Left: José María García de Paredes. Right: Rafael De La-Hoz

Many masters with extensive careers behind them ‘disown’ their early works, judging them inconsistent with their later output and attributing them to inexperience or young ardor. Such introspective thoughts tend to coincide with critical revisions: hence, alongside Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 we vaguely recall No. 1, or beside Goya’s Black Paintings fade his Zaragoza frescoes. But no one doubts the worth of maiden creations, which often show glints of genius and hint at non-comformist attitudes that eventually open up new roads.

Ditto can be said about the first steps of José María García de Paredes and Rafael de La-Hoz, two Andalusian architects who shared classrooms and accommodations during their student years in postwar Madrid, and who upon graduating in 1950 ventured into professional practice together. Shortly afterwards, the former obtained the Rome Prize and the latter a scholarship for postgraduate studies at MIT, so they parted ways, and the solid individual trajectories that came later – stretching until the close of the century and partly responsible for shaping the country we now know – ended up eclipsing their joint experience of the 1950s, fleeting but intense, at the dawn of their biographies.

This magazine wishes to observe both their centenaries by dusting off and putting the limelight on the fruit of those years of youth, two brilliant examples of Spain’s then incipient modernity, fortunately well preserved to this day: the Córdoba Chamber of Commerce and the Aquinas Student Dormitory. Illustrated with material from family archives and coming with portraits penned by Kenneth Frampton (this from the catalog of the García de Paredes exhibition set to open in October at Museo ICO) and Luis Fernández-Galiano, these buildings assert their lasting currency, and make ours that which is gone, as Manuel Machado might have expressed on the occasion of another centennial.[+]