Jorge Oteiza’s ‘de-occupation’: towards an ascetic space in Spanish modern architecture (1948–60)

The work and thought of the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (b. Orio, 1908 – d. San Sebastian, 2003) is an omnipresent reference point in the historiography of modern Spanish architecture. Since the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation was opened shortly after his death, a great number of studies have been published about him, mainly in Spanish and Basque. Oteiza’s artistic career was closely connected to the postwar Spanish architectural scene. During the 1950s, he participated in numerous projects and architecture competitions and published his work in specialised journals and magazines in the field. Spain was at that time under the regime of General Franco and, as a consequence of the Civil War (1936–9), the country was suffering an economic crisis that affected culture, art, and architecture.

architects, defining some projects as especially significant in understanding Oteiza's approach to architecture. These articles were compiled and published as a book in 1968, with the title Oteiza 1933Oteiza -1968. The book was the first monograph dedicated to Oteiza's artistic and architectural career. The fact that this book was edited by an architect and published by an architectural publishing house is a clear demonstration of the great interest that his work and thinking aroused in Spanish architects. Secondly, the paper seeks to express in simple language what Oteiza meant by 'de-occupation', mainly following Pedro Manterola's ideas, which explain that Oteiza's sculpture could be defined as 'ascetic' -as a path to moral and spiritual perfection. Finally, the article explains how Manterola's ideas can also be applied to Oteiza's architecture, an idea that drives us to understand architectural space also as ascetic.
Exhaustive research has been done in the archives of the Oteiza Museum Foundation to carry out this work. The Museum Foundation provided access to original manuscripts and correspondence of Jorge Oteiza, as well as access to his personal library, where it was possible to consult the comments and marginal annotations that the sculptor wrote down at the time he was reading the books, journals, and magazines commented on in this text.

A brief approach to Oteiza's work and life
Jorge Oteiza was born in 1908 in Orio (Basque Country, Spain). His artistic schooling was essentially self-taught, and his career was marked by a period of living in Latin America. In the years before 1935, he had some experience with architecture after a failed attempt to study the discipline. In spite of not obtaining qualifications, he began his artistic training essentially between Madrid and the Basque Country. In the early years of the 1930s, Oteiza became acquainted with the artistic and architectural milieu created by the architects José Manuel Aizpurúa and Joaquín Labayen in San Sebastian, strongly influenced by the artistic avant garde in Central Europe. 3 In 1935, Oteiza left for Buenos Aires intending to explore arq . vol 24 . no 4 . 2020

