Journal of Architectural Education

ISSN: 1046-4883 (Print) 1531-314X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjae20

Rafael Moneo: Building, Teaching, Writing

Julio Salcedo Fernández

To cite this article: Julio Salcedo Fernández (2016) Rafael Moneo: Building, Teaching, Writing,
Journal of Architectural Education, 70:2, 332-334, DOI: 10.1080/10464883.2016.1197693

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2016.1197693

Published online: 20 Sep 2016.

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Notes
1 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Penguin,
2000).
2 For example, Steven Levy, “Google Throws
Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center,”
Wired, October 2012, www.wired.com/
wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-
center/all (accessed February 15, 2016).
Rafael Moneo: Building, Teaching,
Writing
Nicholas Ray and Francisco Gonzalez
de Canales
Yale University Press, June 2015
308 pages
$40 (hardcover)
On the heels of what has been a
rare and late outpouring of publica-
tions on Jose Rafael Moneo—mostly
by Moneo himself—arrives Rafael
Moneo: Building, Teaching, Writing. This
plethora of publications subverts the
authors’ surmised assessment of the
absence hitherto of a comprehensive
published effort to assess Moneo’s
contributions to the academy and
practice. Although Building, Teaching,
Writing is a wonderful addition to
this canon and amply contributes
novel biographical and material
insights, Moneo’s three most recent
publications taken together deliver
an unrivaled insight into his work;
they also argue more convincingly for
twenty-first century relevance than
this more circumspect tome strives to
impart. By Moneo’s own introduction,
Remarks on 21 Works (Monacelli Press,
2010) is a long-gestated monograph,
though its pairing projects to new
and retooled theoretical essays,
expanding its scope to a theoretical
332 Reviews
and pedagogical manifesto; Theoretical
Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work
of Eight Contemporary Architects (MIT
Press, 2004) delves just as much
into Moneo’s deep scholarship and
theoretical tenets as those of the
eight architects it critiques; and Rafael
Moneo: International Portfolio 1985–2012
(Edition Axel Menges, 2013)—an
unself-conscious glossy opening of
project vaults—provides rare insight
into projects rarely published such as
the Beirut Souks that should expand
“the referent canon” if critically
examined.
As we turn our gaze to the
book at hand, in one of the most
informative passages of this engross-
ing volume, a chapter devoted to
“Composition,” the authors posit:
“Composition,” or the possibility of
an architecture made from different
parts, is what provides Moneo with
the essential flexibility that was not
permitted in organic functionalist
models of the 1960s. If composi-
tion for Durand was the necessary
freedom to respond to the diverse
programmes of nineteenth century
society, for Moneo ... it provided the
possibility of incorporating existing
reality and, more importantly history
and context. (210)
In so heeding, composition also
becomes the method by which
the authors choose to organize an
encyclopedic assessment of Rafael
Moneo’s architectural projects and
theories as a means to argue the
relevance of Moneo’s work for the
twenty-first century (9).  As such, the
volume is made up of three distinct
strains, aptly titled “Biography,”
“Seven Buildings,” and “Thinking.”   tic and humanist school where
The three strains are finely
grained with revelatory and exhaustive
research—hitherto scattered or
lacking—this abundance compiled
in a single volume makes it a key
resource for the understanding of
Moneo.  Perhaps just as significantly,
extensive footnotes contextualize the
subject and entice the reader to delve
into decades’ worth of the intense
historiographic milieu conforming
Moneo’s stance: we learn, for example,
how Moneo in Rome forged an alliance
with Bruno Zevi’s notions of histori-
cal transcendence while distancing
himself from Manfredo Tafuri, who
was suspicions of operative criticism.
As with any composition, the
relative synchronicity and value
of the strains defines its operative
success.  Of the three strains in this
volume, the most insightful is the
third and final section: “Thinking.”
Both “Biography” and “Seven
Buildings” have much to offer, but
perhaps, in the pleats and demarca-
tions of this sectional composition,
concepts are remised and unable to
expand beyond each strain.
One of those remised themes
across strains is an original category
of the book’s title, Building,
Teaching, Writing. A fragmented
“Teaching” is discussed at length
in the “Biography” and “Thinking”
strains and it is sutured for those
understandingly seeking a note on
pedagogy.  As reviewed below, in
“Biography,” the exegesis is made
of how Moneo’s pedagogy arises
from intense diverse exposures, and
transhistorical interests.  Starting
from his time teaching in the 1960s
in ETSAM–Madrid, Moneo strives
to debunk a simplified “techno
scientific” paradigm in favor of a
“design methodology” that seeks to
equally evaluate disparate approaches
through the larger lenses of history.
This pedagogy would be expanded
during his time as design chair of the
ETSAB–Barcelona, where Moneo
was able to find further synergies
with the systemic nineteenth-century
French models of the Academy,
while providing for a more pluralis-
different departments complemented
the design teaching.  In the strain
“Thinking,” these pedagogical notes
are elaborated to encompass key
operative notions of the pedagogy
such as “typology,” “composi-
tion,” “form,” and “the canon.”  In
addition, perhaps one of the most
significant contributions of the book,
