1938-2021

Born in Valladolid in 1938, Prada Poole finished Architecture in Madrid in 1965, a year that is not special but that is representative of a time marked by vitalism, psychodelia, technocratic ambition, and the political struggles of the French May of ’68. Precisely in 1968 Prada Poole came into contact with the Calculus Center at Complutense University, where he discovered the two sciences that would nurture his idiosyncratic inventiveness: morphology and cybernetics. Using both, Prada set out to develop a ‘pneumatic architecture,’ through which he conceived his first utopias: Expoplástica Pavilion (1968) and Casa Jonás (1970). Then came the libertarian Instant City in Ibiza (1971) – an inflatable, colorist, and growing structure –, the eleven domes for the Pamplona Encounters of 1972 – with their enveloping atmosphere of light and intense smell of plastic –, and later his bioclimatic and applauded Palenque for Expo ’92 in Seville. Locked up in his bubble, Prada Poole devoted the last years of his career mainly to teaching, but he never gave up on his vision of turning lightness, air, and metamorphoses into the materials of the architecture of the future.