Introduction

The European Landscape Convention, signed in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence on 20 October 2000 on the initiative of the Council of Europe and ratified by a large number of European states, including Spain, expressly recognises that “landscape is an important part of the quality of life for people everywhere: in urban areas and in the countryside, in degraded areas as well as in areas of high quality, in areas recognised as being of outstanding beauty as well as everyday areas.” Landscape, concludes the Convention, “is a key element of individual and social well-being.”

Since then, these words have resonated beyond dispute, repeated incessantly, in so many successive definitions of their value. They alone would suffice to justify the need for a congress dedicated to landscape and modern projects, such as the thirteenth edition organised by the Iberian Docomomo Foundation. But they become even more relevant when they are echoed in Galicia, an ancient land with memory, where the spatial and formal reality of its territory acquires characteristics of enormous singularity.

Therefore, from Galicia, organised by the Iberian Docomomo Foundation, the University College of Technical Architecture of A Coruña (ETSAC) and the Official Architects’ Association of Galicia, our proposal for the theme of the XIII Iberian Docomomo Congress is the one represented in its title “La modernidad marítima. Arquitecturas e infraestructuras del paisaje litoral, 1925-1975” [Maritime modernity. Architecture and infrastructures of the coastal landscape].

The express criticism that the book The Territory of Architecture, the third great book of 1966, raised of the modern movement was made more relative and diluted on the coast – and also in the mountains, where landscapes became more demanding and called for more attention – by considering its use of nature and landscape as a mere perspective background for its abstract objects. It was on the coast where so many architectures, loyal to the efficient exaltation of the ocean liner as an icon of modernity, addressed a dialogue with its unique landscape, which contradicted, most of the time, the authoritarian imposition criticised by Vittorio Gregotti.

Emblematically led by the yacht clubs, although to varying degrees, the architecture of the shipyards, the ports, the fish markets, the port warehouses, the factories, the seaside resorts, the beaches, the seafronts, the fishing villages, communal housing and single-family dwellings, etc., sought to establish an in-depth dialogue between the language exhibited by its rational functioning and the characteristic landscape that has always linked land and sea.
The Iberian region – with 1,500 kilometres of coastline in Galicia, 930 in Cantabria, 1,600 in the Canary Islands and 830 in Portugal – guarantees an abundance of examples that will allow us to map, in a manner of speaking, what architectural modernity has meant for them.