This dissertation examines the transformation of Spanish homes in the last two decades of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. During those years, Spain experienced one of the most extreme episodes of rural depopulation in modern European history, with millions of villagers moving into urban settlements. Today, more than half of the Spanish territory is under the so-called ‘demographic desert threshold,’ a population density value that has been estimated at 25 people per square mile (10 people per square kilometer). Challenging the widely assumed idea that the process of rural outmigration was exclusively caused by the mechanization of agriculture and the subsequent migration of male laborers, this dissertation sheds light on the understudied role of female migrants. Through their moving to the city to work as live-in domestic service workers—the only entry point into the urban labor market for female villagers—these women made lasting spatial impacts in city and country, effectively changing the conception of the modern Spanish home. Even the few rural women who resisted migration also contributed to change the design of rural dwellings, appropriating urban domestic ideas and facilitating the emergence of a new vernacular architecture.

This dissertation explores the causes that pushed these women to consider moving to urban settings, paying attention to their domestic aspirations and to the impact of mass media in disseminating new ways of modern living. It examines how changes in domesticity aligned with the ideology of Western modernity that took hold in Francoist Spain from the late 1950s on amid the development of an American-inspired market economy after decades of economic isolation. This approach helps to situate what might appear as a very specific case study within a much broader framework, i.e., the implementation of a certain understanding of modernity in the Western world, the agents that participated in this implementation—knowingly or not—and the architectural implications that this notion of modernization had (has) in both urban and rural areas.

From a methodological perspective, this dissertation is conceived as a catalog of different research tools that can serve to approach the built environment. It acknowledges the ability of all sources—from traditional archives to oral history, from objects to buildings and landscapes, from people to non-human agents—to contribute to tell the stories of places. In combining various frameworks and methodologies, this dissertation brings to the fore actors, places, and stories that have been commonly neglected in the grand narratives of Architecture. Overall, it presents the built environment as an all-encompassing field that simultaneously reflects and absorbs social, cultural, economic, and political changes. Rather than simply building on the history of architecture, this dissertation decidedly prioritizes culture over aesthetics, thus contributing to advance a truly social history of architecture.