This visual itinerary starts from perplexity and hope. Perplexity is caused by the moment of the world, a loud confusion that we strive to hear and pretend to understand. Hope comes from the endless bank of contemporary images, a fascinating legacy w
The optic metaphor of Álvarez Bravo serves to present the wide array of reflections and glances that pretend to offer points of view when they only bring confusion. Chaos has indeed come to be so much in fashion that it served to name a perfume, but
From the vantage point of Spain’s visibility in the 1992 of the Olympic Games and Expo, and the 2004 of the economic and cultural boom, three generations of Spanish architects and three works by foreigners in Spain serve to test a taxonomy of the eye
An elegy that should be written in awareness of its nostalgic nature, because in this carnival the exact eye of the ophtalmologist has been transformed into the equivocal eye of the mask, and the dominant eye of modern ambition has given place to a h
They have to be, because today’s bullring has no space for the laughter of Democritus or the tears of Heraclitus: our sensitivity is closer to the shy smile of Menippus or the bitter lucidity of Aesop, the two skeptical models with which Velázquez re
History begins at home, and hopefully will end there too. Born in a house, as many others my age, and uncomfortable with a modernization of life which has transformed the common, shared place into a specialist space, banishing births and deaths to th
¡ The shelter of Caspar David Friedrich sums up, in its snow-capped geometry, the parasol and blanket of Goya: textile architectures of thermal comfort set against the bright bubble of the bonfire. Cabin and campfire belong to architecture’s childhoo
Taut’s bright Utopia is present in the ecological fantasies of the sixties, both in their fundamentalist and ruralist version and in the realistic one of urban renovation: the energy crisis – as before the political and social crisis of the ancien ré
Nothing expresses the American dream of the 50s as well as the fashion model on the threshold of the Eames house or the paradigmatic marriage grasped by the lens of Julius Shulman in the Case Study House 21 by Pierre Koenig. That domestic and innocen
The unanimous suburbanization of the globe, from the hypercapitalist United States to the post-communist Russia, has a front of grass and a back of asphalt, built as it is on a tangle of motor highways that only clear out in the parking lots around m
The old canonical modernity stripped architecture of desire. Reduced to a concise cell, the rational dwelling expels from its realm the dreary paraphernalia of objects, the suffocating design of interiors and the pretentious exterior display of chara
When the family shows its belongings, the house reveals its condition: not so much an architectural object but a container of life and its objects. Furniture shows the routine of use and the memory of the body; a shiver runs through us if exposed to
The most common variety of residential fiction is the classical simulacrum. Madrid’s example is pedagogical, because the contrast between the anorexic elegance of the structure and the bulimic solemnity of the prefabricated classical orders is repeat
As primitive hut of industrial modernity, the container combines the two founding myths of functionalism: standardization and mobility. Behind the multicolor stacks of containers, the standard dimensions and mass production materialize old architectu
If architecture has become a dream factory, it is not only because its fictions compete with those of films in shaping the symbolic imaginary and mythical geography of the planet; it is also because its oneiric forms shape the amniotic universe that
We pretend to keep organizing the world with the geometry of the eye, but contemporary landscapes are subordinated to the double discipline of density and movement. Human reason interprets the environment with the same tools that it uses to make it u
The landscape is humanized by geometry, and that apparent paradox bears the seeds of its dissolution. Mathematical order, whose tautological and abstract nature is so far away from the organic, is however the clearest sign of human intervention on th
The city is at once the product of composition and of construction: the almost metaphysical mannequin of Grosz presents with a mutilated gesture an urban fragment built with the mute ashlars of geometry, and the articulated puppets of Léger show with
The romance between modern architecture and the automobile was just an adventure among youngsters born around the same years, and who claimed to have the future in their hands. But the conquest of the world by the combustion engine radically transfor
