Bartlett Research Conversations: Ana Mayoral Moratilla

Architectural Reconstruction and the Construction of Power: The case of Madrid's Ciudad Universitaria

Speaker: Ana Mayoral Moratilla
Supervisors: Prof Ben Campkin and Dr Clare Melhuish
Guest panellist: Prof Adrian Forty

Abstract

This study explores the value of citizens’ memory, experience and reading of the built environment as key to analysing the interplay between architecture and political power, which has commonly been approached through the lenses of architectural aesthetics and semiotics. The research will focus on the typology of university architecture, which compared to other types of institutional buildings has not been well-studied from this perspective. 

To explore this approach, the study will employ archival and oral history methods to investigate the role of the reconstruction of Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria (1939-45) in the imposition of General Franco’s dictatorship. The research will investigate the design of the campus, and its reception by different audiences to understand how it facilitated the shaping of a new social and political identity. It will further consider how the relationship between architecture and political power in this context might be implicated in the absence of Spanish rationalist architecture from Anglophone architectural histories of the mid-20th century.

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the Architectural Design MPhil/PhD and Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the programme directors, Professor Jonathan Hill and Professor Sophia Psarra, PhD Coordinators, Dr. Nina Vollenbröker and Dr Sophie Read, and other PhD supervisors.

Image: Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Ana Mayoral Moratilla