Twelve years of the death of one of the big figures of the Spanish contemporary architecture, Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza (Cáseda, 1918 – Madrid, 2000), the architect who followed an innovative line that overcame the threshold of the architectural form..
The author of Torres Blancas never wanted to return to the nature without to construct the city.
Born in the shade of the Parthenon, in the step of the logos´s myth, where the architecture has to see more with the art, the bows and the poetry that with the technology, Oiza not only learned to copy. After the poem was found by Lorca and Chimera was defeated by Belerofonte, singularity was turned in provocation by Oiza.
His work, incarnation of the whole humor of the people of this country, comes out of the professional area. Though his capacity of risk for underestimating the mishaps, sometimes polemic, often magisterial, was not enough to make him an artist.
But the man is not owner of his destiny. The curiosity to see up to where he can advance reserves him a sure shipwreck. Sáenz de Oiza gave the life for this reason without conditions. He did not hold any more codes that his own creativity and only the Architecture saved him.
In the summits of his life he was rewarded by the Prince of Asturias Prize of the Arts (1993) though he was always nearest to the collapse than to the top.
He reconciled the professional activity with the teaching during all his life and exercised a fantastic labor in the transmission of the know-how in the Technical School of Architecture in Madrid, as teacher, director and emeritus teacher at the end of his life. In the same school of architecture he graduated in 1946, year that gained the National Prize of Architecture. But the most admired architect of Oiza was Le Corbusier who got the formation in a self-taught way
Nothing seems more to the glory than Santa Sofía and nothing seems more to Santa Sofía than Oiza.
But if the oblivion of the time that refuses to advance is matter of generations; if we exist only for those who ignore our precedents and we are victims of the recollection up to the oblivion, then it is time to compensate us.
It is not important if the architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza was a terrible professional. He has taught too many things to us, we will never excuse it to him.