history 344
Pérez-Moreno & López-Bahut Jorge Oteiza's 'de-occupation': towards an ascetic space in Spanish modern architecture (1948-60) new horizons, but without realising that his departure from Spain would last until 1948, following the eruption of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. 4 During his Latin American sojourn, Oteiza continued to study the art of the Central European avant garde and dedicated a significant part of his time to his education and research, travelling and reading about the philosophy and criticism of art. 5 His sculptural output was little, but not his theoretical work. Oteiza published various articles in specialised journals, where he introduced the concept of 'trasestatua', a prelude to what he would later define as 'de-occupation': '[…] The empty space shall constitute the movement from the traditional statue-mass to the statue-energy of the future, from the heavy and closed statue to the super light and open statue, the trasestatua'. 6 As the studies of Echeverria Plazaola explain, in these texts Oteiza reveals his interest in the work of Malevich, who generates space with a minimal selection of elements. This would form the basis of Oteiza's future investigations. 7 On his return to Spain in 1948, Oteiza laid down the foundations of his career as a sculptor. His artistic work evolved from figurative sculpture towards abstraction, gradually divesting the initial primitivism inspired by his Latin American sojourn, to achieve a form of abstraction close to concrete art. In these ten years of intense production of sculptures, Oteiza collaborated actively in collective exhibitions, seminars and art conferences, published articles in specialised journals and books, and also contributed to architecture projects. 8 During those years, when the cultural climate in Spain was deeply influenced by the economic depression of the first decade after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Oteiza became a staunch defender of abstraction and the 'new art' as the appropriate art for the time. 9 He also defended it as art that ought to represent the religious Catholic values espoused by the Franco Regime, a key factor for his collaborators in the domain of architecture. Oteiza's greatest international success came in 1957 when he was awarded the Gran Premio at the VI Biennial of sculpture in São Paulo. He presented twenty-eight sculptures in the competition in ten arrangements, which he referred to as 'neo-concrete sculptures', an argument in favour of 'new art' conceived as the evolution of the constructivist legacy from the beginning of the twentieth century, and which he accompanied with the essay 'Propósito experimental 1956-1957[Experimental proposal 1956-1957'. 10 In this text -an essential essay for understanding Oteiza's work -the sculptor wrote about the steps he thought his sculpture was taking, or, as he titled it, his 'laboratory of art'. The argument sets out his disagreement with the ideas of Kandinsky and Mondrian, which ultimately led him to identify himself as someone who was continuing the work of Malevich. This important text also defines 'de-occupation' as the omnipresent concept in his artistic oeuvre. Confronted with forms that occupy a space, which the viewer, as a secondary element, views from outside, Oteiza proposes instead forms that define a space as absolutely secondary, a statue that is empty and emptied. This means emptying the space of formal elements to include the person within it. 11 Oteiza's approach to space was especially interesting for architects. In parallel with the development of his sculpture in the 1950's, Oteiza collaborated actively with several Spanish architects on various projects with various degrees of involvement [ Table 1]. 12 Several of these collaborations with architects were the subject of articles in specialised journals on architecture, especially in the journal for the Institute of Madrilenian Architects (Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, COAM) -RNA later changed to Arquitectura -and the journal Nueva Forma, which enabled professionals in the field, over an extended period, to become aware of his work and thought. Some of these articles featured the reproduction of images and their description, and the debate around the opposition between the figurative and the abstract in the area of sculpture. 13 At the end of the 1960s, when a new generation of architects began to debate the value of Oteiza 16 This book, the first monograph about Oteiza, was edited by Juan Daniel Fullaondo, one of the most relevant critics of architecture of that time in Spain, and part of the journal's editorial team. The book was initially censored by the Franco Regime, but eventually three hundred and forty-seven copies were published. 17 Fullaondo's text reveals a certain  Pérez-Moreno & López-Bahut Jorge Oteiza's 'de-occupation': towards an ascetic space in Spanish modern architecture (1948-60) (de) Oteiza, humanist', with the intention of emphasising how Oteiza did not share the idea that artistic disciplines existed autonomously but exactly the opposite, as his sculptural and architectural work formed part of the same creative process in which the boundaries between disciplines were completely erased.
The criticism expressed in these essays supported the idea that Oteiza's work succeeded in avoiding the repetition of what they considered 'run-down ideas', and that his work was a reflection of a singular even exemplary path. They understood Oteiza as a connoisseur of the past, of figurative, constructivist, and primitive languages, but they also applauded his boldness for forging his own path, defining 'de-occupation' as a concept that guided his work through understanding the creative process as a means to spiritual transcendence through that artistic exercise, as Crepo's humanist label proposed.

