The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) will host, next Thursday, November 27, at 7:30 p.m., the conference titled *The Future of the Past. César Manrique and Popular Architecture*, which will be given by Eduardo Prieto, an international doctor of architecture.
The event will take place in the José Saramago hall (La Plazuela, Arrecife) and will be broadcast live via the FCM website and YouTube channel.
During his presentation, Prieto will discuss the book Lanzarote. Arquitectura inédita (1974) as a documentary endeavor by its author, César Manrique, to record, through an extraordinary repertoire of photographs, the richness of the island's vernacular architecture, which was in danger of disappearing.
A publication that, according to the speaker, was also an artistic endeavor, as it served to give explicit shape to Manrique's commitment to the Islands, especially to Lanzarote, which became—from the detail to the territory—a sort of continuous and open work that bordered on utopia.
In parallel, Prieto considers Lanzarote. Arquitectura inédita a social endeavor, as it managed to bring humble architecture—the beauty of scarcity—closer to the island's population, who, after its publication, began to become aware of its value and demand its protection.
Finally, in the speaker's opinion, it constituted a critical endeavor, in the sense of its contribution to the development of a different idea of "the modern" that combined the rejection of the **excesses of technocratic developmentalism** and the **search for a different kind of effectiveness**, linked to place and manual labor, expressed in a language that, by being tied to tradition, did not cease to point to the future: a future in which "the modern" could become "something else." The future of the past.
Eduardo Prieto's presentation is part of the FCM's reflection space *Borders and Directions of Progress*. A forum intended to review the idea of progress from multidisciplinary perspectives, and which has already featured, among others, Ramón Margalef, José Manuel Naredo, Federico Aguilera Klink, Fernando Savater, Jorge Riechmann, Rafael Argullol, Ulrich Beck, Marc Augé, Susan George, Daniel Innerarity, Joaquín Estefanía, Gloria Poyatos, Marta del Amo, Íñigo Losada, Remedios Zafra, Óscar Carpintero, María Teresa Vicente, Antonio Valero, or, recently, Josep María Esquirol.
Eduardo Prieto is an international doctor of architecture and recipient of the Extraordinary Doctorate Award from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He also holds a degree in Philosophy and advanced studies diplomas in Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts, and in Moral and Political Philosophy.
He is currently a tenured professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, where he teaches the subject History of Architecture and the international course Architecture and Environment, and has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University. He is the director of the master's degree in Architecture and Contemporary Culture.
He is the author of several books, including titles such as: Environmental History of Architecture, The Life of Matter, History of the History of Architecture, The Labyrinths of Air, or The Law of the Clock. He has written articles as an architecture critic for the publications: Arquitectura Viva, El Mundo, and Revista de Libros.
He has given lectures at institutions such as the Prado Museum, the Juan March Foundation, or the César Manrique Foundation, and has received national and international awards for his built work.