The men of the Renaissance aspired to reconcile pleasure with power and wisdom. According to Platonic tradition, human life was to combine voluptas, potentia and sapientia, and this was the origin of many a humanistic dissertation that recommended th
One of the charmed moments of my life took place during a visit to Madrid in the summer of 1991. Alejandro de la Sota sent word that he would like me to visit him at his studio on Bretón de los Herreros. Though already frail, he received me with utmo
Sota was based in Madrid and lived most of his life here, but he came from Galicia in the northwest of Spain, a remote region with a cold, clear light and a vernacular founded upon sharp granite masonry. When glass was used, it was as a sheet or scre
As variations on a theme, these drawings are multidirectional assaults in a continuous creative experience and serve to clarify Alejandro de la Sota’s stance with regard to architecture. His spontaneous sketches for the urbanization of Alcudia are an
The villages Sota built for the National Colonization Institute evolve from a mimesis of the vernacular at Gimenells, in Lérida, to the organicist formalism of Valuengo and Entremos, both in Badajoz... [+]
The efforts exerted by the architects of Spain’s Second Republic in favor of modernity were put aside at the end of the Civil War. Centralized, grandiose and free, the architecture of the forties strove to retrieve the signs of a glorious past from t
The expressionist proposals of the start of the century took years to become of use to architecture. Although they lent formal features to rationalism, besides half a dozen emblematic buildings such as the Einstein or Schauspielhaus towers and a numb
At the same that the National Colonization Institute was creating towns on arable land, an exodus of people from rural areas to the large urbs was apace. Accompanied by their families, laborers arrived in the city in search of employment, rapidly for
During the fifties, with its period of isolation over, Spain resumed its interest in international architecture. Public and private sectors dissociated themselves from the nostalgic mood that had dominated the country after the Civil War. The reemerg
Inland Revenue delegations abounded in the initial phase of Sola’s career. Prior to the project for Gerona’s, dated 1953, he had already tackled the theme in a similar competition for Valencia’s in 1952... [+]
For the Aeronautic Workshops of Barajas (TABSA), dated 1957-1958, Sota worked with engineers Enrique Guzmán and Eusebio Rojas Marcos and was influenced by their technical views... [+]
Between 1955 and 1969 Sota drew up six proposals for dairy centers, of which only the one for Clesa in Madrid was actually carried out. Though he began to work on it in 1958, the final project is dated two years later. By this time the reductive natu
The challenge of undertaking a complex program of classrooms and a gym on a lot boxed in between a retaining wall and Joaquin Costa Street underlies this project for the enlargement of the school run by the La Salle brothers. Sota tackled it like an
The doctrinal insufficiency of the CIAM's rationalist schemes made itself patent in Europe in the course of the sixties because their rigid advocation of an open garden-city could hardly be applied to the continent’s consolidated historical cores. So
The university boom of the sixties brought about a proliferation of halls of residence in Madrid’s campus. The César Carlos Hall stands out on account of its original typology and unique monumentality. Its austere abstract language relates it to the
Built in 1964 at Collado Villalba (Madrid), the Varela House was an opportunity for Sota to undertake a small-scale experiment on industrial prefabrication and designing constructive systems... [+]
The 1970 competition for Bankunión’s Madrid headquarters constituted a turning point in the process of dematerializing architecture that Sota had initiated with the series of tax offices... [+]
Mies passed away in Chicago in August 1969. In tribute to the master and going against the tide, Sota published ‘The Grand and Honorable Orphanhood', exposing his personal decalogue of architectural renunciations. A year later he failed the competiti
Alejandro de la Sota's radical sachlich attitude is concentrated in his compactly diaphanous entry to the 1970 Bankunión head office competition. The project shows an unshakable faith in the ability of a material, in this case Thermopane glass, to re
