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作者

María Cristina García González

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

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作者单位

摘要

Abstract The aim of this article is to describe the work of the first Urbanism Professor in Spain, the architect and industrial engineer César Cort (1893-1978), and to give an outline within the context of the town planning culture in which he developed his work. Since 1918, from the Chair of Urbanología at the School of Architecture of Madrid, he contributed to the consolidation of the Anglo-Saxon influence in Spanish Urbanism in the crucial moment of the second half of the 1920s and the beginning in the 1930s. His professional biography tells of the trips he made, opened labor paths, meetings, skills, interests, social networks woven and examines the coherence or inconsistency between what was said and what was actually done. From his works as a professor, disseminator, urban planner, landscape architect, architect, and politician, Urbanism was always his main interest. Introduction The aim of this article is to outline the work of the architect, town planner, and engineer César Cort (Alcoy, 1893-Alicante, 1978), the first professor of Urbanism in Spain, within the urban context in which he developed his career. He was one of the pioneers in establishing Spanish Urbanism as a professional discipline.1 Cort was a multifaceted character. His professional interests were as diverse as mining, finance, and cinema, among others, but he was also directly involved in the theory and practice of Urbanism through the different factors involved in the construction of the city: from teaching, the field in which he became the first professor in Spain, around which he trained several generations of architects in the School of Architecture of Madrid and vindicated the figure of the engineer Ildefonso Cerdá; from the project and the intervention in the territory and the city, where he participated in numerous planning schemes; from the private sector, in his role as real estate developer; from policy, as a monarchist councilor in Madrid during the Second Republic; and, finally, as a tireless disseminator and publicist of Urbanism among citizens and technicians. This article is formulated from an analytical and narrative position that provides a chronological discourse that makes sense of Cort’s trajectory devoted to Urbanism. The first step begins with an overview of the Spanish background and continues with his academic contributions from 1918. In the third section, the principles of Urbanología that he incorporated into his teaching, based on his presence in international networks between the twenties and thirties, are introduced. His theory was complemented by a professional practice as a planner under the Estatuto Municipal (1924), the Spanish Act devoted to municipal responsibilities. Finally, the last section is dedicated to the creation of the Federación de Urbanismo y de la Vivienda (FUV), a narrative of diffusion of Spanish town planning ideas in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. An Overview of Spanish Urbanism until the Thirties The problem of urban population growth, which implied the acceleration of the industrialization process in Spain, occurred later than in England, Germany, or France. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the Spanish economy improved due to its neutrality in the First World War under the monarchy of King Alfonso XIII. This situation favored exports and enriched the country, although as a counterpart, it meant a price escalation that was not accompanied by an increase in workers’ wages.2 The three dominant ways to allow for the growth of the cities were the regular extension of the preindustrial city, the renovation of parts of the preindustrial city, and the creation of new neighborhoods, which attempted to offer a new way of living based on philanthropic principles and a new kind of townscape. Madrid and Barcelona made up the two-headed urban structure in Spain. Both had begun to develop their regular extensions in 1859. The Eixample of Barcelona was designed by the engineer Ildefonso Cerdá; this masterpiece had theoretical support in the first manual on Urbanism, Teoría General de Urbanización (1867), but was not considered in this way. Fourteen Spanish cities had regular extensions at the end of the nineteenth century based on a geometrical, square block pattern design built around the existing city.3 Cities were arranged in a purely geometric order, based upon the layout of alignments and gradients of the streets, and the city was conceived of as a space for regimented and ordered middle-class intervention. Architects were critical with the lack of quality of the homogeneous sites of the regular extensions at the time. Legal tools were based on urban extension schemes and expropriation—Ley de Ensanche de Poblaciones (1876), Leyes de Ensanche para Madrid y Barcelona (1892), Ley de Saneamiento y Mejora Interior de Poblaciones (1895), and Ley de Expropiación Forzosa (1879)—governing town planning with no integral consideration of the city.4 The grandes vías formed a characteristic feature of inner reform projects for many cities, such as Zaragoza, Málaga, Granada, Valencia, Córdoba, and Murcia.5 It was an economic operation, a type of sventramento with Haussmannian perspectives. The resulting revalorization of the land on either side of the boulevard led to the construction of grand buildings along its length, supported by a bourgeoisie identified with this urban scene. In 1908, the Vía Layetana was built in Barcelona, connecting the center of the old city and the new area of the Eixample. In Madrid, construction of the Gran Vía began in 1910. The last example, in the city of Murcia, opened in the fifties (Figure 1). These interventions, in the core of the old cities, were very controversial due to the demolition of the historical heritage that the projects implied. Figure 1. The Gran Vía street in the inner reform project of Murcia. Source. César Cort, Murcia: un ejemplo sencillo de trazado urbano, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1932. The third proposal regarded the creation of new neighborhoods. The main precedent was the Linear City proposal. Arturo Soria introduced his original idea of a linear garden city in the outskirts of Madrid in 1882—Madrid Linear City—anticipating Howard’s Garden City. Arturo Soria’s Linear City constituted an integrated territorial vision, based on the concept of mobility: his city was not only a city