Bloc Column, 2012

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

Casa Bloc (Block House) 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, it promised hygienic and healthy conditions, far removed from the degradation of the city’s poor neighbourhoods. Its construction programme prioritised the social and communal over the individual (1).

With the arrival of Franco’s dictatorship, the workers’ ideals and collective uses of the building were abandoned. The south wing housed military widows and orphans of the fascist side, and in 1948 an annexe 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 refurbishment which was completed in 2008. As a result, house number 1/11 was converted into a flat-museum.

 Bloc Colum replicates a column identical to those in the Casa Bloc, but with the particularity of being hollow on the inside. With this little consistency close to the props, the column highlights the uselessness of a scaffolding that never supported the workers’ phalanstery dreamed of by its authors, evidencing the ornamental and purely decorative function that the building has today when it was converted into a museum.

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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.