© Eduardo Chillida Archive

The transgressive spirit of the avant-gardes gave rise to a peculiar process of contamination: architecture began to tend to go artsy, and art to aspire to become architecture. While buildings have embraced abstraction and even become sculptures, the arts have relinquished the pedestal to explore the three-dimensionality of the installation and even of urban space. It is hard to find someone in whose work such contamination has come about so naturally and fruitfully as Eduardo Chillida. Not only because shortly after quitting football (he was a goalkeeper of Real Sociedad, the club of his home city of San Sebastián) he for a while attended an architecture school, but above all because from the very beginning of his career – whether with steel, concrete, stone, or paper – he crafted an architectural dialogue between mass and space and made it a philosophical, almost mythological obsession, proof of this being the interest that his work aroused in Martin Heidegger himself. This year marks the Basque master’s centenary, and over and beyond controversies – those which put him and the other great Basque ‘architectural’ sculptor, Jorge Oteiza, in confrontation with one another, and those which to his dismay set him against environmentalists in the polemic around the beautiful Tindaya project – his figure only looms ever larger. Arquitectura Viva gladly joins the collective tribute to one who has a sure place among our most universal artists.