20001207According to an architect, modern art "should not necessarily be built on rationalist criteria".

"Modernity, and specifically the avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century, in order to be modern, did not necessarily have to be built on rationalist criteria". This is one of the conclusions reached by architect Juan Coll Barreu, who defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Navarra. His research, with which he obtained A cum laude, focused on the non-rationalist developments of the modern architectural avant-garde in Los Angeles during the period 1908-1955.

The new doctorate summarizes the contribution of his study to contemporary art "as the confirmation of a modern avant-garde that acts as such, that is to say, that modifies the existing artistic, but open, and even founded, to postulates different from the exclusive ones of reason that, on many occasions, the official culture of our century has explained as the only principle of action of the avant-garde".

"This new point of view seeks - he adds - to add to the discussion on modernity by presenting an architecture different in values and aspirations to that representative of the Modern Movement, but at least as innovative and always prior to the decantation of the rationalist movement, the official binder of the avant-garde."

A modern, but not rationalist avant-garde

The study presented at the University of Navarra addresses both the spatial and conceptual values "of some of the most interesting examples of California architecture. These are buildings that are not widely disseminated by critics of modern architecture, some of them unpublished and almost completely unknown," he says.

According to Juan Coll, "this architecture participates in the aspirations of the modern avant-garde, because of its need to modify the existing". Likewise, "it distances itself from the postulates of rationalist architecture, around which the modernity of discipline was articulated. This distancing was based on the freedom of the approaches, that is to say, on its questioning from the beginning".

The architect defended that "this avant-garde was not simply forgotten, but rejected from the defining moment of the strategy of the Modern Movement at the first exhibition International of Modern Architecture, organized in 1932".

"This avant-garde," argues the newly doctorate, "was undoubtedly an architecture not only of high quality, but of great interest and appeal to architects and, more surprisingly, and contrary to much of the architecture of the modern movement, it was appealing to the public as well.