The cityscape, Ciudad Lineal and freemasonry

Abstract

Arturo Soria y Mata (1844-1920), positivist philosopher, scientist, topographer, mathematician and geometrist devoted his life to the building of a new city just outside the limits of Madrid proper. The paper explains that he wished it to be independant of the capital, have a rational and harmonious ground plan and be an oasis of beauty reclaimed from dusty and barren waste ground, this to be cultivated, productive and lived within. The thinking for his knew master scheme for city life and for his motto «For each family a house and to each house a garden and an orchard» he drew from the novel «The Year 3,000» written by the italian doctor and hygiene expert Paolo Mantegazzo whose ideas bear the imprint of philanthropic freemasonry. Soria was received in 1870 into the Herculania Lodge at Corruna and took the symbolic name «Solon» in honour of that sage amongst the seven of classical greece who had striven as a legislator statesman, poet and philosopher to bring about those changes in his City-State's Laws as to property that were to allow for the participation of the middle and merchant class in things public, a bailiwick hitherto held to be the preserve of the aristocracy. In housing, Soria was for building single family dwellings to fit the tenant's needs and brougth into his topological la out each and every social class including labourers. His architects were on a par with all that was most «modernist» in that epoch.