Rubio Arquitectura   Spain   The Val-verde project is the 2021 winner of Reinventing Cities, which seeks to recover and upgrade the iconic Clesa industrial complex, a work of Alejandro de la Sota in Madrid’s Fuencarral-El Pardo district that is currently in a state of abandon. T

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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

Alejandro de la Sota   Spain   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 results of the competition for the chance to refurbish the main shed of the old Clesa dairy factory, built in the year 1961 by the master Alejandro de la Sota in Madrid’s Fuencarral-El Pardo district, were announced on 27 November 2015. Promoted

For the centenary of Miguel Fisac (Daimiel, 1913–Madrid, 2006) and Alejandro de la Sota (Pontevedra, 1913–Madrid, 1996), the ICO Museum in Madrid hosts an exhibition on the life and work of both masters of modern Spanish architecture. Curated by Carl

Carmen Martínez Arroyo   Rodrigo Pemjean   Few Spanish architects of the 20th century can be said to have had as great an influence on generations coming after him, and been as fervently admired, as Alejandro de la Sota.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   We begin to celebrate the centenaries of those who were our masters, and the many anniversaries in 2013 prompts a pixelated portrait of architecture after the First World War with ten biographies of figures born on the eve of the Second. In my case,

2013 is a year of centenaries. We commemorate the birth of ten masters: five Spaniards, one Japanese, one Greek, one Azerbaijan-French and two Argentinians. The Spaniards (José Antonio Coderch, Alejandro de la Sota, Miguel Fisac, Antoni Bonet i Caste

Antón García-Abril   El Atlas Phaidon pesa siete kilos y mide 45x30x6 centímetros. Su volumen es equivalente al que resulta de agrupar los paperbacks de Mies van der Rohe y Le Corbusier, el Delirio de Nueva York de Rem Koolhaas, la Ciudad Collage de Colin Rowe y Fred Koe

Luis Játiva   Tras más de diez años de catalogación y digitalización de sus fondos documentales, la Fundación Alejandro de la Sota presenta esta cuidada colección de monografías con material inédito compuesto por planos, croquis, memorias y fotografías realizadas

Luis Fernández-Galiano   From the vantage point of Spain’s visibility in the 1992 of the Olympic Games and Expo, and the 2004 of the economic and cultural boom, three generations of Spanish architects and three works by foreigners in Spain serve to test a taxonomy of the eye

El arquitecto que construyó edificios persiguiendo un máximo de abstracción y un reduccionismo de sus elementos, y el arquitecto dibujante con la línea más abstracta y clara. Dos coetáneos, un rumano nacido en Ramnicul-Sarat y un gallego de Pontevedr

«Es preciso ver que la arquitectura de Alejandro de la Sota —tan delicada al detalle, tan relajada en lo fragmentario y en la aceptación de lo concreto— se origina en un movimiento que va de lo general a lo particular (...) La naturaleza de la abstra

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The year of political change-over in Spain has also been one of transits in architecture: the passing away of Alejandro de la Sota, the international consecration of Rafael Moneo, the crystallization of spectacle at the International Union of Archite

Harold Bloom maintains that critical judgment boils down to better, worse, or equal. What if we were to apply such criteria to the match between Madrid and Barcelona? At the risk of charicaturizing, here are some nasty comparisons. Cerdá or Arturo So

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... [+]

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... [+]

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... [+]

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... [+]

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... [+]

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... [+]

Juan Navarro Baldeweg   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

William Curtis   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

Kenneth Frampton   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

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 th

Alejandro de la Sota   Barcelona  2020  
Puente editores   - 144 Pages 

Carlos Asensio-Wandosell Moisés Puente   Madrid  2013  
La Fábrica   - 237 Pages 

Iñaki Ábalos Josep Llinàs Moisés Puente   Barcelona  2010  
Fundación Caja de Arquitectos   - 549 Pages 

Teresa Couceiro   Madrid  
Fundación Alejandro de la Sota   - 2008 Pages