A council appointed by King Alfonso XIII had decided that the new University of Madrid would require the innovative architecture and planning. A team of academics was sent on an international expedition to visit the most prestigious universities in Europe and North America, to combine the best of both continents and design the utopian academic setting. The trip took them to 19 universities in the American northeast, as well as to Paris, Lyon, Oxford, Berlin, Hamburg, and numerous other European cities, all in an effort to discern the best possible building structure. The architectural tendencies of the era, however, ended up having a greater influence than the academics' visits to Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, La Sorbonne or the University of Berlin; while the final plans from this period are hardly recognizable to anyone familiar with the contemporary campus, the buildings from the era that managed to survive the design revisions, the Civil War and the Franco regime betray the period's fondness for the German Bauhaus movement. Indeed, the original buildings, exemplary amongst them the Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy and Odontology, are an homage to structural functionalism and the graceful utilitarianism of the 1920s.