but also the relationship between the land on which it was developed and the cities, which were the nodes of the Linear City, supported by a transport line system, a tram in this case. Its international presentation in 1913, mainly due to the interest of George Benoit-Lévi, generated great recognition. The Linear City was very close to the Garden Cities’ philosophy,6 promoted through the Spanish attendance at the international conferences and the publication of interviews with and articles about Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin,7 who combined three distinguished qualities: proficiency as a technician; sociological insight; and the ability to explain. The main proponent of Garden Cities in Spain was Ciprià de Montoliu from Barcelona, who was responsible for Civitas journal, published by Barcelona’s Social Museum beginning in 1909.8 The Spanish public institution with social housing responsibility was the Instituto de Reformas Sociales (Social Reform Institute),9 which existed for a very short time (1903-1924) with few results but which was very active in international diffusion.10 The Instituto supported small housing cooperatives in cities for the upper working class. These three ways of creating cities did not provide proper housing for the real working class, leading to unresolvable problems of uncontrolled periphery growth and slums in the town centers. These outcomes brought concerns about urban development to the fore, with architects, civil engineers and the administration feeling that a new approach was needed to both concepts and procedures.11 In the twenties, Urbanism began to be considered not only a means of organizing a horizontal space to be filled with building but also an integrated overview of the future life of the city. From Urbanización to Urbanología: Among Town Planning, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture The 1914 Architecture Study Plan incorporated a new subject, called Trazado, Urbanización y Saneamiento de Poblaciones (Town Schemes and Sanitary Infrastructures in Towns). There had never been a similar subject before; previous urban studies had concentrated solely on sanitary infrastructures. There were two Schools of Architecture, in Madrid and Barcelona. In 1918, the architect and industrial engineer César Cort was appointed professor at the Madrid School of Architecture (Figure 2) and became the first person to teach the new subject—together with other subjects regarding construction materials, topography, and machines at the beginning—which he proposed calling Urbanología. As in the Barcelona School of Architecture, under the leadership of the architect Amadeo Llopart, the predominant influence in Madrid was the German approach of Josef Stübben, Reinhard Baumeister, Karl Henrici, and Camillo Sitte. However, Cort also introduced the Anglo-Saxon perspectives to Madrid. He had joined La Sociedad de la Ciudad Jardín de Madrid (Garden City Society of Madrid) in 1919, and he assumed the main aspects of Howard’s urban structure proposal. Three articles published by Arquitectura, the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos’ (Spanish Society of Architects) journal, showed the differences between the two Schools of Architecture: Barcelona introduced an urban design exercise in the center of Barcelona and Rome, while Madrid exposed the survey and development of two medium-sized Spanish cities: Elche and Ciudad Rodrigo.12 Figure 2. Ciudad Rodrigo plan: park system proposal, by César Cort’s students. Source. César Cort, Trazado, urbanización y saneamiento de poblaciones en la Escuela Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid: reforma y ensanche de Ciudad Rodrigo, Arquitectura 77, (1925): 205-215. Cort introduced Urbanología as a transition, more theoretical than the German Stadtebau and more constructive than Anglo-Saxon Town Planning. He saw Urbanología, usually replaced by the word Urbanism, as a dynamic and complex process in the semantic sense of science, a sort of overcoming of the dichotomy of town planning and urban design.13 Architectural design and urban history, with curricula of law, social science, and management theory, were included in the Urbanología field of knowledge. In the syllabus of Urbanología,14 Ildefonso Cerdá was introduced; Josef Stübben’s handbook Der Städtebau and Camillo Sitte’s Der Städtebau nach Künstlerichen Grundsätzen were included; and Vers une Arquitecture by Le Corbusier was mentioned; Past, Present and Possible by Iñigo Triggs and Les promenades de Paris by Alphand, together with Agustin-Rey’s sanitary postulates and some of George B. Ford’s and Nelson P. Lewis’s scientific approaches, were mentioned. Articles by Patrick Geddes about civic surveys, published in Sociological Review, were also recommended. However, three English books formed the core of Cort’s teaching: The Civic Art: Studies in Town Planning, Parks, Boulevards, and Open Spaces (1911) by the landscape architect T.H. Mawson; Town Planning in Practice (1909) by Raymond Unwin; and The Case for Town Planning: A Practical Manual for the Use of Councilors, Officers and Others Engaged in the Preparation of Town Planning Schemes by the sociologist Henry R. Aldridge. These books were available in the Library of the Madrid Architecture School, thanks to the fabulous legacy of the philanthropist Juan Cebrián.15 From 1932, Cort used his book Murcia, un ejemplo sencillo de trazado urbano (1932) as teaching manual until his retirement. The book gathered the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to develop a town plan scheme. The prologue by Josef Stübben blessed the initiatory nature of the book, which was intended as a manual for technicians inspired by The Case for Town Planning, by Aldridge. From 1945, academic bureaucratic problems actually ended Cort’s teaching career,16 with a suit that affected his successor in the Chair of Urbanología; however, the main reason actually consisted of his scattered professional interests. His tenacity allowed him to address many business ventures over his career: an advantageous marriage; the profits of his wolframite mines in Galicia, which initiated his interest in Portugal; and his various businesses ranging from architecture, to the financial sector, insurance, cinema and rubber in Liberia, including the plan for a presidential palace project in the fifties. With the aristocracy represented by the Count of Romanones17 through a friendship with one of his sons, the Count of Yebes, Cort shared four interests: land management, mines, policy, and fine art from Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts).18 Panoply of Cortian Questions in Urbanología In 1925, the Mayor of Murcia commissioned Cort for the town plan scheme, and he used the plan that he developed to illustrate his approach to Urbanología. The essence of the Murcia plan was reflected in a book but not in the real city. Murcia’s plan outlined the conditions to be established for the future city, but the plan was soon modified and only partially implemented by the architect Gaspar Blein, Cort’s successor as director of the plan.19 The main issues that Murcia, un ejemplo sencillo de trazado urbano addressed were the civic survey as a technical tool, urban structures and morphology, the nucleología theory, and regional planning. A chapter was also dedicated to plan management, land subdivision, and plot production. Urbanología, in contrast, was the original title that Cort proposed for his first book (Figure 3).20 With more or less maturity, Urbanología’s principles were fixed in this period, and they would remain unchanged. These principles can be presented schematically. Figure 3. Murcia birds-eye view, the first image of the book Murcia: un ejemplo sencillo de trazado urbano. Source. César Cort, Murcia: un ejemplo sencillo de trazado urbano, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1932. The civic survey introduced by Patrick Geddes was the first point to achieve.21 The survey became part of the professional procedure and stimulated the development of statistical methods, such as those for traffic data, and new technological advances, such as aerial photography. Cort considered the city and its conditioning factors, such as geographical conditions, topography and climate, historical processes, legal factors, morphology, and the identity of the site and the people. The survey was a tool to define situations and open possibilities for development. Spatial, social, and economic factors had been integrated and considered as a complex whole, something that had never happened before. From architectural culture, planning was seen in its social, economic aspect and not only in a spatial dimension. The influence of the social approach of Cerdá is not doubted, although Cort criticized Cerdá’s overconfidence in urbanization’s capacity to improve society. One of the transcendental issues for the proper functioning of towns is the question of size and the concept of growth limit: size and population would be restricted, and the agricultural belt was considered a limit for city growth. The city as a living organism tended to develop in accordance with the activities of its citizens, but just as natural beings have a maximum development of which they cannot pass, “They reach a certain limit difficult to establish a priori, that of being by variable force in different cases but that, when it is transferred, the urban community is seriously harmed.”22 The main influences in Cort’s nucleología are the Garden City movement and Cerdá nuclei introduced in the first Barcelona Eixample schemes. A schematic figure gave a graphic representation of the configuration of nucleología for cities in the future (Figure 4). Cort proposed that both spiritual and economic growth would be directed toward suburbs and new satellite towns, which should always have good transport connections while at the same time retaining connections with the surrounding rural area. The plan looked not only at the municipal limits but also at the areas on the edge of the territory. A satellite town would be structured around a vital center, where spiritual needs (church and school), material needs (markets), leisure needs (theatres and cinema), administration needs, and housing would be integrated. Facilities would have to be coordinated and accessible, so a rural-belt functioned as a support for agriculture, parks, and industrial and transportation systems. Figure 4. Key diagrams of nucleología representing the great city of the future. Source. César Cort, Murcia: un ejemplo sencillo de trazado urbano, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1932. This theory separated him from the new Spanish planners’ generation, all of whom were in favor of zoning.23 For Cort, zoning by itself created problems of mobility and traffic, reducing the quality of life in the city. He argued against the mono-functional city. Cort felt that zoning should not be aimed merely at grouping different activities in separate locations within the city but rather at facilitating favorable conditions for specific activities in different sectors of the city. The location of heavy industry ought to be in the outskirts because of public health issues. The weight given to green spaces in Cort’s approach was due to its significance for public health, in terms of providing access to sun and air. He said, “Big cities need a system of parks connected by wide roads [parkways] to purify the air and render movement easier; expansion must be carried out avoiding agglomerations of buildings and forming a series of towns connected by park systems.”24 With this point in mind, he quantified and compared ratios of open space per inhabitant and established the need for a hierarchy ranging from green belts to private gardens. As he had done for green spaces, he established a hierarchy for road structures, from parkways to street housing access. The criteria were the proportion of tall buildings and the street width. In his different plans, he clearly defined ring parkway systems linked to green-belt areas. The linking of green spaces and mobility had to do with a perception of both as hierarchical infrastructure networks, conceptually close to water, electricity, or sanitation supplies. Cort’s concerns about the rural world,25 in the Cerdian sense of urbanización versus rurización, were answered with the establishment of a seminar in 1932, depending on the Urbanología Chair, under the direction of the architect José Fonseca, a former assistant professor. The original idea was to create a multidisciplinary institution similar to the Institut d’Urbanisme de l’Université de Paris, but the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) disrupted it.26 It focused mainly on the rural colonization process. Cort treated regional planning from the perspective of circulation networks; not only roads and railways but also air flight paths had to be considered. However, at this point, two initiatives were advanced in an integral conception of the territory under regional planning, in which the land uses played the leading role. On one side, the Plan Nacional de Obras Hidráulicas (1933) (Spanish