ABSTRACT
The situ ation changed radic ally around the mid 1970s:2 for example, the exiled architect Josep Lluís Sert returned officially in 1975, and the Basque Country and Catalonia were recog nized as auto nom ous regions in 1980. But architectural de velopments were not so ab rupt. Before the un pre ced en ted urbanization and building boom of the 1980s, Spanish architecture was free to de velop in parallel with that of the rest of the Western nations. As early as 1958, the Spanish pavilion at the Brussels Expo by José Antonio Cor rales and Ramón Vásquez Molezún surprised everybody by its newness and by the absence of any Franco inspired ref er ences to the rural feudal past or monumentalist ‘Escorialismo’. The same year, Coderch and Valls presented a tourist pro ject in Torre Valentina on the Costa Brava. The work fitted into the landscape fol low ing Le Corbusier’s regionalist precedents but, back home, numerous pro jects tried to de velop a more ori ginal approach to Mediterranean regionalism, drawing from the local vernacular. The generation of the last years of the regime succeeded in surviv ing the intellectual scler osis of the Franco era but also, in its effort to join the outside, free world, avoided becoming a thoughtless, passive importer of fashionable icons, including the trendy postmodern ones. Its members
de veloped an ori ginal ‘crit ical regionalist’ approach that re thought moderniza tion, combining it with Spanish precedents and adapting it intelligently to the par ticu lar constraints of specific situ ations. Such is the case of Alejandro de la Sota’s Gimnasio del Colegio Maravillas in Madrid (1961), Antonio Fernández Alba’s Convento del Rollo in Salamanca (1962), and Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza’s Banco de Bilbao in Madrid (1971-1978). A unique regionalist pro ject combining pub lic space and mytho poeic Basque waterfront landscape with sculpture, El Peine del Viento (‘Comb of the Wind’, 1975-1977), was designed during the period of trans ition to demo cracy, the result of a collaboration between the artist Eduardo Chillida and the architect Luis Peña Ganchegui, both Basques, on the western tip of the horseshoe bay of San Sebastian, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Equally unique was the urban furniture for the poor fishing village of Combarro (1971-1974) in Galicia3 by Pascuala Campos. The pro ject, remin iscent of Gian carlo de Carlo’s buildings in Matera, intended to recog nize the identity and
value of the com mun ity, inviting them not to emig rate but to stay in the region and struggle to change its eco nomic and social con ditions. More recently, the renovation of the Santa Catarina Market in Barcelona by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue (1997-2005), photo graphed on the cover of the present book, serves as a means of celeb rat ing and preserv ing the quality of tradi tional markets and traditional agricultural produce – the colors on the roof refer to the colors of the fruits and veget ables sold there – in an urban world encroached on by a socially and nutritionally challenged globalized food culture. In Madrid, Antonio Vélez Catrain’s (1979-1983) cubic block of Yes erias fused modern functional apartment ser vices with the regional element of the patio, as it is known, a microclimatic control device as well as a medium for face toface social inter action. A sim ilar fusion of regional and modern ele ments is dem on strated in a res id en tial complex, the Arturo Soria Apartment, designed by Bayón, Aroca, and Bisquert & Martín (1976-1978), situated in the lush green park like envir on ment of the Ciudad Lineal, and in the Social Housing Block by Antonio Cruz Villalón and Antonio Ortiz García on Dona Maria Coronell Street (1974-1976) in the heart of historic Seville. By the beginning of the 1990s, as global organ iza tions and institu tions were unleashed around the world, determining through uni ver sal design models and routines the shape of buildings, cities, and landscapes and deplet ing nat ural and cultural resources, ‘flattening’ by brute force singular peaks and unique valleys of biological diversity and ways of life, regionalism – crit ical and not regressive – became the focus of numerous architects around the world.
