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		Riding with the Dirty Realist	< B A C K
		Aaron Betsky (>> short CV) Josep Lluis Mateo loves Barcelona. The story of Mateo and his architecture is also that of this city –not of its great monuments and tourist attractions, not of the romance of its port and its mountains, not even perhaps of its often gritty and hard-working reality, but of the way in which his architecture is a re-interpretation of how he has seen, lived and explained the city. Through his architecture, Barcelona becomes a lesson in what architecture can and cannot do. Mateo loves this city not just as a native son who was born there, grew up there, and still lives only a few blocks from his childhood home, but also an architect operating at the beginning of the 21st century for whom this city is the prototype of the modernist metropolis. A port city on the periphery of a country but with most of its wealth, without the glittering allure of such capitals as London or Paris, without the extreme tenuousness in its urbanity that is proper to the sprawling agglomorations of the United States, but with a particular need to invent itself, Barcelona is for him the place where one can read –or, even better, ride—the modern as it becomes a lived reality. Here, after all, is a city that had to re-invent itself as a modern metropolis at exactly the time when culture was used to define national identity, and so it is a test case of how architecture can and was used to define the character of a particular place even though the economic forces that shaped it were global. Here was also a city that not only gave birth to neo-utopian ideas about how a city could be organized to be rational, beautiful, sanitary and just (at least according to the norms of the middle class, who rule all metropoles), but implemented one. Cerda’s plan is still the most effective and visionary urban expansion plan to have been realized in Europe. Finally, Barcelona is the city that most benefited from the Postmodern rediscovery of exactly that city of romantic image and rational planning by renovating and expanding its traditional core in time for the 1988 Olympics. New monuments offered counterpoints, tied to such infrastructure as highways and telecommunication, to new housing developments that sought to continue traditional block patterns. In these three modes –romantic identity creation, rational expansion, and tying local form to global technologies—Barcelona is a test case for how we make cities in the modern era. My experience of Barcelona is largely formed by Mateo, first by his invitation to me in the early 1990s to come see the city, when it was taking stock of itself after the exuberant period of the Olympics had come to an end. He took me walking along the Ramblas and through the old city, where the past is preserved as an active part of the "experience economy." I have seen through his eyes Cerda’s work at making a rational, human city where the block structure was designed to give light inside and out, where cut-off corners made places, and where rhythms appeared that were native to the logic of the modern city. He took me to see the squares that appeared in front of the railroad station and the beaches in the 1980s and gave the city both places of movement and moments of identity. More than anything else, however, it was at the edges, in the cuts, and in the diagonals, that he showed me Barcelona as a city that was a place of motion and development, and yet had a sense of reality. Then my sense of Barcelona grew by driving with Mateo through the edges of the 19th century additions where, in the 1950s, the middle classes built glass, steel and concrete continuations of the patterns set at the end of the nineteenth century, accepting the deformations of the hillsides onto which the apartment buildings were creeping as challenges to exhibit the purity of the elements and the refinement of the detailing in vestibules and bay windows. From there, Mateo took me up, through or around the edges of the mountains that surround the traditional domain of Barcelona, moving along what he calls the "radical acts" of the highways built for the Olympic Games, into the plains where urban sprawl is now moving out to the very foothills of that mythic heart of Catalonian mysticism and Wagnerian romance, Montserrat. The present and future is for Mateo here an operating table on which the chance encounter of the infrastructural sowing machine of suburban railroad lines, highways, telephone and sewage systems and all the other knitting factors of the extended city meets the umbrella of housing projects decreed by cities to house the thousands who no longer can or want to live within the city’s traditional confines, but find themselves spread out along these planes of dispersion, only to meet the thousands more who come from the extended arms of the city, or from the plains of Africa and the Middle East, to find work and housing near Barcelona. Here Mateo slows his movement as he eases through fragmentary reproductions of the exeinte with its square blocks and cut-off corners, finding the building blocks for new constructions that somehow holds onto the orders of the old. Further out, where the city is meeting the outposts of an earlier colonization, in towns such as Terrassa, he confronts what were once the slums that fed the textile mills from which wealth spread into Barcelona. Now the immigrants from far and near are spreading out themselves over old mills and fields, filling them with the low-rise blanket of housing that covers a pattern of industrialization that has become as fine-grained as the circuits as a microchip and as anonymous as a call center. And yet, somewhere hidden at the core of these post-slums in which he tried to build, he finds a restaurant where the pleasures of food and an amazing wine cellar, once established to satisfy the mill owners at lunch, remind one of the specificity of place. Here, in the darkness of an endless lunch hour, he reminds me that Barcelona is still a specific place, with its own climate, its own traditions, its own