Is this by Jujol?
50th Anniversary Polytechnic University of Catalonia · BarcelonaTech — Beyond the ETSAB Archive 1875–2025
Enric Miralles1
I would like to explain where our interest in this work comes from...
Where Jujol’s capacity to start a direct dialogue with whoever approaches the work springs from.
To break with this naturalness with which his work seems to be shared. To see how one of his greatest qualities is offering himself transparently in terms of the thinking behind the work.
Although I am not sure whether his work reflects his thinking, or that of those who contemplate it excitedly.
It seems that in this work, we find recorded, in a direct way, unaltered intuitions, specific emotions, individual impulses, notions...
In their construction it would seem that they are only subject to the rules that they themselves define. They seem to follow the reflection that “supreme exactitude is at the same time supreme freedom.”
It is a work that compels us, even before we start, to judge it according to its own rules: no style, no school, no master...
An individual thought guides his work.
An individual thought that seems to stop to consider instants. But these do not form patterns of greater to smaller. Perhaps they are series that are all formed of elements of equal value.
There is no shift from the large to small, or vice versa.
The various pieces, and by extension his works, are formed without any reference to scale. This true size,2 which approaches that of the miniature.
Remember that small is a way of thinking. It is a mode of thought that rejects everything you cannot take with you in a small suitcase. Thinking that is mixed up in the motion of the journey, in the movement from one part to another3 ...
As we contemplate these works, Jujol’s way of thinking emerges slowly. We have the impression that understanding the author is the only way to understand them.
We see Jujol advance earnestly in what is small, drawing consequences from what is large. It is a thought that knows no repetition: what has been said once is almost hidden and never reappears...
His thinking is voluntarily brief. And it invites us to consider a subjective soul that leaves solutions unfinished, just started and left to their own fate.
These are released, alone. But never distorted to form a preconceived unit.
A discerning eye divides and separates... And unity is achieved by giving a visible or rather a sensitive nature to the additional lines that construct the form.
He seems to take some of the “thousands of rays that fill the air” ... the light, the gravitational paths, the forces to which we subject things when we catch hold of them, push them, etc.
All have the value of “striped light”, and seem to occupy the entire depth of the space, as the classics explain.
They are lines that already existed, but not immediately, in the place. In his work, there is no archaeology. Neither does it belong directly to the place...
Only, perhaps, to what was found in the air: this illuminated dust in many of his details.
His well-known input on the composition of broken tiles in Park Güell reveals how his work can only be explained if we accept that the thinking behind it values a kind of joint work that is almost depersonalised. Attentive to the conversation, to the smallest decisions: the play of questions and answers: Like this or like this? This one or that one?... Following the marginal lines until they are exhausted.
His aborted works, poor, inconclusive, are never the result of a complaint. An intensity such as that they offer is only possible if the thought goes directly to the work. And all sentimental complaints are absent from it.
He seeks in the work, in this relationship with others’ decisions, a distant objectivity. Far beyond what would be a reference to the origin of each design.
The papiers déchirés by Arp y Miró, los frottages by Max Ernst. A way of recomposing the material that these reach, forcing their own work to be the work of another. To be papers that are drawn on then torn, then put back together... Jujol does this in a real way.
Following instructions, comments, waiting for an answer… All of this within oneself: far from all responsibility.
Then, his mark on the bench shows what its size is for him. And it is the sign that intertwines the figures and gives form to the whole.
This need for the other is the way in which his work is offered to be interpreted.
Our gaze on the work, as the author’s gaze had been on it, is never the only one. It is a work that can absorb any insinuation.
It seems that the author only did the work of setting down the works. So many things seemed to have arrived there by chance. However, we can see a thought that follows and obeys the technical requirements of the materials and with them produces a second simplicity.
Jujol could say to himself that some of his solutions cancel out the question that produced them or annul the material from which they emerged. A concentration of tiny lines appear that are almost thrown in, identical to the materials that construct them: iron, ceramic, lead... These provided a slightly smaller size to everything:
Children and not adults.
However, the diminutive size of these lines makes it possible to see the real size of the ground plan of Vistabella: it is that of the marks in the ceramic on the bench of Park Güell.
In Jujol’s work there are never changes of scale, everything has its real size from the start: from large to small... from small to large...
His thinking is expressed like an anagram, as if it were a hieroglyph that is still considered a holder of wisdom, of thinking that is simply stated as a demonstration of our desire to get close to him.
It is not a solution, but a proposal. As can be seen in the many times that Jujol resorted to writing about the completed works, the memory still endures that architecture can be born and simultaneously be a support for “those figures, instruments of the intellect, that represent thinking analogously”.
Jujol writes for the walls. He dedicates devout phrases to his works. He congratulates himself on the smudges that appear.
Arabesque drawings... On his work he shows us the value of another superficial work4, which we need to access in company. Alone it is impossible to decipher all these reflections, shadows that speak... All of this coded writing that is presented voluntarily in an archaic way.
It is a work that we should see with other eyes: it should be shown. Jujol – and this is all I wanted to say in this essay – gives us a way of observing his work. It is a way that needs company, the gaze of another person, their comments.
That is how we find him in our hands in class... He appears in the talks... The walks – it does not matter whether you have attended them – with which Llinás has gradually approached one by one Jujol’s works reveal his way of working. His work is composed of a series of echoes that need to be reflected in other people.
This way of working whatever. “The excitement about stains on a plate”, about “the smoke that makes some walls invisible,” this vosté mateix (you decide) with which he answered all questions. They speak of a work that reflects an awareness that always, at all times, transforms itself at the same time as it transforms, invisibly, the way of working of whoever contemplates it.
From the dream, from the instant...
These works have managed to escape.
NOTES
1. Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme, 179-180, (October-December 1988 / January-March 1989): 52-56.
2. Miró, referring to the series of Interiores holandeses (Dutch Interiors) at the end of the 1920s, spoke of this task of moving away from the miniature: “Soon I understood that I had to go beyond the spirit of the miniature. Enlarge the detail to join it with the whole."
It could seem that Jujol, in entrusting the general schema of his works to the gravitational lines, seeks a similar way of resolving the problem. Likewise, Jujol does not distance himself totally from the form of expression that enables miniaturisation. The way to approach the true size of his works is closer to the small distortions with which sculptors construct the expression of their works. Making small a characteristic. Slightly distancing a figure from its real measurement.
This deviation in dimensions gives a real measurement of things. It distances them from being a copy of our movements. From here, they become monumental.
In this work, making things smaller gives their true measurements. They become real for themselves. Without direct reference to any dimension.
3. “… to miniaturize is to make portable, and for a vagrant and an exile, that is the best way of owning things …”
“… Miniaturize also means make invisible …”
“… What is reduced finds itself in a sense liberated from meaning. Its smallness is, at one and the same time, a totality and a fragment…” These arguments were made by Vila-Matas in his Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil (A Brief History of Portable Literature, Barcelona, 1985).
4. Many of the terms through which Jujol’s work appears are developed in works that are close to surrealism. The term “superficiality” is what Saviano uses to represent thinking that is free of prejudice, that slides among the things…, that gathers on the surface everything that should be hidden…, that accepts everything that appears suddenly, etc.