Resumen de La imagen de la industria de la construcción en las revistas de arquitectura españolas de la década de 1930
The decade of 1930 is especially interesting for the communicational strategies of industry, due to the introduction of new forms of graphic designinspired by the artistic avant-garde movements, which update advertisingand visual communication according to a variety of new styles and techniques. This paper focuses on discussing how the building constructionindustry communicated its image and products in influential Spanish magazines aimed at architects and technicians like Arquitectura and NuevasFormas (Madrid), Arquitectura i Urbanisme and AC Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea (Barcelona).The building construction industry is an interesting study case due to thevariety of products, messages and advertisers: construction companies,materials and components manufactures, innovative systems and technologies providers, who offer a plenty of themes, narratives and visual resources ranging from the simple use of typographic composition to drawing and illustration influenced by styles like Art Déco, Futurism, Expressionism and Constructivism, to the use of photography and photomontagein the most interesting and pioneering experiments, as the commercialworks of Almada and Sala, among others. The national examples are interpreted also in the framework of a European perspective, when the localmagazines are compared with foreign ones like Moderne Bauformen, DasNeue Frankfurt, l’Architecture Vivante, among others. The conclusion that isdrawn from this research is that Spanish publications were attempting atproviding an image of modernity and progress tuned on the internationaltrends of the decade, even if the local context wasn’t as innovative as othersat that time.As in other contexts, such a tendency to experimentalism and communicative innovation was interrupted by the affirmation of more conservativedesign modalities during the years of the Franco autarchy, and was resumed only from mid 1950s.
