Alberto Campo Baeza. Construction as a Manifesto of Architectural Theory

Campo Baeza is a great architect, as well as master for entire generations of students: primary exponent of a Madrid school of hacer Arquitectura that focuses on the relationship between theory and practice of the project. An architecture educator able to make theory through the built work which, by autogenesis, derives from the theory itself. There are no ambiguities: you can be an architect or, equally, you can act as architect. Campo Baeza is an architect and, at the same time, works as an architect: this is a privilege reserved for a few. An architect who, by making theory through the built work, ap-points the latter as a real programmatic manifesto: a treatise on architecture that has become reality. His spatial thought is the result of an intellectual action. Precisely on the word construction, composing together, lies the thought of Campo Baeza and his search for the absolute. A carpenter who becomes a poet: just like Tekton in the work of Sappho. Or again, a poet who becomes a carpenter: a soldier of architecture in search of beauty. The concept of tectonics seems to him to be a pleasant obsession: the architectural project is both intellectual and technical action, since its conception, which is related to the construction’s order and founded on a subtle and deep-rooted technological knowledge. The observation of the professional reality in which Campo Baeza operates, together with that of his various colleagues and students whom he manages to gather with wisdom and love, highlights the al-most «artisan» approach of his work. A cultural attitude not casual, not suffered but pursued and safeguarded by the advent of malformed methodological and project management approaches, due to the complexity of the reality in which we operate. A design poetics rooted in the classic values of our discipline and aimed at a technological know-ledge with a contemporary meaning. A humanist architect understood as a man of knowledge, within an approach to culture pursued through the wise translation of historical and technical evolutions.