tastes and smells that make it into a attractor. People want to be here not just to work, but because there is something about the land on which Barcelona sits, the way it works that land into produce, and how it has responded to its site with its own artifice that makes it hugely attractive. It is its own Oz, a place of carefully calibrated beauty that speaks through from the fish platters to the designed objects to the buildings that make the city such a cliche of what urbanity should really be all about. And this cliche, this inescapable sensual beauty is, it seems to me, what Mateo loves about Barcelona as well. For ten years, Josep Lluis Mateo did not in fact build in this city, but only spoke about Barcelona and the larger forces it represented. As editor of Quaderns, he set a new standard for the integration of urban and architectural criticism. While the Italians refused to look at buildings, reducing them to archetypes and concentrating instead on the half-remembered aggregation of form into urban wholes whose disintegration under the forces of modernization they either ignored (Ciucci, Rossi) or bemoaned (Tafuri), the critics of Northern Europe wondered how to preserve the autonomous building. Speaking the many tongues of Postmodernism, they threw up one experiment after the other, succeeding only in defining architecture as the plaything of the rich and powerful who could separate themselves off from the city to make their polymorphous palaces. In Quaderns, Mateo began to look at how native traditions, by which he meant not just the "vernacular" of peasant houses or the slope of rooflines that depended on the amount of rainwater, but also the uses to which each new wave of technology, each new kind of client and each new urban expansion was put, developed into a flexible and ever-changing response to particular conditions. As the cycles of production and consumption speeded up in the nineteenth century, such responses became self-referential, and styles or ways of doing appeared in local conditions. Thus one cannot think of Gaudi as separate from age-old traditions of building, but he is also part of the Catalonian attempt at artificial self-reinvention at the time of nationalist hegemony and a response to the forms and scales of constructions to the burgeoning city. The work of Coderch is not just a response to Mies van der Rohe with a regional cast, it is also a reworking of Gaudi. Under Mateo’s influence, and with the help of a number of unusually civically engaged architects, one of whom (Bohigas) even gained considerable political power, a "Barcelona School" began to emerge that obsessively mapped and plumbed the city’s development and forms. At first, there was practical need for this. After decades of suppression under the Franco regime, Barcelona was once again finding its own voice and culture, and it was natural that local architects would try to understand how this had been done a century before the then current attempt to build character. This was also a period of strong growth, given an artificial deadline by the coming of the Olympics, that produced major public works projects along the city’s edge. The harbor frontage, the passes through the mountains, the ends of the such great avenues as the Diagonal, and the airport and port all became sites for massive investment. It was up to architects to come up with the appropriate forms for the new construction that was the result of this investment. At first, Mateo did not participate in the actual design work. He left it to his friends and colleagues. Later, and to this day, it is his former students who have had an immense and continuing influence on the way both local planners and outside observers have looked at Barcelona. Starting with such massive efforts at cartography that informed many of the magazine’s articles and culminating in the 1996 "Barcelona Contemporary" exhibition about the city itself, these planners, theoreticians and architects began to first lay out Barcelona as a fact, and then to use it as an example of urban form that could be experimented upon. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interwoven groups around ACTAR, the various schools of architecture and museums had begun to use Barcelona as a site of modernist urbanism. Under Mateo’s influence, Barcelona has begun to be seen as a tectonic whole, in which the layers of geography, geology and climate become an active substrate that is mirrored in construction and lay-out, which in its turn creates its own geography. "I am most interested in archaeology and geology, not in forms," Mateo himself says. It is out of this digging that form in fact appears, as a smooth cut, a revelation, a forming with a knife of what already exists. This man-made reality works itself out in the details of material, the way forms are started, developed, ended and entered (base, facade, roofline and entry), and finally into the way in which such elements are specified in detail. The willfull forms of Gaudi have become known as "organic," but this way of thinking makes it clear that these are only the most extreme expressions of a unified way of making architecture within an urban context. "It is the inorganic that is truly beautiful," Mateo says. It is for this reason that the work of Josep Lluis Mateo is difficult to define. It is never meant to be a making of autonomous, monumental form, nor does the architect see it as an anonymous response to context. It is an attempt to lift up, unfold or separate out the layers of the city into something that lets us understand where one is and what one is looking at. It is always new, but only in the way that the city continually throws up the moments of unexpected collision and collage that make it always modern. It is also always refined, especially at the point where the individual comes in touch with it, such as in vestibules or at windows, because the city demands a certain pose, a certain stance, and a certain refinement of raw materials as its raison-d’etre. But perhaps this is too general. For the city is, to Josep Lluis Mateo, not a whole entity. In