1924-2019

On 11 August, at 95 years of age, Juan Antonio García Solera passed away in Alicante, the city where he was born. He was one of the last living masters of the second modern generation: that of the professionals who started working in the Spain of the 1950s, a country that was starting to embrace developmentalism. Born in 1924 and classmate of Javier Carvajal at the ETSAM, García Solera developed his career mainly in the province of Alicante, both as freelance architect and at the Administration, first at the Provincial Government and later as Municipal Architect of Benidorm. Aside from urban and territorial plans, his work includes large residential developments for tourism and commercial facilities characterized by their open plans and their rationalist abstraction and simplicity, but showing a certain sensibility towards the Mediterranean and with some references to vernacular tradition. His list of works is very extense, but amongst the most widely published are the Vistahermosa Clinic, the CESA building, and the apartment block on Virgen del Socorro street, all of these in Alicante.