambridge: University of Cambridge
Ingle, Marjorie. 1986. Mayan Revival Style Albuquerque:
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O'Gorman, Juan. 1973. in Luna Arroyo, Antonio (ed.) Juan O'Gorman Mexico City: Cuadernos Populares de Pintura Mexicana Moderna
Newman, Barnett. 1990 'Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture' pp. 61-66, 'Northwest Indian Coast Painting' pp. 105-7, 'The Sublime is Now' p.170. in O'Neil, John (ed.) Barnett Newman. Selected Writings and Interviews New York: Alfred A Knopf p.63
Riley, Terence. 1994. Frank Lloyd Wright - Architect New York: MOMA
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Thoreau, Henry David. 1989. Walden - A Short Story of Life in the Woods Princeton: Princeton University Press
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