200001201-A Full Professor of Barcelona highlights the architectural beauty of Pamplona

"Pamplona is a city that is loaded with anonymous architecture, an architecture that is not hurtful; this is a great advantage because we are surrounded by cities that have areas of great architectural beauty and at the same time possess very ugly parts, but in Pamplona it is not like that". These were the words of architect Federico Correa, who gave a lecture at the University of Navarra, lecture series at the technical school of Architecture of Pamplona.

The Full Professor of the technical school of Architecture of Barcelona, who was part of the team that designed the Olympic complex of the city of Barcelona, stressed that "Pamplona also has a quite acceptable urban delimitation".

According to Correa, "the problem of city expansion is not new: cities have expanded through the periphery because there was no other choice. What has happened is that a number of years have passed in which these things have not been planned and we have very disastrous peripheries".

In any case," he added, "well-planned peripheries should not cause any problems. The ensanches, like the one in Pamplona, were once an expansion of the city inhabited by a bourgeoisie that, because of its economic power, made sure that everything was well controlled. Then came another style of expansion with another subject of citizens, who on the other hand had no say or economic power, and these areas have been left in the hands of speculation".

The interests of the real estate market and the media world

Correa acknowledged that architecture is a profession beset by the interests of the real estate market. "Unfortunately this is the case; since the mid-1990s, in Barcelona we are reaching quite serious extremes if measures are not taken. Today the development companies are totally dominating the market and are choosing architects for purely economic reasons. The authority is allowing itself to be dragged down by this".

"I am very concerned that architectural culture is quite neglected, because it is in the hands of the media: what is promoted is only what interests architectural magazines, which are very biased on points that have, in my opinion, a negative relevance," he said. "In contrast, the real importance of architecture, which is in housing, has been very little developed because it is very difficult to achieve spectacular results in housing, which makes it of little interest to the media world."

The Full Professor commented that "architecture is becoming more and more homogenized in the world and it will be difficult to distinguish architectures from one country from another. If architecture maintains some Degrees of rationality, it will be what differentiates one from another, because rationality will correspond to different solutions for different environments".