the authors articulate a key global
and ultimately pedagogical tenet for
Moneo stemming from the Spanish
philosophers Miguel de Unamuno
and José Ortega y Gasset: a primacy
of the circumstantial, of contingency
and ultimately construction. In other
words, a return to a contested plural
“reality,” in contrast to fantasti-
cal dogmatism “into which the
Modern Movement had degenerated”
(182).  Hence, Moneo’s singularity and
rise to architectural notoriety may be
attributed to teaching a pedagogy at
once deeply imbued in an argumen-
tative theoretical process assessing
potential approaches and deeply
reliant on the validation of praxis.
In “Biography,” Moneo’s life
accounts and notes are incredibly
insightful, particularly regarding his
formative years.  The painstaking
research offers an amazing window
into his personality and interests.  One
follows Moneo from the small but
strategic birth town of Tudela to
Madrid, where a comparatively
ebullient artistic and university life
provided a digression from Franco’s
regime. In the Madrid of the 1950s, an
adventurous Moneo is uncertain of his
vocational calling and first becomes
acquainted with artists.  The ensuing
pedagogical environment is one of
master classes, professorships, and
apprenticeships. These latter ones—
his experiences under Francisco Javier
Sáenz de Oiza and Jørn Utzon—are
elaborately positioned with regard
to his formation.  However, it is his
time at the Spanish Royal Academy
in Rome, consequent approximation
to La Tendenza, and pedagogical work
as Design Professor in Barcelona that
informed Moneo’s discourse.  There
are some minor editing omissions
that prevent a better understanding:
Moneo’s birth is mistakenly dated after
and not before his town’s civil war
bombing (14), and a further explana-
tion of when he became a registered
architect is necessary as terms and
dates are oddly juxtaposed.
Nonetheless, the term
“Biography” ought to solicit a further
examination and daring interpretation
of the respective interplay between
Moneo’s life events and architectural
trajectory. For example, one finds this
Reviews
stranded sentence as the last passage
of a momentous chapter:  “Meanwhile,
on a family note, in 1975, Moneo’s
youngest daughter, Clara, was born
in Madrid” (59). Other biographi-
cal events of great significance, as
Moneo’s editing of Arquitecturas Bis
or his participation in the Pequeños
Congresos—Small Congresses—are not
developed in the “Thinking” section
to the degree they deserve—in part
a result of the tripartite composi-
tion. The Pequeños Congresos—where
the Madrid and Barcelona camps
congregated, with guests such as Aldo
Rossi, to parse the theoretical territo-
ries of the “late organic style” and
of the nascent urban and typological
historicism—engendered a complex
output that is not discussed.
In the section “Seven Buildings,”
the iconic built projects of Bankinter,
the Logroño Town Hall, the Roman
Art Museum in Merida, the Miró
foundation, the Kursaal, the Murcia
Town Hall and the Cathedral of Our
Lady of Los Angeles are individu-
ally represented and discussed
while presenting a rich context and
background vicissitudes for each
project.  Regarding this compilation,
and though it may be explained as
providing a wider typological range,
the inclusion of the Los Angeles
Cathedral in this list merits discussion.
It is not a question of the worthiness
of the project but rather of its
exemplary significance to arguments
as deployed in the third and final
strain “Thinking”: the cathedral’s
design in its mediation of the
circumstantial, historical, typological,
contextual, and formal parameters
engenders a less transformative—
disambiguated from original—project
than other key works such as the
Atocha Train Station or the Davis
Museum at Wellesley College.
Always insightful, the book’s
graphic documentation is carefully
selected and beautifully printed.
However, there are shortcomings in
breadth and foci that are rather salient
in this section. First, there is further
material required to understand the
buildings and in cases find depictions
to direct mentions in the text. For
JAE 70:2
example, an invitation to discern the
two different porticos in Logroño’s
Town Hall has no accompanying
image unless one is fortunate to
venture near the book’s index.   
Second, as we are reminded
throughout the text, Moneo embarks
on “a unique, personal interpreta-
tion” (141) of history, theory, and
context.  This method—coined a
“theory of design”—is based on the
analysis, assimilation, and projection
of precedents, expansive readings on
site, and theoretical positions. The
resultant by-product is a plethora of
built, drawn, and written referents. In
this light, the sparseness and choice
of the graphic documentation for
referential allusions are perplexing: the
only referent photographs are Stirling
and Gowan’s University of Leicester
and Le Corbusier’s Millowner’s
Association Building.  There are
moments when Moneo’s biography
intertwines well with the description
of projects; for example, Bankinter’s
reliefs are explained to be the work
of Francisco López Hernández—an
artist Moneo befriended at the Royal
Spanish Academy in Rome. And
yet more graphic documentation
depicting Moneo’s biographic locales
and references would enhance both
sections on “Biography” and “Seven
Buildings.”
Finally, as deftly unpacked
elsewhere in the text, stemming from
the Spanish philosophers Miguel de
Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset,
Moneo’s theory and praxis is informed
by “the circumstances that engender
design: the contingencies of the site,
the client and the programme,” and
more critically, construction (177).
In other words, “the true theorist
has also to be a practitioner, because
