School of Mining Engineering, Madrid, 1884-1893. © Archivo Ruiz Vernacci

This year marks a hundred years since the death of two eminent figures of Spanish architecture, Ricardo Velázquez Bosco and Vicente Lampérez. Both were chair professors – who became directors – of the Madrid School of Architecture, and also presidents of the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos, members of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, important architectural historians, and practicing professionals who alternated new-build construction with interventions on landmark historical buildings (a field in which the two of them came to be indispensable references, albeit from different angles of restoration theory). The year 1923 was a turning point for the architecture school of the capital: besides the almost simultaneous demise of both figures, there was the jolt caused in the old mansion on Madrid’s Calle de los Estudios, when a promising young student by the name of José Manuel Aizpurúa brought Le Corbusier’s newly published book, Vers une architecture, into the classrooms…[+]