The Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad is a private non-profit cultural organization with a national and international projection. With offices in Pamplona and Madrid, it was instituted in 2008 on the initiative of Francisco Mangado, an architect keen on promoting architecture as a field indissolubly linked to life and society.

To give solutions to the complex social framework, architecture has to interact with other disciplines of creation, thought, or economics. This interdisciplinary fabric is what inspires the Foundation, which takes architecture to be a service called upon to express, condition, and facilitate the everyday life of people. So it is that the Foundation incorporates the know-how of urban planners, sociologists, thinkers, scientists, artists, and all those concerned with the great challenges of our times.

Architecture takes up physical space and is therefore conditioned by physical and urban geography, by a historic journey linked to materials and techniques and at a particular point of time. Therefore, it cannot be a stylistic exercise isolated from context. The Foundation believes that architecture must go beyond the endogamous space of the discipline and address the social concerns of each moment of history.
It is architecture’s duty to take part in the preoccupations and challenges of our era and offer the solutions demanded by today’s society in areas of research like sustainable development, environment, international cooperation, integrated urban planning, and social action in its broadest sense.

Mission and Values

The Foundation wishes to put itself in the world avant-garde of analysis and debate in a field that year by year has been gaining in social presence and importance, to the point of becoming the mirror of a country’s development. It is not in vain that Spain today is a reference in architectural creation.

Architecture made in Spain and from Spain can and should be part of a larger solution to the problems of our times. Rather then succumb to the technocratic picturesque, it ought to look for an innovative concept of beauty that is linked to ethical values of utility and harmony, rationality of resources, constructional efficiency, care of materials, tracking of projects, and finishes at all phases.

To work towards its goals and go by its idea of operating in the context of a larger network and sharing resources and know-how, the Foundation will maintain agreements with public and private institutions, universities, companies, and peer organizations as well as foundations of other natures or architectural associations and institutes, whether national or international.