Research on Drawing and Photography of Spanish Architecture in the Sixties

REFERENTE: CRISTIANA BARTOLOMEI

CREDITI: 0.5

AMPARO BERNAL - University of Burgos

The lecture I am going to present you is about my recent research career beginning with the doctoral thesis and it has evolved in different fields of architecture representation. I did my doctoral thesis on the magazines Arquitectura and Cuadernos de Arquitectura between 1960 and 1970. These magazines were edited by the Colleges of Architects of Madrid and Barcelona respectively. They were the main documentary reference of modern Spanish Architecture because of the quantity of their publications compared to the rest of the Spanish magazines and architectural books published at the same period. During the sixties, most of the architectural reports were made up with photographs instead of drawings, so I became interested in architecture photography as a means of representing architecture and I focused my research in the particular case of Paco Gómez, photographer of the magazine Arquitectura, during fifteen years (1959-1974). The research on the architecture photography of Paco Gómez and his collaboration with Arquitectura was my main contribution to a Research Project about Photography and Modern Architecture in Spain, in which I’ve been working since 2014 till 2017, with a group of professors from different Spanish universities specialized in architectural photography. The aim of this project was to understand and document the role of photography in the spread of modern architecture in Spain since 1925 until 1965, because since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern architecture discovered in photography a powerful means of dissemination for its formal and aesthetic principles. On the other hand, I keep studying the drawings of Spanish Architecture in the sixties with my thesis as the main reference. The most published architect on Arquitectura in the sixties was Antonio Fernández Alba. He was also full professor at the School of Architecture in Madrid, and therefore his architectural drawings had a key role in graphic expression of Spanish Architecture of this period. I went on further researching the relationships between some of these drawings and architecture photographs, because there are drawings and photographs that look alike, even you can confused them, although they are made with different techniques. The border between both means of expression disappears when concepts of both languages are mixed and they seem what they are not. Moreover, in the sixties, architectural models played a very important role in the representation of modern architecture in Spain. When we talk about models in architecture representation, our narration is necessarily supported by photographs of the models, because the physical materiality of a model, its size, its materials and construction, determine its conservation. Therefore, there is a necessary symbiotic relationship between the model and the photograph. Models are rarely kept in the archives, most of them have disappeared. For this reason a model needs a means of visual editing such as photography to be registered, analysed and classified. I have studied the characteristics of these photographs of models published on the architecture magazines articles together with the plans of the project. Sometimes, they play a documentary role as an objective record of the model, and other times, photographs of models shows a purposeful reading of the model and the architecture it represents. Frequently, some photographs of models submitted for the Contests in the sixties, have become iconic images of Spanish Modern Architecture because the projects were never built and their models were the only final evidence of architecture.

Amparo Bernal holds a professional degree in Architecture from the University of Navarra (1993) and PhD from the University of Valladolid (2011). She is Professor of Architectural Graphic Expression at the Higher Polytechnic School of the University of Burgos since 1993 and director of the department since 2012. Her main field of research is focused in the spread of modern Spanish architecture through architectural magazines in the sixties. This work had led her to specialize in representation and communication of architecture through drawing and photography, disciplines that focuses most of her research output. During the last three years, she has been researching on photography and modern Spanish architecture.