During the years immediately preceding this project Alejandro de la Sota found himself deprived of the opportunity to build. Still he held on to his smiling intransigence when once again given the chance to construct a clear-cut, compact and flexible
The brief of the project for the courthouse of Zaragoza is the most extensive and detailed of all those published by Alejandro de la Sota. In it the author accurately describes exactly how the program is organized, with segregated circulations provid
The Domínguez House in La Caeyra (Pontevedra), built in 1976, incorporated the dimensional rigor and economy of means tested by Sota in previous proposals involving industrial prefabrication... [+]
Trazos biográficosBiographical Strokes
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Las tres vidas de Alejandro de la Sota The Three Lives of Alejandro de la Sota
Kenneth Frampton
Maestro de esenciasMaster of Essences
William Curtis
Del monumento a la máquinaFrom Monument to Machine
Juan Navarro Baldeweg
Construir y habitarBuilding and Dwelling
Los 40 y los 50The 40s and 50s
Vida voluptuosaIn Pursuit of Delight
El placer de la forma: un populismo orgánico
The Pleasure in Form: Organic Populism
Pueblo para el Instituto de ColonizaciónVillage for the Colonization Institute
1952-1956, Esquivel, Sevilla
Casa Arvesú en la calle Doctor ArceArvesú House on Dr. Arce Street
1955, Madrid
Poblado de absorción Fuencarral BFuencarral B Slum-Absorption Development
1955-1956, Madrid
Gobierno CivilCivil Government Delegation
1956, 1959-1963, Tarragona
La abstracción de lo público: diagramas económicos
The Abstraction of the Public Domain: Economic Diagrams
Los 60The 60s
Vida activaIn Search of Strength
El poder de la técnica: la razón del ingeniero
The Power of Technique: Engineering Logic
Central lechera ClesaClesa Dairy Plant
1960-1963, Madrid
Gimnasio del colegio Maravillas Maravillas School Gymnasium
1960-1962, Madrid
Viviendas en la calle PriorHousing on Prior Street
1963, Salamanca
Colegio mayor César CarlosCésar Carlos Student Residence Hall
1967-1970, Madrid
La fábrica de tapices: mallas para construir
The Mat Factory: Grids for Building
Los 70 y los 80 The 70s and 80s
Vida contemplativaIn Quest of Knowledge
El saber de la función: los usos de la caja
The Wisdom of Function: Uses of the Box
Facultad de Ciencias Science Faculty
1972, Sevilla
Centro de cálculo de la Caja PostalPost Office Savings Bank Computing Center
1972-1977, Madrid
Edificio de CorreosPost Office Building
1981-1984, León
Ampliación de los JuzgadosCourthouse Extension
1986-1994, Zaragoza
La levedad del estar: burbujas habitadas
The Lightness of Living: Inhabited Bubbles
Obra esencial, 1941-1996 Essential Oeuvre, 1941-1996
Luis Fernández-Galiano
The men of the Renaissance aspired to reconcile pleasure with power and wisdom. According to Platonic tradition, human life was to combine voluptas, potentia and sapientia, and this was the origin of many a humanistic dissertation that recommended the simultaneous emulation of Paris, Hercules and Socrates, or the joint veneration of Venus, Juno and Minerva. In the usual ternary ordering, such insistence on the multidimensional variety of life is occasionally expressed as a desire to integrate the delightful, the practical and the theoretical, in line with the powers of a soul that is allegedly endowed with sensibility, strength and intelligence. These trinities, which will remind architects of the venustas, firmitas and utilitas of the familiar Vitruvian triad, had their canonical expression in the much repeated presentation of the three lives: vita voluptuosa, vita activa, vita contemplativa; three lives which at times appear as alternatives, as they do to Poliphilo in the famous scene that has him choosing among three doors leading to love, earthly success and divine glory, and other times as successive stages, not too different from the archaic three ages of man —ardent youth, active adulthood and reflective old age— which allow one to reconcile diversity by arranging it chronologically. Here it is the latter interpretation of the three lives that serves as a rhetorical device for a narrative orchestration of Alejandro de la Sota's professional biography, a trajectory which is stubborn in some essential convictions but also dislocated at some points by several existential fractures.
