Yale Architecture Forum
María González Pendás
Empty Pavillions, Holy Histories, and the Fascist Imperiality of the Mudejar
While it is now widely understood that fascism did not in fact vanish in 1945, much is still to be understood about the global tactics and aesthetics deployed by the ultra-right after World War II, architecturally and otherwise, for purposes of self-enunciation and propaganda. This talk will see to one such tactic in the reactivation of the Mudejar as both a historiographic and a spatial technique of imperial regeneration, and more specifically of Hispanidad, in pavilions designed for Franquista Spain under the global cultural politics of Opus Dei technocrats.
María González Pendás is an architectural historian of modernity and coloniality of the Spanish transatlantic world and professor at Cornell University. Her research explores the intersections of aesthetics, technologies, ideologies, and power through the built environment. Her current book manuscript, Holy Modern: Technocracy, Theocracy and the Architectures of Hispanic Fascism, studies the architectural workings of fascism, technocracy, and the imperial figment of Hispanidad in the second postwar and through the lens of Spain. Other projects have investigated relations of labor and race in México; the coloniality of concrete technologies and innovation across the South Atlantic; and the relationship between technology, religion, and secularism in global modernity. González Pendás received her Ph.D. in Architecture History and Theory from Columbia University and her Masters in Architecture from the Polytechnic University in Madrid. Prior to joining Cornell, she taught at Vassar College, The Cooper Union, and the Art History Department at Columbia University.
Architecture Forum is a PhD-led symposium jointly organized by the Departments of Architecture and History of Art, providing an inclusive platform for scholars to present and debate new research on the history of the built environment.