If seen in small images, what sets Jodhpur, the blue oasis in the Indian Rajasthan desert, apart from the famous 1:500 model of the future Shanghai? One could say that color is more important than density in differentiating these two Asian cities, lo
The most radical utopias of the second half of the 20th century have ended up converging with the theme city. In a world colonized by technical reason and mass entertainment, the popular demand for leisure and fantasy has crystallized in childish cop
At first sight, the situationist New Babylon and the spontaneous cities of Archigram belong to opposite universes: the archipelago of fragments into which the phsychogeography of Guy Debord transforms Paris, or the tortuous branches of Constant’s uto
The McDonaldizacion of the world does not exclude cultivated architecture, as the work of Venturi shows well. Together with Scott Brown, he has taught us to look at Las Vegas, Disney or Atlantic City in a different way, and his scholarly populism has
In contrast with the pop flair of Las Vegas, which increases the scale of everyday objects to turn them into advertising icons, but using rather similar construction methods, Disney miniaturizes architecture to take us back to childhood; Michael Grav
As violent reply to the kind world of the theme park, the one portrayed by Andreas Gursky is pervaded by an extreme desolation that hurts the eye. The relentless beauty of the images represents urban and human landscapes of fascinating geometry and d
If the city fades away in indistinct territory, and if landscape only survives through simulation, the human body reproduces the stages of that journey through the dissolution of the naked body in a virtual crowd, the fleeing of the figure towards th
In the arts we find a pedagogy of the body. Through the representation of the nude it hearkens to our boundless curiosity for others, and through the filter of its gaze it encodes our own perception. When a renaissance retina depicts Adam and Eve, th
In the digital age, the disappearance of the body brings the fading of sex: the computer androids from the ad refrain from copulation to preserve their cyber-organisms, and the Russian architect registers a machine that replaces carnal with virtual i
Surfing the net, the proliferation of virtual organisms may be perceived as a risk, threatening as the huge dot that emerges from the depths in the ad of Sun Microsystems. When the press embraces that immaterial environment, it leaves a trace on the
The museum as space of the body gradually moves from the scandal of religion to the religion of scandal. If the stiff Christ of Holbein is trivialized within the comfortable context of the Basel museum photographed by Candida Höfer, the installation
In contrast with the fatal fantasy of the cybernetic body, the stark organic materiality of human existence imposes itself with abrupt gravitas. The conscience of the body in the extreme experience of pain or pleasure finds an echo in the heightened
We get to know the body through pain. The tied torsos by Hans Bellmer or Andrés Serrano, like Araki’s suspended Shijico, provoke more than sadistic fantasies of submission: the elasticity of flesh under bondage conveys its tactile materiality better
The face makes us different; the hand, similar. The prints on the wet concrete of Hollywood Boulevard need to be identified with the name of the star, and the hand on the billboard by Félix González-Torres recalls an individual Jeff through a univers
The anatomic theater is the essential stage of scientific humanism, because only there is humanity exposed in its organic truth. Knowing we are built with the common matter of the living world makes us more understandable, but also more human, becaus
The cattle epidemics have led to disasters whose dramatic representation in the media have made us inevitably conscious of the perverse nature of our food production system. Modifying animal genetics to such tragicomic results as the Israeli-bred nak
As the poet Giacomo Leopardi well knew, and expressed with admirable prose in one of his Dialogues, death and fashion share the territory of disappearance and change. The same material aging that forces the permanent renewal of living creatures becom
The technical arrogance of airplanes or ships becomes a titanic spectacle when they suffer catastrophes, and if the airplane vanishes in a sudden ball of fire, the gradual sinking of the ship in a whirlpool of bottomless sea turns the shipwreck into
After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, architectural deconstructivism extended its fractures as a stylistic disease. The deliberate evocation of earthquakes, fires, explosions and collisions tried to surprise with cracks, disturb with tilting wal