Hydrological Plan) was one of the first approaches to integrated territorial development based on the drainage basins. A contest held to develop plans for the new villages in the new irrigation areas of Guadalmellato and Guadalquivir rivers, similar to those in the Italian Agro Pontino under Mussolini dictatorship, received an enthusiastic response among architects such as Cort, but there was no development until the reconstruction and colonization programs of the Franco dictatorship.27 In Barcelona, the regional government published El plà de distribució en zones del territori català (regional planning). Examen preliminar i soluciones provisionals28 offered a territorial scheme based on uses close to the Abercrombie Plan for Doncaster, in the context of the political identity of Catalonia. Cort’s ideology defined the construction of homes for families and not of isolated housing projects, which were considered a form of class distinction led by architecture. Cort maintained this position of social class integration in the urban space through housing even after the Spanish Civil War, when the most conservative wing of the new Spanish dictatorship, represented by the Falange, preferred the segregation of working-class neighborhoods.29 This social concept of housing was not opposed to the mercantile aspect.30 Private initiative had to be part of the solution to the housing problem but with an adequate legislative body that set the rules of the game and the municipality as the regulating agent for land prices if necessary to avoid speculation. Another contributing factor was increasing the level of professionalism and the efficiency of all participants in the housing construction process, from the project through technical management and the construction industry. Nevertheless, proposals, such as his insistence on reducing daily work force wages because they had provoked a corresponding increase in the price of housing in critical postwar conditions, aroused controversy.31 Public subsidies did not enter into Cort’s Liberalism. The images inside and outside of the city were both considered as identity and aesthetic values. Externally, the skyline created by topographical features and historical buildings had to be considered and incorporated into any plan. Inside the urban sites, views and perspectives were to be created using points of reference and perspective, enabling each part of the city to have a distinctive character distinguishing it from other parts, following Sitte schemes. Cort expressed this interest in crossroads as a morphology issue but closer to Unwin’s catalog of traffic intersections than Cerdá’s brilliant approach. Cort called for the protection of Spain’s rich legacy of architectural and urban heritage and attempted to introduce the broad meaning of the word “heritage,” anticipating new concepts, such as townscapes, as an artistic value under the Anglo-Saxon influence. He was also concerned with the protection of singular green spaces, such as the Hort in Murcia, Elche palm site, or the park Casa de Campo in Madrid, including even the protection of trees.32 Later, Cort was elected a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando de Madrid (Royal Academy in Madrid) in 1940, and from 1943, he owned Plus Ultra Editions as a compromise with the Real Academia. This editorial house published a series of art collections, such as Monumentos Cardinales and Ars Hispaniae: these books are considered the best works available on Spanish art. Each volume was authored by the most recognized authors, such as Fernando Chueca Goitia or Leopoldo Torres Balbás, among others. For Cort, there had to be a balance between heritage and modern issues that justified, for example, the sventramento proposal that destroyed the Arab traces of Murcia but solved the circulation and the aesthetics—open perspectives—problems. Transnational Networks for Housing and Town Planning These postulates were generated by Cort in the twenties and consolidated in the thirties. The origin was located in his presence in transnational networks regarding town planning and housing. Spanish attendance at international congresses was not very well-known prewar, but it existed. It persisted based on the idea that the only way to progress and to overcome the backwardness endemic to Spain was to be open to traveling abroad.33 Cebrià de Montoliu attended the Berlin Exhibition Allgemeine Städtebau-Ausstellung in 1910. The Councils of Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbo sent their municipal technicians to international meetings to complete their training. Thus, Montoliu coincided with the Gante Exhibition (1913), with the architect from Bilbo, Ricardo Bastida, and Amós Salvador from Madrid. Hilarión González del Castillo, agent of the private Society Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización, introduced Arturo Soria’s Linear City. Two years later, the Barcelona Council sent the municipal engineer José María Lasarte to the International Engineering Congress in San Francisco (1915), and when he returned, he translated the Nelson P. Lewis Conference into Spanish as Urbanización.34 César Cort became one of the most active Spanish attendees of the international forums in the interwar period. Cort spoke English, French, and a little German. This was of great importance at the time, given the lack of education in foreign languages among architects and the lack of translations into Spanish. His first experience was in 1919. As the representative of Sociedad Central de Arquitectos, Cort attended the Inter-Allied Conferences of Paris (1919) and London (1920), in the context European postwar reconstruction, where he met the French architect Donat-Alfred Agache, Henry R. Aldridge, and George B. Ford, representing the American scientific approach.35 Cort was nominated as an agent of the London Council in Spain. This institution held the second Inter-Allied Conference in London (1920), focused on the colossal English housing program “Homes fit for heroes.” Salvador Crespo and Federico López Valencia, representing the Instituto de Reformas Sociales, attended the Congress, returning to Spain with the idea of applying English social housing policy based on subsidies and tax reductions for social housing development.36 The result was the reform of the Ley de Casas Baratas (Social Housing Act, 1921). These ideas were strongly criticized by Cort, who felt that it was pointless to copy policies when both the contexts and the conditions of Great Britain and Spain were so different. Cort attended also the Congrès