Federico Correa in Vienna Central Europe in Arquitecturas Bis (1974-1985)

• Main Author: Alejandro Valdivieso Royo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Bologna 2020-03-01
• Series: Histories of Postwar Architecture
• Subjects: federico correa; barcelona; hans hollein; josef hoffmann; vienna; arquitecturas bis
• Online Access: https://hpa.unibo.it/article/view/9821

Time and again, the Barcelona-based magazine Arquitecturas Bis (published from 1974 to 1985) has been studied and analyzed through the Italian-North American polarity, based on the linkages created with its contemporaries Oppositions (New York) and Lotus International (Milan). Among the members of its heterogeneous Editorial Board, Federico Correa (Barcelona, 1924) – in addition to his well-known Italian connections; explained since his very first contact with Gardella, Rogers, Albini, amongst others, within the Venice CIAM summer course in 1952; giving purpose to an influential genealogy for Catalan contemporary architecture that starts off in José Antonio Coderch (1913-1984) – was notable for its purpose in disseminating not only postwar 1960´s counterculture Central European architecture in Spain, but the Viennese turn-of-the-century avant-garde; promoting their exploited by the media theoretical ties. Furthermore, Vienna and its ‘middle-term’ architectures were for Correa unavoidable references for his own professional work, developed together with Alfonso Milà (1924-2009). All these facts brings us to understand how much that generation (educated in the Spanish and European post-war years) understood, dealing with the historiography of modern architecture, that architects had to stop not only in certain ‘middle-terms’ – as stated by Peter Collins, amongst other historians – but also aim to seek for continuities in order to explain the disjointed contemporaneity.