50th Anniversary ETSAS
Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz
Collaborators
Rodrigo Castro and ETSAS students
Client
Subdirección de Cultura de la ETSAS. Universidad de Sevilla
Construction Companies
FabLab ETSAS Universidad de Sevilla
Drawing the 50-Year Map of the School of Architecture is to uncover the portrait of the thousands of students, hundreds of professors, and countless projects that have passed through it. The life of the School is also the life of the projects and ideas that have emerged from the desks of the architects who were trained there. The geography drawn, built, or conjectured over this half-century of projects, arising directly or indirectly from the School, has definitively influenced the shape and life of the city. The drawing we could trace by following the wake of the School of Architecture’s history would be tangled, frayed, full of threads and connections crossing Seville, scratching its map through endless relationships.
Perhaps the only possible way to tell this story would be to attempt to outline that tangle of data and dates, causes and consequences, ideas and constructions—a cloud in which we might glimpse how many students have passed through the School of Architecture, what books arrived in Seville through it, how much architecture was built during those years, how many square meters were occupied by its classes, how the number of female architects grew, what cities became forever connected to Seville through the visiting architects, how the ratio of architects per inhabitant evolved, what urban debates were sparked, how much paper and ink were consumed in them, how many PhDs were defended, how many imagined versions of Seville emerged during these years, how far the School’s influence reached across the territory, and how many architects have not worked as architects…
In this account of the School of Architecture’s existence, metaphor will have no place. The accumulation of records, dates, quantities, names, signs, and symbols that form the School’s development since its founding will be presented with rigor and accuracy—a precise yet inextricable map like those Ramón y Cajal used to depict the intricate geometry of the nervous system. And perhaps the opposite will occur: all metaphors will then become possible, through the correspondences that each observer establishes by connecting the various references. Just as a score—a chart of precise symbols—resonates as music within us, or a topographic map full of symbols evokes an entire landscape, or a recipe—a sterile list of quantities and proportions—can recall the memory of a taste, we propose compiling the record of 50 years of the School and its imprint on the city through a web of interconnected data. This will build an interpretable space, a code through which the School’s history can be reimagined by cross-referencing multiple variables—an inventory from which to envision the future School and its relationship with the city.
The data shaping this 50-year portrait of the School of Architecture will span academic and teaching domains (evolution of student numbers, gender distribution, average time to graduation, yearly GPA, postgraduate studies…), research (number of books, acquisitions, most-read books by year, dissertations defended annually, publications by knowledge area…), the profession’s relationship with society (graduates per capita, ETSAS architects by region, number of graduates per approved project per year…), and architecture and culture itself (exemplary works, ideas and buildings developed during these years by ETSAS architects, significant international works from the same period, influential countries, authors, and movements…). All of this, sourced from research conducted by the School’s administrative office, library, the Architects’ Association, and the Fidas Foundation, will form the material and formal expression of the exhibition itself. That is, there will be no distinction between container and content—rather, the latter will give form to the former.
The exhibition will allow for a dual reading along two axes—abscissas and ordinates—corresponding to the 50 years and the researched data, composing a spatial graph that can be explored in both directions. A series of porticoes, each representing a family of the data investigated, will be deformed by the fluctuation of those variables over the 50 years. All of them, arranged in parallel, will form a partially covered urban space, whose reading in different directions will allow for a chronological understanding of the School’s development, by data category—or may simply create a small disturbance in the daily rhythm of the city center, caused by the 50 years of the School of Architecture.
