The retrospective on the architect José María García de Paredes on view at the ICO Museum until January 12, 2024, brings together, among others, more than 400 pieces belonging to the García de Paredes Archive, donated by the family in 2021 to the MNCARS and catalogued by the museum with the close assistance of Ángela and Manuel García de Paredes, the architect's children.
Through photographs, plans, models, letters or drawings loaned by numerous institutions and individuals, the exhibition will allow us to approach the architect's work from new and unusual perspectives. In this way, the public will be able to learn about his most emblematic works, as well as the rich cultural, architectural and artistic panorama of which he was a part and which depicts a fruitful and promising time in Spanish culture.
"José María García de Paredes. Meeting spaces" at Museo ICO. Photograph by José Luis de la Parra.
100 years of José María García de Paredes, the simple lines that modernised Spanish architecture
José María García de Paredes. Meeting spaces, organised by the ICO Foundation in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), presents for the first time an extensive overview of his complete work over four decades of career from 1950 to 1990.
"This project has a long history that begins in 1990, when I found myself without warning with a silenced architectural studio, with two auditoriums under construction and tubes of plans and drawings, letters, photographs and documents that I began to discover and sort. The curiosity to know the story of the works, the voices of the names that spoke to each other, gave shape to an archive and to the reading of these encounters today, understood as an ideology that is in force outside the life of his architecture.”
Ángela García de Paredes.
"José María García de Paredes. Meeting spaces" at Museo ICO. Photograph by José Luis de la Parra.
Four decades in six encounters with the architecture of García de Paredes
The exhibition José María García de Paredes. Espacios de encuentro covers four decades of work through six stops that gain value as a whole and that show the thought and work of the architect and his time.
The Early Encounters explain the collective work of multidisciplinary groups that gave rise to works that exhaustively analyze reality, concerned with sustainability in its essence. These encounters began at the School of Architecture in Madrid and continued at the Spanish Academy in Rome.
In the Musical Encounters with Manuel de Falla, García de Paredes aims to give material form to the musician's thought, understanding the musical work as a whole. The study and care of his legacy represent an approach to the one García de Paredes considered his architectural teacher.
The Encounters of the Spirit collect the ecclesiastical projects that the architect carried out. addressing a new conceptual approach, as well as the need for precision and accuracy given to structure and construction. In them the architect shares with the visual artists involved the moderation and a voluntary austerity.
In the Encounters with trade, the works carried out in the city of Granada are exhibited in which the relationship with the painter Miguel Rodríguez-Acosta, begun in the years of Rome, led to commissions for both his bank and the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation and two cármenes in the Albaicín. These works integrate contemporary constructions in historical and landscape environments.
Encounters with history is a stop that includes the installation of Picasso's Guernica upon his arrival in Spain during the transition, with a powerful and solitary presence in a glass urn under the vault of Lucas Jordán in the Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid.
Church of Our Lady of Fuencisla, Almendrales Village, Madrid, 1964 by José María García de Paredes. Photograph by Alberto Schommer.
The last stop of the exhibition is the Encuentros melomanos, where the auditoriums designed by García de Paredes in Granada, Valencia, Madrid, Cuenca and Murcia are displayed in an installation designed by the architectural photographer Luis Asín. In them, the sound is masterful thanks to precision and measurement. In addition, the concept of "accommodating" the public, the performers and the building itself in their urban environment is important in their conception.
A career full of musical architecture José María García de Paredes played an important role in the renewal of certain architectural forms and typologies during the second half of the 20th century, combining the refined languages of international modernity with the idiosyncrasy and tradition of Spanish construction. His understanding of architecture as a way of making history, of incorporating new gestures into an existing framework, gave rise to a respectful and attentive approach to the environment, in which hints of the past can be recognized, reinterpreted with imagination.
Among the types of buildings that García de Paredes helped to renovate, the religious centre stands out. The architect was able to pay attention to both its mystical character and its social function as a meeting place. Examples of this synthesis between functionality and sensitivity include, among others, the Parish Church of Nuestra Señora de la Fuencisla, in the Madrid Settlement of Los Almendrales, or the Church of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, in Vitoria.
