Madrid,
Architecture was not the first vocation of José María García de Paredes, but the navy; He changed his course through Casto Fernández-Show and became interested in the precision and austerity of constructions linked to naval history, until graduating in 1950 from the Higher Technical School of Madrid. His various youth trips to European countries allowed him to learn first-hand about the contemporary development of that discipline and it did not take him long to obtain commissions (before completing his studies, having to wait to sign them) and no recognition either: in 1954 he received the National Prize along with to Rafael de la Hoz, both now centenarians, and the following year the Grand Prix of Rome, which allowed him to reside for three years in the Italian capital, and learn at the Royal Academy of Spain there.
It is very likely that it was in Italy that García de Paredes soaked up the rich possibilities offered by the encounters of architecture with the plastic arts and music, a path the latter would have the opportunity to develop following his marriage to Isabel de Falla. , niece of the composer, and when she could design a good number of auditoriums in our country, which we will talk about.
In its line of examining the career of the most relevant Spanish architects of the last century and disseminating their work among the youngest, and coinciding with the aforementioned centenary, the ICO Museum dedicates the anthology “Meeting Spaces”, curated by Ángela García de Paredes, his daughter and also an architect. Based on six thematic sections, not strictly chronological, this exhibition presents a journey both through the Andalusian’s own career, and through the fruits of an almost golden generation of artists and architects, who collaborated with each other again and again, and from a time in recent history when sophisticated constructions in their simplicity were built with usually very limited resources (García de Paredes worked between the sixties and the nineties, when he died early at the age of 66). The materials that nourish the tour (models, photographs, sketches, plans, works of art) come mostly from the Reina Sofía Museum, which has among its collections the very extensive Paredes archive, now cataloged and made available to researchers; As Manuel Segade explained today, this exhibition should not be an end point of this study work, but rather a starting point.
Speaking of games and endings, the structure of the exhibition differs from that usual in ICO exhibitions: the visit begins on the first floor, which includes his projects up to the eighties (none public works, many from religious orders) and culminates in the ground floor with the exam to your device to dispose Guernica in the Buen Retiro Palace – when Picasso’s work returned to Spain in 1981 – and in its musical auditoriums, to which a good part of his work corresponded since 1978, in this case by public initiative.
The first section, early encountersconsists of projects in which García de Paredes participated, forming a team with other authors with whom he was friends and whom he met while studying in Madrid; Her daughter has insisted on the importance of that co-authorship and in a creative context in which stardom had no place. The work that earned him the aforementioned Rome Prize, even if it did not materialize, would be that of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, relatively simple in its conception: two exhibition rooms were proposed, one for painting and the other for sculpture, with different characteristics linked to these two arts; The first required continuous and uniform lighting and the second, a mass of direct, but variable and contrasting light.
But before, in 1953 and together with Rafael de la Hoz and Pascual de Lara in the stained glass, he began to develop the project for the chapel of the Colegio Mayor Aquinas in the University City of Madrid; He just went to Italy, leaving the structure of this temple under construction and García de Paredes said that many of its essential parts, and especially its aforementioned stained glass window and the altarpiece, germinated in his hours of meditation in Rome. The plans had to take into account that this chapel is part of a larger complex, next to the Colegio Mayor itself and a convent for the Dominican order, and that it should foster a spirit of discipline and work among the users; The orientation of the light had to be equitable and the importance of access corridors was reduced. And even earlier, in 1951-1952, also together with De la Hoz and Jorge Oteiza on sculpture (the curator emphasizes that the artists who participated in their constructions did not do so as decorators, but as full members of the project from their beginnings), had shaped the Córdoba Chamber of Commerce, which he referred to as the starting point and basis of his journey, and even more: The joyful experience of touching, for the first time, made material, the cold and speculative lines of the planes… Oteiza’s sculpture was arranged in the hall, as a counter; Its shape corresponds half to that of a woman and to that of a conch.
The trip to Italy also brought García de Paredes the possibility of carrying out, together with Javier Carvajal and García Donaire as sculptor, the Pantheon of the Spanish in Rome, very different due to its open conception from a usual pantheon. A small open chapel was planned, limited on one side by a wall and on the other, behind the altar, by a bronze and iron fence that, although it obscured the view, allowed contemplation of the trees. Four key elements articulated the work: the pavement, with travertine slabs; the aforementioned reinforced concrete wall, the black granite altar and the closing fence.
