Discipline facing questions: The 1957 Syllabus and Spanish architecture’s lost opportunity for specialization

Abstract

The 1957 Syllabus represents, among the different architecture syllabuses in Spain since the creation, in 1844, of the Special School of Architecture, a rarity. It is not only, alongside the 1956 one, the first to eliminate the selective course, but also, until today, the only one that offers a last course that is truly diverse, in which there is room for specializations as valid today as restoration and rehabilitation and the energetic aspects of building.

This text will analyse how the Spanish architects, while comfortable in a golden inertia that lasted since soon after the end of the Civil War, and giving priority to the induvial creator’s narrative before any other argument, rejected this emerging professional diversification for the sake of maintaining an idealized proprioception that just a few years later (coming the 1970’s decade) will start to show clear signs of exhaustion. They will do so, and this is the main postulate of the present article, recurring to the architectural project, considered the work of an heroic creator, as a haven to which they could come back when facing the instabilities common to the normal professional evolution that, somehow, they have always tried to avoid.