The menacing blob in the science fiction of the fifties returned half a century later under the auspices of the computer revolution and, just like the economic mutations brought about by the dot.com, its formal expression was delivered in two version
The sculptural individuals of the setups of Juan Muñoz, as the toy characters in the models by Rem Koolhaas, place the human figure as a hinge between art and life, museum and fashion. Varied and monochrome like the clay warriors of Xi’an, but at the
The architecture of our time is marked by a double compulsion: exhibitionistic advertising and physical colossalism. Apparently, both driving forces are characteristic of a period that has witnessed the development of the mass media and has contempla
Architecture validates fashion, but fashion also validates architecture. Georges Rech or Louis Vuitton endorse and are endorsed by the aluminum warps of the Pompidou restaurant, providing an exact example of the synergies of design: stark works as th
The masters who yesteryear hoped to appear on paper money, are satisfied today with the papier couché. The Swiss bill of Le Corbusier or the Finnish one of Aalto – one in use, the other disappeared after Helsinki adopted the Euro –coin an epic story
In constrast with the solitary heroe who is portrayed in front of his work, both socialist collectivism and the capitalist company promote cooperation. After the archetypal individualism of Wright, the still conventionally depicted Gropius encourages
Yes, one can be an architect with the titanic dimension of Michelangelo at St. Peter’s, or with the miniscule one of Borromini at San Carlo, represented here at the same scale to underscore the contrast. But the temptation of the Tower of Babel is al
The destruction of theTwinTowers is the founding catastrophe of a historical period. It has been compared with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that simultaneously brought the eighties and the Cold War to a close, and its chronological coincidence has pr
The almost cinematographic sequence shows the moment in which the catastrophe is revealed as deliberate; the smoking north tower after the impact of the American Airlines plane, the United Airlines aircraft coming closer and finally hitting the south
The architect of the towers destroyed by the aerial terrorism of a Wahabite Saudi also designed airports in Saudi Arabia, and reached the greatest critical fame with a demolition: that of his Pruitt-Igoe housing in St. Louis, whose destruction in 197
The skyscraper and the airplane are born with the movies and jazz at the dawn of the 20th century, but their initial romance soon turns sour. For Moses King, the cosmopolis of the future is formed by clustered skyscrapers that rise towards a sky fill
Aside from a flying machine, the airplane is shopping center, hotel, cinema, restaurant, kiosk and office; and this intimate relationship with the fabric of daily life is what makes the use of the airline as a weapon so scary. From the shopping on bo
Postmodern resignation saw the planet as a tamed stage of a conflict between comercial logos. After the essential conflict between capitalism and socialism ended with the implosion of the former Soviet block and the unanimous extension of the market
The week of the attack, The Economist printed a manifesto in favor of globalization: Pro Logo, with a red and black cover in reply to Naomi Klein’s No Logo. On 9/11, Bin Laden would produce his own antiglobal manifesto with homicidal violence and adv
The representation of the globe from space has given us an acute perception of our essential solidarity as passengers of a small blue planet lost in the cosmos; and the night vision of planet Earth, with the urban areas strongly illuminated, a clear
The column of smoke of 9/11, which ghostly evoked the memory of the skyscrapers, was soon followed by the project to raise two towers of light – carried out with searchlights pointing skywards six months after the attack – without paying much attenti
When terror bursts into the city of cosmetic towers like a phallic projectile, everything is contaminated with ballistic echoes: the Twin Towers are transformed into weapons not so different from those built in Oklahoma, minarets into missiles simila
It is trivial to assert that mass media manufacture the conscience. It is not so to underscore that, even if this circumstance favors the political control of opinion and the totalitarian manipulation of the minds, it is not possible to build the con
In the installation of Antoni Muntadas, the production of political discourse is summed up in the brief journey between the light of the stand and the printing press, showing the ideological assembly line that joins statement and headline; in the ima
