On 7 March 2026, Jolanda Devalle presented the paper “Before Architecture Without Architects: Raoul Hausmann in Ibiza 1933–1936” at the 1Rice Architecture Dissertation Colloquium, held at Rice University (6-7 March 2026).
© Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart
Jolanda Devalle’s paper “Before Architecture Without Architects: Raoul Hausmann in Ibiza 1933–1936” was presented at the 2026 Rice Architecture Dissertation Colloquium in Houston. The paper drew on Devalle’s doctoral research, a critical investigation of the recurring “anthropologization” of architectural discourse across the history of modern architecture, of which Hausmann’s work constitutes one case study. Raoul Hausmann came to embody a peak expression of the German avant-garde: a leading figure of Berlin Dada, he theorized its rupture with the past as “presentism”—a desire to sever ties with tradition and even with the linear understanding of time. Against this backdrop, the work Hausmann produced during his three-year exile in Ibiza appears as a striking departure, even a contradiction: an intensive study of the island’s rural farmhouses through photography, survey drawing and extensive writing at the intersection of architectural, archaeological and anthropological inquiry—an endeavor that has been described as the reverse of his Dadaist work. Devalle’s paper traced this seemingly paradoxical inquiry through Hausmann’s writings of the 1930s and 1940s, critically examining the recurring image of the rural house as an architecture outside of historical time—a fascination shared by several architects and authors of the period—and presented this episode as a limit case of a broader phenomenon: one that unsettles historiographic categories and prefigures terms and ideas that would become central to architectural discourse. This conference paper became the basis for the essay “Without Time, Without Architects” published in AA Files 83 (2026).