The essay on an amazing and not very well-known monument opens a series of publications that we plan to devote to the history of architecture. Series is a joint project of Archi.ru and new direction of "History of Art" of the Faculty of History of the Higher School of Economics … From time to time, HSE professors will share with our readers their thoughts on well-known and not-so-famous monuments of world architecture.
Here and now - Lev Maciel Sanchez reflects on the meaning and peculiarities of the strangest work of the post-war rule of General Franco in Spain. Francoist architecture itself (as well as Mussolini's projects) is comparable to Stalin's Moscow, but only in the most general terms: it is also totalitarian and also classic. Looking closer, you can see more recent allusions. In between, the author of the essay looks at the ensemble as a historian and interpreter. So, before you is a gigantic complex built by the ideological opponent of modernism, Luis Moya Blanco.
Northern Spain is rarely mentioned in connection with 20th century art. Her image is a reserve of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Here, in the Altamira cave, the most famous prehistoric paintings in the world were found. Here in Asturias the most important pre-Romanesque buildings in Europe have survived. Finally, these lands were the main pilgrimage route of the European Middle Ages - the path of St. Jacob (in Spanish Santiago), to the edge of what was then Europe, to the Galician Compostela. But there is also great architecture of the twentieth century, one of its grandiose and forgotten achievements. We are talking about the Working University of Gijón (Asturias), whose area (270 thousand m2) makes it the largest building in Spain.
More than twenty workers' universities are one of the key social projects of Francoism. The University of Gijon was not only the first, but also the largest building of its kind. Its construction, three kilometers from the city center, lasted from 1948 to 1957. The author of the project is Luis Moya Blanco (1904-1990), a critic of modernism and an educated traditionalist, famous for his Madrid buildings of the 1940s - the Museum of America and the San Agustin Temple.
The idea of the university can be described as an ideal city. From the outside, it is seen as a city - an asymmetrical cluster of buildings, over which a tower with a spire rises. Most of the buildings are stretched in length, their facades are rather monotonous, which emphasizes the resemblance to El Escorial, the country monastery-palace of King Philip II, which became a symbol of Spanish absolutism, especially relevant in the traditionalist and non-democratic era of Francoism. However, there are no direct references to the forms of El Escorial in Gijón; on the contrary, it includes a round monastery (reminiscent of either the Colosseum, or the residential building of the Chinese Hakka people), and a piece of the Roman aqueduct, and much more. Despite the general unity of style, the appearance and details of the buildings are noticeably different from each other, which emphasizes the idea of a city growing and reflecting the change of eras. The compositions of the facades are in many ways close to the aesthetics of Art Nouveau, its constructive and romantic versions. The similarity with the latter is enhanced by the cladding of the walls with raw stone, immediately reminiscent of the pre-war Finnish buildings of Eliel Saarinen and Lars Sonck.
The center of the ensemble is the closed main courtyard. The entrance to it is under the tower, through a square vestibule, surrounded by a Corinthian colonnade - perhaps the most classical part of the ensemble. This is followed by a huge courtyard, reminiscent of the "solid facade" of buildings with low turrets, the main squares (Plaza Mayor) of Spanish cities. But unlike them, in the center of the composition is not an equestrian monument to the monarch, but a round temple. And the viewer-visitor suddenly finds himself not in Spain, but in the ideal city of the Italian Renaissance, as if it had just descended from one of the beautiful leads of the end of the 15th century. Moya himself compared his courtyard with the Venetian Piazza San Marco - the buildings are also asymmetrically located here, and a thin tall tower reigns above the even horizontals of the facades. Layering of figurative landmarks is not an accident, but a principle of work. In the ensemble of Gijón, each element - according to the behests of baroque rhetoric so dear to the heart of the Mediterranean man - in no way can indicate one thing, definite. On the contrary, he must talk about several things at once, thus turning the chaos of being into a light network of silver threads of hints and golden knots of meanings.
Let's return to the tower, towering to the left of the temple above one of the buildings. Its height is 117 meters, so that it significantly surpassed its model - the symbol of Seville and the famous Giralda throughout Spain (Giralda is the bell tower of the Seville Cathedral, rebuilt in the 16th century from a minaret of the end of the 12th century. Together with the sculpture of the Victory of Faith, its height is 104 meters) … Meanwhile, despite the general similarity, the Gijon "Giralda" has nothing to do with the minaret, its architecture is entirely European, and the top is decorated in the form of a Roman triumphal arch.
