A Fragmented Archive: Reconstruction of the Creative Process of the Spanish Architect Antonio Fernández Alba

Abstract

Antonio Fernández Alba (Salamanca 1927-Ma- drid 2024) is one of the main Spanish architects of the 20th century. The archive created by this architect reveals the diverse dimensions of his professional career as an architect, artist, intel- lectual and professor at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid. To delve deeper into his graphic and documen- tary legacy is is a huge and complex task due to the extensive architectural output projected over more than sixty years. During the last years of his professional career, Antonio Fernández Alba made successive donations of the graphic materi- al from his studio to different institutions follow- ing a criterion of trust, but without carrying out a prior planning to guarantee the documentary unity of each project. Nowadays, his archive is dispersed through the Spanish architectural col- lections of the Museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the National Library of Spain, the Association of Architects of Madrid, the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, and the architectural collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the cre¬ative itinerary of three projects through the dif¬ferent collections where his legacy is currently deposited. For this purpose, three representative projects of his creative stages have been select¬ed: the Amsterdam City Hall Competition (1967), the Restoration of the Astronomical Observatory of Madrid (1975) and the Faculty of Law of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid (1987). Tracing the graphic material donated by the ar¬chitect to different archives will allow us to iden¬tify the drawings that belong to each of these projects, document them, and reconstruct their creative process also relying on the texts that are also part of his legacy.