Architecture dedicated to different areas of education was an interesting field of experimentation for some architects from the late 1950s onwards. There were various reasons for this focus. The growth of the immigrant population, especially in the newly expanded areas on the outskirts of Barcelona and other cities in the metropolitan area, generated a demand that had to be met urgently, both by public and private initiatives.
Several schools run by such active teams as Martorell-Bohigas-Mackay and Giráldez-López Iñigo-Subías and, to a lesser extent, Anglada-Gelabert-Ribas fall into this category. In addition, from the 1960s onwards, a new Catalan school education project was also established by private institutions that considered the quality of architecture to be an integral part of the teaching environment. In some cases, the concept of the educational environment was extended to holiday camps near cities, designed to offer leisure activities in a community setting for schoolchildren; in the case of university students, this role was played by halls of residence. While in the aforementioned areas the initiative fell to municipal administrations and private institutions, in the field of higher education the promoter was the Francoist state through the Ministry of National Education and the universities. The two most relevant examples of these operations, which served both to enhance prestige and to control the university population, were the works carried out on the UB campus on Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona and the Autonomous University, located in Bellaterra, near the areas where the metropolitan area’s administrative centre was to be built.
This collection of works also provides an interesting overview of the different international architectural references associated with various brutalist and late modernist movements that arrived in Catalonia, as well as the materials used during the period, from the ceramic elements so prized for their realism by the so-called Escola de Barcelona to the different ways of using concrete, both in concrete and other materials.
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