ubtle, when the door of the hall opened and a woman in high-heeled shoes walked in, her steps resounding on the wooden floor in spite of the caution of her movements. Caution and a certain insolence, or simply the awkwardness of someone who arrives late and has to move about in semidarkness. She passed in front of the beam of light from the projector, the entire length of the first row, toward an empty seat in the corner. I see the silhouette, moving and at the same time frozen, the profile against the screen as in a shadow play, the skirt made of light fabric like an inverted corolla. Ignacio Abel made it a point to stay silent, following the newcomer with his eyes and not hiding his annoyance. That evening in the Residence, in the darkened hall where he could barely make out the familiar faces in the audience — Adela, his daughter, Señora de Salinas, Zenobia, Moreno Villa, Negrín, the engineer Torroja, the architect López Otero, Professor Rossman, far in the back, his bald oval head among women’s hats — he was pleased by the strong, clear sound of his own voice and the attention he was getting, which had a lightly euphoric effect after the first few minutes of settling in, after the noise in the hall and the scraping of chairs, and after the several days of insecurity he wouldn’t have admitted to anyone came to an end. The silhouette of the newcomer was outlined on the slide of a peasant façade, a house built in the middle of the eighteenth century, he explained, looking at his notes, in a southern city, conceived not by an architect but a master builder who knew his trade and, literally, the ground he walked on: the earth that produced the sandy, golden stone of the lintel over the door and windows, the clay for the bricks and tiles, the lime that had whitened the façade, leaving exposed, with admirable esthetic intuition, only the stone of the lintels, delicately carved by a master stonecutter who’d also sculpted, in the center of the lintel, a calyx situated exactly at the axis of the building. He signaled for the next slide, a detail of the angle of the lintel. With the pointer he indicated the diagonal of the joint of two ashlars that formed the corner, where two contrary forces balanced with a mathematical precision that was even more astonishing given that the men who conceived and built the structure probably didn’t know how to read or write. Stone and lime, he said, thick walls that insulated against both heat and cold, small windows avoiding obvious symmetry and distributed according to an irregular order related to the slant of the sun’s rays, and white lime that best reflected the sunlight and eased the interior temperature during the summer months. With mortar and reeds that grew along nearby streams, they created natural insulation for the roofs of the highest rooms — the technique essentially the same one used in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Architects of the German school—“myself among them,” he noted with a smile, knowing that isolated laughter would be heard in the hall — always speak of organic construction. What could be more organic than the people’s instinct to use what was closest at hand and flexibly adapt a timeless vocabulary to immediate conditions, the climate and ways of earning a living and the demands of the work, reinventing elemental forms that were always new yet never yielded to whim, that stood out in the landscape and at the same time fused with it, without ostentation or mechanical repetition, transmitted throughout the country and from one generation to the next like old ballads that don’t need to be transcribed because they survive in the current of the people’s memory, in the discipline without vanity of the best artisans. At the rear of the hall, in spite of the darkness, he guessed at or almost discerned the approving smile of Professor Rossman, leaning forward so as not to miss any of the Spanish words: the intuition of forms, the integrity of materials and procedures, courtyards paved with river pebbles tracing a rotating visual rhythm, tiles fitted together with the organic precision of fish scales. (He’d said that word again; from now on he had to avoid it.) As he spoke, he became less self-conscious and his gestures lost their initial rigidity, which perhaps only Adela had noticed, just as she noticed how his voice became more natural. He showed a paved courtyard with columns and a fountain in the center, which could have been in Crete or Rome but belonged to an apartment house in Córdoba, its form so well adapted to its function that it had endured with only minor variations for several millennia. Light and shade shaped just like the material — light, shade, sound, the flow of water in a fountain refreshing a courtyard, the opacity of the outside walls, the daylight that enters from above and spreads through rooms and hallways. Who’d be presumptuous enough to affirm that functional architecture — he almost said “organic”—was a twentieth-century invention? But it was fraudulent to imitate external forms by parodying them; one had to learn from processes, not results, the syntax of a language and not isolated words. Iron, steel, wide sheets of glass, and reinforced concrete would have to be employed with the same awareness of their material qualities that the plebeian architect possessed when he used reeds or clay or stones with sharp edges to erect a dividing wall, instinctively taking advantage of the form of each stone to fit it to the others, not feeling obliged to force it into an external mold. He showed a slide of a shepherd’s hut made of interwoven straw and rushes, another of the interior of a mountain shelter where with stones but no mortar a vault had been built that had the rugged solidity of a Romanesque apse. The chance form of each slab was transformed into necessity when it was fitted as if by magnetic attraction to the form of another. And at the heart of everything was the people’s instinct for making full use of scarcity, their talent in turning limitations into advantages. Until now the slides had shown only buildings. The click of the projector sounded and the screen was filled by a peasant family posing in front of one of the huts with eaves of admirably woven straw and rushes. Dark faces stared into the hall, the large eyes of barefoot, big-bellied children dressed in rags, a gaunt pregnant woman holding a child, a lean, dry man beside her in a white shirt, trousers tied at the waist with rope, and sandals made of esparto grass. In the Residence Hall the picture was something like documentation of a trip to a remote country sunk in primitivism. Just as he used the pointer earlier to indicate architectural details, Ignacio Abel now pointed out the faces he’d photographed only a few months earlier in a village of phantasmagorical poverty in the Sierra de Málaga. Architecture, he said, didn’t consist of inventing abstract forms, and the Spanish plebeian tradition wasn’t a catalogue of the picturesque to be shown to foreigners or used decoratively in the pavilion of a fair. The architecture of a new time had to be a tool in the great task of improving people’s lives, alleviating suffering, bringing justice, or better yet, or said more precisely, making accessible what the family in the slide had never seen and didn’t know existed: running water, airy spaces, a school, food that was sufficient and, if possible, tasty; not a gift but restitution, not charity but an act of reparation for unremunerated labor, for the skill of hands and the fineness of minds that had known how to choose the best rushes and braid them to hold up a straw roof or make a basket, the proper clay to whitewash the walls of a hut. From what those people have created over the centuries come almost the only solid, noble things in Spain, he said, original and incomparable, music and ballads and buildings. He was moved, Adela noted from the first row and privately shared his emotion. Ignacio Abel forced himself to contain an effusiveness that took him by surprise. He wasn’t quite sure where it came from, rising from his stomach, as if he were suddenly possessed not by memories of his father and the masons and stonecutters who worked with him, the ones who erected buildings and paved streets and dug foundations and tunnels and then disappeared from the earth without a trace, but by the awareness of those who’d lived before, several generations of peasants from whom he descended, those who’d lived and died in mud huts identical to the one in the slide, as poor, as obstinate, as lacking in a future as those people whose faces were fading, now that the lights in the hall had been turned on but the slide projector had not yet been turned off.