Luis Domingo de Rute, architect of sample plans for public school building design in Spain at the beginning of the Twentieth Century

• Published in: Historia de la educación 2020-05, Vol.38, p.257-276
• Main Author: Francisco Javier RODRÍGUEZ MÉNDEZ
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: construcción escolar; españa; luis domingo de rute; modelos arquitectónicos; siglo xx
• ISSN: 0212-0267; 2386-3846
• DOI: 10.14201/hedu201938257276

The Collection of public primary school sample plans, published in November 1908, consisted of twelve school samples of increasing complexity. They had been designed by Luis Domingo de Rute, an architect attached to the School Architecture Bureau of the incipient Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. They were intended to serve as a guideline as the architects were to follow in the future for the design of public primary school buildings. Although the Rute Collection enjoyed wide dissemination, the truth is that its application was quite limited due to the rapid obsolescence of the samples and the premature death of its author. Both circumstances undoubtedly contributed to accelerate the creation, a decade later, of the Oficina Técnica para la Construcción de Escuelas por el Estado (Technical Office of Public School Construction). There is no study referring to the Spanish school architecture of the early twentieth century that does not mention this collection and its author. Apart from that, little else has transcended the trajectory of Luis Domingo de Rute. The objective of the present investigation is twofold: on the one hand, to rescue the figure of Rute from oblivion in which he has been plunged –practically, since the publication of his Collection– and, on the other, to deepen the analysis of his school sample plans.