The architect from Salamanca, one of the great thinkers of his profession in the second half of the 20th century, combined humanist tradition and critical commitment to the contemporary city.
As a child, Antonio Fernández Alba went to the school of Atilano Coco, the Anglican pastor who had a friendship with Miguel de Unamuno and who one night in December 1936 was shot in the hills of Salamanca. The tragic memory of the master and, with it, the blurred image of Unamuno – whom Fernández Alba’s father, a wealthy local builder, frequented – formed the substrate of the architect’s memory, that unconscious part that never ceases to shine through. throughout his life and that Fernández Alba enriched with images partly real and partly constructed by his nostalgia: the tranquility of a busy home; the golden splendor of Renaissance Salamanca; the smell of harvest from the Castilian fields; or the shadow, finally, of Tormes en la Flecha, that estate where Brother Luis de León retired and which Fernández Alba, in his old age, evoked with devotion and sadness.
It is difficult to know if a set of memories can sustain a life, since a good part of the memories are made a posteriori, they have some posthumous illuminations, but in the case of Fernández Alba there is no doubt that the images treasured in his childhood help to better understand his career. If the memory of home evokes her trip to half-gutted Madrid in 1947 to study Architecture under the tutelage of a friend of her father, the architect José Luis Fernández del Amo, the memory of Salamanca and its countryside explain Fernández Alba’s first projects in that city, perhaps the best of his work, while Fray Luis’s retirement speaks of the passion that the architect always felt for poetry, in which he saw a weapon more powerful than architecture, the discipline to which he nevertheless dedicated himself with passion and sobriety.
Fernández Alba’s is not a stylist architecture. It is not subsumed in the recognizable and pre-cooked forms of a brand, but rather it unfolds, evolves, mutates depending on the different contexts and the intellectual changes and preferences of its author. It is not the architecture of the hedgehog that knows everything from the beginning, but that of the fox that continues learning and is not afraid to change. In this game of changes, there is a first Fernández Alba, young and energetic, who seeks in the soft forms of organicism and in his aspiration to get closer to life an antidote for mechanistic coldness (the “catalog rationalism”, he called it). ) that in the mid-20th century froze architecture. Although Fernández Alba’s organicism was modest, precarious, as Spain was then, he has left us a handful of buildings that time will continue to confirm as masterpieces: the Rollo convent in Salamanca, where the hygiene of Le Corbusier, the plasticity come together. by Aalto and Utzon and local history made with sandstone, tile roofs and barred windowsbut also the Nuestra Señora de Santa María School in Madrid or the Montfort School in Loeches, agoras where pedagogical renewal knows how to ally itself with the human scale, traditional materials and the landscape.
After the organicist, there is the Fernández Alba who met Louis Kahn in 1967 and, fascinated by the modern but at the same time monumental rhetoric by the American architect, built a notable collection of public buildings in Spain, that of the Transition, which I needed new emblems. Among them is the Valladolid School of Architecture, which escapes blunt functionalism to assert itself in an overwhelming geometry, with which Fernández Alba begins his long list of university buildings. And there is also the Data Center of the Geographic Institute of Madrid, with its façade measured like a temple but vast like a factory, or, later, the M-30 Mortuary in Madrid, whose timeless and serene geometry challenges the highway and imposes dignity on the always difficult atmosphere of death.
Along with the organicist of late Francoism and the civicist of the Transition, there is, after all, Fernández Alba who was interested in history and who, marked by his learning as a fleeting director of the Institute of Conservation and Restoration, dedicated a good part of the last stretch of his career to build on what was builta commitment that would give rise to outstanding interventions both in monuments of his native Salamanca – the Real Clerecía – and in some of the best buildings of that Madrid of the Enlightenment, optimistic and contained, with which Fernández Alba so identified: from the Astronomical Observatory to the greenhouse of the Botanical Garden or the former San Carlos Hospital, today the Reina Sofía Museum.
Prolific and committed to his time, the career of Fernández Alba – who received all the awards an architect can receive and was part of two royal academies – can make us forget that What interested the Salamanca master was not so much the splendors of the style but the cultural heart and civic sense of architecture.. For Fernández Alba, architecture was rigor of the material, but also feeling displayed in forms and the ability to see reality with critical eyes and dream things for the better. The teacher was convinced that architecture creates shelters as much as it builds symbols., transcends the resolution of ephemeral functions or the validation of real estate speculations, and is, ultimately, an art for all, common, since it builds the city. For this reason, he was also convinced that the only way to maintain the broad, relevant cultural status of architecture was for architects not to renounce the status of humanist technicians that they had once had or were said to have once had.
That he, of course, was a humanist is evident, from the outset, in his very early passion for the most demanding literature, that of mystics like Saint John of the Cross and romantic poets like Hölderlin or Novalis, who continued reading until the end. And it is also evident in his almost obsessive interest in art and philosophy. If art – which he lived from within as the only architect of the El Paso Group – was for Fernández Alba an escape from self-conscious architecture to the presumed kingdom of freedom, philosophy became the channel of an inexhaustible curiosity but not She could or did not want to be systematic, because it was made at the mercy of her concerns. That does not make it any less rich: it was the demanding curiosity with which he supported himself just as he supported his many disciples in that Madrid School of Architecture whose pedagogy he renewed from the roots, to modernize and enrich it.
The face that time has given to architecture ended up being unrecognizable to Fernández Alba. He was scandalized by the superstitious adoration of “starchitects”, the cultural anomie of cities and the dissolution of humanism; He felt all of this almost like a personal failure. He did not give up, however, going against the current, although he chose to do so quietly, with clairvoyance, and in two ways: writing texts that he knew few would read and losing himself in a nostalgic retreat to seek, like the poet, the company of few friends and even fewer but more learned books together. At the end of his long life, Antonio Fernández Alba, one of the most influential architects of his time, felt less like an architect than simply a reader, and this humble but lucid statement gives the measure of his intellectual and human stature.
