Books
Juan Navarro Baldeweg
The architecture of Juan Navarro Baldeweg has a prominent place in the international scene not only because of the architect’s trajectory, which has unfolded with success in painting and sculpture as well, but very especially because of its peculiar nature, always innovative and fresh. In the final analysis, he is admired for his exceptional modernity; a modernity that is always an ‘escape’ or ‘flight’, that vanishes when caught, as Franceso Dal Co expresses in the foreword to his book. This defines a good part of the unique imaginary universe of the work of Juan Navarro. The uniqueness is that of someone who works in various disciplines at the same time and is capable of arriving at a genuine interpretation of all of them. But this apparently personal approach also manages to go beyond the architect’s inner room and address the big issues of architecture and its history, such as structure, decoration or space, in the process establishing, suspended in time, a lively dialogue with other architects and architectures.
The imaginary universe is revealed with intensity in the book, to date the first to take stock of Navarro’s oeuvre in a systematic manner, from his early projects at MIT to designs and works still in process. Completing this is a selection of his writings. In sum, a collection of projects, works and texts that shows how the architect’s oeuvre is not heterogeneous, but complex; a complexity with a tension that makes his architecture a sounding board of life, but also of arts and architecture.