The same day of 2002, the first page of two Madrid journals had two women with their heads covered: a Nigerian Muslim condemned to lapidation and a Salvadorian nun by a murdered bishop; two years later, they again coincided with the images of a distr
Almost exactly a year after September 11, El País and El Mundo reflected on cover the scandal of the Cibeles catwalk: the designer David Delfín had presented models with hanging ropes, penitent crosses and executioner hoods; well, the reprehensible p
Unprecedentedly, El País printed on its first and last page two images of a Palestinian woman burnt alive by her own family, and now wearing a mysterious mask, which expresses the horror through the paradoxical vehicle of extreme impassivity. The hid
To close this interrupted and endless journey, a kaleidoscope of images about the time of the world or, rather, about the moment of the world as the media chooses to portray it, with its illuminated scenarios and its areas of shadow, its leaders with
Surrounded by flags of a so-called alliance with star war echoes, George Bush launched his campaign against a shadow sheltered in the mountains of Afghanistan under the protection of a theocratic regime which enjoyed support on ‘the Arab street’. As
The road that led to the imposition of the American flag in Basra and Baghdad started in the photoopportunity of Mount Rushmore, where the war presidency drafted in Normandy took on epic tones, and reached its summit in the rhetorical ultimatum of th
The climate of patriotic affirmation lived by the United States after the Al Qaeda attacks is expressed in the sacralization of the remains of Ground Zero, where the last steel pier of the World Trade Center earned the treatment of war victim, covere
There are few better expressions for the loss of identity than those Hutu women looking for their children, lost in the exodus of 1994: behind each human tide there is a series of individual biographies buried by the statistic anonymity of the helple
The story comes to an end, but this is not the end of the story. The last stretches of the way show the impetuous leading role of the multitude, actor and victim of the times in a symphonic scale, interpreting another revolution of the masses that is
The multitude exists only because the void does, and the impact of its presence in architectural frames comes precisely from the contrast with empty space. Tienanmen Square on two consecutive First of May – the second one of them coinciding with the
The uniformed choreographies of work or aid seduce with their musical discipline. When bodies are blurred in anonymous crowds, it is not necessary to dress them in black to shadow their identity, obscure as the dark bags of victims, and the motley co
The form of the group is our collective language, and the position of bodies carries more eloquent messages than words themselves. The recreation of Leonardo’s last dinner in the Basque Country or Israel takes the evangelical scene to harsh stages, a
That war and politics are not only a media spectacle could be seen in Somalia, where the American marines disembarked before the CNN cameras to later abandon the country rushedly after the dramatic episode that Ridley Scott would recreate in Black Ha
House, Body, Crisis
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Galería de sombras
Gallery of Shadows
Prólogo Prologue
Centón de colecciones Cluster of Collections
La mirada del arquitecto y los escombros de la historia
The Eye of the Architect and the Rubble of History
El desorden alrededor The Surrounding Disorder
Maneras de mirar Ways of Seeing
Elegía del ojo Elegy of the Eye
Visiones escépticas Skeptical Visions
Casa House
Casas y contextos Houses and Contexts
La vida elemental. Energía, habitación y territorio
The Elementary Life. Energy, Dwelling and Territory
La Cabaña mutante The Mutant Cabin
Virus suburbano Suburban Viruses
Belleza americana American Beauty
Un planeta plano A Flat Planet
Contenedores y contenidos. El sueño doméstico
Containers and Contents.The Dream of the House
Escenas del ajuar Domestic Scenes
El clásico simulacro Classical Simulacra
Contenedores a la deriva Containers Adrift
Sueños de diseño Designer Dreams
Ciudades del consumo Consumer Cities
Paisajes urbanos. Geometrías del movimiento
Urban Landscapes. Geometries of Movement
Agitaciones orgánicas Organic Agitations
Tiempos modernos Modern Times
Paisajes sobre ruedas Landscape on Wheels
Paradojas de la densidad Paradoxes of Density
Utopía y facsímil. Entre Babel y Disney
Utopia and Facsimile. Between Babel and Disney
Utopías cooptadas Co-Opted Utopias
Ciudades temáticas Theme Cities
Cuentos de hadas Fairytales
El mundo según G. The World According to G.
