Miguel de Oriol e Ybarra. Photo: Fundación Fernando Higueras

In all the facets of his life, Miguel de Oriol sought the skies – framing it in his buildings, scrutinizing it in his passion for birds, and pursuing heaven with his deep faith. As an architect, he produced a copious oeuvre in forms and types, where icons like Torre Europa or the Reina Sofía School of Music were complemented with incursions into housing, urban planning, and heritage preservation. As an environmentalist, a vocation which eventually shunted aside his penchant for hunting, he denounced excesses inflicted on landscapes and promoted the regeneration of estates. And as a man of firm beliefs, in addition to designing churches and the Holy See Pavilion at Expo 92 he stamped his atypical, lucid personality on the newspaper ABC, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and all his other cultural commitments.