City Modernist Melilla City Modernist Melilla"Beauty does not see it is only seen", Albert Einstein commented one day. With the very same innocent and humble attitude, Melilla invites us to discover its unique beauty. The perfection of the streets of Melilla and the value of its architecture, have become the pillars of the tangible, visible and studied heritage which might one day lead to the city being named Patrimony of Humanity.
Melilla belies its distance from the Iberian Peninsula with the presence in the city of great treasures of Spanish art. On the streets, with its architecture as the guiding thread, Melilla reflects the history of its five cultures, with hidden enigmas in every nook and cranny. One of these lucky secrets is Modernism. The Autonomous City is home to hundreds of different buildings designed to engage the stroller's interest, which have transformed the city into the home of modernism in Africa, and Spain's second most important modernist city, after Barcelona.
The modernist Melilla that we know today was built at the beginning of the 20th Century, and is the result of a mixture of styles practiced by architects who believed in the city, imbuing it with a serene and vigorous elegance. They made it into a city of buildings with marked architectural personality.
This modernist essence was brought to Melilla by the architect Enrique Nieto, a disciple of Gaudí, who, at the start of the last century escaped from the shadow of the Catalan genius to let his imagination run free in the streets of this north-African city. During years of service to the City Council, he provided Melilla with a very personal architectural identity through his buildings.
The influence of Modernism even reached the different religions in the city. Enrique Nieto was commissioned to design the main synagogue, the Central Mosque, and several buildings for the Catholic church - ample evidence of the important presence of modernist architecture at the heart of Melilla society.
As the 20th century began, Melilla was undergoing a transformation due to the consequences of significant economic, social and political changes.
Growing industrialisation, key to the birth and development of modern cities, greatly influenced Melilla, which was subject to a real vortex of town planning. A new concept of the city was born, and it was an original way of understanding town planning - touched by military-style rationalism but also influenced by the modernist winds blowing from Catalonia.
Birth of the Modernist suburban development
Following several oneoff projects which attempted to standardize the centre (Ensanche del Mantelete, 1888; extension of the Polígono neighbourhood and El Carmen, 1896; the Alfonso XIII development, 1896), the engineer Eusebio Redondo planned a large urban development in 1906. It was the beginning of the Reina Victoria suburb, now known as "Triángulo de Oro". Divided up into blocks, the area acquired a look similar to that of La Cerdà in Barcelona. An infrastructure with easy access was designed - based on the principle of standardisation and order in planning.
The modernist quarter was beginning to take shape. Company owners, salesmen, and businessmen all worked to create a city anchored in modernity. Melilla became a city where architects had freedom to develop original designs - buildings which, brought together under the term 'modernist', represented movements such as artdeco, classicism and eclecticism.
These are some of the main schools of architecture which left their mark on Melilla in the first few decades of the 20th Century:
Classicism was the style typical of buildings constructed in the city at the end of the 19th Century and start of the 20th Century. There had simple designs, pure lines, and symmetric ornamentation, and gave the city an academic and geometric air. Carmelo Castañón, Eusebio Redondo and Joaquín Barco were three of the military engineers representative of this school, which used sober and academic forms to develop of a city in the throes of modernity.
This movement gained ground in our city as a response to the rigidity imposed by classicism. Nevertheless, it did not win many converts, given that it only made itself felt just before the coming of a modernist movement which was to capture the imagination of the city's architects and engineers
The first eclectic works in Melilla were closely related to the works of military engineers, who mainly produced private houses on commission. These were houses which still had façades with a rigid succession of balconies and openings in symmetrical designs, but in which decorative elements were now changing. There was greater variety in worked iron, cantilever cornices, and more adornment. Droctoveo Castañón was the main figure in this movement, and he built many private houses in c/ Prim, General Marina and General O'Donnell.
In Melilla, historicist architecture was characterized by a return to the past - mainly medieval forms. Neo-gothic, Neo-Romanic and Neo-Arabic forms were heavily used in religious and military buildings. The Military Church, the Casa de los Cristales, the Hospital Indígena, Central Mosque and the Yamín Benarroch Synagogue are clear examples of this style.
This was the driver in architecture in Melilla in the first half of the 20th Century. Brought to Melilla by Enrique Nieto, modernism won the city over with its flowery invention. Since then, Melilla has been a promoter of this style, which established itself to the extent of revolutionising everything which had previously been built in the city.
Modernism entailed doing away with classicist lines and imposing a rich decorative style which can still be seen in the streets of Melilla. Plants, flowers, animals, and female faces were predominant, with brown and cream colours making the decorative elements of the building stand out more.
The rhythm of construction in Melilla in the first few decades of the last century was truly vertiginous; everyone, bourgeois and lower classes, wanted to take part in this movement which, using colour and varied adornments, created original buildings of great beauty. The academic style of Emilio Alzugaray, the faultless geometry of Manuel Rivera and the creative freedom of Enrique Nieto could be found side by side.
Art deco, in its different styles, was a real turning point for architecture in Melilla. Tired of modernist aesthetics, the pioneers of this style substituted the decorative detail of geometric forms for the floral designs of modernism. Straight and super-imposed lines, stylized buildings and an overall geometric conceptualism paved the way for the so-called zig-zagging art deco style or zig-zag moderne.
Horizontal forms, dynamism and the end of figurative ornamentation were the aesthetic pointers of this movement, which was inspired in the design of great industrial machinery and transport. The main representative of this movement in Melilla was Francisco Hernanz, designer of some 142 buildings in the city. Hernanz abandoned the idea that floralism had to be the aesthetic base of modern architecture, creating buildings with voluminous curves, elegance in composition and simple symmetry.
This movement flowered in the second third of the 20th Century. It involved fusion, using aerodynamic curves art-deco sgraffito forms to create areas of bright colours and detailed drawings. The leading proponent of this type of architecture was the famous Enrique Nieto, whose building at number 5 Padre Lerchundi is clear example of a style which gave way to new styles in the second half of the last century.
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