The desire of good architects to give everything they have inside them is so great that now is a splendid time to do this degree program.

In the current moment of Spanish architecture we must be optimistic. Far from being a bad time, this is a great time for good architecture and to train well.

Our architecture reached in the twentieth century very high levels of quality and sensitivity, thanks to the exercise of the great masters we had, who admired the world with his works in the sixties, when Gio Ponti, an important Italian architect of the time, one of the most sensitive and perhaps with that wonderful frivolity that makes them exquisite in art, ventured that the twentieth century would be 'il secolo spagnolo'. And so it has been.

And a pleiad of good architects has arisen who have filled Spain with good architecture and who have taken the values of a way of doing, emotional and strong, of great human quality, admired and recognized, with countless prizes and awards all over the world.

Unfortunately, the economic boom introduced consumerism, haste and excess into architecture; although that was not what we learned in the schools. There came a time when it seemed that there was no limit to the expense, and sometimes it was encouraged by the promoters of the works, who then appeared proudly boasting of excesses and crazy costs, as if that were good and brought quality hand in hand.

But it was a process in which architects went from protagonists to prisoners. It was everyone's fault. Excessive mistakes began to be made and common sense and the balance between means and ends was often lost, falling into excesses that resulted in rarely beautiful, but very noisy architecture. It must be said, however, that the majority of society celebrated them in inverse proportion to the architectural culture of the celebrants.

Therefore, this moment, in which the superfluous is intolerable and offensive, does nothing but feed optimism, because now the qualities of our good architects will shine more, those who know how to give 'hare for a cat', which is the distinctive wisdom of the good architect; those who, as in the fifties, know how to do wonders with what there is, without spending or asking for what there is not, and serve society by filling it with optimism for the beauty of the buildings they build.

This moment is once again the European moment of Spanish architecture because it is very Hispanic to do without anything to do, and also to do it well. And that is why so many Spanish architects are being hired beyond the Pyrenees.

Society needs to renew itself and needs to learn to live in a different way, and for that there are those whom society itself has trained to do so: architects, capable of providing beautiful, well-built and well-oriented housing, which is the essence of our task.

Society can rest assured and so can those who are thinking of studying architecture. Both know that we architects continue our work with more enthusiasm than ever. In the first crisis of the twentieth century, the interwar period, a great German architect, Bruno Taut, devoted himself to writing and reading and studying because he could not build much. When the storm passed, he built in a few months thousands of houses, extraordinary then and extraordinary now, eighty years later. He used to say that he was able to do it because those years without work had allowed him to think a lot, and so when he was able to build he knew perfectly well what the society he had to serve needed.

That is why, apart from other issues, this is a time of optimism for society as far as architecture is concerned: because it is a time of dreams and hopes, because in the near future a much better architecture will be built, because the desire of good architects to give everything they have inside them is so great that now is a splendid time to do that degree program. Their masters will be more committed than ever, and in no time society will see that we have not forgotten to build and that architecture continues to be the queen of the arts, the one that changes cities and illuminates them with new wonders that only architects are capable of imagining and, moreover, building.