TEACHING ARCHITECTURAL CONSERVATION IN SPAIN. THE CASE OF THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE OF VALENCIA WITHIN THE NATIONAL CONTEXT

Architectural conservation is nowadays an important part of the activities of the Spanish architect. Nevertheless, its teaching is not as present in the Spanish schools of architecture as it should be. There is presently and there has been historically, a gap between the professional competences requested from the architect and his university education. Teaching architectural conservation has been in many cases neglected and relegated to a level of specialization and posgraduate courses although the professional competence in the field is attributed to the non-specialized architect. This gap is mainly due to the conviction of the importance of the generalist architect and his authority in all the fields of the architecture and urbanism, included architectural conservation. This text aims to present an analysis of the evolution of the teaching architectural conservation till today, with the emergence and disappearance of compulsory and optional topics in different Spanish schools through the vicissitudes of the new curricula, above all, the ones related to the so-called Bologna-process. This detailed study of the panorama of teaching architectural conservation in several Spanish schools of architecture will be compared with the specific situation of the teaching of architectural conservation in the school of architecture of Valencia, of which the authors of this text are main professors at different levels (grade, master, postgraduate, PhD courses).