Bloc Column, 2012

Wood, cement. 304 x 31x 31 cm.
Photographic diptych: 42 x 62 cm. c.u. Digital print mounted on wood.

The Casa Bloc is a building constructed in Barcelona between 1933 and 1939 by the architects Sert, Torres Clavé and Subirana as a prototype for workers’ housing. Influenced by the postulates of Le Corbusier and Russian revolutionary architecture, its authors promised healthy hygienic conditions far from the degradation of the poor neighborhoods of the city. Their construction program prioritized the social and community over the individual (1).

With the arrival of Franco’s dictatorship, the workers’ ideals and the collective uses of the building were abandoned. The south wing housed military widows and orphans of the fascist side, and in 1948 an annex building, known as the “ghost block”, was built for national police officers. After a long period of deterioration, in 1992 the Generalitat de Catalunya declared the Casa Bloc an Asset of Cultural Interest in the category of monument and carried out an extensive restoration that was completed in 2008. As a result, the house number 1/11 became a flat-museum.

Bloc Column replicates a column identical to those of the Bloc House, but with the particularity of being hollow inside. With this little consistency close to the props, it highlights the uselessness of a scaffolding that never supported that worker’s phalanstery dreamed by its authors, and evidences the ornamental and purely decorative function that the building has today after being converted into a museum.

(1) ‘The planned workers’ housing complex will be equipped with all the ancillary services that a purely social orientation requires, such as: bathing facilities, consumer cooperatives, popular libraries, children’s nurseries, workers‘ clubs, free spaces for sports, swimming pools, children’s garden with sandboxes and a small paddling pool (…)’.

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Exhibition:
Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis
Valle Ortí Gallery. València. From 3 to 31 October 2013.

Exhibition:
Modernitat amagada / Pavelló Sert
Curatorship: Domènec and Dani Montlleó.
Can Palauet. Mataró. From 24 November to 3 February 2019.

Exhibition:
The meaning of sculpture
Curatorship: David Bestué
Miró Foundation. Barcelona. From 15 October 2021 to 6 March 2022.