Defining 'de-occupation'
As regards the development of Oteiza 27 In contrast, Pedro Manterola's studies consider that it is necessary to introduce a mystical perspective to understand Oteiza's career development and the evolution of the concept of 'de-occupation'. Manterola identifies three successive periods in the development of the concept of 'de-occupation'. In the first period, the concept is understood as 'emptying': the physical subtraction from the mass, the act of taking away from a material block that which is not required to create the sculpturesimilar to what Michaelangelo did in the sixteenth century. In this regard, Materola and other critics agree that the Friso de los Apóstoles (1953) in the Sanctuary of Arantzazu is one of the most relevant examples. Concerning the second period, Oteiza wrote in his Sao Paulo 'Experimental Proposition' (1956-7), the 'de-occupation' is created by the fusion of light formal units. In this period, Oteiza develops an interest in working with a more systematic approach, incorporating a methodology inspired by science into his creative process. As Manterola states, 'the inclination of the metaphysical spirit to seek the shelter of science is clear, as Bergson argues in The Creative Mind'. 28 Thus, previously defined geometric units, called 'Malevich units' would form the basis of his exploration and the language of de-occupation, leaving behind the previous figurative phase to are experiencing, is even more relevant now than when he wrote it. That is why, we are pleased to re-publish it in our pages. 18 Thus, the book was an attempt to present a series of reflections on Oteiza's historical and aesthetic relevance, as a sculptor and architect.
Rafael Moneo described Oteiza's contribution to architecture as something 'apart from the whole architecture scene [of the time], different in its concept of space, its understanding of surface, its idea of the history of society'. Moneo pointed out that Oteiza raised the possibility of doing without the established language of architecture, of the entire set of conventions, to give form to a new idea. 19 He continued: 'Oteiza is a type of artist like Mondrian, van Doesburg, Kandinsky, for whom the new world that they sensed, and that was beginning to take shape, had to be, above all, a new form.' 20 However, he did not suggest that Oteiza's work was just a formal reflection, but the contrary. He considered that Oteiza's contribution to architecture went further than actual debates on form or style, whether in sculpture or architecture, presenting it as an 'ethical' position and stating: 'if the formal world of Oteiza does not impress us, perhaps what happens is that we do not understand it, or we do not want to understand the new world that lies latent within it.'  Juan Daniel Fullaondo also wrote two articles in which he concurred with Moneo, noting that Oteiza's approach diverged from contemporary currents, such as in the brutalist tendencies in architecture or informalism in painting, where expression dominated the work (see the work of Tapies or Feito in Spain's case). 23 He centred his arguments on the idea of a 'crisis' in the language of modern architecture, a critical angle that was particularly influenced by the thought of Bruno Zevi and his personal criticism of functionalism and its architectural language, which, in Zevi's opinion, was evolving in the situation that lacked creative liberty. 24 Meanwhile, Ángel Crespo wrote an essay in which he highlighted the inter-disciplinary nature of Oteiza's work, an aspect that he linked to his understanding of art and architecture as nonautonomous disciplines and, therefore, relating it to the search for integration with arts related to modern architecture. 25 Crespo titled his article 'Jorge Subtraction and deformation of mass in sculpture and its overlap into architecture Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza and Luís Laorga were the architects commissioned for the design of the Sanctuary at Arantzazu. 35 They worked on the design and composition of the facade together with Oteiza.
In the historiography of Spanish architecture, this project is considered representative of the willingness of artists and architects to incorporate abstraction into buildings of a religious character.
Oteiza's group of sculpture for the facade of this sanctuary were positioned in such a way as to look out towards the landscape while enhancing the building. 36 After various versions, the facade was resolved with a frieze of fourteen figures representing the apostles -which created some controversy within the Church. A wall flanked by two towers supported Oteiza's reliefs, and a sculpture of the Virgin was added to preside from above. The works of sculpture are formed by extraction and deformation of the mass, as Manterola states, and interact with the architectural composition with the aim of creating a complete religious space for the community. 37 The Sanctuary of Arantzazu was thus converted into 'the proclamation of an aesthetic, political, and religious dream based on the dual and inseparable idea of community of sacrifice' -in this case, the sacrifice of mass in the hands of the sculptor and, at the same time, the sacrifice of the sculpture itself at the spiritual service of architecture.

38
In the Córdoba Chamber of Commerce (1954), a work developed in parallel to the Sanctuary of Arantzazu, this sense of religion and community was not so evident, yet the interaction of Oteiza's work of sculpture with the architectural space in which it is inserted is of great interest, especially on the ground floor. 39 The architects García Paredes and La-Hoz designed an organic space understood as a total work of art, a decision in harmony with the ideas of the Italian critic Bruno Zevi, one of the most widely read at that time in Spain, and who certainly influenced Oteiza. The building's interior was defined through three pieces of sculpture -the reception counter and two sculptures -linked formally and materially to create an interior space with a defined composition. Oteiza's thought can seem paradoxical, considering that many of his aesthetic references were far removed from the world of religious devotion. Nevertheless, Oteiza considered art and sculpture as 'ascetic' -as a path to moral and spiritual perfection.

