From Zuazo, Palacios, or Gutiérrez Soto to Higueras, Peña Ganchegui, or Moneo, many of contemporary Spanish architecture’s greatest figures have come from Madrid’s School of Architecture. Much of our urban landscape bears the mark of ETSAM, which has forged ideas that have transformed our understanding of the city.
This book presents lectures that seven emeritus professors delivered in 2024 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in an initiative reinforcing the links between two institutions devoted to education, among other things. These talks pick up from those offered the previous year by the director of the series, Alberto Campo Baeza, which come in another book and reflected on other essential themes: beauty, wisdom, intellectual enjoyment, renouncement and universality, time, memory, and light.
This new title shows how architecture drinks from multiple references: pictorial sources in Navarro Baldeweg’s work and spatial ones in Linazasoro’s thus coexist with landmarks like El Escorial monastery or the Córdoba mosque (analyzed by Carlos Sambrico and Gabriel Ruiz Cabrero); the illusory forms that inspired Aalto (Antón Capitel); nature in projects of Asplund, Piano, OMA, Oíza, or Nouvel (Margarita de Luxán); or domestic spaces of Ledoux, Loos, and Le Corbusier (Ignacio Vicens).
Beyond academic rigor and in view of the current public-education crisis, the lessons honor critical thought and the figure of the master, whose commitment is now the best form of resistance.
