Foreword

Chapter 4. The electric Decade The Electric Drama of Dissolution Cybernetic Circuses The Repose of the Masses Technodevices for Social Emergencies

Chapter 5. The Pneumatic Community Theaters of Air Peaceful Atoms The Dissolution of the Great Machine The Counterculture Campaign

Chapter 6. Sacred Geometries Order, Technocracy and Industry The Great Mystic Campout Lines and Time Tunnels Technowalden

Conclusions. Et in Arcadia Ego

148 151 158 164 168

182 185 189 198 205

212 215 220 227 235

242

This book seeks to tell the story of a very particular moment in history, using a metaphor we will call the Mobile Theater. This metaphor has been embodied in many different examples, but just one of them will serve as the main story line – although not the only one – in the narrative presented here. Our focus is the degree project developed by the Spanish architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (Madrid, 1942) for his studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, which we have reproduced here in its entirety.

In addition to this project, Navarro de Zuvillaga published an article in 1976, also included in this book, which laid out the foundations for his research. Navarro’s project and the themes from his article were the conceptual drivers behind this book, which aims not only to disseminate them, because of their importance and their exceptional quality in the context of Spanish architectural culture, but also to situate them in a broader context, both geographically and culturally, within a rich international framework.

Therefore, and despite what it might seem, this book is not a monograph about a design by an author – or it isn’t only that. It is the story of a highly complex, and chronologically clear-cut, cultural network. Over the course of this narrative, Javier Navarro’s Mobile Theater appears and disappears, only to reappear again, as a point of reference and a specter that haunts the investigation as a whole. Moreover, this discontinuous structure is also characterized by a series of themes, each providing a title for a chapter, which are independent from one another, but globally they offer a comprehensive portrait of the cultural climate in London in which Javier Navarro’s project took shape. In that sense, we have aimed to produce, or reproduce, a certain critical cultural atmosphere, rather than a narrative that is closed off, conclusive or dogmatic.

The period during which this book’s title project was developed is of great interest today, because it outlines cultural, economic and social conditions that are somewhat similar to our own. What should most interest us today about that chapter in history is not its premonitory character – which can only be evidenced in hindsight, by a nostalgic or even opportunistic outlook – but rather how the main characters in the story were able to navigate, almost blindly, the contradictions of their times. What honors almost all the architectural experiments that are reviewed in this book is not their anticipation of certain phenomena that are predominant, accepted and ubiquitous today: just the opposite, it is their enormous antagonism with respect to the dominant architectural culture of their time.