La muerte de la arquitectura moderna: el Instituto María de Molina (Zamora)

The contributions of the Modern Movement in our country gradually made their way to provincial cities with little difficulty in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the commitment to this architectural trend was mainly in these contexts due to official promotion. In this way, its novel formal solutions, its solvent constructive proposals and, with them, the new ways of understanding and experiencing architecture began to be implanted in certain urban landscapes in full expansion. And since then they have been the - discreet - watchtower of a new architecture, even though their contributions have gone almost completely unnoticed by the common people. However, perhaps because of these reasons and their temporal proximity to us, among others, a good number of these architectures are in serious danger of surviving as they were conceived, built and inhabited. Perhaps the present moment is bringing with it certain signs of danger in terms of updating these architectures, with some of them undergoing contemporary interventions that are now absolutely irreversible. This is the case of the María de Molina Institute in Zamora. Of course, the lack of an adequate assessment of this architecture, the lack of criteria for intervention and deficient mechanisms for heritage protection and dissemination of its values are ruining some of these landmark buildings forever. The aim of this work is to analyse the original architectural values of this school architecture, perhaps one of the most interesting examples of this architectural trend in Castilla y León. And in doing so, we will record, and also sound the alarm, about its values until they were radically altered by the installation of a SATE in 2023. An unappealable conclusion after studying the architectural project and the historical reading of its genesis and evolution.