The figure of the architect Fernando Higueras, seemed for a few years to blur until almost disappear. After the spectacular exhibition and catalog at the beginning of the year, the figure has been revised and once again occupies an important place among Spanish architecture, (actually a place never lost).

Quatre Caps pays tribute to this architect and completes, gives a new twist, to a fertile project productivity, with these images that reflect on unbuilt projects, imagined with great definition and that had been built would have allowed to take a spectacular step to The trajectory of this architect.
* It is often said that time will sort everything out, and in many cases it goes this way. We do not believe in the existence of a divine being that has the duty of amending the injustices of the development of history.

Just the absence of contemporary references to certain artistic creations are not helping to value as they deserve: Films that did not receive any award or great commercial failures that finnaly end up as a cult pieces thanks to later revisions.

Architecture, except on few occasions, is built. Rare are the cases in which an initial design that has not come to be constructed, comes to be transcendent. Generally, unrealized projects disappear without the option of revision; in the same way that unfilmed scripts die.

How would they really have been like? Which relevance would have they reached?

Can a single work change the trajectory of an entire discipline? In a way, they all do. Any work built will open a way, lift a style or even form part of the culmination of a movement. Everything adds up and everything influences in one direction. We are talking about a living network of styles halfway between cooperation and survival. A multiform mass that normally walks and sometimes jumps.

What would the construction of Fernando Higueras’ Multipurpose Building in the seventies have meant for architecture? How is it possible that today there is still more talk of a drawn floor of an unbuilt building than of the very building which nowadays occupies the place where the first one was suposed to be? It is not a question of justice or anything like that; it is simply curiosity.

What would it have meant for the trajectory of the architecture?

The project we are carrying out is based on this premise: a film can be relocated over time, but can one film that has not even been filmed do so? What’s more, can one of its parts do it? Can a script do it? At the very least, if we simplify its language, we can democratize its consumption. We can offer more possibilities for it to be read.

Architecture is not image. Or at least not only. We have all seen the pyramids, but how many of us have stepped on them? In most cases we live architecture visually. It does not exist, or at least not with total security.

Only the illusion of its existence. It does not replace the experience, but in many cases it is more than a worthy substitute. Hopefully, if it manages to break through the barrier of the image, it can be installed in the collective imaginary as real.

The project we have started deals with the unbuilt work of Fernando Higueras. Not how it would be today but how it would have been at his time.

A small ucronia built with the hope that it manages to reach our days. 20 years of unbuilt work in a journey through the photography of the 70s, 80s and 90s: different cameras, different reels, different prints, different colour processing, etc.

*Text by.- Quatre Caps

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Quatre Caps, a Spanish studio of image and 3D visualization.
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Fernando Higueras
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Fernando Higueras (Madrid, 26 November 1930 – 30 January 2008) was a Spanish architect. He studied at the Instituto Escuela and Colegio Estudio in Madrid, combining his academic education with music and painting. He graduated in architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) in 1959. His graduation project, a funerary chapel in a military cemetery, was published in 1969 in Nueva Forma, a magazine edited by Juan Daniel Fullaondo.

In 1959, together with architects Juan Pedro Capote and José Serrano Súñer and engineer José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez, he received second prize for a Children's Theatre in a public park. In 1960, he received an honourable mention in the National Architecture Awards for his project for ten artists' residences in Monte de El Pardo, Madrid. In 1961, he was awarded the National Architecture Prize alongside Rafael Moneo for the preliminary project of the Centro de Restauraciones Artísticas in Madrid, which he began developing in 1965 in collaboration with Antonio Miró. The building now houses the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España (Spanish Cultural Heritage Institute).

In 1962, he designed the Lucio Muñoz House in Torrelodones and Colegio Estudio in Aravaca, Madrid. In 1963, he worked with Luis Cabrera, José Luis Crespi, José Luis Espinosa, Antonio Miró and Francisco Javier Weber on the Unidad Vecinal de Absorción de Hortaleza housing development in Madrid. That same year, he developed urban planning projects in Lanzarote, including the Playa Blanca Partial Plan.

In 1967, he was commissioned to design housing for military personnel in Madrid, a project developed with Antonio Miró. In 1969, he participated in an international invited competition for a multipurpose building in Monte Carlo. In 1973, also in collaboration with Antonio Miró, he designed the Hotel Las Salinas in Costa Teguise, Lanzarote.

His later works include the Antonio López Torres Museum in Tomelloso (1980–1985), developed in collaboration with José Manuel Benito; La Mareta residence in Lanzarote (1981); and the Church of Santa María de Caná in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid (1997).

Alongside his architectural practice, he pursued interests in music, painting, sculpture and photography. He studied classical guitar and was recommended by Andrés Segovia for a scholarship to study at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, which he ultimately declined to take the entrance examinations for architecture school. In 1954, he received the Medal of the Association of Watercolourists at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and First Prize in Watercolour at the Second Art Exhibition organised by university residential colleges. He also participated in painting, drawing and photography exhibitions and competitions.

His urban planning project for Lanzarote is represented in the holdings of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His work is also included in the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, which holds, among other documents, the original drawings for the ten artists' residences in Monte de El Pardo and a photograph of the Centro de Restauraciones Artísticas taken by the architect himself. Part of his professional archive is held by the Historical Archive of the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid (COAM), to which he donated project documentation in 2005.

Fernando Higueras died in Madrid on 30 January 2008.

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Published on: December 17, 2019
Cite:
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
"Fernando Higueras. Unconstructed work (1959-1969). What if it were reality?" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/fernando-higueras-unconstructed-work-1959-1969-what-if-it-were-reality> ISSN 1139-6415
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