Luis Fernández-Galiano   Memory speaks in these ten interviews with masters. I borrow from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography the title for the presentation of these conversations, transcribed as monologues to place the focus on the protagonists, whose voices I hope to have re

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Frank Gehry   Frank Gehry is easygoing, generous, cordial. At 68, this Californian is America’s most admired architect, but no one who saw him amid the intense bustle of his Bilbao construction site would notice his stardom. The casual clothes and distracted appro

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Peter Eisenman   To America came my great-great-grandfather in 1848. There’s a huge difference between people that came in the middle of the 19th century and people who came in the middle of the 20th century, especially among Jewish families in the States. There’s a

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Álvaro Siza   I was born in Matosinhos, in 1933, into a large family. We were five siblings, common at the time, and twelve people living at home, starting with my grandmother, who had come from Brazil as a widow with six children. We ate all together and converse

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Norman Foster   The library of Manchester is arguably one of the most important buildings of my life in terms of influence. There I disovered Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, the work of Henry-Russell Hitchcock on Frank Lloyd Wright… I discovered those wor

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Rafael Moneo   If I am an architect, it is largely owing to my father. When I finished secondary school, I was especially drawn to the humanities, and seeing me waver, it was he who steered me toward architecture. It was difficult to get into the School at that tim

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Renzo Piano   My first experiences as an architect were threaded together by a search for lightness. It’s very simple. When you are young, you try to do the opposite of what your father’s been doing. My father was making buildings with sand, concrete, and bricks.

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Jacques Herzog   Early on, I had two great masters: an artist, Joseph Beuys, and an architect, Aldo Rossi. With them I began to lay the intellectual and formal foundations of my architecture. Rossi was in our time the best-known professor at the school, and he had pl

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Eduardo Souto de Moura   Mine was a normal childhood, in a conservative and religious family of northern Portugal – my family is from Braga. My uncles, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers were educated, they all studied Greek and Latin in Coimbra, or medicine and psychiatry

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Luis Moreno Mansilla, Emilio Tuñón   Luis M. Mansilla: Many things that happen in life are a mix of intention and chance. My father was a naval engineer, but on my mother’s side, too, there were people connected to art. The time came to choose a path and I asked my twin brother, “What a

Luis Fernández-Galiano, Bjarke Ingels   Bjarke Ingels is ecstatic. His son, Darwin, is now one week old, and both baby and mother, the Spanish architect Ruth Otero, are the main characters in the photographic archive of his cell phone, which shows the boundless happiness of his recent fath