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Jean-Francois Lejeune
Jean-François Lejeune, Professor, is a Belgian-born architect who graduated from the Université of Liège, Belgium, with the Diploma of Engineer-Architect (1974). He worked at the Research Center of the University where he co-designed the University Farm (completed in 1980). From 1976 to 1985 he worked as researcher and urban designer for the Atelier de Recherche et d’Action Urbaines (ARAU, Brussels) and for the Archives d’architecture moderne (AAM, Brussels) under the direction of Maurice Culot. He started to teach architecture at the Oregon School of Design in Portland, OR, before moving to the University of Miami, where he has been teaching architecture, urban design, and history. From June 2009 to December 2014 he was the Director of Graduate Studies. He has been Visiting Professor at the Universidade do Rio Grande du Sul (Brazil), the Università La Sapienza Roma, and the Universidad de Alcalá in Alcalá de Henares. In 2007 he was an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He is now a Ph.D. candidate researcher at TU Delft, The Netherlands, where he is preparing his dissertation.
His books include the three issues of the School of Architecture periodical The New City (1991, 1994, 1996), The Making of Miami Beach 1933-1942: The Architecture of Lawrence Murray Dixon (with Allan Shulman, Rizzoli, 2001), Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, CICA Award for Best Architecture Catalogue in 2005), Sitte, Hegemann, and the Metropolis (with Charles Bohl, Routledge, 2009), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (with Michelangelo Sabatino, Routledge, 2010, commended for the 2011 CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award). He has published many essays in Rassegna, Stadtbauwelt, Architektur Aktuell, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Journal of Architectural Education, Bolletino del CE.S.A.R., and in various exhibition catalogues and books. He is a founding member and current secretary of DoCOMOMO-US/Florida.
In 1994, Lejeune curated the exhibition at the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture, Havana and the Cities of the Caribbean, and he later wrote for the special issue “Cuba” of the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (Wolfsonian Miami, 1996). In 2003 he curated in Brussels the exhibition Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America. Other exhibitions include The Florida Home: Modern Living in Miami, 1945-65 (Miami-Tallahassee, 2004-5), Interama: Miami and the Pan-American Dream (Miami, 2008), and more recently, Cuban Architects at Home and Exile: the Modernist Generation, at the Coral Gables Museum (co-curated with Prof. Victor Deupi). The book Cuban Modernism: Mid-Century Architecture 1940-1970, authored with Victor Deupi, was published by Birkhäuser (Basel) in 2021. He is currently at work on two monographs: Loos and Schinkel: Lejeune was awarded his Ph.D. in May 2019 by TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Part of the dissertation was published in Berlin by DOM-Publishers under the title Rural Utopia and Water Urbanism: The Modern Village in Franco''s Spain (2022). Lejeune is currently at work on a monograph titled Loos and Schinkel: The Metropolis between the Individual and the Collective (Routledge, 2024).
His books include the three issues of the School of Architecture periodical The New City (1991, 1994, 1996), The Making of Miami Beach 1933-1942: The Architecture of Lawrence Murray Dixon (with Allan Shulman, Rizzoli, 2001), Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005, CICA Award for Best Architecture Catalogue in 2005), Sitte, Hegemann, and the Metropolis (with Charles Bohl, Routledge, 2009), Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (with Michelangelo Sabatino, Routledge, 2010, commended for the 2011 CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award). He has published many essays in Rassegna, Stadtbauwelt, Architektur Aktuell, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Journal of Architectural Education, Bolletino del CE.S.A.R., and in various exhibition catalogues and books. He is a founding member and current secretary of DoCOMOMO-US/Florida.
In 1994, Lejeune curated the exhibition at the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture, Havana and the Cities of the Caribbean, and he later wrote for the special issue “Cuba” of the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts (Wolfsonian Miami, 1996). In 2003 he curated in Brussels the exhibition Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America. Other exhibitions include The Florida Home: Modern Living in Miami, 1945-65 (Miami-Tallahassee, 2004-5), Interama: Miami and the Pan-American Dream (Miami, 2008), and more recently, Cuban Architects at Home and Exile: the Modernist Generation, at the Coral Gables Museum (co-curated with Prof. Victor Deupi). The book Cuban Modernism: Mid-Century Architecture 1940-1970, authored with Victor Deupi, was published by Birkhäuser (Basel) in 2021. He is currently at work on two monographs: Loos and Schinkel: Lejeune was awarded his Ph.D. in May 2019 by TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Part of the dissertation was published in Berlin by DOM-Publishers under the title Rural Utopia and Water Urbanism: The Modern Village in Franco''s Spain (2022). Lejeune is currently at work on a monograph titled Loos and Schinkel: The Metropolis between the Individual and the Collective (Routledge, 2024).
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The Rural and the Modern in Franco’s Spain
Anchored by Hüppauf and Umbach’s notion of Vernacular Modernism and focusing on architecture and urbanism during Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975, this thesis challenges the hegemonic and Northern-oriented narrative of urban modernity. It develops arguments about the reciprocal influences between the urban and the rural that characterize Spanish modernity, and analyzes the intense architectural and urban debates that resulted from the crisis of 1898, as they focused on the importance of vernacular architecture, in particular the Mediterranean one, in the definition of an “other modernity.” This search culminated before 1936 with the “Lessons of Ibiza,” and was revived at the beginning of the 1950s, when architects like Coderch, Fisac, Bohigas, and the cosigners of the Manifiesto de la Alhambra brought back the discourse of the modern vernacular as a politically acceptable form of Spanish modernity, and extended its field of application from the individual house and the rural architecture to the urban conditions, including social and middle-class housing. The core of the dissertation addresses the 20th century phenomenon of the modern agricultural village as built emergence of a rural paradigm of modernity in parallel or alternative to the metropolitan condition. In doing so, it interrogates the question of tradition, modernity, and national identity in urban form between the 1920s and the 1960s. Regarding Spain, it studies the actuation of the two Institutes that were created to implement the Francoist policy of post-war reconstruction and interior colonization—the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas, and the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. It examines the ideological, political, urban, and architectural principles of Franco’s reconstruction of the devastated countryside, as well as his grand “hydro-social dream” of modernization of the countryside. It analyzes their role in national-building policies in liaison with the early 20th-century Regenerationist Movement of Joaquín Costa, the first works of hydraulic infrastructure under Primo de Rivera, and the aborted agrarian reform of the Second Republic. Inspired by the Zionist colonization of Palestine and Mussolini’s reclaiming of the Pontine Marshes, Falangist planners developed a national strategy of “interior colonization” that, along with the reclamation and irrigation of extensive and unproductive river basins, entailed the construction of three hundred modern villages or pueblos between 1940 and 1971. Each village was designed as a “rural utopia,” centered on a plaza mayor and the church, which embodied the political ideal of civil life under the national-catholic regime and evolved from a traditional town design in the 1940s to an increasingly abstract and modern vision, anchored on the concept of the “Heart of the City” after 1952. The program was an important catalyst for the development of Spanish modern architecture after the first period of autarchy and an effective incubator for a new generation of architects, including Alejandro de la Sota, José Luis Fernández del Amo, and others. Between tradition and modernity, these architects reinvented the pueblos as platforms of urban and architectonic experimentation in their search for a depurated rural vernacular and a modern urban form. Whereas abstraction was the primary design tool that Fernández del Amo deployed to the limits of the continuity of urban form, de la Sota reversed the fundamental reference to the countryside that characterizes Spanish surrealism to bring surrealism within the process of rural modernization in Franco’s Spain.