The dimension of time is intrinsic to culture. All the disciplines that make it, including architecture, express the essence of the moment one way or another. Now that a hundred years separate us from the birth of the Madrid architect José Luis Fernández del Amo, it is important to present his work as a synthesis of a time and a reality that may seem remote, but which our current circumstances make extraordinarily contemporary.

His work as an architect of new towns in the Spanish countryside and his ties to the fine arts of the Spanish postwar avant-gardes are his main legacy. Deliberately distanced from fashions and trends, his ‘style-free’ architecture is clear evidence of a stand and attitude towards reality. Austere, discreet, almost absent, like a description of the architect himself, his work shrewdly flees from the propagandistic monumentality of the Franco regime’s big works...