addition to its accumulation of history that is always stripped off by the renovating practices of the new, the development of form and the caustic criticism of both use and analysis, there is both a deep fissure at its heart and a displacement of its very center. It is on this contradiction and absence that Mateo is now working with more and more concentration. The monuments that fascinate Mateo are not the Sagrada Familia or the Casa Milà, nor even the expansion itself. What he speaks about with great passion is the co-existence, in the 1960s, of the massive housing blocks decreed by the Francoist regime in 1958 at SO Besos and the favellas that grew up alongside them. The former were classics of canonical modernist thinking. Highrise behemoths with no particular connection to their site, they marched across the landscape at acute angles to the existing patterns of development and streets. Within their cellular confines thousands of poor Barcelonians found cramped quarters that were still an immense improvement over the slums from which most of them had come. For the repressive regime that then tried to control its distant, always upstart economic engine, these housing estates were also ways of controlling the otherwise perhaps dangerous masses, at a location away from the city itself, where they could be easily isolated and watched. And yet there was a beauty to these structures, Josep Lluis Mateo points out. They were laid out according to an intricate geometry that seemed to delight in its own sophistication as it did in the way it guaranteed variety, views and breezes. Their detailing was crisp, workman-like and yet carried out so that one would be aware of the machined and mass-produced nature of such new structures. An exposition of materiality gave way in favor of the statement of the new, the rational, the state, and, to use a vague, but historically accurate term, the other. A radical departure arose on the edge of Barcelona, yet it was one that somehow turned into object the geometries of the expansion that has so changed the city a century earlier. Next to this crop of modernity arising on hard-scrabble fields, but also adjacent to the beach that gives Barcelona so much of its character, one could in those days find the self-built neighborhoods that the towers sought to replace. Built by immigrants not from other countries, but from the poorer regions of Spain who came to find work in the relatively thriving industries around Barcelona, these neighborhoods grew up quickly, haphazardly, and with few provisions. Here streets and squares appeared as if by happenstance and in response to small variations to local conditions. They were the "organic" counterpoints to the "inorganic" developments, yet both had the logic of a new kind of landscape. These neighborhoods had their own character and materiality. They made use, as do favelas everywhere, of the cast-off building materials that helped shape the towers, from misformed bricks to concrete block. As they grew up, builders became more ambitious, pouring concrete and creating structures with more decoration and functional differentation, but they always remained collages that reflected the contingencies of use, settlement pattern, terrain and building material. These neighborhoods were like the city undressed. To Mateo, they were also like fractals: the subdivision of the clear object-and-field of the towers, the infinite complication of the way one builds that reflects the recursive nature of the landscape itself. There was –and is to this day—a beauty in this specificity, this relation of every aspect of how something appears as a whole to the minute choices about where a brick appears and what one sees from a window. Mateo does not over-romanticize these neighborhoods. They were unsanitary, cramped and removed from social services. For all the social solidarity they produced, they were also containers of workers that had no real connection to the city. It is the contrast between the planned and the unplanned, the mixture of collage city and Corbusian absolutes, that is to him the vital truth of the city. Cities cannot be planned, nor do they grow up organically. They occur through the cancerous process of accretion and the surgical reparations or prosthetic additions that try to excise such developments. It is through the actions and reactions of urban growth, the bulging additions and radical incisions, that the body of the city takes on its hybrid form. This is what interests Josep Lluis Mateo: where arte povera meets the confines of the museum, not the museum or the art itself; the tension between what is planned and what grows, not either; the fact that materiality always hides in the tomb of architecture, not the clean tomb or the messy material; the present as the accumulation of half-remembered forms and conjectural plans for the future. It is what he calls "Dirty Realism." The site for such Dirty Realism is, by its very nature, always on the periphery. Whether consciously or not, Mateo seems to prefer this site in all kinds of ways. He at first worked on the periphery of the profession, and continually exiles himself from Barcelona to teach and work in other places. He grew up on what was once the edge of the city and still lives where the central core meets its natural edge. Even his office is at the very end of the Passeig de Gràcia, where the monumental axis peters out into confusion. These might seem like fragments of biographical happenstance, but they are also indicative of his theoretical position that "the periphery is the new center." In this position, he is not alone. Certainly the so-called "Los Angeles School" of urban geographers and architects has been espousing this position since the beginning of the 1990s, and it is no accident that Mateo spent a year in Los Angeles ten years ago as a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Institute for Advanced Studies. In the ultimate capital of sprawl, the city has morphed into a poly-centric behemoth that dissolves into multiple centers of attraction or "Edge Cities." Grouped around highway