Architecture Magazines in Spain from 1939 through the End of Francoism: A Historiographic Overview

Abstract

Since the beginning of modernity, and through to today, architecture magazines have been the primary medium for re ection, production and dissemination regarding contemporary architectural culture. As such, studying the periodicals associated with a given historical cycle is essential to understand the scope of the debates taking place in architecture and urban planning during that time.
This overview aims to “map” the Spanish architectural and urban planning culture from the postwar years and the period of desarrollismo to the early 1970s, drawing on a selection of some of the main historiographic studies centered on the most relevant architecture periodicals of the period.
Because their contents offer an “archive” of modern architecture, architecture magazines have long been genuine platforms for the exhibition and defense of new ideas. And that is not only the case for the ones that have legitimized avant-garde postures; it also includes the ones that opted to defend conservative approaches, and whose pages were home to the formulations of the architectural and/or urban planning proposals required by society at a particular point in time, or the ones that offered dreams of a new utopia.