La construcción de templos conventuales masculinos en el nuevo Reino de Granada

In the practice of restoration, knowledge on the primitive spatiality of buildings, their transformations throughout time and their materiality is crucial to responsibly approach this hard task. This is why the research project entitled "the construction of men's convent temples in the New Kingdom of Granada" contributes to the technical and construction-related knowledge concerning these types of patrimonial buildings. This contribution is made via the analysis of the contents of a large number of secondary sources, a documental and graphical analysis of primary sources from different files and a field exploration of each one of the studied buildings. The historical and geographical context is the so-called Colonial period, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, when the region located on the western corner of South America (know as Colombia today) was called New Granada. This is why this period is also called the New-granadian era. Although its inception saw the same basic influences, Neogranadine architecture has its distinctive features depending on the region where it was developed. This is the main reason justifying a detailed study of its historical centers. Religious architecture expressed the maximum monumentality of these centers, where the social, political and economic aspects were merged to produce the result we have today. In addition, male religious congregations built their temples as monumentally as possible, which is why this research focuses on this type of buildings. We were able to determine that, in spite of the extensive discussion on religious buildings, there are few publications discussing the technological aspects in depth. Likewise, up to this moment, no relationships have been established which make it possible to know and understand the differences concerning the construction-related knowledge among the religious communities that built those structures. Therefore, this research was motivated by the lack of published information on architectural technology relevant for the history of architecture in Colombia and the interest in treating the subject of religious architecture using another approach. By considering, comparing and analyzing technical studies, unpublished construction logs and all temple-related data obtained from secondary sources for the purposes of this research, we were able to shed some light on the apparently contradictory or incomplete aspects presented by some authors. Likewise, we identified gaps and compiled, in one single text, all the information published to date regarding the studied buildings. Thus we obtained more comprehensive and critical information. The existing publications have never identified the building systems as precisely and comprehensively as we did in this research. This was possible because we consulted different national archives to obtain all the technical studies conducted to completely restore the buildings, the books and manuscript reports describing the interventions, the photographs taken during the restoration process and, in some cases, the reports and photographs of the temples' state of deterioration or collapse by earthquake. This information also made it possible to solve our hypotheses, raise new ones, deny claims from other authors regarding the historical, spatial and technological aspects of the studied temples. In addition, we created a comparison-based analysis process to establish, based on the aforementioned information, the institutional, regional and time-related parameters characterizing the technique used to build men’s convent temples in this region of the indies. This is thus an important contribution to the body of knowledge known as “historical construction”, which has never been approached for the case of religious New-granadian architecture.