I have always admired Mantegna’s ‘Camera degli Sposi’ and this may explain my penchant for making the work of artists – painters or sculptors – a part of architecture. Pablo Palazuelo was the only name Ramón Bescós and I considered when it seemed clear that the Bankinter hallway would benefit from the participation of a painter. I had followed him closely since we met in the 1950s, when I was working with Oíza. Palazuelo, with Chillida and Oteiza, was a favorite artist of Juan Huarte, builder of Torres Blancas. Palazuelo’s aesthetic interests are not unlike those that fuel the artistry of Bankinter. The Bankinter strategy was based on urbanistic solutions and on materials seemingly out of the range of a painter’s concerns. But it will not escape anyone taking a look at his work that the urbanistic options and formal mechanisms architects deal with are grounded on a geometry where contrast between oblique and frontal becomes a substance of architecture. This is also present in the Palazuelo of those years. With our proposal approved by the clients, Palazuelo took it to heart and from the first sketches, the web of polygons settled easily on the ceiling. One might say that his intervention clarifies and endorses the architects’ aesthetic by making the Bankinter foyer’s ceiling the geometric matrix of the whole building...[+]