Тhе University City in Madrid in the memo-rial context of the Second Spanish Republic

Abstract

Тhе University City in Madrid is one of the most ambitious projects of the Spanish rationalist architecture of the late 1920s - the first half of the 1930s, a symbol of the reality and utopia of the republican desire to transform Spain. The fate of the university campus acquired a special tragedy during the civil war, acts of terror, bombing and fierce battles, the use of buildings for wartime needs, all this led the buildings of the campus to a deplorable state, not only in a physical sense, but also in a symbolic one - the destruction of rationalistic archi-tectural forms was accompanied by the collapse of the dream of a new modernized Spain, built on reasonable and fair prin-ciples. At the present stage, due to the “memorial turn”, as well as the return of “republican memory” and the experience of the legacy of the “difficult past” by Spanish society, it seems natural to turn to the symbolic heritage of Тhе Univer-sity City in Madrid. Cultural transformations of the XXI cen-tury. determined the impact of the “memorial turn” not only on historical research, but also on the sphere of artistic crea-tivity. As for historians, the subject of research is increasing-ly becoming the memory of the past, so in literature - not the ups and downs of the plot, but the construction, interpretation and translation of memories become the basis of a work of art. The symbolic image of Тhе University City in Madrid al-so appears on the pages of Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel In the Night of Time (2009), which plunges the reader into a stream of reconstructed memory of the tragic events of the 1930s. in Spain, built around the construction of a campos in Moncloa.

Keywords

• second spanish republic
• тhе university city in madrid
• ra-tionalist architecture
• spanish civil war
• cultural memory
• historical memory