Books
Ortiz-Echagüe & Echaide
My first design course at the Madrid School must have been Rafael Echaide’s last year as department deputy head. In the lack of architecture books, I had only managed to get hold of Pevsner’s Outline of European Architecture and Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, two theoretical publications, when Echaide edified us with his mini-treatise El origen de la forma en arquitectura. On its only three glossy pages were two blurred photographs of the Tajamar School. Now, with an elegant parade of photos, I re-read that last collaborative project of César Ortiz-Echagüe and Echaide.
El origen de la forma and Tajamar were seeds of our education in modernity. It is curious that a book with pedagogical drawings of windows, slabs, and stairs was my introduction to architectural design, as Lynch’s drawings for The Image of the City would be the next year. We had to wait to get my hands on the reports on their precedent, the California steel-and-glass works of the 1950s and 1960s, but we already knew the lesson. Those Case Study Houses came to us through Julius Shulman, but when they did, Spanish photographers like Pando had long shown us the poetics of laminated steel and the modern metaphors of structural authenticity, transparency, and industrial economy.
Tajamar is also a testimony of Pando, who with Ortiz-Echagüe and Echaide introduced the rationalist architecture of metal into Spain. His photos accompany the original plans, and today we can re-admire the unity of its formal composition.
