The 1940s in León, between tradition and modernity: Ramón Cañas, Arriola and Ceremonies Houses

Abstract

The decade of the forties of the 20th century was a great change for Spanish architecture due to the conflict of the Civil War. The city of León did not stay out of this alteration. As an example of this we have selected the figure of the architect Ramón Cañas y del Río and two of his most representative works such as The Arriola House and The Ceremonias Building.

Two projects that will serve to confront and subsequently verify the stylistic disparities between both buildings despite having been conceived by the same author in a short time interval.

From an incipient and primary rationalism putting in value “the modern”, which meant a real break with the orthodox academicism, to take a step back and return to the concretion of historicist axioms, presumably derived from the implantation of a new Francoist regime obsessed with the search for a national architecture that represents the institutional values of autarky.

The reality was that modernity and tradition were not so far apart in the work of Ramón Cañas, since historicism was nothing more than a mask for the rationalism implicit in his work.