The opening of the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition not only consolidated the architectural language of Modernism in the form of Mies van der Rohe's pavilion. It also introduced Montju'ic's Magic Fountain which fascinated spectators with its kinetic and multi-coloured forms.

The Mies pavilion — meticulously examined in its materiality and spatiality — instantly entered the annals of architecture. Yet, the fountain, despite its popularity, was more of a footnote, relegated to the realm of popular culture, of mannered sensory languages, of the decorative disciplines. Still, Carles Bu'igas i Sans' project signified the triumph of a new paradigm in design.

Since its emergence in the 19th century, electricity has had a profound influence on every facet of life. A spectrum of electrical devices, from street lights to refrigerators, gradually came to monopolise daily activities. This new energy source, originally intended to be the overriding motif of the 1929 Exposition, opened the possibility of including dynamic elements in design. Light, sound and movement could now be produced electrically, without human or animal power.

The 1929 Magic Fountain took the use of electricity beyond strict functionality and granted it an aesthetic dimension. It sought plastic, spatial and sensory expression. A lively design style developed over time, Eugeni d'Ors called it the art of aiguallum (water light)¹ while Bu'igas would later deploy it in other projects such as La nave luminosa (the Luminous Ship). In it, the electrically activated and illuminated water acquires an architectural presence.

These first exercises in turning electrical power into multi-sensory experiences were interrupted during wartime, but they made a powerful comeback in the 1960s and 1970s, which saw a renewed interest in the concepts of mood and atmosphere, seen as the multidisciplinary design of the inhabited environment. Different materials, techniques and systems developed by the military were integrated into the world of design and their potential to transform the experience of the environment was explored.

Internationally, the new interest in space, technology and multi-sensory experiences found its expression in museums — for example, in MoMA, under the direction of Ambaz — in universal exhibitions (Montreal, 1967, and Osaka, 1970) and in Western art, design and architecture: Italian radical architects, the American counterculture, and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, to name a few. In a context of technological optimism, though often also of political and social criticism, certain projects and experiments from that time still stand out today as radical proposals for the inclusion of new mood technologies.

Within the Spanish and Catalan context, the most interesting experiments in dynamic and multi-sensory designs were conducted by the leisure industry; more specifically, the nightlife sector, rather than the institutional one. The discotheque, which emerged in the 1960s as a new space for socialising while dancing to electronically produced music under artificial lights and the influence of drugs, became a testing ground. Discos in the Costa Brava were pioneers, as cultural critic Simon Frith noted in the 1970s.

On dance floors in towns like Platja d'Aro, multidisciplinary teams of architects and light and sound technicians, among others, worked together to create an experience based on trans-sensory effects produced by electronic and chemical technologies. Light and sound waves were now used as building materials shaped as desired to provide a high-intensity experience.

Tectonic materials, static and lasting, which assume their shape in response to mass and gravity, gave way to new fluid and fleeting materials which, like the water in the Magic Fountain, lack a shape of their own and flow in space. The result was a new materiality that expresses itself as a field of expansive waves intersecting with the surrounding bodies. New possibilities thus opened for design. Instead of being understood as the geometric composition of an object, it was now conceived as the body's relationship with an ever-changing environment.

It was during this period that the body took centre stage as a receptor and mediator in design practice. The use of chemical technologies that interact with the body's metabolic processes became popular. Psychotropic substances were seen as tools to modulate perception and, therefore, potentially design it. Acting on sensory and cognitive mechanisms, lab-designed molecules became, simultaneously, powerful instruments of design.

On the dance floor, psychotropic substances not only were the medium to enhance the experience of the setting, but their effect was a design referent as well. The psychedelic movement, particularly, impregnated all areas of design, shifting the entire range of the perceptive and sensory qualities of one's inner journey to objects, fashion, music and other areas. Outside of Spain, architects and designers even went so far as to use chemistry as the ultimate design tool. Archigram and Hans Hollein imagined inhabitable settings accessible by ingesting a pill.

Since the 1960s, the emergence of new electronic and chemical materials has gone hand in hand with the development of cybernetics. If the Magic Fountain had a control board and discos a booth where disc-jockeys manually regulated mood parameters, from then on, more sophisticated, reactive and autonomous systems would be experimented with to regulate the setting.

Put simply, the interaction between spatial design techniques and cybernetics that started in the 1960s led to today's digital media. Currently, 3D-design programs make it possible to represent objects and moods not subject to the laws of physics, but that exist only as digital codes. What we are witnessing, then, is the final dematerialisation of design.

This summarised genealogy, based on experimenting with mouldable materials like water, and which with the help of electric and chemical micro-technologies ultimately was used to design and produce intangible settings, is not isolated from the technical and economic transformations of our culture. Rather the Montju'ic fountain can be seen as the aesthetic manifestation of the mechanical progress of the first Industrial Revolution; the disco as the aesthetic manifestation of the second technological era, which coincides with the liberalisation of the economy, and digital settings as the aesthetic manifestation of the acceleration of techno-capitalism.

The transition of the world of design from tectonics to intangibility occurred while production systems were being transformed. The water rays in Montju'i'c fountain heralded a process of dematerialisation that invokes the unique experience of the individual as the central axis of design. Ever since, technologies and techniques of intangibility have made available to us the fluid, changing, transient and subjective environment characteristic of the post-industrial era.

Bio

Pol Esteve Castelló is an architect, researcher and educator. Pol’s work focuses on the relationship between body, space, and technology with a special interest in non-conforming bodies, non-canonical histories, and collective and anonymous design. Their work has been presented internationally in different formats, including writing, performative talks, and installations. They are a practising designer and a co-founder of studio GOIG.

Notes

1https://www.lavanguardia.com/edicion-impresa/20170626/423699552843/la­nau-lluminosa-de-buigas.html