Books
Fisac in New Perspective
With near-annual punctuality Fundación Fisac and its director, Diego Peris Sánchez, this time with Javier Navarro Gallego, release a new tome of the series through which they have since 2014 disseminated the legacy of the master from La Mancha. Following the ones on furniture designs, photography, research and industry buildings, dwellings, and religious architecture, the new book looks at his schemes in culture, education, and heritage restoration, the facet of his career least known of.
The authors present the canonical Fisac résumé of labor institutes, culture hubs, and schools, complementing them with lesser-known projects like the Cuenca auditorium, the opera house in Madrid’s AZCA business district, and the unusual proposal for the Spanish pavilion at Expo 1992 in Seville, where rational Fisac adopted a narrative attitude in accord with postmodernity, with a piece evoking the Torre del Oro to be executed with flexible formworks, and two stone volumes on which he meant to carve the coat of arms showing the Columns of Hercules and drill a hole “as the product of an explosion.”
The book’s last part tells of his silent incursions into restoration. Apart from early interventions on churches of his hometown, heritage refurbishments took up his final decades, after he was forced to close his studio in the 1970s. A low-key activity Fisac threw himself into with the same vehemence that marked his more mediatic constructions, and which for sure helps to put these into perspective.
