Without Time, Without Architects

Raoul Hausmann is best known as a founding figure of Berlin Dada, a movement defined by its radical rupture with tradition and its desire to sever ties with the past. It is striking, then, that during his three-year exile in Ibiza, between 1933 and 1936, Hausmann devoted himself to the island's rural farmhouses, the fincas, producing a substantial corpus of photographs, survey drawings and writings at the intersection of architecture, anthropology and ethnography. Tracing this inquiry as it took shape on the island, alongside the parallel observations of Walter Benjamin and Walter Segal, the essay focuses on this apparent contradiction and what it reveals: a portrayal of the rural dwelling as a metahistorical artefact, suspended from chronological time, and through which a different relationship between life, time and architecture comes into view. In doing so, it situates Hausmann's inquiry within a broader turn towards rural architecture, pre-history, and an idea of non-progressive temporal horizon that surfaced across the European avant-garde in the 1930s, as the belief in progress that had sustained it began to fracture.