‘Genuine Invariants’: The Origins of Regional Modernity in Twentieth-Century Spain

Abstract

During the decades that followed the loss in 1898 of Spain's last colony, Spanish architecture languished in a turbulent search for identity. In this search, some architects argued for a return to the historic architecture of the Spanish colonial empire, while others followed the progressive ideas of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Finally, in the mid-1940s, Spain's architects began to progress towards a successful reconciliation of these two seemingly opposed camps. A critical moment occurred in 1947 with the publication of Fernando Chueca Goitia's watershed textInvariantes Castizos de la Arquitectura Española (Genuine Invariants of Spanish Architecture).In this text, which Chueca conceived as a pocket reference for Spain's Modern architects, he described Spain as a unique place where the diverse architecture of Christian Europe and Islamic North Africa coalesced into a new — and essentially Spanish — whole. In it, he called on Spain's architects to move beyond superficial considerations of both history and modernity, and to arrive at a genuine, self-critical identity for Spanish architecture.