intersections, shopping malls, clusters of office buildings and sites of significant infrastructure (airports, container ports, high-speed cable ports), these dissolved centers have developed their own multiple and competing facsimiles of the traditional core, complete with cafes, stores, civic monuments and housing arrangements. The emergence of the cluster around South Coast Plaza in Orange County, now the site of a significant art center and dense housing on what was twenty years ago bean fields, can serve as a prototypical example of such strange attractors. Not only are such peripheral developments seemingly the way in which the metropolis will develop, there are also reasons to rejoice in their appearance. Though we have a romantic attachment to it, the traditional center is above all else the place of command, where political and economic power is exercised, culture is defined and opinion is made. It is also the place where the rich and the accepted gather to live, work and shop. The periphery is the place for immigrants, the poor, and the displaced. It is also the place of economic innovation and development. The edge is the site of countless of Silicon Valleys, Glens, Glades and other clusters of technological innovation. It is also where the rigid grid of the city falls apart and meets the possibility of a landscape that is no longer the realm of agriculture with its immutable ways, but the plane of potential for future development. Of course the periphery is not a place of beauty, neither in traditional morphological terms, nor if one is to judge it according to social, economic or environmental standards. It is a place of alienation from the core and from the land, a place of ecological devastation and human dislocation, and the site where the lack of cultural imperatives allows sheer ugliness to flourish. It is where cities put their garbage, where services peter out, where those who can’t afford to live in the center find themselves exiled, and where developers have much greater freedom to make cheap housing, office buildings and factories. It is dirty, both literally and metaphysically. It is this dirty reality that Mateo sees potential. He manages to create housing blocks and even cultural institutions there that accept the economic logic of these sites from which money is leeched as soon as possible to feed the center that somehow retains a sense of place. His methods are simple and varied. He has recourse to the monumental, as that which retains memory by building something that is both reminiscent of forms we have already see and, in its size and composition, refuses to blend in with its surroundings. He creates elisions in the field by creating compositions that are unfinished at their edges, that break into fragments, or that contradict one’s expectations about where things should begin and end, thus giving form to the unfinished. All of these strategies are most clearly on display in his large housing block in Terrassa, but also in the smaller, and decidedly more economic, development at El Prat and at numerous other housing projects spread out through the sprawling area of Valles to the North of Barcelona proper. Josep Lluis Mateo is not altogether sanguine about his own achievements in these areas. He realizes that the economic pressures under which he works makes it very difficult to rescue some sense of coherence from these commissions. Instead, he prides himself on his ability to create decent living environments, sheltered parks, a good place to put the laundry, a little more light than one would expect. He continually experiments with new ways to create compact housing configurations that maximize privacy and light, as he did in his project for Borneo Sporenbrug in Amsterdam. If truth be told, he has also put a hold on his work in this area, perhaps waiting for economic and cultural conditions to come back to a point that his experiments can take place. Most of his commissions thus are no longer on the literal periphery. Instead, he is asked more and more to abandon the Barcelona he knows and the edge that fascinates him to engage in the traditional work of the architect, to shape the central institutions of the state in forms that will make that abstract entity recognizable and acceptable. In accepting such work in Portugal, Switzerland, Morocco, France, The Netherlands and Germany, he risks abstracting what he has learned into forms that will gain that identity through the development of a style or signature that denotes the architect more than the client. Well aware of this conundrum, Mateo has recourse to floating. In his civic buildings in Castelo Branco, Portugal and Haarlem, The Netherlands, he does this quite literally, floating the major programmatic spaces above the ground in highly abstract volumes. The weightlessness of the civic removed from the city becomes a sign that delights in its own power. It also frees a void or plaza that continues underneath the building. In Haarlem, the real work of the bureaucracy hides underneath this space, but in both cases it is the openness that helps one understands the edges of the space. What already exists in pulled into a relationship with the new. Here the inorganic is stated, but as an abstract, tenuous supposition that does not impose itself on, but depends on the work of the cantilever and our own acceptance for it to exist. Mateo repeats this strategy in a project for an office building in Lille, and in several of the buildings for both the Spanish embassy in Rabat and the hotels on Lake Lugano in Switzerland. There he also has recourse to a strategy of vermiculating his buildings so that they have no clear center, but instead dissolve, as does the seemingly taut housing block in Amsterdam, into a three-dimensional checkerboard of solids and voids in which there is not one, but many open hearts that give life and light to the repetitive elements that make up the project. Here the city is reproduced in miniature as a dense package of negotiation between individual needs and social form. The collage of inhabitation finds itself packaged inside the modern, as if the