International d’Urbanisme et d’Hygiène Municipale in Strasbourg (1923), organized by the Société Française d’Urbanistes. Public health was the main goal of this discipline. Cort, as professor of Town Planning, Amós Salvador from the Madrid Council, Ricardo Bastida from the Bilbo Council, Hilarión González del Castillo, Federico López Valencia, Salvador Crespo, later the vice-president of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning (IFHTP),37 and delegates from the Instituto de Reformas Sociales, attended some IFHTP Conferences. In the case of Cort, he attended the IFHTP Conferences in Gotteborg (1923), where he introduced the workshop of Elche (1921), Amsterdam (1924), Paris (1928), Rome (1929),38 and London (1935), where he presented a paper titled “Positive Planning in Spain,” and he posited, It is wise to endeavor to foresee the main lines of development of large areas and to implement only those parts of the plan that are necessary for immediate purposes. That means preparing a general plan that is not rigid and severe but capable of being adapted to new technical conceptions in the various details. This plan must be based on principles that would guarantee its permanence. The chief points that it should address are the development of the vital centers, the arterial roads to connect the centers and open spaces and improvements to ensure the circulation of air.39 In the context of the Barcelona and Seville International Exposition and the Ibero-American Exposition of 1929, Seville and Granada hosted the Fifth Conference of the l’Union Internationale des Villes et Pouvoirs Locaux (IULA), organized by the Federación Nacional de Municipios Españoles (National Federation of Spanish Municipalities), with the participation of Cort and the Madrid municipal engineer José Paz Maroto representing Spanish Municipalism. A singular trip was one to the USSR in 1932. Cort, together with twenty-four other architects and urban planners, joined the I Réunions Internationales des Architectes, organized by L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. There, he met Agache again and contacted the Portuguese architect Pardal Monteiro. The impressions of the trip were transmitted at some conferences and articles. He criticized the null possibility of citizen participation in Soviet urbanism, the centralized and bureaucratic government, and the loss of heritage in Moscow. The opposition of the speculative city versus the Soviet city was not as fair as Stalinism proposed, but Cort considered the reconstruction of Kharkov, mainly the highway infrastructures.40 Although these networks were being developed close to officialdom, in Spain, there was also the CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture), which was active in a vindicating way, holding a meeting in Barcelona in 1932, although the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 brought these developments to a halt. Postwar, Cort participated in the IFHTP Conference in Stockholm (1939)41 to obtain information for the Spanish reconstruction, and after the Second World War, the anti-communist Spanish dictatorship began to introduce into the networks again, and Pedro Muguruza attended the Hastings IFHTP Congress (1946),42 where he offered the Spanish experience in reconstruction “replanning cities is a problem on every frontier. When we come to put them into practice, plans must not lose the human personality or tradition of the city.”43 Spain normalized this presence at the Lisbon IFHTP Congress (1952), with César Cort, Pedro Bidagor, Rafael de la Hoz, and José Fonseca very close to the incorporation of Spain into the UN in 1955. In 1961, Santiago de Compostela hosted an IFHTP meeting with Cort as president of the Spanish delegation. The Estatuto Municipal (1924) as a Tool for the Institutionalization of Professional Practice in Prewar Spain In 1923, the Spanish Ministerio de Trabajo (Ministry of Labor) organized the Conferencia Nacional de la Edificación (National Construction Conference), in an attempt to find an answer to the different problems faced by housing construction—materials, the economic situation, and social housing—and all of the agents involved in the process were invited. Acting as the representative for the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos, Cort participated in the section on coordination of the different activities involved in the construction process. For Cort, housing as a construction activity was connected to town planning. The conclusions were a sort of precedent to the Estatuto Municipal (1924), the first and truly limited Spanish Act concerned with town planning as a municipal responsibility.44 The Estatuto Municipal introduced a new approach to intervention, proposing expansion plans for municipalities with a population of ten thousand inhabitants and growth of 20 percent (from 1910 to 1920). There were sixty-four Spanish municipalities directly affected.45 In this respect, the Estatuto Municipal was more a conceptual, methodological, and instrumental formulation than a general experience. Like the French “Cornudet” law (1919), both were more ambitious in theory than in real development.46 The town expansion plan had to be approved by the councils and not by central government, as happened before. The only supra-municipal control was approval by the Comisión Central de Sanidad (Health Central Commission), although in fact, this commission exceeded its responsibilities. This municipalist act was passed during the first Spanish dictatorship of the twentieth century of General Primo de Rivera under the King Alfonso XIII, imitating the Italian Monarchy with Mussolini, from 1923 to 1930. However, the Estatuto was very limited, and this question was raised in 1925, at the First Congreso Nacional Municipalista (National Municipalist Congress), organized by the Unión Nacional de Municipios Españoles (National Union of Spanish Municipalities).47 Cort, among others, argued in favor of a National Town Planning Law and the establishment of National Institute for Regional Planning. Such a law, Ley sobre el Régimen del Suelo y la Ordenación Urbana (Land Act), would not be passed until 1956. Meanwhile, Spanish council concerns were very specific beyond housing, and they were oriented toward solving public health problems, such as water supply and sanitation services, to decide on the best sites for the indoor market, the slaughterhouse, and the open-air market and to obtain an accurate map of the town to define the blocks and to control future expansion or inner renovation. The projects were financed, in