Industrialization and housing: Images of Spanish modernization (1953-1981)

Abstract

In Spain, the lack of housing focused the debates and proposals on adapting industrialized constructive processes during the 1950s. The professional magazines, specially the Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, collected diverse approaches to new techniques and published different articles about their application to the economic housing and its construction by prefabricated elements. At the same time, the official cinematographic propaganda by the NO-DO newsreel contributed to spread these researches to the whole population with news about new building components, prototypes of foreign prefabricated housing and exhibitions of construction progress.

Even when these brief reports were shown together with others news of varied content, they contributed to disseminate the new housing building standpoints according to a certain pragmatism and to bring THE professional debates to the general public. The researches developed by the Spanish architects belonged, in turn, to the international context and debates of the CIAM and Team X on the use of technology and industrialization to solve the construction of social housing but applied from a perspective closer to the real situation. Specifically, this paper analyzes how the news presented by NO-DO transmitted professional interests in technical modernization to Spanish people.