Underground, elevated, self-built, mobile: the radical architecture that Michel Ragon advocated

BarcelonaHe only had a primary school certificate, but his humble origins did not prevent him from obtaining a doctorate at the Sorbonne, despite not having taken any courses. Nor did it prevent him from being a renowned writer and critic of avant-garde art and architecture in France. In addition, Michel Ragon (Marseille, 1924 – Suresnes, 2020) was an interesting and prolific scholar of anarchism, as demonstrated in the historical novel The memory of the vaincus (1990), The memory of the defeated in the Spanish translation published by La Oveja Roja in 2010.

"Proletarian literature and so-called avant-garde art criticism may seem like contradictory activities, but this can only be the case to those who forget that, at certain moments in history, the aesthetic avant-garde and the doctoral avant-garde, which La Virreina Centro de la Imagen has very wisely translated and edited in a handout which is offered free of charge at the entrance ofAnd after Le Corbusier? Michel Ragon. The exhibition, open until May, was presented last week, the same day that Barcelona City Council announced the purchase of Casa Orsola, and it was inevitable not to see an echo of the current housing and urban planning crisis that we are experiencing today.

"Our current cities are, as we know, the emanation of an ideology of financial, technocratic and bureaucratic power, but they are also a theatre in which a propaganda work is performed that pursues the efficiency of production and the intensification of consumption," he said elsewhere in the thesis. The practice of the city and its ideologies. Let us remember: from 1975. He continues: "If the ideology of a liberated city, of a playful city, looms over our alienated cities, if indignant citizens have been able to make their own a slogan like the right to the city in what should be called urban struggles, it is to say, lluites pel que es urbà, es que el mite de la fia de la ciudad es tan fragile com la fide de la historia o de la mort de l'art". Currents of architecture among men and women including those in the 50s and 60s are trying to propose a radical alternative to what we could say about the functionalist academicism of the post-war period. Rationalism has led to the efforts of the powerful to reconstruct Europe quickly, economically and simply. the increase in world population —in 1950 there were about 2.5 billion people in the world and today they have exceeded 8,000— and they are looking for solutions to accommodate the growing population, many of them in large polygons made of blocks all the same.

"Towards the sixties, several groups reconsidered whether what was being done in architecture and urbanism was the best way to respond to the new needs of society," says Marzá in relation to the International Group of Prospective Architecture (GIAP), created in May 1965 and in which Ragon played a relevant role as a disseminator. "They began to investigate in the theoretical field, and also with practical proposals, the technological and ideological alternatives to that model. The proposals were there, the engineers showed that they could be done, but almost nothing was put into practice, although we are still talking about it today," says Marzá.

What they were proposing, as can be seen in the exhibition, was such a paradigm shift that it was considered visionary, utopian or fanciful. For example, the Franco-Hungarian Yona Friedman, the other key figure in the exhibition, in his defence of mobile architecture, proposed large superstructures - among them the spatial city that weighs on the existing city - in which citizens could place their homes as they wished. The idea was to create a large superstructure of services that was sufficiently flexible and malleable to be adapted to the needs and tastes of each person. There was also the Intrapolis of the Swiss Walter Jonas, a project of "funnel cities" made up of a series of conical constructions that allowed the habitable part to be concentrated towards the interior, ensuring sunlight for all residents and isolating them from the noise and smoke of the roads outside. And finally, there are temporary cardboard holiday apartments as an alternative to the urban depredation of the tourist coastline, underground dwellings lit by a system of distribution of sunlight and snail houses that allow for adding rooms as the family grows by the Frenchman Guy Rottier. Or, also, the "parasitic cells" by the Frenchman Jean-Louis Chanéac, also designed to be added like mushrooms to existing buildings to increase their space.

"If we stick to the shapes alone, we will be wrong, because the exhibition did not aim to show these more or less visionary ideas, but to explain what these shapes responded to, because they proposed making a conical building, incorporating urban gardens and nature into the buildings, proposing mobile structures and working with solar energy," he comments. "The interesting thing is that they do not approach it only from the point of view of the architect, the administration or the promoter who must do the project, but from that of the user," adds Moyano. "For them, it is the inhabitant who must decide how he should live. That is why they do not speak only of forms, or of infrastructures, but the basic concept is from."

This centrality of the inhabitant is, according to Moyano, a constant in the architects present at the exhibition. "And the thread that unites them is libertarian thought," he adds. "That is, the idea that the city cannot be structured from power, because when it is done it always tends to create a concentrationary architecture, which is what we have seen until now." They propose, as Friedman did when he defended the urban structure of the Somorrostro barracks against the piling up of large blocks at the Mina, a more self-managed and free way of defining the city and architecture.

And what does the Le Corbusier of the title have to do with this? It becomes clear at the start of the exhibition. On one wall are Ragon's biography and books on architecture and the anarchist movement. On the other, photographs and a poster from the Festival of Avant-garde Art held in August 1956 in Le Corbusier's newly opened Marseille Housing Unit, one of the milestones of modern architecture. Ragon was the curator of the artistic section and Maurice Béjart of the dance section - a must-see video of the dancer as a young man dancing among abstract works of art. Le Corbusier, who had also designed an underground tube city under a motorway with housing according to the user's taste, is the main inspiration at the beginning. But later, he also becomes the figure to be fought when his thousands of followers around the world forget his spirit of research and dedicate themselves to cloning some of his proposals ad infinitum. And so it goes on to this day.