The 2014 Scholarship award ceremony took place on Thursday 23 October in Room B of the Manuel de Falla Auditorium in Granada, with the participation of the architect Alberto Campo Baeza, who was a member of the jury for the 2014 Scholarship contest, who gave a lecture entitled 'Looking deeply for beauty', and the architect Juan Domingo Santos, who presented the topic of the 2015 contest, 'A tower to fly'.
He was born in Valladolid and moved to Cadiz.
His works range from small houses such as Casa Turégano, Casa Gaspar or Casa de Blas, to large works such as Caja Granada or the Advisory Council of Zamora.
His work has been exhibited in the Crown Hall, Chicago, at the Basilica Palladiana, the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, or the Hagia Irene in Istanbul, or in the MAXXI in Rome. In 2013, he was exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.
He has been a Projects Professor in Madrid since 1986 and has taught at ETH Zurich, EPFL Laussanne, Penn University in Philadelphia, and last year at CUA Washington... as well as in many other universities around the world.
This year he received the Tessenow Gold Medal 2013 from the German architects in Hamburg, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize 2013 from the American architects in New York, and the International Award Architecture in Stone 2013 from the Italians in Verona. And there are still some other unconfirmed big prizes.
In his library there are more poetry books than books on architecture. He has no car, no television, no mobile phone and no clock.
And he is happy.
(Granada, 1961) is an architect from the school of architecture in Seville (1986), professor of architectural projects at the school of architecture in Granada since 1994, visiting professor at the Technischen Univertät München (Germany, 2010) and has been a guest professor at various national and international schools of architecture.
With his work, he develops a research line on the architectural intervention on heritage and transforming landscapes. His projects and works have been selected for international and national exhibitions such as On-Site, New Architecture in Spain organised by the MoMA in New York; the 7th Biennale di Architettura di Venecia; and the Spanish Architecture Biennial (1993-1994 and 2010-2011), among others. He has been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe awards, won the Enor Award and obtained an Architecture recognition at the 11th XI Spanish Architecture and Urbanism Biennial, and an award at the VIII Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism.
He has recently won the international contest Atrio de la Alhambra with Álvaro Siza.
His book "La tradición innovada. Escritos sobre regresión y modernidad" published by Arquia Foundation in its collection Arquia/Thesis has won the FAD Award for Tought and Criticism in 2014.
His studio is located in the alcohol tower of an old sugar factory in Granada, which he has restored through a revitalisation project and turned the industrial space into a place to live and work. It is a place that has conditioned his way of thinking the relationship between architecture and heritage. At the same time, this activity has become an initiative to rescue this abandoned industrial site. On this subject, he has made the short film A meeting with the film director Juan S. Bollaín, in which his occupation of the factory is told and the experiences carried out since his occupation in 1986.
A TOWER TO FLY
I dreamt that San Giorgio Maggiore was flying high...
It aims to project a space between the sky and the earth, above or below the clouds, where to live and observe the world and the stars. Like a kite that flies in the air.
A place to stay forever, like the lighthouse keeper in his lighthouse or the bell-ringer in his tower. A space to signal to the world, an ephemeral symbol inhabited by "strange beings".
Air towers, wind, light and water catchers.
Taking into consideration the shadow that is casted on the earth, how it rises and falls, in the light and in the air, a construction built suspended in the air but touching the ground, with vertigo.
The tower was the closest thing to a dream house...
The story has begun. It's up to the student to finish it.
