An Introduction to a Monograph on the Work of Oscar Tusquets

Looking at the work of Oscar Tusquets, I am struck by how American it seems. I do not mean this in the sense of style, but in the sense of the pragmatic attitude which pervades it.

A distinction is in order. Pragmatism, to the European, carries the distinctly pejorative implication that to strike a balance between principles and circumstances is to sell out on principles. This is a remnant of the Old World theological culture, where distinctions of belief lead to enmity, and often to bloodshed.

The American connotations of the same word are entirely positive. Websters New American Dictionary defines it thus: "Pragmatism: 1, a practical approach to problems and affairs; 2, an American movement in philosophy founded by C.S. Peirce and William James and marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief." Although this definition is substantially North American, it does not exclude the men of Spain who once improvised heroically to affect the conquest of the New World.

Tusquets is like an American pragmatist in the way he engages reality. His designs harness place, culture, and technique. It permits him to conceive mansions in Europe, embassies in America, housing in Asia and tea sets for the international cognoscenti without homogenizing them in response to some ideological mono-mania or, more vacuously, in the pursuit of a recognizable personal style. We are currently oversupplied with such architects by the media. They are presented as paragons of rectitude, but it is rarely noted how little they bend the world at large to their standard.

The architect, willing to engage the hearts and minds of the user and not just the connoisseurship of the patron, is an honorable model in America Such is the practice, for example, of Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, Thomas Beeby and Robert Stern. This is not to say that they are superior to the promotions of Venturi or Eisenman, merely more effective. Nor is it to Say that both types of architect are unnecessary.

There is as much need for the theologian as for the captain of infantry. In collaboration they change history. It is tragic that students are offered so few infantry schools and so many monasteries. The model represented by Tusquets should be held up to them since it offers the possibility of influencing the popular mass towards a superior architecture.

In a Europe again about to undertake projects of a continental scale, the architectural ideologue will surely be marginalized as completely as the political one has been discarded. The forces of pragmatism dominate when there is much to be done. If Tusquets and those of his temperament undertake the necessary friction with reality, Europe will again experience the consequences of having architects.