Tomás Masó Sotomayor

Josep Maria Bosch Aymerich was a prolific architect, with a wide variety of commissions from the very beginning of his career. Although sacred architecture is not the most developed of his works, he has received several commissions that allow him to experiment with liturgical spaces. One of his first projects, the SEAT housing complex (1953), includes a plan for a school with a church that would serve as a parish church.Bosch’s sacred architecture demonstrates the role the Catholic Church played in Spanish developmental society. This role was evident not only in the main temples but also in every institution.

After the Spanish Civil War, the shortage of building materials in the country and the restrictions imposed by the Dirección General de Arquitectura limited the use of steel in construction, encouraging solutions that reduced the consumption of this material. In this context, the thin-tile vault gained new relevance due to its low cost, speed of execution and good structural and fire performance. Among the architects who revisited this system, Ignasi Bosch Reitg (1910–1985) developed an innovative procedure for the construction of continuous ceilings, based on double-curved vaults with a single layer of brick. His cousin, Josep Maria Bosch Aymerich (1917–2015), an industrial engineer and architect trained in the United States, brought a business vision to the table when he discovered the potential of this system. This paper proposes an in-depth study of the patents requested on this system by the two architects, questioning the reasons for their success or failure in different countries, both in terms of dissemination and exploitation, in regard to the historical context in which it was developed. The analysis, based on original documents from the Bosch Aymerich Archive, uncovers the tensions that the reinterpretation and global projection of a traditional technique can generate.