“Architecture Is to Put in Order a Room, a House, a City”: In Conversation with Alberto Campo Baeza
© Javier Callejas. MA
Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza was born in 1946 in Valladolid, Spain and grew up in Cádiz. He graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1971 and earned his PhD there in 1982. Campo Baeza has been teaching architecture at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, ETSAM for more than 40 years. He sees architecture as building ideas and expressing them in the most essential and clear ways, consistently relying on such basic elements as firmly grounded rectangular platforms, thick solid walls with deep cavities and frameless cutouts, and flat thin planes propped up by delicate posts. Colors, complex curves, and diversity of materials are largely avoided to accentuate primary relationships between elementary prisms and to exalt magic out of sunlight. Campo Baeza’s architecture is about transparency and precision, as well as asserting such fundamentals as ground planes, straight lines, and precise corners. He has built relatively few projects and, for the most part, on a small scale. Yet, his legacy is remarkably complete, consistent, profound, memorable, and inspirational.
