Galego | English

Non fiction

Artistas Galegos Arquitectos- Da Modernidade ao século XXI

By VV.AA.

About this book

This volume presents a comprehensive vision of the lives and works of architects born in the 30s and 50s and who became the main figures in architecture in the last three decades of the 20th century. This diverse group was united by their commitment to Galicia. All of them, with different backgrounds, intellectual ideas and architectural creeds, worked in the same cultural, social and economic context, and all of them gave an architectural response to the status quo.

The works of the thirteen architects in the book reveal, when we see them all together in its pages, the common links, complementary explorations, and positions. Their relationship to modern architecture, their relationship with the place as their first commandment, the value of the material, their sense of volume and a certain sense of mass and weight can be seen as the characteristics that bind them together.

Book fragment

...It is not our intention to present here a “generational” criteria when we speak about the work of our thirteen architects. Indeed, the younger ones developed a more experimental body of work and far from Modern traditions, but the others are not a homogeneous group either. They sometimes offer opposing architectural arguments.

The way the work was developed in architectural studies in Galicia, at least until recently, resulted in an individual professional activity so that each architect is the only responsible figure in the creative process. In an attempt to present a clarifying scheme, with the risk of over-simplification, we could highlight in that group of heterogeneous works and personalities, several architectural intentions, to use the title and contents of the text by Norberg-Schulz. The intentions we propose are: a continuity with Modern traditions, the adaptation of the Italian tendenza, environmental eclecticism and the poetics of a neo avant-garde. These definitions do not respond to style criteria but to project strategies, the definition of objectives and solutions; in a nutshell, the intentions described by the master of the Oslo architecture school…