THE LIST OF HIS MOST ADMIRED WORKS
For Rafael Moneo, in his book published at the end of 2018 by Acantilado entitled “The Life of Buildings”, the three most important historical buildings from the perspective of contemporary practice, are in Andalusia. “Cordoba, Seville and Granada are three essential cities for those who want to get to know Spain and its architecture,” he warns in the first pages of his essay.
The Mosque of Cordoba, the Archive of the Indies of Seville and the Carmen Rodríguez-Acosta of Granada have been the selected buildings. These are three examples of adaptation over time, miscegenation and hybridization.
In relation to the work we have in Seville, the Archive of the Indies (former Merchants Market, the work of the Renaissance architect Juan de Herrera), Moneo emphasizes its importance in the possibility of exploring to what extent a way of thinking is at the origin of a work of architecture.
One of those cases in which architecture materializes the world of ideas. For Moneo, the ‘speech of the cubic figure’ of Herrera supposes a antecedent of the formal proposals that so much were going to interest to the Vanguards of the XX.
