Jesús Ayuso Tejerizo began his studies of architecture at the Madrid School in 1934, but his studies were interrupted by the Spanish Civil War. He was able to resume his studies in 1939 and graduated in 1943. In January 1944, he took a position as an architect at the National Institute of Colonization (INC).

Jesús Ayuso’s career at the Institute has not been given enough recognition. His villages have been published much less widely than those of other architects, despite displaying a high degree of professionalism. Ayuso took advantage of the opportunity for investigating and is among the architects who designed the most interesting new towns for the INC.

In an initial period, between 1946 and 1956, he worked for the Duero Delegation of the INC, where he developed the following towns: Foncastín (1946) and San Bernardo (1953) in the province of Valladolid; La Vid (1946) and Guma (1951) in Burgos; Arrabal de San Sebastián (1951), Ivanrey (1955), Sanjuanejo (1954) and Conejera (1956) in Salamanca; and Bárcena del Caudillo, Fuente Nueva and Posada del Bierzo in León, the latter in 1956.

Beginning that same year, his professional activity centred on designing towns scattered across the southern half of Spain. They include San Leandro in the province of Seville (1956); Mingogil and Nava de Campana in Albacete, both from 1959; Campillo del Río (1961) in Jaén; Pizarro (1961) in Badajoz; Casar de Miajadas (1962) in Cáceres; Cortichelles (1962) in Valencia and El Trobal (1962) in Seville, designed jointly with José Luis Fernández del Amo, possibly because Ayuso had requested a leave of absence, which he was granted in February 1963.

As an external collaborator with the Institute, he was commissioned to design Vegas de Almenara (1963) in Seville; the towns of San Francisco and San Isidro (in Huércal Overa) and Torrefresneda in Badajoz, all from 1964; and, finally, the town of San Agustín (1968) in Almería, during the final years of the INC’s operations.

In the 24 years between 1944 and 1968, Ayuso built the 24 towns cited above. The smallest were built in the Duero basin; the largest, consisting of more than 300 homes, are El Trobal and San Agustín. He developed different proposals for urban layouts following a variety of criteria. On the one hand, he tried separating the circulation between pedestrians and cars. Other times he used resources such as shifting the position of blocks to interrupt views and avoid very long streets, as was the case in Nava de Campana. Finally, he introduced twists and turns in the road layout, such as in Casar de Miajadas. In 1953, he designed the town of Arrabal de San Sebastián, where half of the 22 plots were grouped into a small circular sector. Ayuso heeded the INC’s instructions to avoid long perspectives, and this early attempt at a curved layout would be further developed in his work some years later.

Ayuso proposed a series of curved streets in Casar de Miajadas, enclosing a circle where the church, the town hall and the crafts workshops were situated at the centre. In Pizarro, the 14 blocks of housing are all different and, to break up the monotony of a flat façade, Ayuso proposed rotating the plots with respect to the street façade so that the houses were slightly set back from one another generating a sawtooth effect. The road network in Vegas de Almenara was designed to be partially covered; it was an option that José Antonio Corrales had tested out a few years earlier in Llanos de Sotillo (Jaén).

Ayuso experimented with a variety of layout possibilities in his designs: orthogonal or rhomboidal grids, separate or combined circulations, a superposition of two grids, curved streets, façades set back in a sawtooth pattern and semi-covered roads. In conclusion, we might say that, through the professional activity of its architects, the INC created a real laboratory for experimentation in urban planning.

As for Ayuso’s religious architecture, it is worth mentioning the roof of the church in Nava de Campana, which incorporated inclined gables that alternate their slope every two porticos. It is impossible not to be reminded of the secondary school in Herrera de Pisuerga by Corrales and Molezún, built a few years earlier. The square plan of the San Agustín church (1968) is an adaptation of the guidelines issued by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, held between 1962 and 1965.

With regard to construction techniques, Ayuso used simple materials from popular tradition, such as masonry walls and plastered whitewashed brick. He also used exposed brick, like in Nava de Campana and Sanjuanejo, often alternating it with white walls on the top floor of the residential buildings, a solution also adopted by other architects. In his final project for San Agustín he proposed an absolutely novel solution: the use of exposed brick painted white. This option was not seen in any of the other new towns built by the INC. The town is included in the Docomomo Ibérico Registry.

Biography by Miguel Centellas

Bibliography

• CENTELLAS SOLER, Miguel, “Jesús Ayuso Tejerizo. Arquitecto funcionario del INC”, in AA VV Otra historia. Estudios sobre arquitectura y urbanismo en honor de Carlos Sambricio, Lampreave, Madrid, 2015, pp. 146-155.
• ÁLVARO TORDESILLAS, Antonio, Pueblos de colonización en la cuenca del Duero, Junta de Castilla y León, Salamanca, 2010.
• CALZADA PÉREZ, Manuel, Itinerarios de Arquitectura nº 3. Pueblos de colonización I: Guadalquivir y cuenca sur, Fundación Arquitectura Contemporánea, Córdoba, 2006.