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At the Sacristy of San Carlo ai Catinari in Rome, unusual conic and cylindrical elements are hidden within conventional architectural symmetries. The effect of concealment can be compared to anamorphosis, an extreme case of conventional perspective that produces distorted images only able to be seen undistorted only from a peculiar position or by using a special instrument. The Sacristy can be likened to an anamorphosis executed in the language of architecture. It becomes accessible by means of the instruments of geometric analysis presented in this article. The projective transformations enacted here establish a concordance between architecture and geometry which is otherwise not evident in their historical relationship.

The phases of the Venice Hospital project by Le Corbusier, from 1963 to 1965, are documented in plans and letters held by the authorities.

Los días 16 y 17 de marzo de 2000 tuvo lugar en la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Navarra el Congreso Internacional “Los años 50: la arquitectura española y su compromiso con la historia”, dedicado al estudio de la historia de la arquitectura española contemporánea.

As of not long ago the way of going about architecture began to be seen as subject to moral valuations and indeed to ethical judgements. The phenomenon is at present ebbing. However it is connected to an image of the architect that has presented a remarkable predicament in the recent past. This predicament came about when the architect appeared and was seen by himself as an ideologist, as a political activist and as an agent of deep social transformation. Even though this image is not apt today, but rather raises a certain sceptical curiosity, one is dealing with quite a well spread attitude within the vanguard and ‘advanced’ circles of the profession. This so-called Modern Movement in recent times is indeed characteristic of a limited approach towards architecture. This movement has been seen as a sort horizon, a beacon and a historical enterprise. If one looks carefully such a phenomenon is fittingly modern: this is the conclusion if one relates the idea of modernity to the underlying cultural attitude and state of consciousness that this word has come to mean and was identified with at its zenith. It is worth warning of the series of consequences that are derived from this observation. Among other things this provides the necessary perspective for a considered analysis of the complex trappings of postmodernist speech and the assorted reflections in this area of architecture. It also provides bases consequentially better founded for the composition of an updated, critical vision of the situation within the discipline.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the start of work on the Universidad Laboral de Gijón, the last great building of Classicism and the most outstanding work of the architect Luis Moya Blanco (1904-1990).

Joze Plecnik must be placed in the history of architecture as a central figure of architectural Modernism. This significance of Plecnik is dictated by the uniqueness of his themes and images both in his civic and in his religious architecture in Vienna, Praque, Ljubljana and elsewhere. Plecnik's religious architecture has a double emplhasis: pubicly, it gives rise to the type of urban church that gave support to the emerging democratic states and to the type of rural church that gave support to nationalist, populist piety; privately, it provides expression to the architect's wrestling wiht the problem of mortality. As Plecnik grew older, this latter preocupation translated itself into a subconscious ''compulsion to repeat" or, formally, into a "constructive mania" much closer to traditionalNordic forms than to Classical forms. In all of his religious work, Plecnik synthasized, both metaphorically and metonymically, the contributions of the materials and the craft to the constitution of contemplative (world) and visionary (tradition) forms of the imagination. Since their components can be distinguished but not separated from each other, such forms are at the same time realities and symbols, therefore they cannot be identified with the radical fictions of traditional and Post- modern art. As symbols, Plecnik's tectonic and decorative forms should no~ be considerad arbitrary, linguistic, signs; they are instead natural, as the forms and expressions of life.

In the early 20th Century, new technologies and discoveries in physics and psychology privileged the subjective and relative over the objective and absolute. Architecture, seemingly of an unquestionable objectivity, was now subject to a ‘crisis of the object’. Photography contributed to this crisis. It construed architecture as image. Initially this liberated Modern-movement architecture, detaching it from the tyranny of tradition and freeing it from its place of origin and from the effects of aging. Ultimately, however, it interfered with the authenticity of the object, depreciating its authority and effacing its ‘aura’. The image of architecture bred an architecture of image.

The study on the use of models, as a system of representation, in the 17th Century in England, provides interesting information on the architectural ideas of the period. In addition to the influence of the writings of the Italian renaissance, we can see that the use of models goes together with the emergence of the architecture as a profession, the importing of new architectural styles, and the importance given to the idea of design rather than construction.

Classical architecture is studied as a mode of social presentation, developing ideas put forward by Gombrich in his book The sense of order. Architecture is included in what Irving Goffman called face, and the technical development of the new French ethno-sociology deepens its relationship with manners and rituals before our period. Architecture has great power of representation. Classical architecture was, above all, the architecture of great occasions (the ‘Grand Manner’, according to Reginald Blomfield). The history of classical architecture shows that it was indeed the Western way of presentation in public: the one that has accompanied public life.

Twenty years have gone by since José Romero prematurely left us one 8th December while he was chopping firewood in his modest country house in El Burgo de Ebro, Zaragoza. Perhaps there has been too much silence around his architecture and life, and this article sets out to fill in this unjustified gap.