Within the Cold War framework, a culture alien to our own, unleashed by the construction of various infrastructures and developments, appropriated territories until it merged with the local reality, taking the best from both ways of inhabiting spaces.

The embrace between Franco and Eisenhower on 21 December 1959 came at a price. The historical context was the Cold War, a Europe divided into two blocs, its most explicit symbol being West Berlin surrounded by a concrete wall watched over twenty-four hours a day, mined on the FRG side. The United States of America economically props up European countries impoverished by the World War, granting them loans at very low interest rates, supporting the prevailing political regimes when it suits them, and establishing trade relations with them regardless of their democratic status.

Within this framework, Spain has been agonising for decades. The Civil War left it economically shattered, divided into two camps that persist to this day, subjected to a terrible dictatorship that isolated it from the rest of the continent, with no clear trade relations, no productive economy, no effective education system, and little to export. This is the Spain that, under the plan of General George Marshall, then Secretary of State of the United States of America and, (let us not forget) Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1953, will become, in exchange for substantial economic aid, admission to the UN and the subsequent end of its international isolation, the second most militarised country in the Western European bloc after Germany.

The United States, mindful of where they are working, will literally import pieces of their country to establish them in Spain: the Torrejón de Ardoz air base (the site of the embrace between Eisenhower and Franco) will, for decades, be the most important in Europe. Rota will become the base of the Sixth Fleet. All these enclaves, along with a few others scattered across the country's geography, will be American soil, which will require passport control to enter.

Catalonia will not be immune to this reality. The Empordà region will be regarded as a key strategic site for telecommunications: a site will be established on Pals beach. Radio Liberty, with a building designed by the architect Augustine Borrell Sensat completed in 1959, on the Montgrí massif near L'Estartit, the LORAN Base, a radio-navigation control for the entire Mediterranean Sea, operational from 1961, and the military and civil air traffic surveillance base on the summit of Pení near Roses, in operation since 1953 and still active. Nearby, in Sant Climent Sescebes, one of the Spanish Army's most important training bases must be monitored; it is also located just a few kilometres from a contentious border: between Portbou and La Jonquera there is no border crossing in between. All this will require intelligence and logistics to be overseen by senior officers. These will be housed in the county town, Figueres, on land also considered American soil, a neighbourhood completely separate from the rest of the city: today, the Customs barriers are still intact and clearly visible, linked together by what is known as John Fitzgerald Kennedy Street. The neighbourhood was handed over around 1959.

Some of these houses are attributed to Richard Neutra.

Richard Neutra will form part of the roster of architects who regularly work for the American Army. The American Army can be regarded as virtually a patron of architecture, encompassing military architects who build by direct commission, subject to military hierarchy, and the subcontracted firms that carry out the more delicate commissions. Among the latter are Marcel Breuer, SOM, Louis and Albert Kahn (no known relationship between them) and Richard Buckminster Fuller.

Neutra's authorship of these houses (and of other commissions in Spain) is disputed: he is credited with the officers' housing in Torrejón de Ardoz, and, recently, his authorship of a still-extant colony in Zaragoza has been denied. The Docomomo (a prestigious website regarded as a leading authority on the subject) maintains the thesis of the Master's authorship of the houses in Figueres. And, most importantly, a visit by the Master to the houses, via Barcelona, has been documented. If Neutra were really the author of the houses, the circumstances of the commission would be, to say the least, curious: the architect would have drawn them, and a third party, with full powers, would have overseen the construction on his own account. Neutra would have had no intermediate stage: from the drawing board to the finished building.

I'm not particularly interested in whether the houses are by Richard Neutra or not, beyond one further consideration: if they aren't his, I want to know their true architect, because it will almost certainly be someone worth investigating; the quality of the buildings is such that it transcends the name of their creator.

The housing estate (the neighbourhood) is situated at the northern end of the city, parallel to the road to La Jonquera. Very close to the Motel Empordà, a building of exceptional quality (whose architect I do not know), which, incidentally, has a restaurant of a standard commensurate with its architecture. Very close, about a five-minute walk from the Dalí Museum, perfectly visible from one of the gates (read: customs posts) of the development. Very close, by the way, to the Centre of the Universe, logically located by Dalí at the Café Royal on the Ramblas. As anyone who has had a glass there will know cake.

