Alejandro de la Sota’s modern villages: vernacular abstraction and surrealist modernity

University of Miami School of Architecture, 33146 Coral Gables, United States

Corresponding author: flejeune@miami.edu

Abstract

Asked to implement General Franco’s ambitious “hydro-social dream” of modernization of the countryside, Falangist planners, engineers, and architects of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización (I.N.C.) developed a national strategy of “interior colonization” that, along with the reclamation of extensive regions, included the construction of302 modern pueblos between 1944 and 1970. Alejandro de la Sota (1913–1996) was one of the first five architects of the I.N.C. He designed Gimenells (1943), which set up the standards for the 1940s, and thenfour innovative villages: Esquivel (1952), Entrerríos (1954), Valuengoand La Bazana (1956). Based on research within the archives of the Fundación Alejandro de la Sota and the Ministry of Agriculture, this paper summarizes the modernity of his pueblos: the separation of traffic, the propagandistic concept of the open plaza, the volumetric abstraction ofthe vernacular house, and his ironic use (as understood by Ortega yGasset) of the Spanish classical. The research emphasizes how de la Sota transcended the functionalist elements of modernity in order to mobilize memories of the real and produce a “surreal” reality. In so doing,he reversed the fundamental reference to the countryside thatcharacterized Spanish surrealism to bring surrealism within the processof Franquist rural modernization.