Bernardo Giner de los Ríos

Bernardo Giner de los Ríos (1888 - 1970) was a Spanish architect and author of architectural works. He built many buildings in and around Madrid, including many schools.

Background

The son of Hermenegildo Giner de los Ríos and Laura García Hoppe, Bernardo Giner de los Ríos was born into a family of intellectuals and progressive politicians. His uncle, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, was a philosopher and proponent of the ideas of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, some of whose aesthetic ideas he translated in 1874 as "Compendio de Estética". Francisco and Hermenegildo Giner de los Ríos also founded the freethinking "Institución Libre de Enseñanza" in 1876.

Career

Architecture

Between the wars, Bernardo Giner de los Ríos specialised in the construction of schools, serving as a school inspector for the Spanish province of Levante, around Alicante, and built many schools in Madrid. During the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, he served as the Minister of Communications, Transport and Public Works for the Republican side. After the war, he spent five years in exile in Paris as the General Secretary of the Presidency of the Republic, before moving on to Mexico.

Writings

In Mexico City in 1952, Giner de los Ríos published "50 Años de Arquitectura Española (1900-1950)" ("50 Years of Spanish Architecture"), a history of Spanish architecture in the 20th century that had grown out of a talk that he gave at the "Ateneo Español de México" in August of 1951.

Though he assumed an objective voice and omitted a political discussion of architecture from this book, his point of view on the history is particularly interesting given his political activity and his family's history with the "Institución Libre de Enseñanza". The book adopted a progressive, but technocratic view of modernization and focused on the role of school construction and municipal urban design achievements in Spanish architecture.

Open minded about aesthetics, Giner de los Ríos himself built schools in the modern "Madrileño" compromise style typical of the younger generation of architects, red-brick with strip windows and moldings of simplified section, like many 1930s buildings at Madrid's new University City (Ciudad Universitaria). However, Giner's book for the most part set aside politics and matters of architectural style to focus on technical advances and planning successes. Thus continuities across political regimes were emphasized, which might have prevented the later debate between Oriol Bohigas and Carlos Sambricio over the former's "Arquitectura Española de la Segunda República" (1970).

Responding to Sambricio's critiques, Bohigas's book became "Modernidad en la Arquitectura de la España Republicana" in 1998. Had Bohigas read Giner de los Ríos more closely, he might have resisted the desire to simplistically identify modernity in Spanish architecture with the politics of the Second Republic.

From 1961 to 1970, the "Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza" resumed publication (it had stopped in 1936) in Mexico under his direction. Publication resumed in Madrid in 1977, after the "Institución" was legalized.

External links

* [http://www.laic.org/cat/espai/articles/print/12_apuntp.htm article in Catalan about his father, Hermengildo Giner de los Ríos]
* [http://www.fundacionginer.org/boletin/boletin.htm article in Spanish from the "Fundación Francisco Giner de los Ríos", as the "Institución Libre de Enseñanza" is now called, on the history of its "Boletín".]