Toward a Modern Inhabit. Peripheral Territories Casa Lucas Prieto. Oíza, 1959-64

Abstract

20th-century architecture progress arrived late and in a limited form on the Spanish Peninsula. Furthermore in local areas. But when it took place it was an important vehicle for connecting with the ideas of modern architecture. During the first decades of the 20th century, the Modern Movement found in the house a field of research in which the itineraries were not synchronized either in time or in place.
Casa Lucas Prieto by Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza, built in the early 1960s in the expansion area of Talavera de la Reina, is a representative case of this fact. Even though its limited presence in reviews of the architect’s work, it’s a landmark in its local context and helped it get included in a list of buildings that are moving towards modernity.
This article aims to contextualize the project and analyze aspects that relate it to international archetypes from the beginning of the century, and how the concepts and formal language use the physical and material means of the place to generate a work with its own value, which will mark a change in the local understanding of living and the transition towards the ideals defended by modernity. Considering the value of the Lucas Prieto house will allow us to approach the beginning of the path towards modernity in a peripheral territory.