only the practitioner knows about
the complexities and constraints
of construction” (184). The case
is further made that construction
validates theory and combats Moneo’s
nemesis—arbitrariness.  Therefore,
“Seven Buildings” ought to be
equally steeped in the circumstantial
construction.  Abductive documenta-
tion of the material and construction
practices would elucidate and augment
333
this key tenet: for example, detailed
discussions of the Kursaal’s ribbed
concave glass, cast mullions, precast
and cast in place concrete vis-à-vis
historical precedents and Spanish
building practices would attain the
level of disciplinary depth demanded
elsewhere in the text.
As previously stated and as
this review is devised, the section
“Thinking” articulates all sections
into a cohesive argument. “Thinking”
manages to dovetail novel interpreta-
tive analysis with a rigorous theoretical
chronicle of Moneo’s philosophy and
influences alike. A series of passages
provide a nuanced and accessible look
into Moneo’s referents: this review’s
opening quote belongs in a discussion
that emanates from Deleuze’s reading
of Spinoza and posits Emil Kauffman’s
notions of the primacy of reason—
vis-à-vis Rudolf Wittkower's reliance
on transcendence—as instrumen-
tal in Moneo’s accrued interests in
composition beyond those of Durand.
Other passages such as “Design
Approach” advance a methodology
based on Moneo’s intent to relegate
“the excitement of new technolo-
gies” in favor of a “realignment of the
disciplines of the human sciences”
(178).  In “Thinking,” not all the
passages are equally revealing, though,
and the last two, “The Confrontation
with Reality” and “Conclusion,”
lack both incisiveness and broader
perspective to deliver on the promise
to argue the relevance of Moneo’s
work for the twenty-first century.   to a countermovement of social
Still, in reading this volume,
one marvels at how Moneo navigated
vibrant and disparate theoretical,
cultural, and tectonic contexts to
generate such a rich and cohesive
body of buildings and texts; and, as a
corollary, one becomes painfully aware
of the relative flatness and bareness of
recent architectural culture.  Although
three recently emerging vectors are
beginning to disrupt this flatness—
namely, pulling toward computational,
social programming, or environ-
mental concerns—few people are
able to reap the expanded benefits of
this new context and even fewer are
able to grow a building practice that
334 Reviews
guides theoretical stances the way
Moneo has.  Hopefully Moneo’s recent
publications and the authors—in their
expansive gaze across architectural
cultures and in their dual examina-
tion of theory and practice—will help
reinvigorate Moneo’s stature as a key
referent, commentator, and maker at a
time when many in the United States
are mostly concerned with Eisenman’s
exceptionalism.
Julio Salcedo Fernández is the Chair
of the Spitzer School of Architecture
at City College and has taught at
Harvard University, the University of
Pennsylvania, Syracuse University,
and Cornell University. In addition
to his 2011 book, Generic Specific
Continuum, Salcedo’s work has won
an Architectural League award and a
European Award; been exhibited at
the Farnsworth Museum; and has been
widely published. In addition, prior to
funding Scalar Architecture, Salcedo
worked extensively in studios such as
Rafael Moneo.
Architecture and the Welfare State
Edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom
Avermaete, and Dirk van den Heuvel
Routledge, 2014
360 pages
$59.95 (paperback)
The editors of Architecture and the
Welfare State claim that despite great
interest among architectural histori-
ans about architecture during the
second half of the twentieth century
on the one hand, and studies “within
political sociology” examining the
postwar welfare state as an interna-
tional phenomenon on the other,
“little attention has been given to
the varied ways in which architec-
ture and urban planning interacted
with the different regimes of welfare
provision.” The aim of this book is to
fill this gap in the literature.
The editors report two
motivations to revisit “the architec-
ture of the welfare state” today: (1) to
understand the forces that shaped
the context in which particular
building(s) stood in order to inform
decisions about their preservation
or demolition, and (2) to understand
the actual role(s) of the architect in
shaping or implementing welfare state
policies, in order to improve theory
and practice as democratic social
reforms continue to evolve worldwide.
There is significant variation in
the extent to which these chapters
successfully address these editorial
goals; success here depends largely on
the ability of the authors, all architec-
tural historians, to get the historical
contexts right.
The introduction includes a
theoretical framework, intended
to unify the collection, that traces
the origins of the welfare state to
what Karl Polyani described as the
Great Transformation that began
in the nineteenth century, a period
characterized by the rise of industrial
capitalism, rapid urbanization, and
economic growth. These transna-
tional phenomena also gave rise
protection, which by the 1920s led
to a convergence of ideas, from
both left and right, on the ideal of
a Third Way: social democracy and
progressivism. These reform ideals
provided the framework for welfare
states, which took shape in various
national forms after World War II, and
which subsequently were repeatedly
modified, widely maligned, and then
dismantled beginning in the 1970s.
The case studies in this collection
examine a range of issues and building
types, in different countries and
at different times, from the 1920s
through the 1970s.
Chapters are grouped into three