García de Paredes / La-Hoz, Chamber of Commerce, Córdoba (Spain)

Son and father of architects, Rafael de La-Hoz’s biographical threads are braided with those of a generation of professionals who set out to modernize Spain without cutting the nutritious fibers that connect new construction to the fertile traces of the past. The warp of this collective project was architectural modernity at its most international and at its most alert to the impatient heartbeat of the times; but its silent weft was the resistant tenacity of tradition, present in the rigorous training of these architects and in their sharp sensitivity to knowledge accumulated in the urban heritage of an old country whose territory has been rewritten countless times. In this palimpsest of a country, ruined and exhausted after a civil war, La-Hoz and his young colleagues worked on a modern experiment that had pages of dazzling brilliance, remaining in the physical and documental register of the last half-century as stations on a road that has built the Spain we now inhabit. Allow me to briefly visit some of these architectural milestones...[+]