Antonio Fernández Alba, architect from Salamanca, professor in Madrid and member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and the Royal Spanish Academy, has died at the age of 96. Each of these facets is significant to explain his life, beyond the honor of the positions: at the university, Fernndez Alba was a crucial figure who modernized the teachings of the School of Madrid at a very early moment in the dictatorship. As a man of letters, he was the architect of his generation with the most literary culture and the one who wrote the most and best. And his architectural career can be summarized as an effort to expand the limits of his discipline, to connect it to the art and knowledge of his time, and to seek moral meaning in it.
Fernndez Alba’s life has been so long that his story seems taken from history books. His first teacher, according to Luis Fernndez-Galiano in Living Architecture, was a Protestant pastor who was a friend of Miguel de Unamuno and who was shot to death during the Civil War. When the fighting ended, Fernández Alba moved to Madrid in 1947 to study Architecture and a degree in Quantity Surveyors and received the protection of José Luis Fernández del Amo, the director of the National Colonization Institute, although his first instinct was directed towards art rather than construction. Fernández Alba entered El Paso as a painter and as an intellectual entertainer. He was a friend of Saura and Chirino and left some drawings that are like notes on Analysis and Forms taken to a freer, almost expressionist language. He read Kierkegaard, Karl Kosik, Walter Benjamin and Mara Zambrano and attended Xavier Zubiri’s classes. In his last interview, a dialogue with Eduardo Prieto and Salvador Guerrero in the magazine It variesFernndez Alba remembered as a vital influence a bookseller who worked near Cibeles, whose name was Inchausti, and who allowed him to order books in an account opened in his father’s name.
Fernández Alba was also one of the first architects of his time to travel and recover the connection between Spanish architecture and that of his time, after the interruption of war and self-sufficiency. Fernndez Alba visited Alvar Aalto and met Louis Kahn before almost anyone else and with his influence she designed the Convento del Rollo, his first great work. The Roll is a stone fortress in Salamanca that even today speaks with the city’s historical architecture and essence without imitating it. In 1963, he received the National Architecture Prize.
Fernández Alba’s career is full of public works that investigated that desire to synthesize the landscape, the memory and the dignity of the people who inhabit it in the most austere way possible. The architect from Salamanca built schools and universities such as the Nuestra Señora Santa María classroom, promoted by a group of feminist teachers together with his friend Martín Chirino, along with many of the new Transition campuses. Soon, his studio began working on public projects such as the restoration of the Retiro Observatory in Madrid, the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca and the Sabatini building of the future Reina Sofa Museum.
As Fernández Alba’s public career prospered, his voice as a writer became clearer and more relevant. First, I wrote in professional magazines, sponsored, among others, by José Daniel Fullaondo. Then I jumped to Notebooks for Dialogue, Triunfo, El Pas, Diario 16… “I could say that [mi tema ha sido] the concern for the hegemony of modern machinery, due to the generalization of architecture as a simply functional product and alien to feeling. The rationalism that began to proliferate in Spanish architecture in the 1950s and 1960s was not the clean rationalism of the first European experience, but a rationalism that was too close to real estate speculation, a rationalism that translated into a modernity with few ideas, simple in its constructive innovation but that used the formal repertoire of modern elements simulating the modern label,” said Fernández Alba in the interview It varies.
Some of his books seem titled after a poet: Chronicles of Lost Space, Domus Aurea. Dialogues in Virgil’s House, The Wounded City… In Closed autumn blues He told his life as a vital and intellectual story. There he referred to the “translucent space of accelerated time” to which he had dedicated her career: architecture, philosophy, poetry, art. She is also a citizen. In 2006, Fernndez Alba entered the RAE with a speech about the history of the city and spoke about “the post-city” in which architecture “assumes the role of being an industry in which its products have been dematerialized from their purposes as an organizing principle of the city, in its ethical, aesthetic and political sense.”
