However, he makes a critical analysis of the will of cultural consensus of the organic era that according to Capitel himself

was unsuccessful: “But such a dream, if it existed, was soon frustrated, disproved by reality”. (2)

is a reaction to the issue devoted to Catalonia by Arquitecturas BIS —more specically to an article by Oriol Bohigas en-

titled “Una nueva Escuela de Barcelona”— and to Helio Piñón’s book Arquitecturas Catalanas, the text “Notas sobre una

generación” opens a confrontation with the denition of the School of Madrid coined by Fullaondo and what the author

calls the “Nueva Forma project”, which he even describes as a “failure”. (3)

Capitel focuses the dispute on two visions, one of which he participates in. As opposed to the “neo-avant-gardes led by

that, according to the author, recovers condence in what is beginning to be called discipline, and which is manifested in

the “attention to the international inuences commented on in a panorama, somewhat eclectic if you will, but increas-

teaching— and conguring —architecture—”. (7)

e School of Madrid itself was also immersed in the process of political and social change facing Spanish society as a

their curricula.

modern system of professional training that codied the architect

s responsibility to design and build for the needs of

society, we move to a postmodern educational system that positioned architecture as a critical and intellectual practice

that began to question the very limits of the discipline.

is panorama of tensions and transformations is at the origin of Arquitecturas Modernas, an exhibition of drawings held

at the Ynguanzo gallery in the fall of 1980. Organized by Antón Capitel together with Gabriel Ruiz Cabrero and a large

delves into a dialectical confrontation between expressionist organicism, the dominant sign of the Madrid School's own

identity, and what we will see was a postmodern manifestation, which uses drawing as a generational binder and as a

sign of distinction.

As Javier Torras points out, “e exhibition had two distinct parts. On the one hand, the works belonging to the teachers

of the School, precursors of the event, and on the other, the images belonging to those still students, although in their nal

“And if this now academic architecture needed, to become concrete, to imitate avant-garde art, the modern architecture

that this book presents does not follow, like many others, such a direction, but try to get inside the architectural gurative

resources. And to such an extent that we could observe in many cases how architecture oers New Figurative Movements

to art, to painting, which can thus draw inspiration from it and recover the defeated loan”. (10)

According to the initial announcement, the event, more than others promoting the postmodernization and simultaneous

mode of representation, since the original idea was to publicly display the conceptual pluralities and communicative

invaded the eld of painting, renewing it with their proposals.

At the base of this exhibition is the manifest relationship that many of these architects maintained with young painters,

in the Casa para una peluquera by Cristóbal Bellver. Drawings that speak of unprejudiced and multi-referential architec-

tures in which a clear urban feeling, the city, its streets, take center stage.

e M-30, for example, was the subject of several highly iconographic proposals such as those of Álvaro Soto or Sigfrido

Martín Begué. e dos torres proposed by Soto recreated, without nostalgia, the Trade Union Building by Asís Cabrero

and crowned it with two circular towers. For his part, Martín Begué imagined a glass and metal tower that, with its

great road in permanent change, appears bright and luminous amid the smoke of the starry Madrid night in Juan Mera's

Peláez. Archetypal forms that, through simple strategies of repetition, delimit a grid of rooms and voids.

tions of architectural drawings at the Leo Castelli Gallery —Architecture I, Architecture II: Houses for Sale and Architec-

of architectural drawing as a work of art in Spain, thus fostering the fusion of the eld of architecture and the art world,

which came to accept the dual status of symbolic object and cultural merchandise.