4 March 2009

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

STATELY HOMES AND PALACES OF NAVARRA

Town halls in Navarre. Urban planning, morphology and typological evolution.

Mr. José Javier Azanza López
University of Navarra

The Town Hall is a special type of civil architecture, whose social purpose gives it its own characteristics that must combine representativeness in its exterior appearance and functionality in the interior distribution of its rooms.

A common aspect of most council houses in Navarre is their location in a place that is representative of the locality in which they are located and which gives these constructions a high urban prominence, almost always overlooking an open space over which they preside and of which they become an element of reference letter. Reasons of an urbanistic, sociological and symbolic nature contribute to explain this reality.

On the exterior, the council buildings are configured as large cubic volumes whose main façade is organized in two or three levels plus attic and concentrates almost all the elements of interest of the building. These include the gallery of arcades on the ground floor leave, the balcony or authorities' box where the protocol flags fly, and the coat of arms that identifies the building as the municipal house of all citizens; to these are sometimes added towers or belfries to house the clock and the bells that regulate the life of the city. Nor is the presence of images foreign to council architecture, organizing an allegorical program centered on the virtues of good government inherent to the municipal institution -Pamplona and Bera de Bidasoa- or resorting to historical personages proposed as models of civic conduct -Allo-. More frequent are the inscriptions, most of them of historical-architectural content, as they illustrate the date of construction or renovation of the Town Hall -Saldías-, or some historical event related to the town worthy of remembrance -Yanci-.
 

Elizondo. Baztán Valley Town Hall
 

The interior distribution of the council house is organized according to a double criterion of rationality and spatial functionality, so that all its rooms are designed for a better development of municipal policy, without forgetting their respective ideological contents. As in stately architecture, the interior of the council building is also organized around two elements between which a spatial sequence of continuity is established, the entrance hall or hallway, and the staircase of honor. The latter leads to the main floor, where the rooms proper to its function are located: the Assembly Hall or Plenary Hall, the Mayor's office, the administrative office, the Court, the Treasury and the file; and in the more spacious buildings there was also the chapel or chapel. But in addition to its own function management assistant, we cannot ignore the multipurpose and multifunctional nature of the council building that brought together many of the services that the civic infrastructure required, both in subject criminal and economic and professor, areas whose responsibility fell directly on the municipal institution. Thus, on numerous occasions, the town hall housed the jail and dungeon, the bond and the meat and fish market, butcher's and fish market, tavern and inn, and the primary schools for boys and girls, to which was frequently added a dispensary or doctor's office that completed the wide range of municipal services.

Having established the general approach to Navarre's council houses in terms of urban planning and morphology, their typological evolution allows us to distinguish several stages: the first council houses of the 16th century; the centuries of the Baroque; the influence of Academicism; Eclecticism and the first half of the 20th century; and, finally, tradition and the avant-garde in contemporary Navarre council architecture.
 

Burlada. Town Hall