Minimal formal units and the creation of architectural space
32 This idea is supported by Manterola writings (which build on the previous suggestion of Crespo who defined Oteiza's as a humanist), which emphasise his determined search for spiritual perfection through religious belief. At heart, Oteiza could be considered a radically anti-modern artist, if 'modern' is understood as the result of the secularisation process that accompanied the various artistic movements begotten at the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries. As Manterola states 'the historical-logical dressing for [Oteiza's] discourse, served no other purpose than to justify art's raison d'être as an instrument to re-sacralise the world'.

33
It is possible to comprehend how Oteiza's concept of 'de-occupation' was transferred to architectural and urban space, by following these three phases described by Manterola illuminated in different ways generating a variety of spatial situations. Oteiza called these works 'Malévich Units'. Their creation was a definitive step towards 'de-occupation'.

Metaphysical boxes and architectural 'de-occupation'
In the text Experimental Proposition [Propósito Experimental, 1956-7] 45 From this point onwards, Oteiza begins to work with 'de-occupation' as a creative end, and his architectural proposals will reflect this. As Fullaondo noted, the architectural project that stands out in this regard after São Paulo is the Monument to José Batlle in Montevideo, created in collaboration with the architect Roberto Puig.

46
'De-occupation' is identified here as a metaphysical empty space, which for the person experiencing it, has both a physical and spiritual resonance. In addition, importantly from an architectural perspective, there is a clear interest in linking this concept with the configuration of urban space. In 1958, Oteiza gave a lecture entitled, 'The City as Work of Art'. In it he expressed his conviction that architecture and the city participate in the same environment as the work of art [having] in common the fact that they are intimately related to human needs that they try and satisfy. 47 As is characteristic of his thought, Oteiza understands this 'human necessity' transcendentally, and translates it to every conceivable scale, from sculpture to urban design. Oteiza and Puig's proposal is composed of three parts that respond to cultural requirements (library, study centre, auditorium, etc.) and create an urban space, a gift to the city. They form a white horizontal prism located on top of a hill, a location defined in the competition's specification. This prism, 54 m x 18 m x 12 m, rises from the ground creating a glass entrance at ground floor level. The building is lit from above, through a continuous system of skylights, and the walls are enclosed in concrete panels worked with mason's bush hammer on both sides. The prism's metal superstructure is only constructing a three-dimensional grid lifted up from the floor plan. Oteiza added to this idea a proposal to define the interior of the Chapel using three walls of different lengths, independent from the threedimensional roof structure. Sáenz Guerra concludes that Romaní mediated between the strong personalities of the other two and made many of the drawings for the project. The most notable of these is a 'Collage' of the Chapel, which as the years passed, became one of the most iconic images used to explain how Spanish architecture decided to embrace modern architecture. However, this was not secular modern architecture like the new architecture that aped the Central European avant garde, but a re-sacralised modern architecture.
The competition became a plea in defence of rationalism as the architectural language for the zeitgeist and at the same time a model of how architecture could represent the prevailing Catholic values in Franco's Spain, both suited to the modern age and distancing itself from the processes of post-Enlightenment secularisation. 42 A little more than a decade later, the Spanish critics saw the project as 'the best and most fitting swansong for Spanish rationalism'. 43 In developing the idea of the project, Oteiza made some sculptural reliefs for four of the walls' planes, three intended for the exterior walls and one for an interior wall. From a sculptural perspective, these reliefs did not entail any advance in the concept of de-occupation but were more a further iteration of ideas informing the reliefs already created for the facade of the Sanctuary at Arantzazu. Nevertheless, architecturally, these three walls -three elemental units -were formed in such a way as to generate a space of welcome for the pilgrim under the metal roof structure, a space with an important symbolic and religious weight and a transcendental purpose. The space might be considered as a precursor of the third phase of 'de-occupation': a work with minimal formal units loaded with transcendence. However, at this time, Oteiza did not describe them as such.
After the competition, Oteiza designed a series of works for walls, both for the facades of various buildings and interior spaces. These mural sculptures were thought out gradually, like the transition from a solid wall to a wall with spatial possibilities, defined by minimal forms and the play of natural light. 44 The defining step was the artistic experiment of the Light Wall (1956). This work was made out of glass models that referenced the Suprematist paintings of Malévich to create light and colour effects, the overlapping of various glass sheets -planes or curves -on which were interlaced shards of different colours and shapes that were in turn '[…] this was not secular modern architecture like the new architecture that aped the Central European avant garde, but a re-sacralised modern architecture.' '"De-occupation" is identified here as a metaphysical empty space, which for the person experiencing it, has both a physical and spiritual resonance.' when the space created no longer needed any object to be added because both aesthetically and spiritually the sculpture is the creation of de-occupation. As Manterola says: The metaphysical subversion 'healer of death' that the artist has decided to undertake and whose aim is to establish space in place of the material, to replace time with all that dies, the aroma of eternity exhaled by all empty bodies.

