Juan Navarro Baldeweg

The architect, painter and sculptor Juan Navarro Baldeweg has received the Gold Medal of the Spanish Architectural Association. Presided by Carlos Hernández Pezzi, the jury noted that Navarro “acknowledges the place and history of architecture and replies with a concise architecture that opens paths. His career reflects perseverance, relinquishments and polyhedrical attention to all the facets of architecture”. Born in 1939, Navarro studied at Madrid’s School of Architecture and is chair professor of Architectural Design since 1977; he has always combined academic activity with architectural and artistic experimentation. The CSCAE medal joins a long list of honors, including the Plastic Arts National Award in 1990, the Tessenow Medal in 1998 and that of Merit in the Fine Arts in 2007. In 2008 Navarro opened the Canal Theater in Madrid, a project surrounded by controversy due to political disagreements that led to the architect’s temporary removal from the building direction. The Altamira Museum in Santillana del Mar (2000) and that of Human Evolution in Burgos, still under construction, are two of his most noteworthy works.