Fernando Higueras (1930-2008), a leading figure of late-modern Spanish architecture in the 1960s, was, like many others of his generation, an Icarus-like youth obsessed with reaching the sun. Far from conforming to the rigid standards of his time, his architecture rose above the earthly plane with a single goal: to conquer the unknown. Even then, he concluded that modern architecture was misguided, that none of it made sense. Looking at contemporaries like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe—with their flat roofs and obstinate obsession with lightness—nothing added up for him. His undeniably reactionary attitude drove him, from an early age, to boldly rebel against the hypocrisy of the triumphant establishment.
His method of working, far from being novel or exceptional, reiterated the timeless lesson of the creative process. Talent and grace were not enough; they had to be accompanied by a massive dose of tenacity and, above all, passion—the kind that refuses to back down from obstacles and instead capitalizes on the challenges they present. He can be seen as an optimistic architect when approaching a project, always convincing himself that a solution lay within the narrative or pattern he had pre-visualized. He bypassed the routine rationalist method of starting with a functional program—a practice still taught in schools today—and instead integrated it into his preconceived scheme, modifying the latter as needed until finding a satisfactory compromise.
