Joan Ramon Resina

AFTERWORD: THE TEMPLE AND THE CITY— CONTAMINATIONS OF THE SACRED IN MODERNISTA BARCELONA Joan Ramon Resina In his classic study of the institutions of ancient Greece and Rome, Fustel de Coulanges wrote that the ancient city was never the result of gradual accretion but a full-blown foundation. It was created all at once when the families, phratries, and tribes resolved to unite and adopt the same worship (134). Their association was called civitas , and urbs was the place where they came together, “the sanctuary of this association” (134). 1 Characterized by sprawl, multiculturalism, and dispersion, modern cities came into being through densifi cation and overlapping of people unre- lated by kinship or creed. The genealogy of modern cities radically differs from that of their classic ancestors. Or does it? One paradox of Barcelona’s modernization after the 1888 International Exposition was the attempt to model the city according to Fustel’s description of its ancient precursor, for Roman Barcelona had been laid out according to the typical pattern of Roman cities, a system of coordinates formed by two axes, the Cardus Maximus and the Decumanus Maximus, with the forum at their intersection. Today the seats of the Catalan and the municipal governments stand roughly where the Roman forum once was. In this forum was a temple J. R. Resina () Stanford University , Stanford, CA , USA © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 193 A. Cordoba, D. García-Donoso (eds.), The Sacred and Modernity in Urban Spain, Hispanic Urban Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60020-2 194 AFTERWORD: THE TEMPLE AND THE CITY—CONTAMINATIONS… dedicated to Augustus, the columns of which can still be seen on a side street. Augustus had turned to Apollo, the sun god, for help in the battle of Actium and had repaid the divine assistance by erecting a sanctuary and a local cult in his honor. After him, emperors adopted the Sol Invictus as their protector and celestial image. In 274 AD, Aurelian made it an offi cial cult of the empire, and the image of the invincible sun appeared in Roman coins until the reign of Constantine. I do not suggest the survival of a pagan cult into the modern era in Barcelona, but I do think that the sym- bolism of the rising sun, adopted by the socially oriented Anselm Clavé for his musical society L’aurora (Dawn) between 1845 and 1850, had a similar psychological motivation. Post-Weberian commentators propose the trivial explanation that the society was named after the time of its daily rehearsal, musicians being factory workers at a time before the eight-hour working day. I fi nd it more plausible that the name of their association was, like the sun in Roman coins, an assertion of confi dence in the vic- tory of a cause, which in Clavé’s case, having been imprisoned two years earlier for participating in popular revolts, could only be the people’s. This hypothesis is supported by the name chosen by Clavé for the expanded association, Spain’s fi rst men’s choral society: La Fraternitat (Fraternity). In relation to the solar cult, Paul Veyne has this to say: “But for the people, the sun evoked rather [than a mystical religion] an emotion; there are testimonies from different periods, of crowds or armies acclaiming the rising sun, the moving spectacle of a cosmic power that envelops us” (211). Early in the twentieth century, Eugeni d’Ors adopted the Italianate term “civiltat” as the key social virtue. This word choice recalled Fustel’s distinction between civitas and urbs , the former being a community of worship and the latter referring to the physical space where the community assembled. D’Ors’s major work, Glosari , is full of articles on civility amounting to a doctrine of social life in the City, which the intellectuals of the new century, the noucentistes , capitalized to emphasize its ideal nature. The city in small caps, real turn-of-the-century Barcelona, was at best an urbs , a space where people pursued their private interests in a chaotic, haphazard, and ultimately subjective way. The incongruity of the modern industrial city with the classic model advocated by Barcelona’s rising intel- lectual class was apparent. The liberal city was inhabited by a diffuse mass of individuals, by monads with discontinuous and often antithetical wills. But these monads were the material out of which a common will might be fashioned if one could only organize the crowds. The motto “from the many, one” pointed the way to the reversal of the urbs into a civitas AFTERWORD: THE TEMPLE AND THE CITY—CONTAMINATIONS… 195 through the emergence of a public spirit. “And fi nally glimpsed,” wrote d’Ors, “the conscious future organizations, the premonition and promise of the day when the multitudes, which are no longer Chaos, will organize; better yet, will coordinate