This mythical reconstruction of the life of the hero begins with a period dominated by the pursuit of pleasure that beauty provides, in a path that leads from the organic folklorism of the villages to the abstraction of the public buildings in an introverted postwar Spain. The second phase corresponds to the years of economic growth, during which the architect, fascinated by engineering, formulated practical challenges involving the rationalization of construction and the choral anonymity of minimums. In the third and final period Sota pursued the silent wisdom of function with progressively naked and immaterial boxes, in a stripping process that anticipated his own physical disappearance. Premodern, modern and transmodern, the three lives of Sota were three movements of a single score played in the course of half a century.
Son of a military engineer and surveyor from Santander, Alejandro de la Sota Martínez was born "in a stone house" of Pontevedra on October 20, 1913, and cultivated his musical and artistic talents in the favorable setting of a well-to-do and educated family, soon beginning to play the piano and draw cartoons in the manner of Castelao. After two years of Mathematics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, young Sota set forth for the restless Madrid of Republican times to study architecture, only to be interrupted by the break-out of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936. At the end of the conflict, in which he participated on the Franco side, he resumed his studies at the Madrid school and earned his degree in 1941. He was to reside in the capital until his death in 1996 but remained tied to Galicia, where his father was influential as president of the central government delegation in Pontevedra, where family and social contacts afforded him many of his first clients, and which was birthplace as well to admired colleagues like Ramón Vázquez Molezún of La Coruña and to masters like fellow-Pontevedran Antonio Palacios who then had much clout in Madrid.
In Pursuit of Delight
From 1941 to 1947 he worked for the National Colonization Institute, an organism created to plan rural settlements in the newly irrigated lands of a country devastated and impoverished by war. Also a fruit of this long contractual relationship were the villages Sota carried out during the first half of the fifties, where he used the same friendly and organic language of his private house commissions or his office and store renovations. In 1952 he married Sara Rius, a very beautiful young woman who was to give him seven children, and between that year and 1956 he took part in a series of competitions for public buildings whose functional and symbolic requirements geared his architecture toward abstraction. This period of formal preoccupations ended with the project for the civil government of Tarragona, a trip to Berlin that put him in contact with European trends, and his entry in the School of Architecture as a teacher, three events which, combined with the failure of the country's isolationist economic model, sparked a process of critical reflection that led Sota away from formalist esteticism. At the end of the decade, a professional drought prompted him to join the Post Office, becoming a functionary in 1960.
In Search of Strength
The boom of the sixties gave a new impetus to Sota's career. The long postponed construction work in Tarragona finally got going, and in Madrid he supervised the building of the Clesa dairy plant and the Maravillas gymnasium, two projects of an industrial character which allowed him to continue the dialogue with engineering initiated a few years back at the aeronautic workshops of Barajas. On completion of these works he obtained new commissions in Zamora and Salamanca, as well as one for CENIM's research facilities in Madrid, and in 1964 he signed for a leave of absence at the Post Office, eager as he now was to devote full time to his practice. In this climate of social and technological optimism, besides continuing to experiment with large metal spans in sport building projects, he began to explore systems of prefabrication in concrete, which he first tested in houses and later tried to apply in mat residential developments such as those for Mar Menor and Orense. Yet none of these was carried out and his disappointment was aggravated at the end of the decade by two severe blows: the defeat of his Miesian glass prism in the competition for Bankunión, an office building on Madrid's Paseo de la Castellana; and his failure to obtain a chair at the School of Architecture, a let-down which made him abandon teaching altogether.
In Quest of Knowledge
Sota's depression brought him back to the Post Office in 1972, and he would stay in the service until his retirement. During this final phase of stocktaking and introspection his obsession was "the box that functions," a progressively immaterial container that was a continuation of the Bankunión proposal, that was best expressed in two unexecuted projects, Aviaco's headquarters and the museum of León, and which also lay at the base of his two major Post Office jobs, the calculation center of the Caja Postal in Madrid and the Post Office building in León. The same pursuit of functional lightness is perceived in his residential projects of the period, the greater part of which would remain on paper. The twilight years saw public recognition coinciding with physical deterioration and the pain caused by the death of his architect son. Shortly before his own demise on February 14, 1996, Alejandro de la Sota signed his last project for the Maravillas school, a tribute which closed his biography in the place where it had reached its finest moment.
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