Subway access canopy on the Red de San Luis, 1920

Fifty years ago was the centenary of the birth of Antonio Palacios. Spanish architectural culture, at that time still imbued with the principles of modernity, was not as given to celebrating such milestones as it is nowadays. That year, 1974, at the Madrid School of Architecture, there was hardly any talk of Palacios – and I can attest to this, as I was then beginning my studies.

Carlos Flores, in his rather early Arquitectura española contemporánea (1961), called Palacios a “megalomaniac who always found motives to raise monumental buildings whatsoever their dimensions,” thereby describing him as contrary to the modern attitude and defining his architecture as ‘anti-rational.’...[+]