In general, the Roman theme dominates in the appearance of all buildings in the main courtyard. In the center of the square there is a temple that looks round, but in reality it is oval. Its massive lower tier is decorated with alternating niches and columnar ledges, just like in one of the most famous buildings of the ancient Roman "Baroque" - the so-called Temple of Venus in Baalbek. The facade of the theater on one of the sides of the courtyard is modeled after the library of Celsius in Ephesus, another masterpiece of the ancient Roman Baroque. The patronage in front of him hints with its pushed forward colonnade at the library of the emperor Hadrian in Athens. It is difficult to say whether the reference to two famous antique libraries was accidental in the context of the university? Moving further in this direction, one can liken the Gijon tower to the Alexandrian lighthouse and recall the Alexandrian library …
It is interesting that, with an excellent knowledge of the classics, Luis Moya is not a classicist in spirit. The exact repetition of samples is alien to him, as is the very light and restrained spirit of the classics. He translates it into his Spanish, stern and expressive. The proportions of its colonnades are squat, the details are generalized, even rough. Columns look like witty quotes rather than an organic part of the language. And the coloring is not at all antique: the red granite columns have gray bases and capitals, and all this is set against the background of the yellowish rough stone of the walls.
The interior of the temple is especially full of allusions. Its oval dome is likened to the Roman church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-1641), an ingenious creation of Borromini. The layering of "Gothic" crossing arches on it is a reference to the vaults and domes of the Turin churches of Guarino Guarini, but at the same time to the rotunda in Torres del Rio in Navarra, a Spanish variation of the Crusade era on the theme of the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The altar canopy of four spectacular columns recalls early Christian basilicas and also the Bernini canopy in the Roman Cathedral of St. Peter. The belt of small aedicules that goes around the entire temple is a hint of the Roman pantheon.
Moya invented unexpected pulpits for his church - they are arranged in two-tier cylindrical volumes on the sides of the altar space. It is interesting that the same volumes flank the western entrance, but there they include spiral staircases leading to the upper tier. And two spiral objects on the sides of the entrance are an obvious allusion to the two twisted columns described in the Bible, Yachin and Boaz, which stood at the entrance to the Jerusalem Temple of King Solomon. Thus, Moya likens his temple to the Old Testament, that is, he elevates it to the archetype of the Temple. The originality of his technique lies in the fact that he moved the columns inside. Is this a coincidence? Obviously not, just as it is obvious that the second lectern is practically unnecessary, and serves only for symmetry. It seems to me that the idea was to juxtapose four cylindrical volumes in the inner space of the temple. And I believe that they refer to the four exedrams of Sophia of Constantinople, located in the same diagonal. Only in Gijón is it “turned inside out” - which only adds postmodern irony to this association. This appeal is not surprising, since the image of Sofia was popular in the architecture of the 1920s - 1950s: for example, the Saint-Esprit Church in Paris (1928-1935, Paul Tournon) or the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Mexico City (completed 1931 –1934, Federico Mistral). The memory of Sophia is also indicated by the large glazed window openings of the side walls of the Gijon temple with their green marble bindings.
So, Moya managed to liken the university temple at once to all the great temple buildings of European civilization - the Old Testament Temple, the Pantheon, Sophia of Constantinople and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Despite the imperial scale of the order, the University of Gijón and its intellectual architecture were not the manifesto of Franco architecture. His main work - Valley of the Fallen (1940-1958, Pedro Mugurus, Diego Mendes) - is addressed exclusively to the patriotic image of El Escorial, which is reinforced by enlarged monolithic forms, devoid of refined baroque rhetoric. Moya also does not fit into European neoclassicism, for all its breadth - from the almost religious seriousness of Ivan Zholtovsky to the witty lightness of Jože Plečnik. In the spirit of an omnivorous interest in all world architecture and freedom in working with its forms, the University of Gijón can be more closely related to the Stockholm City Hall of Ragnar Östberg and the Kazansky railway station of Alexei Shchusev, that is, to the highest achievements of traditionalist architecture of the early 20th century. Decent neighborhood!
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