Cuerpo Body
Cuerpos concertados Corporal Concert
Materia virtual. El desvanecimiento de lo físico
Virtual Matter.The Fading of Flesh
Nueva Eva y nuevo Adán New Eve and New Adam
Desnudos intangibles Intangible Nudes
La figura en fuga The Fleeing Figure
Marcos y marcas Frames and Signs
El rebaño desnudo. Dolor y domesticación humana
The Naked Herd. Pain and Human Domestication
Deconstrucción del dolor Deconstruction of Pain
Historias de la mano Stories of the Hand
Anatomías expuestas Exposed Anatomies
Holocausto animal Animal Holocaust
Catástrofes cabales Calm Catastrophes
Lo accidentado y lo informe. Burbujas en el museo
Accident and Formlessness. Bubbles in the Museum
Ficciones de fractura Frictions of Fracture
Catástrofe y exorcismo Catastrophe and Exorcism
Burbuja de bultos Bubble of Blobs
La moda del museo The Museum Fashion
Arquitectos en la pasarela. El espectáculo y la escala
Architects on the Catwalk. Spectacle and Scale
Obras que se exhiben Works on Display
Arquitectos de papel Paper Architects
El autor y la audiencia Author and Audience
Estilo frente a escala Style against Scale
Crisis Crisis
Crisis crepusculares Crepuscular Crises
El rascacielos y el avión. Metáforas del 11-S
The Skyscraper and the Airplane. Metaphors of 9/11
Fotogramas del horror Frames of Horror
Premoniciones y ecos Premonitions and Echoes
Duelo en las alturas Duel in the City Heights
Las formas del vuelo The Forms of Flight
Logos en pugna. Globalización y choque de culturas
Logos in Conflict. Globalization and Cultural Clash
La lógica del logo The logic of Logos
Arquitectos de papel Paper Architects
Geografías del ocaso Geographies of Sunset
Luces y lápidas Lights and Gravestones
Colores de guerra War Colors
Códigos del conflicto Conflict Codes
La imagen del otro. Comunicación y conciencia
The Image of the Other. Conscience and the Media
La esfera de los mediosThe Media Sphere
Mujeres desveladas Unveiled Women
Occidente y el otro The West and the Other
Vestidos para morir Dressed to Die
Líderes, banderas, víctimas. Los límites del planeta
Leaders, Flags, Victims. The Boundaries of the Planet
El gran juego de Asia The Great Game of Asia
Babel contra Babilonia Babel against Babylon
Levantando banderas Raising Flags
Identitades errantes Wandering Identities
Epílogo Epilogue
Cámaras corales Choral Cameras
La historia sin fin y las multitudes del mundo
Endless History and the Multitudes of the World
La multitud y el vacío The Crowd and the Void
Humanidad unánime Unanimous Humanity
Dinámica de grupos Group Dynamics
Espíritus y espectros Spirits and Specters
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Made up with slides of lectures and classes, this virtual patchwork of architectures, seductions and horrors is organized around three main themes: house and city; body and catastrophe; and crisis and conflict. The sections are built with the elementary unit of the double page, and with introductory texts for each four of them to lessen the monotony of the openings formed almost exclusively by images. In its structure, the printed issue evokes its academic origin and its material archive, because the frequent pairing of illustrations in the layout comes from the usual double projection in the classroom, and their grouping in the thematic cores of the double pages handles a number close to the twenty slides that fit in a standard plate. I have tried to let the images speak for themselves, and have written the texts only after designing the page layout. The predominance of the graphic discourse is an architect´s vice, but perhaps the art historians - from the Warburg of the atlases to the Wöllfflin of the parallel project - can also be held responsible for the parallel projection- can also be held responsible for the presentation method. The resulting density recalls the clutter of old painting cabinet, and that is why this text is illustrated with the Panorama of the Central Gallery of the Prado Museum, the 10 meter long photograph by Laurent carried out between 1882 and 1883 with 72 assembled shots, which could be seen using a rotary machine. Here, the strip of the Grafoscopio has been replaced by a sequence of frames, though weaved in a panorama of somehow similar continuity. With a title which evokes another monograph published over fifteen years ago - replacing the sweet dreams of the eighties with the bitter crisis of the millennium beginnings-, the thousand images of this gallery of shadows compose a discourse of the eye or against the eye, a record of the disorder of the times and perhaps also a melancholy cry for order.
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