Responses to Walter Gropius. Dialogues around the historic city. The questions raised by Fernando Chueca in “Historic cities (a drama of our time)”

Resumen

This text analyzes Fernando Chueca’s article “Las ciudades histo?ricas (Un drama de nuestro tiempo)” published in 1965 in the Revista de Occidente in response to the article published a few months earlier in the same magazine by the Bauhaus master Walter Gropius, contributing his vision of the destiny of the historic city. Gropius’ ideas regarding this argument were also taken into account by Leonardo Benevolo, an Italian architect and historian whose professional figure is comparable to Fernando Chueca, to whom Gropius’ ideas also served as a starting point to formulate his reflections on a pressing problem in Europe in the 1960s: the progressive destruction of the urban fabric of historic centers.

This text analyzes three practically contemporary texts, the one published by Walter Gropius, “Urban environment and planning” (1965), which gave rise to Fernando Chueca’s essay “Historic cities (A drama of our times)” (1965), as well the one published by Leonardo Benevolo in 1957 in the journal Ulisse “La conservazione dei centri storici e del paesaggio.” These essays provide different reflections on the problem of the insertion of contemporary architecture in monumental ensembles, the necessity for citizen education, and political intervention in urban planning, issues that are still key today in addressing the problem of the continuity of historic cities.