Arquitecture without a home: between asceticism and the ornament: José Moreno Villa and the ambivalence of the avant-garde

Abstract

Two years before Lorca’s visit to New York, José Moreno Villa, his friend and mate at the Residencia de Estudiantes undertakes the same trip. Villa’s extraordinarily multifaceted character (as poet, painter, art and architecture critic) allows us to consider his New York experience as a privileged point of departure to analyze the Spanish cultural crossroads at the end of the 20s. The very particular circumstances of Villa’s trip take us to look at those crossroads as a dialogue between an ascetic tendency in Avant-Garde formalism and the latent threat of an ornamental drift. Simultaneously, his thoughts about aesthetics and architecture are formulated, as we will see, in terms of gender: his personal project, getting married to his American girlfriend and establishing a home is intertwined with his search for an aesthetic position in the Avant-garde crossroads.