Politics of the Void

When, in the summer of 1958, the architectural press reviewed the Brussels International and Universal Exhibition, mostly disappointedly, the building presented by Spain made it onto most of the short-lists for best pavilion. The special issue of Architectural Forum on Expo 58 featured a drawing of the Spanish pavilion on its cover, noting that the building was one of the few “unexpected gems of architecture” on the fair’s grounds. In Domus Gio Ponti regarded it as “most poetic, structurally sound and yet formally new, simple, honest.” ¹ The one aspect of the building that was invariably stressed—and probably one of the reasons architecture critics liked it so much—was that it was empty (Fig. 8.1). As was put in Bruno Zevi’s L’architettura: “Inside the pavilion, the void. Nothing to see.” ² Associating this emptiness with a sense of vibrant openness and multidirectional transparency, reviewers saw the pavilion as redeeming Spaniards from the unrefined symbolism and rhetorical clichés that otherwise pervaded the exhibition grounds: “The problem here—this was noted in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui—is not to show as many things as possible, as in the French pavilion, but to suggest through photography, music and dance, the ambience and spirit of a country.” ³