dreams of social control (the inorganic) and the need to make a place for one’s self (the organic) have come into a single, complex structure. Nowhere are these strategies more beautifully on display than in the building for the German Bank in Chemnitz. Here there is even a public square in the parking garage, and the whole building floats like a mirage of wealth, clad in precious stone, over a lobby that in its turn occludes the real center of the bank, its hidden vault. The material and the spatial gymnastics make the building float "at the edge of kitsch," as Josep Lluis Mateo himself states. It also makes it reminiscent of the work of Adolf Loos, always denying the materiality or even the decision to place and make place that would seem proper to the role of the architect, in favor of the nervous avoidance of order, symmetry, or center. Uncertainty and a scurrying at the edge here gains a scrumptious form and elegant pose. Only in details does Mateo have solace to good form. It is not in the central spaces (of which there are very, very few in his oeuvre), nor in the overall facade that one can find the mark of the architect, but in the way two different kinds of stone meet at the mailboxes in his housing projects, or in the way in which a sill can become a fin that helps accentuate the horizontal, sedimented quality of the succession of floors he stacks up. Always at the corner of one’s eye, at the periphery of where one would think to find good architecture, Mateo’s work consists of something that draws together the strains, strands and layers of the floating, uncertain city into moments of form. Now he faces his largest challenge back home in Barcelona. After years of making housing blocks and small buildings, he must design one of the largest new elements in Barcelona’s civic fabric. The city’s main conference center, complete with a hotel and office facilities, is to rise right next to the confrontation between apartment blocks and self-built city that is so important in Mateo’s interpretation of the city. It is to continue the extension of the city from its traditional core along its now so glamorous edge, the beach, that began over a decade ago with the construction of the Olympic Village. It is to mark the point where the city has given itself an artificial edge by decreeing the construction of new parks that will serve as buffers to development. It also stands at the end of the Diagonal, the line decreed by Cerda to point the way towards ever more urban expansion. Here the periphery must come to a point. The problem is not only that Mateo must make an object at a place where edges become intersections, a new center in a place that would seem to defy such making of markers, but he must also do so around the kind of program that usually defies architecture. Such convention centers now exist all over the world and serve global clans of corporations and salespeople who strike down in one or the other city with no real connection to where they are. To serve their needs, the convention center must be a space that is almost unimaginably large and completely flexible. Thus, but its very nature it can have little character to obstruct temporary stand construction, networking and the flows of thousands of people. It is the ultimate modernist building in the sense that it is abstract, made possible by technology, without connection to the past, completely defined by systems, and always changing. Mateo is choosing to bring the beach as close into the building as he can, perhaps hoping that, in contradiction to what the students of Paris in May 1968 hoped to find under the street, he can here find Barcelona’s stones under the sands of that beach. He is also floating his functions at a scale he has until now not attempted by converting the necessary beams into carriers of function. He is then turning the denial of center and the game of center and void into a delirious construction of different grids that will run past and through each other at a scale one is never sure anybody will ever be able to understand. All off this Josep Lluis Mateo will then pack in a straightjacket of finely woven materials whose hems he will, no doubt, detail to a point of perfection. When I drove last summer to the site where this monumental structure without character will have to arise, Josep Lluis Mateo seemed almost in despair because of the difficulty of the task he faces. What has been built next to the convention center is horrendous: placeless shopping malls and fragments of urban blocks awash in the delta of the Diagonal as it dies at the curve of a highway that has no need of any civic point. On one side stretch the fake fragments of urbanity that were the Olympic Village, on the other side the empty land that will be park. Here he must finally make a center in the periphery. He is confident of his ability to make an architecture here, but not certain anybody will recognize it. No doubt he is right on both issues. In this sense, Mateo is a person on the periphery. He is an architect who has operated at the margins of his profession, at the edge of his city, and the boundaries of a recognizable language of forms. He had had an influence beyond his modest building practice because he has focussed us on the edge and its meaning. He has continued to believe that architecture must work at the edge of development to make life better for ordinary people. He has fought for modernism in the face of the call for a total recognizability of form in his native Barcelona. He has also made buildings, both organic and inorganic at the same time, coldly modernist and hotly urban, and that is where his dirty realism comes in. It is his particular genius to be an architect who is, in the sense of Loos and Musil, without character: one who does his job, exceedingly well, and manages in the process to throw up some dirt: a building, an obstruction to seamless modernism, a reminder of the earth on which and with which we build, a pornography of beautiful stone, a kernel of material suspended in midair. Aaron Betsky

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