For the 1957 Milan Triennale he worked again with Carvajal on the Spanish Pavilion, with paving by José María de Labra, geometric in whites, blacks and blues, standing out against the dazzling white of the brightly lit walls. With Mediterranean echoes, a metal fence represented the cold and industrial counterpoint of the complex and composed a circle, a shape also associated with Spain (hoops, arenas, popular dances), present in display cases and tables.
Already in 1964, his project (together with Alejandro de la Sota, José Luis Aranguren, José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún) for the Madrid Opera Theater stands out for its ambition, when it had not yet been enabled. The current Royal Theater and most of the spaces with these characteristics were practically nineteenth-century. It won third prize in the contest, with its splendid exterior play of volumes and its stage with two lenticular rooms. The organization was unprecedented: the axis of the main room and that of the chamber were perpendicular to the largest entrance and an extensive staircase was parallel to the south façade.
After these first meetings, a second section delves into the musicals, related, as we said, to the marriage of García de Paredes with Isabel de Falla. With the death of Germán de Falla, Manuel’s brother who was initially responsible for his archive, the couple took charge of it and its organization and prepared with him an exhibition in Granada in 1962 that would have great echo in the international media. Its setting was the refectory of the Monastery of San Jerónimo and, while it took place, García de Paredes meditated on finalizing and presenting, with specific sets, Atlantisthe unfinished work of the author of witchy love on the submerged continent, paying attention to Falla’s own annotations. In San Jerónimo, precisely an islet occupied the center of the exhibition.
We said that, in his early years, a good part of García de Paredes’ architecture was religious; His first projected temple, already as a final project, was a funerary chapel, but where he best demonstrated his conception of this type of space (meeting to pray) was in his intentions for the church of San Esteban de Cuenca that He was later able to build in the still active Almendrales, in Madrid. For the architect, churches could not be understood as houses of God (who would not need one, due to his omnipresence for believers), but as houses of those who gather to pray, which do require these places, hence he avoided unidirectionality. and the attention to singular points (although the altar is visible from any area) and proposed multipolar spaces, based on thin, enveloping steel columns, bathed in abstract lights. These last lights gain all the prominence in the Stella Maris church, in Malaga, with a once again precise and measured structure; It suggests austerity, like the plastic works of the artists who were involved in the ensemble.
In Granada he would display, in the second half of the sixties and in the seventies, most of his buildings, curiously as a result of a Roman contact: the painter and banker Rodríguez-Acosta. From his hand came commissions for the Banco de Granada, the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation and for two Carmenes (etymologically, closed garden), close to nature, which aspired to go unnoticed in it. There he also designed and built, in a minimum of time, a school for the Juan XXIII institution for a thousand children who had not previously been able to access education: its volumes adapt to the environment, but above all they link architectural prototypes and social responsibility. .
Perhaps one of García de Paredes’ projects with the greatest projection, at least in terms of information, was his device for the installation of Guernica in the Buen Retiro Palace since 1981, here remembered in photography and through a reproduction by Fernando Sánchez Castillo. Due to the conditions of the moment, and despite its apparent lightness, it was a triple glass urn riot which was planned so as not to disturb the joint vision of Picasso’s mural, neither because of the reflections, nor that of Lucas Jordán’s paintings in this place.
And after this encounter with history, this exhaustive exhibition ends with Falla’s independent music-loving encounters: during the eighties, after taking charge of the first Spanish auditorium, that of Granada, García de Paredes took care of the beautiful Auditorium of the Prado Museum, which It was demolished during expansion works; of the National Auditorium of Madrid, counting on the advice of musicians, performers, orchestra directors and managers to ensure the best acoustics, satisfaction of the needs of the orchestras and the experience of the public; and the Palau de Valencia, the Cuenca Theater and the Murcian Auditorium. It was not built, but it was perhaps his most complex work in terms of the reflections it could provoke on the musical event itself and its relationship with the spectators, the Generalife Theatre, from which the Alhambra could have been contemplated.
The exhibition ends with a very good José Guerrero in blue and black, which could be seen in the Manuel de Falla Auditorium in Granada, and with a multi-screen installation by Luis Asín that captured rehearsals, movements, changes of lights… the life of those spaces musical, flanked by two Semperes very favored by the black of the room.
It is worth spending a few minutes contemplating them; also to examine a set of sketches arranged in vertical trios, which attest to the many fronts (also economic) of the architect’s work, and one of the lighthouses of the Manuel de Falla Auditorium that bids farewell to the visitor, somewhere between delicate and functional.
“José María García de Paredes. Meeting spaces”
ICO MUSEUM
C/ Zorrilla, 3
Madrid
From October 2, 2024 to January 12, 2025
