Pad (Dec 2021)
The Recovery of Vernacular Interior Design as a Value for the Modern Movement. Bridges between Le Corbusier, Gruppo 7 and GACTPAC
Abstract
There are several similarities that point to the aesthetics of design between various countries that address the Mediterranean. Although it is well known that design practices have always been common in this area, it is also the transfer produced between them due to trade and cultural exchanges produced throughout history. This transfer generates synergies and transformations between design resources of the local cultural traditions. It is the case of interior design done during the decade of the thirties in Catalonia, through the publications of the GATCPAC magazine D’Ací I d’Allá [From Here and There], whose articles demonstrate how important traditional Mediterranean design is at that precise moment, in which the Catalan territory is in the middle of the interwar period and supposedly under the emancipatory umbrella of the International Style. However, it is already observed in the 1930s that there is a common thread that links the apparently rationalist design methodologies of Lombardy and Catalonia, led by Gruppo 7 and GACTPAC groups of architects, with a certainly Mediterraneanizing trend. And the common reference of both realities is detected in the figure of Le Corbusier, who at the end of the 1920s, he begins to enter towards the Mediterranean regional universe.
