1942-2018

Born in Elche on 23 October 1942, Vicente Verdú passed away in Madrid on 21 August. Verdú was a journalist, a poet, and a painter, and was fascinated by architecture. Doctor is Social Sciences by the Sorbonne, he made rigor compatible with intuition in his journalistic work, first as editor-in-chief of the mythical Cuadernos para el diálogo published during the Transition period, and later as key member of the newspaper El País, where was director of Op-Ed and of the Culture section, and in which he wrote uninterruptedly since 1982 until his death. His work as journalist was the humus from which a series of sociological books emerged, like El estilo del mundo: la vida en el capitalismo de ficción, where the literary talent of Verdú allowed dealing with contemporary issues. Of course, among these topics was architecture, a discipline he cherished and brought closer to a general audience in his weekly columns in El País and in his collaborations with Arquitectura Viva, magazine for which he wrote unforgettable articles. In later years his passion for architecture shifted towards painting – through chromatic abstraction in his case – and poetry, which he never abandoned.