A creative architect, a visionary humanist

Miguel de Oriol E Ybarra has died in Madrid, his hometown, to which he dedicated so much time, thought and effort throughout his ninety -one years of life. With him disappears one of the last and most significant representatives of the “generation of the 60s” in Spanish architecture, a stage in which the predominance of postulates derived from the “modern movement”, initiated after world War I and broadcast in the world, is finally consolidated in Spain.

Born within one of the most relevant families of Spanish business in the contemporary era, his creative concern and his visionary spirit characterize his figure. Although his work and his architectural thinking are fully modern, to some extent they continue the innovative and creative path opened by their paternal grandfather José Luis de Oriol and Urigüen, also an architect and the time a great promoter of business initiatives, among which the Spanish hydroelectric companies – today Iberdrola stand out, after their merger with Iberduero – and Talgo, which have decisively configured the reality Socio-economic of our country.

In the case of Miguel de Oriol, the family spirit of entrepreneurship and social responsibility, linked to the development of Spain and a clear awareness of its role in the world, was combined very well with the spirit of innovation, also reinforced by the expansion of its training as an architect and urbanist at the University of Yale in the United States, after finishing the race at the Superior School of Architecture of Madrid in 1959.

This spirit sometimes acquired utopian and visionary accents, especially in regard to urbanism and the role of architects in the conception and management of the city, without ever shunning the public defense of their approaches, by controversies that could be. All this can be seen in urban renewal projects designed and directed by him as important as the remodeling of urban space around the Royal Palace and the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid, and also in his numerous writings and articles, starting with his speech of entry in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1990, to which another relevant architect and academic, José Antonio Domínguez Salazar replied. His title, “Madrid on foot, a utopia,” reveals those features of his personality significantly.

With this text, dedicated to reflection on contemporary Madrid and its possibilities of becoming one of the great capitals of the western world, Miguel de Oriol became somehow a precursor, saying “Madrid aspires to preside over an urbanized region that represents and summon the world that speaks our language.” Three and a half decades after those possibilities are becoming something tangible, with all its consequences – positive many and other problems, as happens in all the “metropolis regions” -, and the author of that speech has managed to see it.

The varied architectural work of Miguel de Oriol includes all modalities, from residential architecture to industrial, through tertiary, teaching, representative and religious buildings. Although rooted in the functional and aesthetic postulates of the architectural renewal of the twentieth century, this work also responds to a will to configure urban space. The most successful expression of this is, without a doubt, Torre Europa, one of the buildings that preside over the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid, built between 1975 and 1985. Its unmistakable silhouette makes it one of the symbols of Madrid in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Many other works constitute the architectural creation of Miguel de Oriol. Perhaps the most interesting and representative are the Carmelitas College of San Sebastián, one of the first Spanish buildings of the brutalist current, projected in 1963 together with Vicente Orbe Piniés, the San Jaime residence, built in 1964 in Estepona (Málaga), the headquarters in San Sebastián of the University of Deusto, built between 1961 and 1973 Universal Exhibition of Seville of 1992, and some other buildings located in Madrid, such as the Salesiano Santo Domingo Savio College, of 1961-1968, the La Rinconada residential complex, carried out between 1968 and 1971, and the Eurocis complex, which occupies an entire apple of the Salamanca neighborhood, finished in the early 80s, to which the Moral Golf Club is added Music Reina Sofia-Foundation Isaac Albéniz.

The deliberate search for its own style within contemporary architectural rationalism, of which all these works are example, allows to say that Miguel de Oriol, in addition to leaving a lasting imprint in the Spanish urban space of our time, has managed to capture in them his strong conviction in the artistic value, and not only social, of architectural creation. His figure is told, therefore, among the most prominent Spanish architects of our time and will be remembered.

• Alfredo Pérez de Armiñán and La Serna He is an academic number of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando