Private air-raid shelters designed by the Valencian architect Joaquín Rieta during the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

One of Valencia’s outstanding twentieth-century architects, Joaquín Rieta is well known as the designer of some of the most famous buildings in the city centre of Valencia. But his promising career was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War, when Valencia became one of the most heavily bombed cities in Spain. During this period, Rieta designed a series of private air-raid shelters to protect the civilian population. These pioneering structures, which formed an essential part of the architecture of air-raid shelters during World War II, have been analysed in terms of their materials, construction, and structural system. More than eighty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, this article brings to light the documents of six air-raid shelters designed by Rieta, to reappraise the quality of the original projects, acknowledge the cultural value of these war architectural sites, and to retain the memory of this painful historical period alive in the present.