The intellectual influence of an engineer father and the Jesuits of Tudela forged the early personality of this native of Navarre who ran the bulls at the San Fermín festival while preparing for admission into the Madrid School of Architecture. There Alejandro de la Sota showed him the abstraction of Mies van der Rohe, but it was the organicism of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto that he took to, and the young student trained for three years in the studio of Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza. After earning his degree, a year in the Danish studio of Jørn Utzon (then struggling with the construction of the Sydney Opera House) and two in the Spanish Academy in Rome gave his architectural training an unmistakable classical and Scandinavian patina that would soon come in tune with the theoretical influence of Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi... [+]