Func­tion­al­ism

 

The work Func­tion­al­ism an­a­lyzes the uni­ver­sal­ist prin­ci­ple of Mod­ernism, the idea of a sin­gle ar­chi­tec­tural so­lu­tion which could be ap­plied to any prob­lem, any­where. Reinaldo Pérez Rayón’s de­sign for Mex­ico City’s In­sti­tuto Po­litec­nico Na­cional, loosely based on Mies van der Rohe’s Illi­nois In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy in Chicago is, on the sur­face, a per­fect il­lus­tra­tion of this prin­ci­ple. Its mod­u­lar func­tion­al­ism seems end­lessly re­pro­ducible, and its neat rows of class­room build­ings seem to her­ald a well-or­dered fu­ture, at­tain­able through ef­fi­cient build­ing tech­nol­ogy. Guillermo Zamora’s pho­to­graph of the Poly­tech­nic—re­pro­duced in Func­tion­al­ism

—is like a ban­ner for Mod­ernist ideals of uni­ver­sal­ism and so­cial progress through de­sign.

 

Yet there is some­thing ex­ag­ger­ated about the pho­to­graph. The scale and per­fec­tion of the com­plex feel omi­nous, like those fa­mil­iar im­ages of the huge “mass or­na­ment” spec­ta­cles or­ches­trated by the Mex­i­can and Ger­man gov­ern­ments in the 1930s. In the same way, the Poly­tech­nic pho­to­graph is a care­fully or­ches­trated dis­play, set up to im­press the viewer with the form of the com­plex as much as with the ide­ol­ogy be­hind its con­struc­tion. In fact, much of the tech­nol­ogy we see on dis­play in the Poly­tech­nic pho­to­graph hadn’t yet ar­rived in Mex­ico in 1963, and many of the ma­chine-pro­duced,

mod­u­lar el­e­ments of the com­plex were in fact made by hand. Mex­ico has al­ways en­joyed a large pool of in­ex­pen­sive, skilled labour, which means an I-beam is less costly to as­sem­ble by hand than to ex­trude with ad­vanced metal-work­ing tech­nolo­gies. What we see in the pho­to­graph of Func­tion­al­ism is an idea of progress.

 

 

 

Func­tion­al­ism brings the Mex­ico City Poly­tech­nic to Ha­vana in a kind of metaphor­i­cal uni­ver­sal(ist) tour. The piece is in­stalled at the his­tor­i­cal site of the Con­greso Mundial de Ar­qui­tec­tos (In­ter­na­tional Union of Ar­chi­tects’ World Con­gress)—Juan

Cam­pos y En­rique Fuentes’ Pa­bellón Cuba. The pho­to­mural, at­tached to the 4D scaf­fold­ing struc­ture, ap­pears to be some kind of ghost or for­got­ten rem­nant of the 1963 con­fer­ence and ex­hi­bi­tion (The use of the pho­to­mural was a com­mon dis­play strat­egy in Mod­ernist ar­chi­tec­tural ex­hi­bi­tions.) In keep­ing with the CMA’s theme of an in­ter­na­tional ex­change of ar­chi­tec­tural ideas, the pho­to­graph of Pérez Rayón’s 1963 Poly­tech­nic In­sti­tute brings Mies’ uni­ver­sal­ist ideas back to Ha­vana: Mies de­signed a head­quar­ters build­ing for the Bac­ardi com­pany for San­ti­ago de Cuba in 1957, but the pro­ject was halted by the Cuban Rev­o­lu­tion. Mies went on to de­sign a ver­sion of the Cuban fac­tory for Mex­ico City a few years later, lo­cated not far from the city’s Poly­tech­nic In­sti­tute. The Mies/Cuba story doesn’t end there,

but goes on to be­come an ex­cel­lent il­lus­tra­tion of the ex­per­i­men­ta­tion with the uni­ver­sal ap­pli­ca­tion of build­ing forms: When in­vited to de­sign the New Na­tional Gallery for Berlin in the early 1960’s Mies is said to have told his draughts­men “Let’s give them the Bac­ardi build­ing from Cuba.”

 

Ter­ence Gower