Transhistorical Pedagogies: 150 Years of the Barcelona School of Architecture

After lengthy negotiations in Madrid, on October 5, 1875, Elies Rogent was appointed director of the new Provincial School of Architecture of Barcelona, where, for a brief period, studies in Fine Arts and Master Builders converged with what would become the embryo of the School of Architecture. From that moment and for almost a century, until 1966, Madrid and Barcelona remained the only centers for architectural education in Spain. In the early 1960s, the School left its old building at the Central University and moved to the Technical and Artistic Campus on Avinguda Diagonal.

Today, and following the extension by José Antonio Coderch in 1984, this building continues to house not only its various academic programs but also one of the finest archives on architectural education over the past two centuries: 180,000 documents including plans, drawings, artistic reproductions, glass plates, videos, photographs, and lectures. This kind of media archaeology allows us, on this 150th anniversary, to question the always ambiguous and complex idea of “novelty” from within the classrooms of the academy.

Under the title “Transhistorical Pedagogies”, the exhibition is organized—seemingly without chronology or a unifying theme—into nine units of meaning that display a suspended time, challenging the false notion of linear progress and instead committing to the idea of a cyclical history of the institution and its knowledge. Alongside these nine sections, four display cases present sections that unfold historical time. In an exercise of systole and diastole, the visitor’s gaze moves between documents that preserve the memory of many generations of professors and students, from Antoni Gaudí to Enric Miralles, as well as through the collections that form the ArxiuEtsaB · CàtedraGaudí (ETSAB-UPC) from the eighteenth century to the present day.