Neutra (I'll stick with the working hypothesis that the houses are his) conceives of five more or less identical, standard buildings, to the almost parodic extreme of being ready to plug into the street at the front and the back alike. Each of the five buildings contains four dwellings, two on the ground floor and two upstairs, and consists of two smaller buildings, each housing two dwellings stacked vertically, identical to one another. The two small buildings are symmetrical (with only a slight asymmetry if the layout varies by one room), and they all face south, regardless of their position on the street. The housing typology is binuclear and compact, meaning there is no separating courtyard between the day and night areas. Four of the buildings face the street (President Kennedy) at the front, with one at the rear. Access is provided by the platforms that connect them. At the ends are two Wright-style garages, two open carports, and a porch supported by metal columns of circular cross-section, as slender as can be calculated. There isn't a single fence in the entire development: the open space, all of it covered in greenery and mature trees, is negotiated between the neighbours according to their mood, and nothing more.

The five buildings each present some small differences among themselves. The main one is the way they touch the ground. In each case it is different, and in one building it even required turning the carport ninety degrees. The plot is on the slope of the hillock of the Castle of Figueres, and the street approaches it from the lowest level. Thus, the first building up the slope features a plinth (clad in stone) almost a storey high, with rooms housed within it, while the buildings at the higher level have ground floors that are accessed at pavement level. The position of the chimney, plus some cladding, also of stone, which covers them when they are set against the main façade, the size of some of the joinery, some additional staircases in the common areas of the buildings are some other variations that rhythm and individualise the buildings and, surely, are due to the local site director, whoever he was, rather than the genius of the Californian architect. The ensemble is complemented by a sixth building at road level, a small facility of remarkable quality, perhaps linked to customs.

The buildings are constructed with masonry and are topped with a low-pitched, double-sloped roof finished with self-protected asphalt membrane. The slabs are concrete, and the floors, at least the external ones, are ceramic. The original wooden joinery features a typical American design not commonly found in Catalonia at the time, with horizontal panels running from floor to ceiling that can be opened. The structure is mixed, concrete and metal, which suggests the use of local contractors for the execution of the work.

The most remarkable feature of the entire intervention is its scale. Five buildings in the middle of a sea of lawn, a street with restricted traffic. Nothing more. Scale is not something an architect can decide on a priori, and so conceiving these dwellings in this way takes Neutra's project one step further, he being accustomed to designing much larger housing developments in exactly the same way. In this case the size of the intervention is manageable. Almost an oasis. And its location, at once hidden and connected to the city centre, makes this way of conceiving it a project that could be extrapolated to other places and situations: a huge city-block interior to be colonised with low density, vegetation and privacy, very close to a European, Mediterranean city. The neighbourhood, by its scale and placement, therefore presents the best of America combined with the best of Europe: density, relational fabric, small-scale retail, all within walking distance, combined with the luxury of suburban life in a small, manageable community on a site that allows neighbours to interact without losing too much privacy in the process. Just like many Central European inner-city squares, Parisian, London or Dutch public passages (so similar and yet so different), or even the gardens of some Italian urban palaces.

Beyond what Neutra (if it was Neutra) proposed for the site, beyond the way the ensemble was built, there emerges a model of city-making based not so much on a model and a typology as on a specific scale of that model: a way of serialising it that would need to be carefully studied to determine its size limits. To understand, beyond its picturesque qualities, and even beyond (as much as this may be intrinsic to the proposal) the quality of the buildings themselves, the neighbourhood is thus what can most fully appreciate this experience, what can universalise what is a singular case, circumstantial, of the appropriation of a territory by a culture alien to it, to the point of being able to fuse it with the local reality, taking the best from both ways of life.

–

As supplementary information, the exhibition is currently underway. Sosuburbia At the CCCB in Barcelona until 8 September 2024, there is an intriguing staging on the construction of the American Dream. The exhibition traces the cultural history of this ideal of life, reproduced ad nauseam on television, in advertising and in film, and analyses the enduring relevance and most controversial aspects of this urban model.

Nowadays, the «American Houses» are inhabited and well-preserved, although not all recent interventions have respected the original solutions. Aside from more recent photographs than those in this article, which you can find at the Docomomo link referenced above, we have preferred not to photographically document the complex, thus respecting the privacy of the people who live there.

Article written by Jaume Prat. Originally published in Jaume Pratm 5 October 2012. Dedicated to Jordi Badia, who introduced him to houses. Photos: Jaume Prat, except where indicated.

Article recreation date: 29/8/2024.

LET'S KEEP ATTENTION

We need your support to continue raising awareness of the various threats affecting the architectural heritage of Pals Beach.

If this information has been forwarded to you and you like it, subscribe here.