Abstract
The magazine Arquitecturas Bis, published in Barcelona from 1974 to 1985, coinciding with the end of the Franco dictatorship and the ensuing transition to democracy, has up to now been studied with a focus on its being self-referential, a mirror of Catalan architectural culture. Also, albeit to a lesser extent, in relation to two of the attributes that made it a deliberately different medium, distanced as much from the magazines that preceded it as from its contemporaries, in Spain and abroad alike. On one hand, a heterogeneous editorial board that rendered inexistent any marked editorial line of the kind often associated with the figure of a single director. On the other, a graphic design that could express the magazine’s diversity and independence, and above all its lack of a programmatic structure, instead critically representing and interpreting—through both text and image—the discursive practices of postmodernity. Arquitecturas Bis was published by Rosa Regás and her firm La Gaya Ciencia, and at the outset the editorial board—in addition to the architects Oriol Bohigas, Federico Correa, Lluís Domènech, Rafael Moneo, Manuel de Solà-Morales, and Helio Piñón—included the art historian and critic Tomás Llorens, then exiled in England, and the graphic designer Enric Satué. The only member of the editorial board trained not in the Barcelona school (ETSAB) but the Madrid school (ETSAM), Moneo was nevertheless connected to ETSAB, where he served as chaired professor of Elementos de Com-posición after passing the corresponding national examinations in the late 1970s. It is around his person that we can name a small and recognizable group of Madrid authors who published their first research articles in Arquitecturas Bis. Trained in the Madrid university world in the period between the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, the Madrid authors—María Teresa Muñoz, Antón Capitel, Carlos Sambricio, and Juan Antonio Cortés, besides Moneo himself—helped to establish that the debates surrounding architecture in Spain should not be resolved from its two leading cities, nor from the angle of the links historically consolidated and instrumentalized by them. By means of some early studies that time has simply made more prestigious, the texts they published in Arquitecturas Bis laid down an idea of architecture that was nuanced with respect to the proposal of the Barcelona context, understanding the disciplinary discussions differently from how the editorial board did, with ways and viewpoints that the magazine sometimes assessed as divergent or complementary, but which at other times sparked some controversy, enriching the debate and making Arquitecturas Bis a medium for discussion. The title of the thesis—“Another Arquitecturas Bis: The Critical Contribution of Madrid”—makes reference to the critical contribution of the Madrid authors and their differential value, as much to the “other architectures” that the texts are, on one hand, as to the “other” understanding of architecture offered by those authors. Their contribution to the magazine—both as a group and individually: five possible voices of one same reality—confirmed the construction of a renewed critical discourse coming from the architectural culture of Madrid in the 1970s, through a medium which nevertheless, paradoxically, cannot be thought of without Barcelona.
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