part, by loans from the Banco de Crédito Local (Local Credit Bank), created in 1925 to provide economic support to the municipalities. However, this financial support was not sufficient, and the Estatuto Municipal allowed municipalities to obtain money from the gains generated by the developments. Cort supported municipalism and land management as financial tool for municipalities. This situation was the Gordian knot. The council should acquire land to facilitate effective land management, thus enabling the community to benefit from the development of the town. The council ought to act as a regulator. In Cort’s opinion, the authorities had a duty to promote property development and to draw up appropriate renting policies to encourage private-sector interest through possibilities for job and wealth creation. The theoretical and practical issues surrounding plot production and the concept of land as merchandise were at the heart of Cort’s Urbanología.48 On the other side, the Estatuto Municipal meant the need for technical professionals in town planning, and these professionals were not available. Cort denounced the situation and asked for the educational system to be adapted to the new needs and for the professional consolidation of Urbanism. The Spanish architects decided to focus their 1926 Congress on urban issues, seeking the institutionalization of the discipline under their responsibility. The Eleventh Congress of Architecture (also the first on Urbanism), organized by the Sociedad Central de Arquitectos, was held in Madrid in 1926 by architects and for architects to give systematic and theoretical support to the new science. The Congress was an important landmark in the development of town planning as a discipline in Spain, remembering the foundational RIBA Congress of 1910, and the echoes of this experience arrived even to the American journal City Planning.49 Cort was a speaker on Urbanism teaching, and Nicolás Rubió Tudurí introduced green spaces; among other participants were Gustavo Fernández Balbuena (Congress Secretary) Fernando García Mercadal, Modesto López Otero, Secundino Zuazo, Manuel Sánchez Arcas, Teodoro Anasagasti, and Amadeo Llopart. Cort presented the Ciudad Rodrigo students’ work, which was included in the Congress proceedings Trazado de Urbanización, a posthumous publication by Gustavo Fernández Balbuena, edited by Otto Czekelius in 1932. At this point, the importance of dissemination for consolidation of the discipline was unanimous, and it was achieved through conferences, the publication of articles, and attendance of national and international congresses. Cort was believed to be an accomplished speaker, and he was also an unflagging traveler, both in Spain and abroad. His texts are neither a systematic presentation of his beliefs nor a technical guide but rather a compendium of thoughts and ideas combined with moral judgments and personal information, nevertheless containing interesting reflections on Urbanología. Many times, the interesting titles were not properly developed. Cort demanded the leadership of the architect in town planning because of issues related to civic art, feeling that aesthetic appreciation was needed, annoying the civil engineers. All of the other technical experts involved were to be limited to their own fields of expertise, reserving the global vision for the architect in an Ortega y Gasset sense.50 Cort demanded social commitment from architects and considered policy to be a fine art because of the capacity to create beauty, goodness, and truth. In accordance with these two principles and convinced of the importance of municipal councils, as well as concern over the management of land on the outskirts of Madrid, he stood as a candidate in the election for councilor on the Madrid Council for a monarchist party in 1931. He stood for and was elected councilor of Madrid, but as a consequence of the election, the Second Republic (1931-1936) was proclaimed, and King Alfonso XIII abandoned Spain. The contests for the expansion of cities, because of their bases, their participants and the jury’s acts, became true pieces of critical judgment for Spanish Urbanism.51 In 1929, the Madrid Council held an international planning contest for the city’s expansion.52 The City Council’s technical services drew up a report on the city, more than a survey, describing and presenting the overambitious aims of the competition for the use of participants.53 There was no outright winner, and the first classified team was formed by Secundino Zuazo and Hermann Jansen. The idea of continuing the South-North axis with Madrid as the development guide was then fixed and incorporated into the 1931 plan. Madrid had to wait until the postwar plan by Pedro Bidagor in 1946. Cort participated with Josef Stübben as a partner, another Spanish-German partnership—they had met at in the contest in Bilbao (1926) as seen in their correspondence—and they were classified among the six finalist teams. The Cort-Stübben proposal (Figure 5) was based on the creation of satellite towns, a radial road system, a park system joined by parkways, and the prolongation of the Linear City.54 Cort introduced what he called American blocks for the first time in two town planning proposals: the project for the contest of Ceuta, a Spanish city in Africa, and Madrid in 1929. American blocks or superblocks (Figure 6) were considered a reference to some of the new projects that had been started “in the suburbs of New York,” as he specified in the Ceuta Plan Memory. The most significant aspect of the American block was the separation of road traffic and pedestrian walkways. Pedestrians could access houses from inside the block via pedestrian pathways that alternated with traffic access to the houses via a kind of cul-de-sac. In these blocks, residential buildings were arranged around the perimeter, and the central area was freed up. Sometimes school buildings were incorporated in the block perimeter, leaving the central area free for sports fields, playgrounds, or gardens. American blocks required a large area and were distributed in a balanced manner throughout the city extension. Figure 5. Madrid plan by Cesar Cort and Josef Stübben, 1929. Source. “Del concurso urbanístico internacional de Madrid,” Arquitectura 143 (1931): 78-85. Figure 6. “American blocks” in Madrid plan (1929) by César Cort and Josef Stübben. Source. César Cort, Campos Urbanizados y ciudades rurizadas, Madrid: Federación de Urbanismo y de la Vivienda, 1941. The FUV as an Attempt at an International Network Once the Spanish Civil War was over, a