Avant-garde advertising in Spanish architecture and construction magazines: 1925-1936

Abstract

This article demonstrate the existence of an avant-garde in the advertising of Spanish architecture and construction magazines between the years 1925 and 1936, a period that coincides almost exactly with the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the Second Republic. For this purpose, the advertising of the main technical magazines of the moment is reviewed, to select and analyze a sample of commercial advertisements large and significant enough to confirm this initial hypothesis. Along with the qualitative study of these advertisements, a quantitative analysis of the sample is carried out, wich yields interesting conclusions, among others, the importance of cement advertising. The study of these advertisements is made difficult by the fairly widespread practice until a few decades ago in different libraries and documentation centers of stripping these magazines of their covers and advertising pages during the binding process. This advertising graphic, barely considered until now, would enrich the panorama of avant-garde graphic desing of that period of cultural and artistic effervescence that has beeen called the “Silver Age of Spanish culture”.