Línies Dures

In 1985, Carles Martí and Xavier Monteys published an article entitled “La línia dura” (The hard line), the farewell issue of the magazine 2C. This text reviewed the work of a group of architects -Hannes Meyer, Hans Wittwer, Marte Stam, Johannes Duiker or Evan Owen Williams, among others- who during the 1930s, within the modern movement, prioritized constructive problems over aesthetic justifications. Martí and Monteys even coined a new category to refer to these authors and their works, which they called “the radical wing of rationalism”.

Paraphrasing the title of that article, we could venture that, between 1949 and 1974, a set of proposals was carried out in Barcelona from the fields of architecture, design, and urbanism that, seen in perspective, constitute “hard lines” with respect to the hegemonic trends of each period, a type of tradition not always emphasized -perhaps pending recovery in the future- that offers three essential features: the attempt to open the disciplines to new collective uses and paradigms that would evolve the formal rhetorics of each moment; the overcoming of the project as a simple theoretical methodology and its transformation into a tool with which to understand and improve the public sphere; the confrontation of citizen conflicts without the use of corporate formulas, preformatted models or exemplary solutions.

This exhibition brings together 29 case studies chronologically arranged and reconstructed through documents, texts, and images that, for the most part, are being shown for the first time in an exhibition context.