new cultural and economic regime was established. The Franco dictatorship was added to the other European dictatorships, including Salazar (Portugal), Mussolini (Italy), Hitler (Germany) and Stalin (USSR), with their similarities and differences.55 In Spain, home, family, and religion (Catholic) formed the ideological basis of Francoism. The autarchic system established by the new dictatorship claimed the reconstruction of the destroyed towns and housings as a Renaissance based on idiosyncratic Spanish values. Cort believed that he was going to be nominated as the head of the Spanish reconstruction and the reorganization of architecture and urbanism, and his beliefs were justified: he was considered an expert. He had even proposed implementing a reconstruction bureau similar to the La Renaissance des cités (1917), and he attended the Stockholm IFHTP Congress (1939) to obtain information for the reconstruction. He saw the consequences of the war as an opportunity to do something new and different to answer the needs of a shocked postwar society. Cort was a hard worker but also a stubborn and proud person. The defense of his political ideas—Liberal, Anglophile, monarchist, Catholic but closer to Masonry—did not favor him. The architect Pedro Muguruza, a convinced Falangist, was chosen, as was Pedro Bidagor, Chair Assistant, for a short time, and they were not sympathetic to Cort. Cort also remained oblivious to the two significant initiatives for urban culture that were occurring in Madrid at the end of the Civil War from the two warring sides. First, the politician Julián Besteiro in Republican Madrid led the drafting of a Regional Plan (1931),56 which was completed in 1939 under the technical responsibility of Fernando García Mercadal. The Madrid Plan (1946) of Pedro Bidagor started developing in the Madrid underground, which was occupied during the Civil War, and it became the most significant Spanish plan. The structure of satellite towns to guide growth and crowns of green spaces and transport lines around the capital were proposed. Cort drew up the Valladolid Plan, which began in 1939, and it was the first postwar plan (Figure 7), followed by the Badajoz Plan in 1940 and La Coruña Plan57 in 1942, but as Manuel Solá Morales testified, Cort’s projects began well only to later end badly,58 although he traced the outlines of the future development of the three towns. For the critic Juan Daniel Fullaondo,59 the planning theoretical debate in the early forties was limited solely to the contributions of Cesar Cort and Pedro Bidagor, although organicist language was in the background of both.60 Cort continued applying the same tools and intellectual background, but the Spain that emerged from the Civil War was quite different, and the lack of evolution of his postulates diluted his influence in a field of professional planning that derived from the Spanish postwar technocrats led by Bidagor. Figure 7. The César Cort’s plan for Valladolid. Source. Urbanización de Valladolid, plan general del ensanche y reforma interior, 1939. Under the Franco dictatorship, there were some official bureaus that assumed the responsibility for meeting housing needs and undertaking towns’ reconstruction.61 In 1938, the Servicio Nacional de Regiones Devastadas (National Service and Repairs Devastated Regions), the mission of which was the reconstruction of the liberated areas and which was soon framed in the structure of the Ministry of Interior as the newly created Department of Architecture under the leadership of Pedro Muguruza, was launched. The Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda (National Institute for Housing) addressed the definition of the rules for new urban housing and rural state promotion; José Fonseca was named its chief architect under the Ministry of Labor, which was created in 1939. There were also the Junta de Reconstrucción de Madrid, Instituto Nacional de Colonización (Colonization Institute) (1939) and Obra Sindical del Hogar (Union Home) (1940).62 These organizations reflected the positions taken by some of the powers in the new regime. The legal support necessary for the implementation of the housing initiatives came in 1939 with the approval of the law on subsidized housing and launched the state machinery for the production of housing in urban and rural areas. Streamlining the process of housing production, planning, and control of the entire process and coordination of power management with industrial power modes of intervention were implemented in Spain. Cort did not find his place in this officialdom. Cort abandoned the professional planning practice and focused on dissemination with the creation of the Federación Española de Urbanismo y de la Vivienda de la Hispanidad (FUV)63 in 1939 out of the official structure. The principle of economic autonomy from the authorities, which marked the Federation from its inception, enabled him to implement his aim of creating an independent organization that would serve as the focal point for the existing conglomeration of official organizations and approaches. The FUV64 never fully satisfied the purpose of its international network character and not only Latin American (Hispanidad), as written in its statutes. The aim was to create the social environment appropriate to allow for the development of dignity in habitable conditions. The objective was very ambitious regarding dissemination, and a professional —not only architects—network for town planning and housing was required. Cort’s insistence on the social and political nature of Urbanología implied the need for the active participation of society in the process. The instruments to achieve the objective were the publishing of books and magazines, exhibitions, congresses and centers of information, including a library for architecture and engineering students within and outside Spain. Again, these society ideals were inspired by the work of the Inter-Allied and IFHTP Conferences. The best known activity of the FUV was the organization of congresses. Seven congresses were held from 1940 to 1954 and became forums of debate on Spanish town planning and housing problems. They took place in different cities in Spain and in Portugal, forming an Iberian peninsula network with the collaboration of the Portuguese architects Pardal Monteiro and Cottineli Telmo (Figure 8).65 Under the Presidency of Cort, the main professionals in Spanish town planning, architects, engineers, or municipal technicians, participated in the congresses. Spain began with the Francoist autarchy of the forties with the problem of