Modernity imported from the Americas: Spain at the Sixth Pan- American Architects’ Congress, a Graphic Void

Abstract

In 1947 four Spanish architects —José Fonseca, Luis Gutiérrez Soto, José María Ayxelá and
José María de la Vega— attended the sixth Pan-American Architects’ Congress in Lima, Peru, to
show the architecture that had resulted from a decade under the Franco regime. The disappointment
was huge. Instead of success, they were met with incomprehension, but also an international
modernity that was unknown.
Only one photograph of this trip was published at the time, one of the four architects on their return.
However, the reports made by two of them revolutionised the Spanish architectural scene. After that
experience, all of them left behind the post-war traditionalist language in their works.
This paper reconstructs the trip to Lima of these four architects of the Franco regime, reviewing
what they saw and what they said. It also includes unpublished images from the architecture
exhibition that so impressed those traditionalist architects. The aim is to disentangle a common
space to explain the importance of that visit in the modernisation of Spanish architecture in the
second half of the twentieth century.