There is something joyfully ancient in A personal history of European architecture by David Ferrer, something that comes from another time when History studies were at the center of the humanities and, thanks to that privilege, had a door that connected with the discipline of Architecture, as it happened in the double rooms of old hotels.
Wasn't historian Fernando Chueca the architect with the most impact on the political and cultural discussion in Spain at the end of Franco's regime and the beginning of democracy? Ferrer belongs to the generation of architects who in the 70s and 80s rediscovered the values of the old European city: coexistence, memory, and the construction of European democracy. The city is the palimpsest that tells the story of life.
A personal history of European architecture
"From the Greek temple to the Bauhaus," says the subtitle of A personal history of architecture and that pair of references is also significant and speaks of a generational longing to find historical resonances like the one that links the Acropolis of Athens with the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and with Mies Van der Rohe's German Pavilion in Barcelona.
In other words: A personal history of European architectureis not written to support a thesis, to explain the world through a specific approach (inequality, the impact of violence, the supremacy of one culture over others, or the interaction between aesthetic traditions). It is, rather, a flow of information that, through architecture, speaks of inequality, violence, how Muslims and Christians influenced each other, and the impact of the Lutheran Reformation on cities.
Let's take an example: the pleasure of the domestic, the discovery that Europeans (not only them, of course) built that there is a form of well-being related to the feeling of being at home. Is there a more human experience than that? The Greeks were unaware of it. The Romans sensed it and developed a first method of creating happy homes. And bourgeois societies turned their houses into emblems of their success. At the end of A personal history of architecture, the domestic is linked to a central theme in the 20th century: architecture as a tool for egalitarianism and social justice.
Ferrer writes from his professional background, not from sociology: when he describes Italian Baroque architecture, he talks about compositions and geometry and when he discusses the 19th century, he focuses on the revolution of construction materials, iron, and glass. But there are also critical judgments in his approach. In the pages where A personal history of European architecture refers to the Baroque developed in Spain, Ferrer states that on this side of the Mediterranean, there was a lack of spatial ambition that existed in Italy.
The book argues that Spanish Baroque was a matter of surface, perhaps linked to the heritage of the arabesques of Al-Andalus. The best of that architecture did not happen in Santiago or Seville but in Lima and Quito. There is not much to object to that idea.
And, a few pages later, Ferrer dedicates a chapter to the modernism of his city, Barcelona. It is in these pages where his explanation of the world becomes more personal, as promised by the title, and less analytical, where the explanation of the successes and failures of Domènech i Montaner, Gaudí, and company is more melancholic. Ferrer prefers in Gaudí what he has as an architect rather than what he has as a sculptor. He prefers La Pedrera over the Sagrada Familia and exposes what connects him to the world beyond Barcelona: Paris, Vienna, London... He understands the complexity of his worldview but does not ignore that his path ended within himself.
The cover of A personal history of European architecture is a detail from a fresco by Piero della Francesca representing a walled town. The last illustrated image belongs to the sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in Paimio by Alvar Aalto, in Finland. Ferrer's geographical and temporal frameworks (Europe, up to World War II) also have a touch of another era but also offer the certainty of portraying a world that we all recognize and that appeals to us.