History
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Originally designed as an orphanage for the children of miners, but transformed during its construction into a Universidad Laboral (Technical College), this magnificent building complex conceived by the architect, Luis Moya Blanco was built as a grand self-sufficient, utopian city, closed in on itself. Indeed, it even had a 100 hectare farm and was fitted out to train generations of working-class children as highly qualified professionals.
Built pursuant to classical architectural principles, the central square was to become the heart of this ideal city, around of which there would be a magnificent church, tower, theatre and management buildings. Around this monumental central area of the city, the rest of the buildings were to strike out, among which the diaphanous workshops stand out, which had been built to accommodate vocational training activities.
Work on the complex began back in 1948 and were to last for several years until being brought to a sudden stop in 1957 as a result of the on the spot dismissal of the Minister for Labour, José Antonio Girón, the main driving force behind Spanish technical colleges. By that time, the first students had already begun to attend classes. Unfinished and abounding in legendary stories about the construction works, the Unviersidad Laboral de Gijón lived on for decades riding a course between the unconditional affection held for the place by the majority of those who had built it and studied there and the incomprehension, or even complete rejection, of those who observed this untimely, disproportionate monolith from without.
Generations of students and qualified tradesmen – fitter-turners, master technicians, welders, millers, technical engineers – from the length and breadth of Spain were trained at Gijón’s Universidad Laboral, which from its beginning was run by the Jesuits with the able assistance of the nuns of St. Clare who looked after the day-to-day logistics tasks. Many of these still play an active part in the Alumni Association, which serves to keep the story of the institution alive.
In the 1980’s, the old Universidad Laboral came to form part of the National Institute of Integrated Education, thus leaving a large part of the facilities obsolete and subject to relentless deterioration until 2001, when the Government of the Principality of Asturias took over the building and began to design an ambitious plan for its use in order to breathe new life into Moya’s under-used, ideal city.
Once the object of all kinds of opposing political, artistic and ideological readings, the ideal city has overcome all of these contradictions and has come down to us today for what it has always been from the very beginning: a magnificent and unique discourse of pure architectural values. As Rafael Moneo has written with respect to Luis Moya’s creation as a whole, “…now, on leaving behind the circumstantial, we can look with other eyes on his work, with eyes that do not preclude that certain shock that comes about when confronted with something which, as a result of being largely unknown, seems anomalous, and which is always accompanied, nonetheless, with a vague feeling of both warmth and respect”.