housing and the rural world, as well as industrial development, intervention in historic quarters and the last congress, which was dedicated in 1954 to the landscape under the leadership of the Spanish planner Gabriel Alomar. Figure 8. The Spanish architects César Cort (second left) and Pedro Muguruza, and the Portuguese architect Pardal Monteiro, among others, in a meeting in Lisbon, around 1944. Source. Espólio Luís Cristina da Silva. FCG-Biblioteca de Arte Although there were almost no practical results, the congresses allow us to see the main issues regarding housing and town planning at the time, mainly because the proceedings were published by the FUV. The topics addressed at the congresses were presented and marked operatively and practically: from the management of housing up to the management of industrial land or the problems of rural emigration. Beginning in 1950, the FUV published some pamphlets of another diffusion experience, World Urbanism Day. Because of the activities of the Federation, the Argentinean engineer Carlos María della Paolera,66 promoter of World Urbanism Day on November 8, contacted Cort, and he became the President of the World Urbanism Day in Spain. The Federation was also the publisher of Campos urbanizados y ciudades rurizadas (1941) by Cort, the title of which was based on Cerdá theory about the rural–urban dichotomy (Figure 9).67 Cort had written the outline of the book while he was living in the Norwegian Embassy during the Spanish Civil War as a refugee for a short time.68 It was planned as a historical overview, using both national and international examples and addressing general concepts and an explanation of public health services in a town–country dialectical context. The questions that attracted the interest of Cort at the time were regional planning and the relationship between city and country. Attention was being paid to the decentralized growth of the city based on satellite towns on the outskirts and “cities within the city” within the urban core. Figure 9. San Fernando-Coslada satellite town by Josef Stubben and César Cort. Source. César Cort, Campos Urbanizados y ciudades rurizadas, Madrid: Federación de Urbanismo y de la Vivienda, 1941 (Dust jacket). This idea led him to purchase lands around the east of Madrid, aristocrats’ properties close to the airport,69 where he attempting to put his theory into practice—first, maintaining agricultural activity in the enormous amount of land that he bought as an agricultural belt around Madrid’s northeast highway; and second, as a developer through the construction of the satellite town Las Mercedes on a tract of 209 hectares—and he created a landscape architecture exercise at the Quinta de los Molinos, 28 hectares (Figure 10), close to the Quinta Torre Arias, which is now surrounded by urban development but then was his leisure home. In fact, la Quinta de los Molinos was the last traditional Madrilenian Quinta70—Carabancheles, Alameda de Osuna, Quinta Torre Arias, la Piovera, Palacio de Boadilla, Fuente del Berro, La Moraleja, Real Florida, la Zarzuela, Quinta del Pardo, Real Sitio de Vista Alegre and Casa de Campo—and Cort built a kind of palace and garden with a typical Mediterranean landscape (almonds and pine trees), reminiscent of his native landscape but also using exotic plants that he brought from his travels in the garden. The small palace between the Secessionist and Art-Deco styles shows his best work as an architect. Today, Cort’s property has opened its doors as a delightful public park. Figure 10. The water reservoir and almond plantations in the Quinta de Los Molinos by César Cort. Source. María Cristina García González. Cort’s effort in defending Cerdá was finally recognized in the second “First Spanish Urban Planning Congress, Barcelona (1959),”71 this time not only for architects. The congress coincided with the centenary of the Barcelonan Eixample. As a tribute the Barcelona Council, the edited book Ildefonso Cerdá. El hombre y su obra was published, and Cort participated with a chapter titled, “Prólogo a una nueva edición, refundida, de la Teoría General de la Urbanización de Ildefonso Cerdá,”72 which was a prologue to a new edition of Teoría General de la Urbanización (1867) that he never finished. Conclusion A biography is a tool that allows access to knowledge about a time or a question but always with the limitation that such an approach imposes on reconstructing and making sense of a trajectory in which there is not only a contextual influence but also an influence on the context. The first contacts with the international networks in 1919 sparked the beginning of an interest for the operative aspects of town planning. Cort’s principles were forged in his receptive attitude in the international network of the twenties and thirties, presented by international congresses with close to official status and in professional collaboration with Josef Stubben. Its highest point arrived perhaps in 1932, with the book Murcia, un ejemplo sencillo de trazado urbano popular among architects. This date signals an important stage in the process of Cort’s maturation. Cort considered himself as a technician with political velleities Cort’s Urbanism, from a liberal and municipal political position, finds in the Estatuto Municipal (1924) a recurring reference, regretting the technical approach of the Ley del Suelo (1956). From a political system that went from monarchy to a first dictatorship, a republic, the Civil War, and a second military dictatorship, Cort maintained his principles almost unaltered, claiming the theoretical legacy of Cerdá, the main postulates of the Garden Cities movement and the need for compromise between society and Urbanology. If Cort’s concerns about Urbanología as a professional practice predominated in the initial writings, soon were added interest in land management and the problem of accessibility to housing. In the context of the post-Civil War Spain and the Second World War, Cort maintained a proactive attitude with the creation of the FUV, born from the vocation of an international network but finally becoming a valuable testimony to the evolution of a Spain that began with the Francoism autarchy of the forties through the opening of the fifties in the context of an urban technocracy inaugurated in the mid-fifties to fight property speculation, as well as the new approaches, such as the landscape point of view of Gabriel Alomar. His professional practice did not update with the new legal and conceptual tools and gave way to the next generation of technocrats led by Pedro Bidagor.