1938-2014

Antonio Díaz del Bo, ‘Tony’ Díaz, passed away at the age of 76 in Madrid, where he lived since 1988. Born in Buenos Aires, Tony Díaz graduated at the UBA in 1964, and furthered his studies in Italy and London, where he specialized in urban planning. His double profile of architect and urban planner explains the character of his work, whose language is placed at the service of social and urban articulation, as can be seen in some of his most emblematic projects, from Barrio Centenario in Santa Fe or the house in Maschwitz, both in Argentina, to his apartments in the Ensanche Sur of Alcorcón (Madrid). Díaz introduced the ideas of Aldo Rossi in Argentina, and had a prominent role in the architectural debate of the 1970s and 1980s, time when, together with Justo Solsona, Rafael Viñoly and Ernesto Katzenstein, he set up the ‘escuelita,’ a sort of intellectual and architectural reserve in the uncultivated land of the military dictatorship. Tony Díaz was a devoted professor, first at the UBA and later at Harvard’s GSD and the ETSAM, institutions where he promoted a simple ideal, but hard to fulfill: striving to make architecture relate to life, to people.