As advanced in the news section of the previous issue of Arquitectura Viva, from which the Focho cartoon shown on this page has been taken, the new DVD collection Arquia/maestros, was presented in Madrid on 25 March at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The series has been produced by the Fundación Caja de Arquitectos with the purpose of leaving testimony of the architectural biography of prominent Spanish figures, through in-depth interviews that cover their life and work, starting with the formative years and reaching up to our days.

With the presence of the first three interviewees – Oriol Bohigas, Rafael Moneo, and Juan Navarro Baldeweg –, the presentation was a tribute to the career of these eminent architects, a tribute extended here with the publication of the rather compact texts written for each of the booklets by Luis Fernández-Galiano, the director of the collection, illustrated with images featured in them, and whose rhythmic structure (an introductory paragraph and another five that mark the milestones of the built biography choosing a theme and three works for each one of the decades into which they are more or less structured) also guides the interview recorded in the DVDs, giving a certain narrative consistency to profiles as different as those chosen to launch this endeavor. The three architects of the second series, which will be recorded in Barcelona, like the first one, are Antonio Fernández Alba, Ricardo Bofill, and Manuel Gallego, a new trio of figures as prominent as intellectually and stylistically diverse, and who thereby extend the pluralistic approach of this cultural initiative.