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DoCoMoMo documented - 1994 International DoCoMoMo conference in Barcelona, Spain

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1995 by James Dunnett

The initial impetus behind the 1994 international DoCoMoMo conference at Barcelona was conservationist, but it had seemed, under its parallel self-imposed task of documentation, that it might also provide a forum for discussion from a Modern Movement viewpoint of contemporary architectural developments, or even for a reassertion of Modern Movement values and concerns. The theme of the latest biennial international conference in Barcelona in September, organised by the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, seemed a definite move in this direction -- The Challenge of Modernity: a Critical Review of Contemporary Positions. The main question to be addressed was: `What aspects of the cultural legacy of the Modern Movement live on in contemporary architecture?'

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No single contemporary architect of note as a designer, however, addressed the conference to explain the significance of the Modern Movement to his work (one would not have thought it hard to find one in Barcelona), and indeed there was little detailed discussion of contemporary architecture. Kenneth Frampton traced a newly identified tradition of `Landform' or `Megaform' buildings through from early Expressionist projects such as Poelzig's 1916 proposal for a Palace of Friendship in Istanbul, to recent work in Spain and California; but this tradition -- if there is real continuity -- can scarcely be called Modern Movement. Ignasi Sola-Morales (principal architect for the reconstruction of the Mies Pavilion) considered that while the first generation of Modern Movement architects had failed satisfactorily to `mediate technology through architecture', Norman Foster had today (using a phrase of Tafuri's) `removed from us the anguish of technology'; but he did not consider Foster's relationship to the Modern Movement in terms of his social, formal, or spatial concerns. Perhaps the conclusion has to be drawn that only in respect of technology is there currently any real persistence of Modern Movement concerns -- a situation that would have distressed Gropius and Le Corbusier. Parallel to this, however, the valuable detailed work of DoCoMoMo in studying individual buildings and their repair continued, and it became apparent that the abstract level of the principal debate did not appeal to the conservation professionals that constituted most of the participants in the conference: they voted decisively against the UK proposal that the next conference be held in Oxford on the `theoretical' theme of The Modern City, in favour of the Slovakian proposal for a conference in Bratislava on DoCoMoMo's developing Register of Buildings of the Modern Movement, from which it is intended that recommendations be made to UNESCO for classification as World Heritage Sites. This is closer to home as a theme, but it is to be hoped that DoCoMoMo will not lose its forward-looking aspect and, with it, its vitality.

The Conference concluded with a splendid reception in the Mies Pavilion whose serenity and monumentality were sufficient to override the throng: but to one seeing it for the first time, there seemed a lack of focus at the centre which in the Wright originals is provided by the fireplace.

DoCoMoMo documented - 1994 International DoCoMoMo conference in Barcelona, Spain

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1995 by James Dunnett

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