defi nitively as City” (27-III-1906) ( Glosari 1906 64). The City still lay in the future; to achieve it was the goal of a new-fangled cultural politics: Noucentisme . The urbs , on the other hand, had already been founded; all at once, in fact, by civil engineer Ildefons Cerdà in the mid-nineteenth century. Turning its back on the old city, Cerdà’s Eixample was an entirely new foundation. Much larger than the old one, it emerged by its side without organic transition. Cerdà had invented the term “urbanism,” and d’Ors responded with the neologism “civiltat.” On blueprint, the new city was rationalistic and socializing. Cerdà divided the Barcelona Plain into orthogonal blocks of similar size to be inlaid with rows of buildings on opposite sides of each block. His city lacked hierar- chical spaces, had no center, only a crossroad at the intersection of the two longest avenues. Because centers do not have justifi cation in Newtonian space, Cerdà did not feel the need to provide for one. In its openness and interconnectedness with global space, the new Barcelona was no sanctuary. D’Ors complained about this secularization, which also was, and could not but be, a privatization of the city. While Greek citizens, he argued, lived in small dwellings with low ceilings in narrow, twisted streets, their city boasted haughty temples built in marble. In contrast, “Barcelona is hardly Greek on this point. Barcelona: a couple of paltry public buildings; one thousand sumptuous homes” (25-V-1916) ( Glosari 1916 149). Created in the mid-nineteenth century, an era of romantic subjectivity and bourgeois individualism, the Eixample was eminently unclassic. Its lots had been fi lling with apartment buildings designed according to the whims of owners, or in the fanciful aesthetics of art nouveau. The acme of individualistic intervention in space was the so-called block or apple of dis- cord (the two meanings of the word manzana in Spanish), a reference to the Greek myth in which Paris adjudicates the title of fairest to Aphrodite. In this block, Barcelona residents were invited to decide a contest as awk- ward as choosing between Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera. Because on this block of Passeig de Gràcia, Antoni Gaudí, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, and Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the most eminent Catalan architects, had vied with each other in mastery and originality. But while the well-to-do commissioned buildings from these and lesser architects, d’Ors considered modernista aesthetics tantamount to spiritual 196 AFTERWORD: THE TEMPLE AND THE CITY—CONTAMINATIONS… anarchy. And he began to theorize the need for a classic refoundation of the city. With the news of the San Francisco earthquake, he waxed ecstatic at the prospect of this city being rebuilt rhythmically; that is to say, with the measure of classic proportions: Build the future City, engineers, architects, construction workers of San Francisco! Make it the world’s most beautiful, the most dazzling in gardens and buildings, on the earth that will shake tomorrow again! Because just with Energy becoming rhythm, just with your Will attaining the completion of the perfect work, eternity will have been created. (26-IV-1906) ( Glosari 1906 95) Like so many anecdotes in the Glosari , San Francisco was an illustration, almost a metaphor, for the subject that obsessed d’Ors in those early years of the twentieth century. The Bay Area city was another name for the future Barcelona looming in his imagination with the perfection of a work of pure “arbitrarietat” (by which he understood something akin to will power). As if in answer to his desire, a disaster struck Barcelona a few years later. Considered in its impact on the urban tissue, the Tragic Week of July 1909 was an attempt to secularize urban space where Cerdà’s blueprint could not do it, namely in the symbolic tenor of the architecture. In the midst of a rebellion against an unpopular colonial war, groups of rioters went around the city setting churches on fi re and, by the end of the week, they had completely destroyed or ruined scores of them. In the course of attacking a convent, the graves were desecrated and corpses of nuns exposed. Elsewhere, I have discussed this episode in terms of a deliberate attempt to alter the public image of Barcelona. For the sake of expeditious- ness, I quote from what I wrote then: “Because architecture, like urban planning, inscribes social controls in space, each fl aming church revealed an effort to change society by altering its spatial referents. Churches and convents displayed the hierarchy that ordered urban life. Hence, in raz- ing these emblems of ideological domination, the revolutionaries hoped to undo that very hierarchy” (96).

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