M. Michaelis: photography as a testimony. Once upon a time in El Garraf

Abstract

With the arrival of modernity, treatises and manuals were abandoned, giving way to histories, narratives, stories that could explain and justify the approach and formal evolution of buildings. The role of photography in this context became fundamental. In 1935, the Austrian photographer Margaret Michaelis captured, through a series of photographs, the recently inaugurated weekend homes in the Garraf, designed by the GATEPAC architects Josep Torres Clavé and Josep Lluis Sert. The study of these images allows us to value the contribution of the work of the catalan architects in their interest in carrying out modern architecture with references to the popular and rural Mediterranean architecture. Through the construction of 3 weekend homes, defined from the combination of the same recognisable elements, the architects configured an architecture, that today can only be visited in Margaret Michaelis´s photographs. The aim of this work is to contribute to the recovery and enhancement of her point of view, anonymous and scarcely recognised until the time. Published in the magazine A.C: Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea —exhibited after Gropius or Helen and Szymon Syrkus works— only some of these photographs will travel in time and become a reference of interest among architects in the following decades, until our days. The current state of the buildings, and the remarkable changes on their configuration and context nowadays, make the photographs taken in 1935 a relevant testimony for the historiography of modern architecture, and can be considered its last reality.