Abstraction and empathy
by Bruno Baldaia
Abstraktion und Einfühlung is a book by Wilhelm Worringer published in 1912 about the typical tendencies of XIX century eclecticism in art and architecture. It´s his PhD Thesis and a surprising little book that puts together the classical tradition, empathic, and the gothic tradition, abstract. It gathers the work of two authors, Alois Riegl and Theodor Lipps and the book’s success lies in the reunion of opposites, the overcoming of a duality. Abstraction is one of the fundamental values of Modern Architecture between wars as it is particularly visible in the Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s curated exhibition International Style in 1932 in MoMA, defining a canon and excluding less purist possibilities. Much of Team X’s effort in the CIAM meetings will be one of discussing the orthodoxy established by International Style and that of reinstating Modern’s initial complexity as much as its hesitations that became plausible again. This state of doubt, one that allows a condition of permanent instability, of critique, is the one that more clearly reaches the peripheries, our farwest, because it makes its centrality possible. It also brings us back to Worringer’s theme which is not the overcoming of opposites.
Bruno Baldaia was researcher at Habitar group in the Architectural Projects Department of Catalonia Polytechnic University Barcelona School of Architecture, where he was developing his doctoral thesis “El Sucio y el Limpio, Estética y Arquitectura en la Europa Occidental de la Post-Guerra”.