52
This proposal is a sign of how the concept of 'de-occupation' is manifested architecturally through the urban public space that is loaded with symbolism for the community.

Conclusion: 'de-occupation' as ascetic space
In Oteiza's writing and work concerning 'de-occupation', we can appreciate three overlapping conceptions: de-occupation as the silencing of formal expression; de-occupation as a creative process in search of spiritual perfection; and de-occupation as a way to create ascetic spaces. The silencing of expression could be understood as a response to the formal debate of late modern architecture, which Moneo often considered irrational. This silence could be also related with ascetism, that considers that just the minimum expression is all that is needed to achieve transcendence -the spiritual salvation that Manterola alluded to in relation to sculpture, and Crespo in relation to architecture. This approach emerged after difficult intellectual reflection; it is a position obtained through meditation. It understands the creative process as a tool for achieving artistic and personal perfection and transcendence; a behaviour that blends life and work and revolves around artistic labour -whether in sculpture or architecture -in a process of salvation, a re-sacralise approach to life as Manterola pointed out. Furthermore, de-occupation could be understood as the design of public spaces that restores the condition of monumentality not only as an ascetic space (designed with the minimum expression in order to achieve spiritual salvation) but also as a social meeting space for the collective life -as, for example, the concrete square at Montevideo. Consequently, it does not appear odd that Oteiza states: 'I moved on to the city', when he considered that his exploration of sculpture and architecture was concluded. It is in the city, understood as the collective transcendental space where the spiritual and social function of the artist could find the place to give back to the community, all that he had learnt throughout his artistic career is manifest.
In the context of Spanish architecture, Oteiza proposed an ascetic response to secularised modern architecture. His working method placed the creation of the architectural project in an ascetic and sacralise discourse, that gives any design a transcendent and spiritual value. Oteiza not only proposed a renunciation of any formal approach to art and architecture, but also a theoretical position that understood artistic creation as a process of salvation, and as an instrument to re-sacralise the world. visible from the inside; therefore, the whole can be understood as a giant elevated beam, open to the sky and the light, but silent and closed to the outside. In the project summary report, the authors state that 'with the rectangular prism we want to commit to not express ourselves with the architecture that we have to reduce and silence'. 48 The project is completed with two more elements: a reinforced concrete wall 1.5 m high and 30 cm thick, white, and worked with bush hammers like the external walls of the main prism, and a 54 m sided concrete square, made from black limestone, situated on the lower part of the hill. The white wall firstly acts as a protection against the steep slope of the hill extending it towards the black square and acquiring its final length of 63 m. The black square also acts as an imprint of the main sculpture, a trace of the metaphysical void generated.

49
In their report for the Monument to Batlle, Oteiza and Puig referred to the ideas of Giedion, Sert, and Leger about the search for a new monumentality. They concurred with them as regards the growing degradation of the symbolic capacity of works of architecture having pseudo monumentality, devalued symbols, disconnected from the society they were representing. In their writings, the three authors proposed the generation of urban spaces for the community, where community centres could be located and where collective life might develop and monumental buildings would be located. Oteiza and Puig agreed partly with this vision, since, for Oteiza, the idea of the monumental was not about constructing new buildings but resided in urban space itself as de-occupation, as a metaphysical void. In the same way as with his final sculptures, the idea of a square black hole on the hill, bordered by a white wall worked with bush hammers was a manifestation of the monumental character -as something re-sacralised -that the new urban public space ought to acquire. We