A concept he borrowed from theorists Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre.
Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in The Anti-Aesthetics: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983).
Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, interview in El País, February 1, 1986.
Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980).
GATEPAC members published a magazine entitled A. C. (Actividad Contemporánea), which included the work of architects sympathetic to their beliefs (Breuer, Neutra, Mies van der Rohe, Moser and others). The publication enjoyed great success and international prestige at the time. In March 1932 the CIRPAC (Comité international pour la résolution des problèmes de l'architecture contemporaine) met in Barcelona with its members Giedion, Le Corbusier, Gropius, Bourgeois, and others and they signed an implicit pact for the Spanish avant-garde to be recognized in the pages of the history of twentieth-century modern architecture.
Besides this, parts of the building floor were covered with typical ceramic tiles of Spanish terracotta, and the exhibition rooms were carpeted with “esparto” (the rope-like grass fiber used in Mediterranean cultures) and even the structure of the pavilion hosted a typical Andalusian “patio” covered by an awning. Another spectacular detail was a wooden lattice characteristic of southern Arabic influence.
This ideology, about raising a truly national architecture, modern and avant-gardist at the same time, rooted in the tradition and in earth, could also be found in the sculpture erected by Alberto Sánchez, entitled The Spanish People Have a Path Which Leads to a Star, that stands in front of the pavilion.
This included special treatment for the representation of two other governments within the same national pavilion (sharing a semi-autonomous status): the presence of the Generalitat of Catalonia (or Catalan Government) and also the Government of Euskadi (Basque Country). See the catalogue Pabellón Español 1937: Exposición International de París, exh. cat. (Madrid: Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1987). It is worth mentioning that the Spanish pavilion was fully orientated towards Agit-Prop and political commitment to support the Republican cause of fighting the uprising of the militarized Nationals one year prior to that.
Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (New York: Seagull Books, 2007), 86–7.
Although this short paper looks promising (in what it seems being a transcription of a panel discussion between the two leading theorists), the result is an abstract account where the reader never finds the thread or argument. Spivak’s use of “critical regionalism” is free from any reference to the architectural debate and it is also ambiguously exposed to ultimately mean a metaphor of the post-national statelessness. When asked about what exactly this critical regionalism would mean, Spivak goes from Habermas and the European constitution to Kant and Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship to ultimately claim: “Can the New Latin America check the Euro-US craze for universalism? Evo Morales would make us hope so. Hence, why ‘critical’ and why ‘regionalism’. It goes under and over nationalisms but keeps the abstract structures of something like a state.” Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, 94.
Ibid., 1–2.
It is also noteworthy that the Museo Reina Sofia hosted an exhibition about the GATEPAC group, entitled A. C.: la revista del G.A.T.E.P.A.C. 1931-1937. This exhibition took place from October 28, 2008 until January 5, 2009.
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Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception: Selected Writings (London: Continuum, 2006) 170–171.