Whoever holds this book and sees its weight as a promise of density won’t be disappointed. Sober like Julio Cano Lasso’s work itself, the cover – showing an abstract floor plan perforated by courtyards – is a preview of the content’s reflection on tradition.

The graphic design itself is traditional. Small but big-enough black-and-white images on even-numbered pages pace the text, and the glossy paper adds to the pleasure of reading.

In coherence with the duality which the authors point out in the architect’s work, the book has two purposes: explaining Cano Lasso’s work while establishing a generalizable analytical system. Just as architecture was for him an opportunity for self-discovery, something into which to pour his intuitions, childhood joys, and inventions, so is this publication an effort of the writers to know themselves and explain themselves to others.

The systematic text explains the steps and strategies followed by the architect, whose work is exhaustively analyzed. There are many shining moments, especially dialectic confrontations and Julio Cano’s ways of settling matters, his ‘processes of hybridization.’ Prominent among the dialectic figures are those that set typological method against ‘referential creation.’ Or the tension between cultured and vernacular, or between tradition and modernity. Also brilliant is the interpretation of the continuous drawing of Spanish cities, particularly Madrid, as a tactic for learning and understanding and as ‘intermediary or translator’ between reality and project.