Publisher's Synopsis
In recent years there has been a constant stream of publications and exhibitions about new Spanish architecture. In them, the totality of current practice has not always been reflected. Instead a certain type of attitude has been privileged in a biased sort of way. The support that has been offered to a particular new model of emerging architecture, more inclined to go beyond the limits of the discipline and to explore fields closer to other disciplines to do with art or participatory action, has overlooked other more traditional architectural practices and has not paid attention to magnificent architects who, despite their trajectory, have been deemed to be not very novel from an exclusively media point of view. The whirl of this desire for the new, along with the lack of other opportunities and the search for a redefinition of the role of the architect in society have led many studios to orientate their speculative practices towards the ephemeral, which, seen from a certain angle, has on occasions turned out to be somewhat unproductive. Instead of 'adding' new fields of action, people have tended at times to 'subtract' those they already had at their disposal. After years of speculative practices, young architects have renounced direct intervention and action on the constructing of the city and the evolving of traditionally more architectonic practices, as if building in itself were a retrograde practice.In this new instalment in the 2G Dossier series we wish to present a panorama (doubtless incomplete) of young Spanish architecture. To do so, it seemed appropriate to take a look at those studios that, without ceasing to think about the actual practice of architecture, have focused their attention on building things. Fleeing precisely from what had been exhibited in the past, we set forth a number of conditions the projects were to fulfil: all were to have been built, and we deliberately did not include alterations, installations or ephemeral constructions. To this we added a generational stricture: on the whole the architects of each office ought to have been born after 1970, and this not in order to discover what was most up-to-date but to ascertain what those other architects who didn’t monopolise the media were up to. The selection presented in this new 2G Dossier volume highlights, in short, those works capable of positioning themselves within the architectural discipline in a pragmatic, and at the same time personal, way, by grasping that architectural practice must never lose sight of the conditions of the status quo; ways of doing things that do not seek after the spectacular or novel form, but which are steps in the direction of constructing discourses that respond to an essential function of architecture: generating spaces for human wellbeing.
