The City as Stage: Rebuilding Metropolis after the Colonial Wars

The City as Stage: Rebuilding Metropolis after the Colonial Wars Luis Fernandez Cifuentes was born in Leon, Spain. He attended a Jesuit School, Madrid's Universidad Complutense and Princeton University , where he eventually became Associate Professor. In 1988 he was hired by Harvard as a full Professor. He has published two books (TeorÃ-a y mercado de la novela en España and GarcÃ-a Lorca en el teatro: la norma y la diferencia), two annotated critical editions (ZorriUa's Don Juan Tenorio and Los majos de Cádiz by Palacio Valdés) and about three dozen articUs. For Javier Arbona, architect The following pages address the notion of re building an urban stage not so much by associating it with general architecture or urban design, as with that specific, resilient space that is the facade or the building's frontage. During the second half of the nineteenth century and, more keenly, around the fin-de-siècU, something quite extraordinary occurs to this architectural border. The design of great avenues and systematized expansions, typically represented by the Baron de Haussmann's transformation of Paris, offered the urban stroller's gaze not only the high aesthetic standards of its large surfaces, but also a latitude for contemplation that the old tangle of small streets had never allowed. Walter Benjamin can thus conclude that "Haussmann 's urban ideal was of long perspectives of streets and thoroughfares. This corresponds to the inclination , noticeable again and again in the nineteenth century, to ennoble technical necessities by artistic aims" {Reflections 159). The bourgeoisie could now liberally inscribe its political, economic, and aesthetic hegemony on that surface which mediated public and private spheres; the great ornamental façades, previously the patrimony of the aristocracy and other institutions of power during the ancien régime, were now available for the documentation of the middle classes' prosperity and sensibility. BenArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 3, 1999 106 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies jamin actually makes an indirect reference to the cult-like regard of these facades when he writes: The institutions of the secular and clerical dominance ofthe bourgeoisie were to find their apotheosis in a framework of streets. Streets, before their completion, were draped in canvas and unveiled like monuments. (159)" At a major turning point in the novel Tormento (1884), Galdós incorporates this change and its connotations through a single but significant detail. After announcing that the wealthy indiano Agust Ã-n Caballero "had acquired a new and very beautiful house, on Arenal Street, and had taken for himself the whole fust floor" (68), Galdós describes Amparos reaction, as she is about to knock on the door of the new building: She had never seen a more venerable door; not the doors of a sacred cathedral , nor those of the Palace of the Pope, and even the Gates of Heaven could hardly be compared to it. Goodness gracious! Would this one finally be the door to her home? (109)2 But the sight ofthe new façades, with their more or less prominent decorations, provoked diverse reactions among urban strollers. Galdós's view—or, at least, his character's—represents only one of those reactions, one shared by eminent critics and theoreticians like John Ruskin (18191900 ), who referred with enthusiasm to "the great concerted music of the streets of a city... a sublimity... capable of exciting almost the deepest emotions that art can strike from the bosoms of men" (Maffei 16). Walter Benjamin would later identify a similar reaction in the nineteenth century flâneur, designating it as the pleasure of the gaze in that interior enclosure created by the new streets of the city: The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur, he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen in his four walls. To him the shiny, enameled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bouigeois in his salon. {Charles 37) However, alongside the pleasure of the gaze, there also emerged a critical view, or more concretely, an eye that looked critically at certain forms of engaging such a...